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Etymology Usage

How good is Captain Renault’s English?

Q: For the nth time, I watched Casablanca and for the nth time I was baffled by Claude Rains’s line, “Well! A precedent is being broken.” The line doesn’t make sense based on my understanding of the word “precedent.”

A: That line is delivered in a scene set in Rick’s Cafe Americain. Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman) has just introduced Rick (Humphrey Bogart ) to her companion, Laszlo (Paul Henreid).

Rick is famous for never drinking with customers. So when Laszlo invites Rick to join them for a drink, Captain Renault (Claude Rains) interrupts to say, “No, no, Rick never—”

But Rick says, “Thanks. I will.” He then sits down at their table.

Renault comments, “Well! A precedent is being broken.”

We hear the usage again later in the movie, when Rick intercepts Laszlo’s bill and refuses to let him pay. Renault says, “Another precedent gone.”

Is Renault using the word “precedent” incorrectly? We don’t think so.

Although this isn’t the way most of us use the word, we can’t find any evidence that it’s wrong.

The noun “precedent” entered English in the 1400s. It was adapted from the identical adjective meaning “earlier in time,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Leaving aside the judicial senses of the word, the OED defines the noun in part as meaning “a previous instance taken as an example or rule by which to be guided in similar cases or circumstance.”

Standard dictionaries have that definition, but they include another as well. “Precedent” can also be defined as a convention or custom established by long practice.

We consulted The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and others.

In other words, “precedent” can mean either (1) the initial instance that creates a custom or (2) the custom itself.

Normally, a precedent is “set” or “established,” and then “followed.” And when some event contradicts a policy or tradition, we say it “breaks with precedent,” or “goes against precedent.”

But if “precedent” can mean a pattern or model of conduct, we see no reason why it can’t simply be “broken.” This usage may be unusual or idiosyncratic, but that doesn’t make it incorrect.

Of course, the script of Casablanca is darned near perfect, with nary a note off-key. So one might wonder how a slightly odd usage slipped in. A couple of possibilities come to mind.

First, the Renault character is French, so we wouldn’t expect him to speak perfect idiomatic English.

Second, we know that the team of scriptwriters who worked on the movie wrote quickly, and that some parts of the script were even written after production had begun. So perhaps this can be chalked up to haste.

We will probably never know, and in the end it doesn’t really matter. Personally, we think the idiosyncrasy only adds to the charm of a great movie.

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Etymology Usage

Is “necessarily” necessary?

Q: I keep hearing the unnecessary use of the word “necessarily,” as in “It’s not necessarily true.” Am I linguistically blind or does “necessarily” add something to “It’s not true”? I’m a foreigner and English isn’t my first or even second language.

A: English speakers have found the adverb “necessarily” to be a handy word since it entered the language around the year 1400.

It’s been used to mean unavoidably, compulsorily, indispensably, predictably, intrinsically, inevitably, and so on.

But the negative version you’re asking about—“not necessarily”—isn’t quite the opposite of any of those senses.

The Oxford English Dictionary says this negative construction is “used as a non-committal response to a question or suggestion.”

This usage, the OED says, indicates that “what has been said or suggested is not true in all respects or without qualifications.”

So when English speakers say something is not necessarily true, they mean it’s not entirely true. That’s not the same as saying flatly that it’s not true.

The OED’s earliest published reference for this usage is from Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. In chapter 20, Lucetta asks Elizabeth-Jane to be her companion.

“I am no accomplished person,” Elizabeth-Jane says. “And a companion to you must be that.”

“O, not necessarily,” Lucetta responds.

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Etymology Usage

Another happening

Q: I had a thought while reading your “Wha’ happen?” post. Didn’t Fred Willard’s character use the expression as a catchphrase in A Mighty Wind? I doubt, though, that the film was of sufficient popularity to credit for a change in language.

A: You’re right—we overlooked the Fred Willard angle in our “Wha’ happen?” blog entry.

Willard delivered a comic riff on “Wha’ happened?” in a scene from A Mighty Wind (2003), a “mockumentary” by Christopher Guest, the director who gave us Best in Show and This Is Spinal Tap.

While the phrase didn’t originate with the film (we heard it long before 2003), we can’t resist recapping the scene.

The film’s plot revolves around a reunion of several veteran folk-singing acts, one of which is managed by Mike LaFontaine (played by Willard), owner and founder of Hi-Class Management.

Touted as “THE South Florida talent agency,” the company specializes in booking acts for cruise ships.

LaFontaine’s claim to fame is that he once starred in a 1970s sitcom called Wha’ Happened?

As LaFontaine says in the film, “Every time something’d go wrong, I’d look at the camera and say, ‘Hey! Wha’ happened?’ … But it only lasted a year, and that’s good because that’s how you establish a cult.”

At one point during LaFontaine’s interview, the camera cuts to a fake front page of Variety, which proclaims: “ ‘WHA’ HAPPENED’ DUMPED due to total lack of interest.”

Any readers of the blog who are interested can catch Willard’s performance on YouTube.

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Etymology Pronunciation Usage Word origin Writing

Electoral and mayoral, orally

Q: When did “mayoral” and “electoral” shift their emphases to may-OR-al and e-lec-TOR-al? These pronunciations make me nuts! Can they be correct?

A: We’ll take these words in alphabetical order, and cite the accepted pronunciations given in the two standard dictionaries of American English that we use most.

“Electoral” is given two pronunciations in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.): four syllables, accented on either the second (ih-LEK-ter-ul) or the third (ee-lek-TOR-ul).

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives those two as well as a three-syllable pronunciation accented on the second (ih-LEK-trul).

So you could justify using any of those three pronunciations in American English.

However, the audio pronouncers on the American Heritage and Merriam-Webster websites accent the second of four syllables (ih-LEK-ter-ul), which is the only pronunciation in the British English dictionaries we’ve checked.

Now on to “mayoral,” which can properly be accented on either the first or the second syllable in American English.

Both American Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s give three-syllable pronunciations that accent the first (MAY-er-ul) as well as the second (may-OR-ul).

In addition, Merriam-Webster’s gives a two-syllable pronunciation accented on the first (MER-ul), with the first vowel pronounced like the “e” in “bet.”

As you can see, it would be difficult to mispronounce this word in American English! However, MAY-er-ul is the only pronunciation in the British English dictionaries we’ve checked. And it’s the one in M-W’s online audio pronouncer. AH doesn’t have an audio pronouncer for “mayoral.”

And now, a brief aside for the histories of both.

“Electoral,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, came into English in 1675 and originally referred specifically to the German system of government by Electors.

In the following century, the adjective acquired a more general meaning: “relating to or composed of electors.”

“Mayoral” entered English in the late 17th century with the meaning “relating to a mayor or mayoralty,” says the OED.

The first recorded use is from a letter written in 1699 by Jonathan Swift: “I was at his mayoral feast.”

But back to the recommended pronunciations and the two standard dictionaries we cite.

American Heritage is the more conservative of the two and is slower to accept new pronunciations as they come into use. The dictionary’s fourth edition, for example, had only one pronunciation for “electoral” (ih-LEK-ter-ul).

Merriam-Webster’s casts a wider net, and is likely to be the first to recognize newer pronunciations as standard once they’ve established themselves in common usage.

Keep in mind that English pronunciation is fluid and ever shifting. The pronunciations recognized as standard 50 years ago are not necessarily those of today.

In other words, common usage is what determines standards from generation to generation.

You asked when the pronunciations of “electoral” and “mayoral” shifted. We can’t tell you exactly, but the change in American Heritage from the fourth to the fifth editions suggests that the ee-lek-TOR-ul pronunciation is relatively recent.

Here are the pronunciations that are given as standard in our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition):

“electoral”—ih-LEK-ter-ul

“mayoral”—MAY-er-ul or MER-ul

Compare those to the pronunciations above in the latest M-W Collegiate. Thus does language change.

[Note: This post was updated on Dec. 19, 2016.]

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Etymology Usage

Black with a capital B

[Note: This post was updated on Sept. 9, 2021.]

Q: I think it’s an insult to lowercase the “b” in “black” when referring to race. Why not, for instance, use the capital letter in writing about Black members of Congress? I always do, and I’m Caucasian.

A: After giving this a lot of thought, we agree with you that the uppercase “B” is appropriate when using Black as a racial designation.

We’ve written before on our blog about capitalization rules, and how publishers’ “house styles” come and go. In the last year or so, in a dramatic instance of language change, a concensus about the capitalization of “Black” has emerged.

This may have been a response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the spotlight it has trained on the killings by police of unarmed African Americans—like George Floyd in 202o.

Today, nine out of the ten standard American and British dictionaries that we usually consult recognize both “Black”and “black” as standard English for the racial term.

But the tenth dictionary, Collins, goes further. For the racial designation, it accepts only the capitalized “Black.”

Many news organizations, too, have changed their capitalization rules, mostly since mid-2020. Those that now use the capitalized “Black” include The New York Times, Associated Press, USA Today, NBC News, The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, the McClatchy newspaper chain, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, Fox News Media, and The Washington Post.

In its announcement, the Post said it had decided to “uppercase the B in Black to identify the many groups that make up the African diaspora in America and elsewhere” (July 29, 2020).

We’ve decided that our posts on The Grammarphobia Blog will also use the uppercase “Black.”

You might also be interested in a blog entry we wrote about the evolution of the word “black,” and another posting about “black American” versus “African American.”

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Etymology

Son of a gun

Q: Pat was skeptical on WNYC when a caller suggested that “son of a gun” originated in seafaring days and referred to an illegitimate child conceived on the gun deck of a naval ship. The caller may be correct. I’ve seen the same explanation in Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories.

A: O’Brian (or one of his fictional characters) may have said something about “son of a gun” in one of the Stephen Maturin novels. We haven’t examined them all, so we can’t say. And we can’t find the expression in our copy of A Sea of Words, Dean King’s lexicon and companion to O’Brian’s seafaring tales.

There is a bit of evidence to support the naval explanation of the phrase, but this evidence is pretty slim and we’re doubtful about it.

The expression first showed up in print, as far as we know, in a 1708 issue of The British Apollo, a short-lived periodical that answered questions from readers.

One of the questions, written in verse, begins this way: “You Apollo’s Son, / You’r a Son of a Gun.” (The writer asks about the number of feet on the lice that inhabit human scalps.)

There’s no indication from the question that the phrase “son of a gun” has anything to do with illegitimate children or sailing ships.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the expression as simply “a somewhat depreciatory term for ‘man, fellow.’ ”

Most of the OED’s early examples use the expression to mean a coarse or rough man.

Here’s an 1840 citation from The Ingoldsby Legends, a collection of supernatural stories by the poet and novelist Richard Harris Barham:

“We heard the rough voice of a son of a gun / Of a watchman, ‘one o’clock!’ bawling.”

The only OED citation to suggest a naval origin of the expression is from The Sailor’s Word-Book (1867), William Henry Smyth’s dictionary of nautical terms:

“Son of a gun, an epithet conveying contempt in a slight degree, and originally applied to boys born afloat, when women were permitted to accompany their husbands to sea; one admiral declared he literally was thus cradled, under the breast of a gun-carriage.”

Although Smyth was an admiral and should have known about naval language, his lexicon didn’t appear until nearly 160 years after the expression first showed up in print.

Women did sometimes travel on British warships during the seafaring age.

In Jane Austen’s 1817 novel Persuasion, for example, we learn that Admiral Croft was regularly accompanied by his wife. (Austen knew about naval life since two of her brothers were admirals.)

So, yes, there’s a little evidence to support the naval origin of the expression, but we think “son of a gun” is simply a rhyming euphemism for “son of a bitch.”

We’ve written before on our blog about the common practice of using mild, euphemistic versions of stronger oaths (like “gosh darn it” for “God damn it,” or “goshamighty” for “God almighty”).

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Etymology

Amen to that

Q: Can you tell me the etymology and original meaning of “amen”?

A: The interjection “amen” comes from the Hebrew amen, meaning truly, surely, or verily, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The Hebrew word was originally a noun meaning certainty or truth, which in turn came from the verb aman (to strengthen or confirm), the Oxford English Dictionary says.

The OED describes the Hebrew interjection amen “as an expression of affirmation, consent, or ratification of what has been said by another.”

The Modern Hebrew-English Dictionary, by Avraham Zilkha, defines it as “So be it!”

The word amen appears in Hebrew biblical texts, including Deuteronomy and First Kings.

When these texts were translated into Greek and Latin, the translators simply adopted the word amen verbatim.

Early Christians used the Greek and Latin amen “as a solemn expression of belief, affirmation, consent, concurrence, or ratification, of any formal utterance made by a representative,” says the OED.

Thus, according to Oxford, it was used “with prayers, imprecations, confessions of faith.”

The word later entered English around the 10th century. But it was used with less solemnity at times, even in the Bible.

In some cases, the OED says, it was added as “a concluding formula,” much like “finis,” to books of the New Testament.

The word “amen” has entirely secular uses in English as well.

“In non-religious contexts,” the OED says, the word is used to express “approval, concurrence, or relief, usually as a concluding response to the statement of another: ‘quite right’; ‘I couldn’t agree more’; ‘I very much hope so.’ ”

This sense of the word is often heard in the phrase “amen to that,” which has been used in English speech since Shakespeare’s time.

Here’s how the expression was used by Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers (1837):

“ ‘Ah, I wish they had the reward that every kind and generous heart would be inclined to bestow upon them!’ said the gratified Mrs. Bardell. ‘Amen to that’’ replied Sam, ‘and a fat and happy livin’ they’d get out of it!’ ”

And here it is in an Agatha Christie whodunit, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920):

“ ‘We do hope, if there has been foul play, to bring the murderer to justice.’ ‘Amen to that,’ said Dorcas fiercely.”

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Etymology

All corned up

Q: A caller asked Pat on WNYC about the origin of “all corned up,” a phrase her grandmother used to mean angry. Having grown up with horses in England and Scotland, I think this is an equine reference.  We would feed grain (“corn” in Britain) to to give horses more nutrition than hay. The more corn you fed, the more lively a horse would be! And sometimes headstrong and difficult to control.

A: Although the expression “all corned up” has sometimes been used to describe a headstrong horse, it has more often been applied to a liquored-up human being.

And the origin of the phrase appears to be human, not equine.

The use of the verb “corn” in the sense of feeding grain to a horse originated in the mid-18th century, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, none of the OED citations use “corned,” “corned up,” or “all corned up” in reference to a frisky or unruly horse. But we found several such examples elsewhere.

The earliest example we found of the equine “all corned up” is from The Well of Loneliness, a 1928 novel by Radclyffe Hall in which a horse is described as “all corned up until ’e’s fair dancin’!”

On the other hand, the OED has published references dating from the late 1700s of the adjective “corned” used to describe an intoxicated person.

For example, here’s a brief entry in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) by Francis Grose: “Corned, drunk.”

And John Jamieson’s Supplement to the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1825) gives this example: “Thae lads are weel corned.”

This sense of “corned” may have been influenced by the much earlier use of the adjective “corny” to mean “tasting strong of the corn or malt,” as in these two 1386 examples from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales:

From the Pardoner’s Preamble: “A draughte of moyste and corny ale.”

From the Pardoner’s Tale: “Now haue I dronke a draughte of corny ale.”

The earliest example we’ve found for “all corned up” used to describe a soused human being is from a 1923 article in the Montgomery  Advertiser.

The article, cited by another Alabama newspaper, apparently refers to an incident in the comic strip “Bringing Up Father” in which Maggie and Jiggs fall on hard times:

“Those Americans who for a dozen years or more have secretly cherished the wish that Jiggs would come home all corned up some night and whip Maggie are having their revenge on the old girl even though she has not yet been paddled.”

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Etymology Linguistics Pronunciation

How do you say “Van Gogh”?

Q: I’m a pre-kindergarten teacher in New York and my British assistant is constantly correcting my pronunciation. If I pronounce “emu” as EE-moo, she says it’s EE-myoo.  Now, we are at odds about the pronunciation of “Van Gogh.” I say van-GOH and she tells me it’s van-GOFF. Which one of us needs to go back to school?

A: Your assistant needs a couple of lessons in the history of English.

As we wrote in our book Origins of the Specious, British English (including pronunciation) is not more (or less) “correct” than American English.

This was such an important subject to us that we devoted our first chapter to it.

We’ve also written about this subject on our blog, including posts in 2010, 2009, and 2008.

The truth is that most of the characteristics that distinguish modern British pronunciation from our own developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, after the American Revolution.

Having said that, we’ll move on to the pronunciations you mention.

The word “emu,” the name of a large flightless bird, has two proper pronunciations in American English.

We can say either EE-myoo or EE-moo, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Both are standard American pronunciations, and both are given equal weight by Merriam-Webster’s.

But there’s only one standard pronunciation in British English: EE-myoo.

The name “Van Gogh” has three proper pronunciations in American English, according to most standard dictionaries: van-GOH (the most common), van-GOKH, and van-KHOKH (which comes closest to the Dutch).

The “-kh” in the second and third pronunciations are not the hard “k” of “kick,” but the guttural one we hear in the German pronoun ich and the Scottish word “loch.”

In Britain, the Dutch artist’s name can be heard as van-GOKH, van-GOFF, or van-GOH, according to the BBC’s Pronunciation Unit.

But the BBC recommends only the first, van-GOKH, with the  “-kh” sounded as in “loch.”  [Update, 2014: This opinion has been confirmed by a correspondent of ours from Oxford, who insists that the other two pronunciations are “nonsense” in British usage.]

This recommendation, the BBC says, “is codified in numerous British English pronunciation dictionaries” and “represents a compromise” between the English and Dutch pronunciations.

One source, the Collins English Dictionary, makes things easy. It gives only one pronunciation for American usage (van-GOH) and only one for British usage (van-GOKH). You can listen to them here: American and British.

And in case you’re interested, we wrote a blog entry last year about names with nobiliary particles (like the “van” in “van Gogh”).

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Etymology Usage

Party time

Q: Why do people on the East Coast “make” a party whereas those in the Midwest “give” or “throw” or “have” a party? I’m from the Midwest, like Pat, but I now live in NYC.

A: Yes, Pat is a former Iowa girl who used to detassel corn in the summer to help with her college expenses. The two of us now live on the East Coast—in rural New England.

As for your question, the Easterners we know also give, throw, and have parties. We don’t recall any making of parties in our neck of the woods. Maybe we should get out more.

The verb “make,” by the way, is very old, dating to the early days of Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons. There are similar words in Old Swedish, Old Icelandic, Old Saxon, and other early Germanic languages.

And, of course, we’ve been making all sorts of things—houses, ships, coffee, movies, fires, money, war, peace, and silk purses.

We’ve even been making parties since as far back as the 14th century. But those early “parties” referred to matches or tournaments or games, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the early 18th century, the expression “make a party” was another way of saying “make up a party,” as in “Let’s make a party at cards.”

We don’t find the exact usage you’ve asked about in the OED. But it’s alive and well on Google (what isn’t?), and not limited to East Coast party givers.

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Etymology Usage

Private parts

Q: Although “public” and “private” are opposites, “publicize” and “privatize” aren’t. Is there any particular reason the forms developed such different meanings? And what would be the opposite of “privatize” in the business sense?

A: You’re right that the adjectives “public” and “private” have generally described opposite things since they showed up in English in the late 14th century.

Here, for example, is the first definition of “public” in the Oxford English Dictionary: “In general, and in most of the senses, the opposite of private adj.”

And this is the earliest definition of “private” in the OED: “Restricted to one person or a few persons as opposed to the wider community; largely in opposition to public.”

The word “public” comes from the Latin publicus (pertaining to the people), according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

It’s usually seen in the sense of affecting, open to, maintained by, or devoted to all the people or the community as a whole.

The word “private,” Chambers says, is derived from the Latin privatus (apart from public life, deprived of office, belonging to an individual).

The verbs you’ve ask about—“publicize” and “privatize”—are relative newcomers. The first didn’t show up until the 19th century and the second until the 20th century.

The word “publicize,” in its earliest sense, meant “to bring to public notice or attention; to make generally known,” according to the OED.

But it later took on another meaning that we’re all familiar with: “to give out information about (a product, person, etc.) for advertising or promotional purposes.”

Both of those meanings reflect the use of the adjective “public” in the sense of affecting or open to the general public.

The verb “privatize” also reflected its older adjective when it entered English.

In the earliest citations for “privatize” in the OED, the verb meant “to make personal or private; to regard or treat in terms of the individual, rather than the wider community.”

Here’s a 1940 example from the American Sociological Review: “We cultivate a lack of confidence towards those who are our partners and our leaders, and we privatize our existence.”

But in the 1950s, according to OED citations, the verb took on a new meaning, the one that has caught your attention: “to transfer (a business, industry, or service) from public to private ownership and control.”

The OED doesn’t offer a reason for the evolution of “privatize,” but it directs readers to its entries for the somewhat earlier verbal noun “privatizing” (1932) and verb “reprivatize” (1937).

The word “privatizing” needs no explanation, but “reprivatize” is defined this way: “to return (a previously nationalized business, industry, or service) to private ownership and control.”

In that definition, you can find an answer to your question about the opposite of “privatize.”

Yes, one possibility is “nationalize,” a word that entered English in the late 18th century, when it meant to give something a national character.

In the mid-19th century, though, “nationalize” took on its sense of “to bring (land, property, an industry, etc.) under state control or ownership.”

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Etymology

Booby traps

Q: Does the word “boob” (meaning breast) have anything to do with the “bubo” in “bubonic plague”?

A: Well, if you answer language questions day after day for year after year, sooner or later you hear it all!

No, “boob” isn’t etymologically related to “bubo,” a glandular abscess or swelling, usually in the groin or armpits, that’s a symptom of bubonic plague.

The English term “bubo,” dating back to around 1398, comes from the Late Latin bubo, which in turn comes from bubon, the Greek word for groin.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the “boob” that’s a slang word for “breast” is probably a shortening of the earlier term “booby,” which was originally “bubby,” a 16th-century word for a woman’s breast.

(There may or may not be a connection with bubbi, German for teat.)

Here are the OED’s earliest citations for these various mammary forms of “boob”:

“bubby,” 1686: “The Ladies here may without Scandal shew / Face or white Bubbies, to each ogling Beau,” from a poem by Thomas D’Urfey.

“booby,” 1934: “She was lying on the divan with her boobies in her hands,” from Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer.

“boob,” 1949: “I felt her sloshy boobs joggling me but I was too intent on pursuing the ramifications of Coleridge’s amazing mind to let her vegetable appendages disturb me,” from Miller’s novel Sexus.

We don’t want to give Henry all the credit for popularizing the one-syllable form, “boob,” though we’re sure he did his part.

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has an even earlier citation for “boob” in this sense, from the novel Young Lonigan (1931), by James T. Farrell:

“Studs didn’t usually pay attention to how girls looked, except … to notice their boobs, if they were big enough to bounce.”

And there’s another meaning for “booby” and “boob” that you’ve probably heard before.

Since the late 16th or early 17th century, “booby” has been a word for a stupid, awkward person (or, in children’s slang, a cry-baby). This was shortened to “boob” in the early 20th century.

Here are a couple of early examples of “boob” in its klutzy usage:

“I had to tell her the boob had gone for the day” (1909, Saturday Evening Post);

“Of course war is wrong—any boob knows that” (1920, Chambers’s Journal).

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Etymology Pronunciation Usage

The SEE-ment pond next to Granny’s still

Q: I was interested (and enlightened) by your recent blog posting about the difference between “cement” and “concrete.” But why no comment on their pronunciations? Both are often mispronounced, with the accent on the wrong syllable.

A:  Your question brings to mind an old sit-com, The Beverly Hillbillies, in which the erstwhile backwoods Clampetts refer to their swimming pool as “the SEE-ment pond.”

It’s likely that most people pronounce the nouns “cement” and “concrete” as sih-MENT (second syllable stressed) and CON-kreet (first syllable stressed). But that’s not the end of the story.

The noun “cement” was originally pronounced SEE-ment back in the 14th century, and some people still say it that way, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The old pronunciation has since been “almost superseded” by sih-MENT, the OED says, because that’s the way the verb is pronounced.

Today, the OED gives both pronunciations as standard, and so does Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), though M-W indicates that SEE-ment is less common.

However, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) gives only one pronunciation, sih-MENT.

The noun “concrete” (the building material) is a relatively recent term, dating only to the 19th century, but the adjective (real, material, etc.) is much older, showing up in the 15th century.

Although the adjective has long been pronounced either CON-kreet or con-KREET, the OED says, the most popular pronunciation today is with the accent on the first syllable.

As for the building material, the dictionary adds, it’s universally pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: CON-kreet. And that’s the only pronunciation given in the OED.

But Merriam-Webster’s and American Heritage give both pronunciations (CON-kreet and con-KREET) for the noun, with no preference for one over the other.

We’re not done yet. American Heritage adds that the first syllable can also be pronounced like “kong.”

The lesson here? English pronunciation is not written in concrete.

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Etymology Usage

Boogie smoogie all night long

Q: This showed up in an online forum: “The Bulldog hitch never actually matched the ‘A’ frame on the trailer, and a means of making it solid required a little smoogying.” Isn’t that a wonderful word? Never heard it before.

A: A wonderful word indeed! The writer apparently used “smoogying” to mean improvising or being inventive or making do or something of that sort.

The reference to “smoogying” in that online welders’ forum is the only one we can find with that meaning.

And we noticed that the welder who used the word inserted an animated icon of a laughing face right afterward, so he meant it humorously.

Our guess is that he used “smoogying” as a nonce-word, one he made up on the spot.

A nonce-word, says the Oxford  English Dictionary, is “a word apparently used only ‘for the nonce,’ i.e. on one specific occasion or in one specific text or writer’s works.”

We can find only one authoritative reference with an entry for “smoogy,” but not as a verb.

Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang says “smoogy” is an Australian slang word invented about a hundred years ago as “a collective term for people who kiss and cuddle.”

This term, according to Cassell’s, may be related to another Australian slang word, spelled “smoodge” or “smooge,” meaning “to ingratiate oneself, to cuddle up.”

Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed.) traces the verb “smoodge” to Australia in the late 19th century.

Partridge says it originally meant “to flatter, wheedle, speak with deliberate amiability,” but in the 20th century the word came to mean “to make love, pay court” in Australian slang.

Interestingly, there may be a connection here (however, tenuous) with the verb “schmooze.” Cassell’s and Partridge say “schmooze” was sometimes written as “schmooge” or “smoodge.”

The OED calls “schmooze” an adaptation of the “Yiddish shmuesn, to talk, converse, chat.”

Oxford’s first citation is from the New York Times Weekly Magazine (1897): “He loves dearly to stop and chat (Schmoos, he calls it).”

But back to “smoogying.” We’ve come across a couple of “smoogie” references that may be using the verb as a euphemism for making love.

In 1975, Atlanta Rhythm Section recorded a bluesy song called “Boogie Smoogie” (containing the line “boogie smoogie all night long”). And in 2004 Stevie Kotey recorded one called “Smoogie Down Punk.”

Slang, as you can see, is just as intricate and complicated as standard English, and much harder to pin down!

This is entirely unrelated, but the OED has an entry for “smuggy,” a rare adjective meaning “grimy” or “smutty.”

The dictionary has only two citations for this adjective, one from about 1515 that refers to “smoggy colyers” (colliers, or coal miners), and one from 1630 that mentions a “smuggy Smith” (blacksmith).

That long-dead adjective is likely to be related to a long-dead noun: “smug,” a word for “blacksmith.”

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Grammar Usage

Passive aggression

Q: I teach English to businesspeople around Cologne, Germany. I was explaining the use of the present perfect passive when a student asked me if there was a continuous form of it. I know there is, but I find it awkward and wonder if it has any use in the real world. What are your thoughts?

A: The present perfect continuous passive tense is a monster. It’s theoretically correct, but only rarely is it good idiomatic English.

As an example, since this is the holiday season, let’s use the verb “give.”

(1) Present: “I give gifts.”

(2) Present perfect: “I have given gifts all my life.”

(3) Present perfect passive: “I have been given gifts all my life.”

Now if you toss in the continuous element, you come up with this monstrosity:

(4) Present perfect continuous passive: “I have been being given gifts all my life.”

Semantically, we can see no difference between #3 and #4. Furthermore, we can see no reason for using #4.

The purpose of the present perfect passive is usually to express a previous action that has continued to the present—in other words, continuous actions that started in the past.

That being the case, the present perfect passive already has an element of continuity built in. 

Only rarely does the continuous “being” need to be added to the  mix. We can think of one of those rare cases.

Say your car is being serviced and you’ve been waiting impatiently for three hours. Here’s how you might express your feelings.

Present perfect passive: “The car has been serviced for three hours!”

This doesn’t quite express your meaning, so let’s try … 

Present perfect continuous passive: “The car has been being serviced for three hours!”

This expresses your meaning, but the active voice would be more natural: “They’ve been servicing the car for three hours!”

The lesson here is that all sorts of tenses are possible in English, but not all of the possibilities are natural.

So when in doubt about an awkward passive construction, try switching to the active  voice.

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Etymology

Siren songs

Q: Why do sirens draw you towards danger in Homer’s Odyssey, but warn you away from danger in real life?

A: What an interesting question! We’re talking about two different kinds of sirens here, but they’re etymologically connected.

First come the fabled creatures known as “sirens.”

These are defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “monsters, part woman, part bird, who were supposed to lure sailors to destruction by their enchanting singing.”

Homer invented these monsters, or at least he was the first to mention “sirens” in writing. In his Odyssey, he called them by the Greek plural seirens.

From Greek, the creature moved into Latin (siren, later sirena) and on into Old French (sereine), from which it was borrowed into English in the 14th century.

But the earliest writers to use the term didn’t always have the Homeric siren in mind. 

For example, Chaucer, in The Romaunt of the Rose (circa 1366), confused “siren” with “mermaid,” the legendary creature that’s part woman, part fish:

“Though we mermaydens clepe hem here … Men clepen hem sereyns in Fraunce” (“Though we call them mermaids here … Men call them sirens in France”).

And some early sources, like the 14th-century Wycliffe Bible, thought a “siren” was a flying snake.

In translating the Latin for “siren,” Wycliffe versions used the expressions “wengid edderes” (winged adders) and “fliynge serpentis” (flying serpents).

But the classical “siren”—part woman, part bird—was pretty scary too.

In 1387, John de Trevisa translated a Latin text into Middle English and described “Sirenes, that were half maydens, half foules, and hadde wynges and clawes.”

Some sirens, like Homer’s, used their beautiful voices to lure ships onto treacherous rocks. Others lulled sailors to sleep and then tore them to pieces. Not a pretty picture!

But in the 16th century, the OED says, the word “siren” acquired another, less horrifying meaning: one who “sings sweetly, charms, allures, or deceives, like the Sirens.”

Now on to the more ear-splitting kind of siren.

In the early 19th century, the French physicist Charles Cagniard de la Tour invented an instrument that could produce musical tones and measure their frequencies.

Since it could emit sounds under water, Cagniard called it a “siren,” after the legendary beings.

The same name was adopted later in the 19th century for the noisier devices we associate with the word.

Today these noisemakers herald the coming of fire engines, ambulances, police cars, civil defense alerts, and so on.

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Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage

Are some numbers more equal than others?

Q: My son is completing his college application. In describing his efforts to teach rudimentary math to children at a community center, he’s written “three hammers plus one hammer equal four hammers.” Is it “equal” or “equals”? I think he’s right, but I’m not certain.

A: Either one is OK, though the singular usage (“equals”) is far more popular nowadays.

A couple of Google searches produced these results: “three plus one equals four,” 12,500 hits; “three plus one equal four,” only 7.

The choice of a singular or plural verb in such equations depends on whether you consider the first part a single unit or a compound.

Here’s what Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) has to say on the subject:

“It’s possible to treat one and one as a single mathematical idea, so the appropriate verb is is. Or it’s possible to treat the two ones separately—hence are.”

Garner’s goes on to say that the same is true for multiplication: “both four times four is sixteen and four times four are sixteen are correct. But the singular is much more common and natural in modern usage.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “plus” in this mathematical sense doesn’t get into the issue of singular versus plural verbs.

But the OED’s entry for the conjunction “and” says two numbers connected by it are “freq. treated as a unitary subject with singular verb.”

In fact, the earliest published reference in the OED for “and” used to connect two numbers (from a 1697 essay by Jeremy Collier) treats the subject as a singular: “The … notion … is as clear as that Two and Two makes four.”

However, the OED also has citations for the plural usage. Here’s one from Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs (1848): “When will you acknowledge that two and two make four, and call a pikestaff a pikestaff?”

In short, your son could use either “equal” or “equals” in his college application, but the singular is more popular now and would probably raise fewer eyebrows in the admissions office. We’d recommend going with it.

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Grammar Punctuation Usage

Comma place

Q: What has happened to the comma that joins parts of a compound sentence?  Is it no longer used? I am seeing more and more compound sentences without it.

A: You don’t mention what kind of compound sentence you’re referring to, but we’ll do our best to answer your question.

There’s no absolute rule that one must use a comma to separate independent clauses joined by a conjunction. (A clause is a group of words with its own subject and verb.)

In a blog item last year, we noted that comma use is sometimes governed by taste and rhythm, not by any formal rule of punctuation.

One author may use a comma to separate parts of a compound sentence where another with somewhat different tastes in punctuation might leave the comma out.

In our Jan 23, 2009, blog item, we quoted a passage from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run as an example of  the tasteful use and nonuse of commas.

In the passage (which we’ll repeat here), the protagonist, Rabbit Angstrom, shoots a basket on a playground as he’s watched by a group of schoolboys:

“As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack against the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread white hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The cuticle moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball will miss because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper.”

Updike uses (and doesn’t use) commas here because of a rhythmic effect he’s employing to build suspense. It would be a crime to interrupt and separate some of those breathless clauses.

Nonfiction is different, of course. But when no rules are being broken, writers have a lot of latitude in comma use.

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Etymology Usage

A stormy courtroom

Q: I’ve read of people being “hauled,” “haled,” and even “hailed” into court. How do you rule on these usages?

A: People who get themselves into a fix can be either “hauled” or “haled” into court.

They’re only “hailed” if their entrance is accompanied by a warm welcome or a chilly meteorological event.

In A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, Bryan A. Garner writes that the “haul” and “hale” versions of the phrase are “equally common.”

Google agrees: “hauled into court,” 372,000 hits, versus “haled into court,” 344,000. (The “hailed” version, described by Garner as a “solecism,” gets 108,000.)

So why, you may wonder, do we have two similar words— “haul” and “hale”—for dragging someone into court?

The story begins with “hale,” a venerable old word that has undergone a few changes over the centuries.

It was first recorded in writing in about 1205, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. 

Back then, its meaning was “to draw or pull along, or from one place to another, esp. with force or violence; to drag, tug.”

So once upon a time, miscreants were “haled” into court or “haled” before a magistrate.

But why are they now also “hauled” into court?

Because several hundred years ago the old verb “hale” was mostly replaced by “haul,” which showed up in the 16th century as a new version of “hale”—same meaning, different spelling.

Apparently the difference in spelling came about because of a shift in pronunciation.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology explains that the “u” spelling represents a development in Middle English pronunciation in which vowel sounds shifted and spellings changed.

However, the verb “hale” can still be found in 19th-century literature in the old sense of pulling or dragging.

In 1879, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of oxen “patiently haling at the plough.”

And, of course, the verb “hale” is still being used in the old legal sense.

A Feb. 18, 2003, article in the New York Times, for instance, refers to health insurance companies “haled into court.”

Here’s an aside. The verb “hale” shouldn’t be confused with the adjective “hale” (healthy, sound, uninjured).

English borrowed the verb “hale” from the Old French haler (to draw or pull), and the French got it from old Germanic sources.

But the adjective “hale,” as in the expression “hale and hearty,” is derived from the Old English hal (healthy), which is also the ancestor of “heal” and “whole.”

Another word to throw into the pot is “hail,” which is both an interjection (as in Shelley’s “Hail to thee, blithe spirit!”) and a verb meaning to salute, greet, or welcome.

This comes from an Old Norse word, heill (health, prosperity, good luck), which is the Norse counterpart of the Old English hal.

And no, the “hail” that’s frozen rain is no relation. It’s a very old term, dating from Anglo-Saxon times, and similar to words in other Germanic languages for those pellets of falling ice.

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Etymology

The first Noel

Q: I have a Christmas question. A French friend who’s a word hound maintains that the word “noel” is derived from “Emmanuel,” another name for Jesus Christ. Is this true?

A: Your French friend is on the wrong scent.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “noel” entered English in the 14th century as an interjection, “a word shouted or sung: expressing joy, originally to commemorate the birth of Christ.”

Here’s the first recorded use in writing, from Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale (1395): “And Nowel crieth euery lusty man.”

The Anglo-Norman spelling “nowel” and similar ones, by the way, survived in poetic usage into the 20th century.

The source of our English word was the Middle French nouel, later spelled noel or noël.

But the French got it from Latin, in which the adjective natalis means natal or pertaining to birth.

In post-classical Latin, according to the OED, natalis referred to the “annual festival of the church.”

In the 1400s, “noel” was first used to mean the feast of Christmas. And in the 1700s, it was first used to mean a Christmas carol.

The name “Emmanuel,” also spelled “Immanuel” or “Imanu’el,” dates from long before Christ. The OED says it’s derived from Hebrew for “God is with us.”

In case you’re interested in more Christmas reading, we had a blog item a few years ago about who’s responsible for the “X” in “Xmas.”

You can learn why there’s nothing irreverent in our wishing you a merry Xmas.

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Etymology Linguistics Spelling Usage

The some of its parts

Q: Why do we use the word “some” when we approximate a number instead of, say, “about” or “nearly” or any of the other appropriate terms? Also, is this use of “some” related to “sum”?

A: English has a humongous number of words—hundreds of thousands, depending on how you count them—so it’s not surprising that we have a lot of ways to approximate a number.

The word “some” (originally spelled sum in Old English) has been used “with numbers to indicate an approximate amount or estimate” since Anglo-Saxon days, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED adds that “some” here is acting like an adverb “with the sense of ‘about, nearly, approximately.’ ”

The earliest published reference in the dictionary for this usage is from King Alfred’s translation (circa 888) of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae.

The use of “about” in this sense also dates from Anglo-Saxon days, but “nearly” didn’t show up in English until the 16th century. And it took another century for it to mean approximately.

As for “approximately” itself, this is the real newbie and didn’t show up in English until the mid-19th century.

You also asked whether “some” is related to “sum.”

Although “some” was spelled sum in Old English, as we noted above, the modern words “some” and “sum” aren’t related.

“Some” has cousins in many old Germanic languages, including Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old Norse. It may ultimately come from the Sanskrit sama (every, any).

“Sum,” on the other hand, entered English in the late 13th century. We got it from the Anglo-French summe or somme, but it ultimately comes from the Latin summa (total number or amount).

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Etymology Linguistics Usage

Wha’ happen?

Q: I’ve noticed a proliferation of “What happen?” (instead of “Excuse me?” or “Come again?”) among younger friends in NYC (I’m 42). Also worth noting, it’s often collapsed into “Wha’ happen?” I suspect a Hispanic or Caribbean influence.

A: A teacher once emailed us to report that his students in the Bronx would say, “What happened?” or “Wha’ happen?” when they failed to hear something he’d said. Some of their parents would say it too.

A search of the Internet finds only a sprinkling of examples, probably because the expression is more common in speech than in writing.

We can’t say where or when this usage first happened, what influenced it, or whether it will have staying power.

But we can discuss expressions like these that a listener uses to ask a speaker to repeat or elaborate on something just said.

The linguist Dwight L. Bolinger coined a name for the usage: “reclamatory questions.”

In his 1989 book Intonation and Its Uses: Melody in Grammar and Discourse, Bolinger discusses the rising and falling tones in such questions.

We’ve written before on the blog about the practice of saying “What?” when you didn’t quite catch what somebody said.

This usage is occasionally criticized (mostly by our elders) as rude, though it has a long history.

We have lots of ways of saying “Huh?” Some of our 19th-century ancestors used “What say?” or “How?” when their ears didn’t catch some bit of conversation.

Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang says “What say?” and “How?” emerged in 19th-century America as synonyms for “What?” or “What did you say?”

“What say?” might be seen as a shorter version of “What did you say?” And it seems likely that “How?” is a shorter form of  “How’s that?” or “How’s that again?”

Now we apparently have a new variation on the theme, “What happened?” or “What happen?” or the even shorter “Wha’ happen?”

None of the slang reference sources we use include this usage.

But Cassell’s says three similar questions with another meaning (“What happen?” … “Wha’appen?” … “What happening?”) originated in the 1950s among Black speakers in the West Indies and the UK.

These questions, according to Cassell’s, are used as “a general form of greeting, hello, how are you?”

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says the use of “What’s happening?” as a greeting originated among Black Americans in the 1950s.

These slang dictionaries no doubt will catch up with the reclamatory usage.

Meanwhile, we can add “What happened?” and “What happen?” and “Wha’ happen” to “What?” and “What say?” and “How?” and “Huh?” and “Eh?” and “Mmm?” and “Yo?” and “Come again?” and “Whazzat?” and “Say what?” and all the rest!

Our hearing may occasionally be faulty, but fortunately there’s no shortage of reclamatory questions.

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Etymology Usage

Tucking into something tasty

Q: On foodie blogs and in restaurant reviews, one sometimes sees “tuck into” used to mean to dine on a particular dish. Example: “I tucked into a grilled chicken Caesar salad.” Where does the term come from?

A: What a seasonal question! We’re still recovering from Thanksgiving, and bracing ourselves for the rest of our holiday meals. We hesitate to step on the bathroom scale.

The slang use of “tuck” to refer to gourmandizing goes back to the 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

This meaning is an extension of the use of “tuck” in the sense of putting something into a snug or hidden place (“The cottage was tucked into the woods”) or covering up something (“We tucked her into bed”).

Here, in chronological order, are some of the OED citations for “tuck” and “tucking” in reference to eating or drinking.

“We will dine together; tuck up a bottle or two of claret” (from the novel Barham Downs, 1784, by Robert Bage).

“Tom Sponge now began cramming unmercifully, exclaiming every three mouthfuls, ‘Rare tucking in, Sir William’ ” (from the anonymous novel Splendid Follies, 1810).  

“Now that I’ve cured you, you’ll be tucking all that into your own little breadbasket” (from Frederick Marryat’s novel Peter Simple, 1833).

“If you’ll just let little Wackford tuck into something fat” (from Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, 1838).

“The strawberries … Which our Grandmother’s Uncle tuck’d in like a pig” (from The Ingoldsby Legends, written sometime before 1845 by Richard H. Barham).

“There is Rasherwell ‘tucking’ away in the coffee-room” (from William Makepeace Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers, 1860).

“Let’s go over and see if we can’t tuck away some of that grub” (from Lessons in Life, lectures of Josiah G. Holland, 1861).

“They gave themselves unreservedly to ‘tucking
in’ ” (from The Golden Butterfly, an 1876 novel by Sir Walter Besant and James Rice).

“Always in at dinner-time and to be found at odd hours tucking in” (from Knight-Errant, an 1887 novel by “Edna Lyall,” the pseudonym of Ada Ellen Bayly). 

Well, it’s mealtime and this is making us hungry!

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Etymology Usage

How full is full up?

Q: I recently saw somebody on television describe a movie theater as “full up.” Is that right? Is it a dialect thing? Wouldn’t “full” be more normal?

A: First, let’s fill in a bit of history.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the adjective “full” in this sense as meaning “having within its limits all it will hold; having no space empty; replete.”

“Full” is a very old word (first recorded in Old English before the year 1000) and it likes company.

The OED says “full” is often accompanied by intensifiers, as in “full to the brim,” “full to overflowing,” and “full up” (which it describes as colloquial). 

And don’t think that “full up” is a new coinage. Here it is in an 1892 article about cemeteries in the London Daily News: “Because they are full up … this additional one is required.”

The phrase was used even earlier with a slightly different meaning. In 19th-century British colonial slang, to be “full up” of something was to be sated with or tired of it.

Here are a couple of examples from the OED:

1890, in The Miner’s Right, an Australian novel by “Rolf Boldrewood” (the pseudonym of T. A. Browne): “She was ‘full up’ of the Oxley … a rowdy, disagreeable goldfield.”

1891, in Homeward Bound After Thirty Years: A Colonist’s Impressions of New Zealand, Australia, Tangier and Spain, by Edward Reeves: “The men … get tired, or as the colonial slang goes, ‘full up,’ soonest.”

In short, “full up” has been around for quite a while, but the OED still considers it colloquial.

We think it’s OK in speech and casual writing, but we’d go with “full” on formal occasions.

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Etymology Linguistics Usage

Why do we have both “less” and “fewer”?

Q: I’m careful to observe the distinction between “less” and “fewer,” but I wonder why this distinction developed in the first place and why we still have it?

A: We observe the distinction too, but we may be in the minority.

We’ve written before on our blog about the decline of “fewer,” a word that seems to be occurring fewer and fewer times.

As we point out in that blog entry and others, the traditional distinction between “fewer” and “less” is that “fewer” means a smaller number of things (“fewer ice cubes”) while “less” means a smaller amount of something (“less ice”).

However, that explanation doesn’t do justice to “less,” which has many other usages besides. It’s used with percentages and fractions, and in expressions like “one less,” “no less than twenty,” and others.

But on to their development. Both “less” and “few” were derived from old Germanic languages, and they were first recorded in Old English writings in the 700s or 800s.

“Fewer,” the comparative form of “few,” came along later, and was first recorded in writing around 1340, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Less” originally was a comparative form of “little,” the OED says. Its meaning was “smaller” or “of not so great size, extent, degree,” and so on.

“Few,” meaning “not many,” is just as old as “less.” It was recorded in such sources as Beowulf (perhaps as early as the 700s), the Vespasian Psalter (circa 825), and the Venerable Bede (c 900).

Keep in mind that the line between “less” and “fewer” was not always as distinct as it is in modern usage guides.

In fact, the OED has examples from the year 888 to modern times of “less” used to mean “fewer”—that is, a smaller number of things.

This isn’t surprising, of course, since “fewer” wasn’t even available until the 14th century.

At any rate, people happily used “less” to mean “fewer” for some 900 years before anybody minded.

In 1770, the grammarian Robert Baker suggested that “fewer” would be “not only more elegant … but more strictly proper” than “less” in a phrase like “no less than a hundred.”

And that, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, is how the “rule” for using these words was born.

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Etymology Usage

Concrete evidence

Q: I’ve always believed cement is a binding agent that’s mixed with water, sand, and gravel to make concrete. But people now use the word “cement” where I’d use “concrete.” Have the two words become interchangeable? If so, is this a recent shift in the meaning of “cement”?

A: To someone in the construction business, cement and concrete are technically different: cement is used, as you point out, as a binding ingredient in what we now call concrete.

But the word “cement” is frequently used for “concrete” by people who aren’t in the building trades.

In fact, both The The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) give “concrete” as one of the standard English definitions of “cement.”

This should come as no surprise, since before the word “concrete” was invented, very similar stuff was called “cement” and nobody minded.

The word “cement” entered English sometime before 1300, more than 500 years before “concrete” showed up.

In its earliest usage, “cement” meant rubble mixed with lime and water to form mortar (a bonding agent used between brick, stone, etc.), according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

We got the word “cement” from the Old French ciment, but it’s ultimately from the Latin caementum, a contraction of caedimentum (rough cut stone or rubble). These are derived from the Latin verb caedere (to cut).

The substance we think of as concrete was familiar to the Romans, who used it to build the Forum, the Coliseum, the baths, and many other  antiquities.

In this form of construction, which the Romans called opus caementicium, a concrete core was surrounded by brick walls.

If you’d like to read more about this, check out “Mechanical Characteristics of Roman Opus Caementicium,” a section in Fracture and Failure of Natural Building Stones, a 2006 book by Stavros K. Kourkoulis.

The word “concrete” entered English in the 15th century as an adjective meaning grown together, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but that sense of the word is now considered obsolete.

The Latin ancestor of our English word is concretus, from the verb concrescere (to grow together).

Over the next few hundred years, the English adjective took on several other meanings, most of them describing something solid, material, or real (as opposed to abstract).

The use of “concrete” as a noun for construction material first showed up in English in the early 19th century.

The first citation in the OED is from an 1834 issue of London’s Architecture Magazine: “Making an artificial foundation of concrete (which has lately been done in many places).”

The next citation, from an 1836 entry in the Transactions of the Institute of British Architects, suggests that the term concrete came into general use “probably not longer than 15 or 20 years ago.”

So what do the words “cement” and “concrete” mean today?

Well, a contractor would use “cement” for that powdery mixture of ground limestone and clay that one buys in bags at a building supply store.

And the contractor would use “concrete” for the construction material one gets by mixing cement with sand, gravel, pebbles, broken stone, and so on.

But Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage notes that “the use of cement to refer to various building materials now mostly known as concrete has been around for some 600 years.”

“Objections to its use, in other than technical contexts, in such combinations as ‘cement floors’ or ‘cement walks’ is pedantic,” M-W adds.

We generally stick with the technical distinction when referring to “cement” or “concrete,” but we don’t think it matters much.

Unless you’re trying to get a job at Home Depot or Lowe’s, use whichever word you want.

Like many language questions, this one doesn’t have a concrete answer!

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Grammar Usage

The cat and the hat

Q: I wonder if this sentence uses the word “who” correctly: “The cat who spat at me didn’t like my hat.”

 A: The question here is whether it’s all right to use “who” (instead of “that” or “which”) in reference to an animal.

We briefly touched on this subject a few years ago in answering a “who/that” question about people and things.

A person, as we explained, can be either a “that” or a “who.” A thing, on the other hand, is always a “that.”

But what about Benji and Morris?

Dogs and cats aren’t people, but they aren’t quite things, either. Is an animal a “that” or a “who”?

This is how Pat answers the question in the third edition of her grammar and usage book Woe Is I:

“If the animal is anonymous, it’s a that: There’s the dog that won the Frisbee competition.

“If the animal has a name, he or she can be either a who or a that: Morris is a cat who knows what he likes.”

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage has similar advice: “Use who if the animal’s sex is known or if it has been personalized with a name. Otherwise, use that or which.”

As for the cat you mention, it seems pretty anonymous, so use “that.”

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English English language Expression Grammar Usage

Live and let die

Q: Here’s a non-grammatical lyric that will amuse you. In the recording of “Live and Let Die,” Paul McCartney sings: “But if this ever-changing world in which we live in.” Isn’t this a serious overdose of the “in” word?

A: This lyric comes in for a lot of criticism from people who like complaining about ungrammatical songs.

Some people even hear one more “in” there: “But IN this ever-changing world IN which we live IN”!

However, the phrase may be perfectly correct in the lyric as originally written, according to Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema (2005), edited by Steve Lannin and Matthew Caley.

The song was written by Paul and Linda McCartney for the James Bond movie Live and Let Die (1973). It was also recorded by McCartney’s band Wings and released as a single.

Here’s the entire stanza, as quoted in Pop Fiction:

When you were young and your heart was an open book,
You used to say “live and let live”
(You know you did, you know you did, you know you did)
But if this ever-changing world in which we’re living
Makes you give in and cry,
Say “Live and Let Die.”

The language commentator Stan Carey, writing on the Macmillan Dictionary Blog, argues that the phrase is indeed “live in,” and he cites a defense of the usage by the linguist David Crystal.

“Certainly it’s ungrammatical; but it’s not unnatural,” Crystal says on his blog. “That kind of prepositional doubling is common enough in speech when people start to use one construction and switch into another, especially when the construction involved (as here) is a usage shibboleth.”

Carey also cites a July 30, 2009, Washington Post interview in which McCartney indicates that he’s unsure of the actual wording of the lyric:

“It’s kind of ambivalent, isn’t it?” he says as he waivers between whether the phrase is “we’re living” or “we live in.”

McCartney ultimately thinks the phrase is “we’re living” (the version given in Pop Fiction), though he regards “live in” as “wronger but cuter.”

We’d like to put in a plea here for caution when critiquing song lyrics. The words found on Internet song-lyric sites are generally supplied by fans who merely post what they think they’re hearing.

And what they hear isn’t necessarily what the lyricist wrote. That’s why we don’t trust what we can’t actually see in published books or sheet music.

In fact, we don’t generally get all hot and bothered about ungrammatical song lyrics. As we’ve written before on the blog, lyric writers are exempt from the rules of grammar, syntax, usage, spelling, pronunciation, and even logic!

(Note: This post was updated on May 27, 2015.)

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Linguistics Usage

Opposing views

Q: Is there a distinction between words that are true opposites—equidistant in opposite directions from a neutral midpoint—and words that are characterized by more or less of something? Mathematically, “east” and “west” are true opposites (opposite directions from a central geographical point), while “white” and “black” aren’t (one has all colors, the other none).

A: We assume your question was inspired by our recent blog entry about antonyms. If not, have a look at it.

In answer to your question, we don’t know of any distinction in language between words that are notional opposites and those that are mathematically measurable opposites.

But don’t confuse the two categories. Language is not quantum physics or differential geometry.

“White” and “black” are clearly notional opposites, or antonyms, words that convey opposite ideas.

The fact that to a scientist one represents the presence of something (color) and the other its absence is irrelevant from the point of view of language.

In fact, the words “absence” and “presence” themselves are notional opposites.

“Hot” and “cold” are also notional opposites. They represent opposing concepts, regardless of what is being measured and whether there is any midpoint between them.

In fact, some words that meet your idea of “true opposites” may not be antonyms at all.

“Red” and “green,” for example, may be opposites on a color wheel, but this doesn’t make them antonyms. The only “colors” that are antonyms are “black” and “white.”

While abstract (or unmeasurable) terms may be regarded as “false” from the scientist’s or mathematician’s point of view, they are nevertheless legitimate linguistic concepts.

Of course many words are opposites to both literary and scientific blokes.

As Rudyard Kipling puts it in his Barrack-Room Ballads (1892): “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

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Etymology Linguistics Pronunciation

Asses and big asses

Q: I know this might sound slightly vulgar, but I’m really curious. I’ve been wondering how to classify the word “ass” in a phrase like, “That’s a big-ass house.” What part of speech is this?

A: “Big ass” alone isn’t hard to classify, as in “My big ass makes it difficult to zip my jeans.” Here, “big ass” is a noun phrase consisting of the adjective “big” plus the noun it modifies: “ass.”

But “big ass” can play the role of an adjective as well as a noun. In the sentence “That’s a big-ass house,” it’s an adjectival phrase modifying the noun “house.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has several citations for “big-assed” with a literal meaning (that is, having large buttocks).

The first is from a 1944 entry in H. L. Mencken’s diary: “The marines’ chosen name for their female aides is bams, from big-assed marines.”

An extended use of this literal meaning—applied to airplanes with big rear ends—was recorded in the military beginning in 1945.

Both the OED and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang have citations from that time, when a plane with a large tail section (especially the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress) was referred to as a “big-ass bird” or “big-assed bird.”

But in addition to these more or less literal meanings, both dictionaries have citations for “big-assed” and “big-ass” to mean simply big or impressive.

The OED’s first citation is from a 1945 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology:

“A big white bastard stood up in front of the door, cop of course, hit me in my head with that big ass nightstick, which really rocked my brains.”

Here are a few more quotations from the OED and Random House:

“We ain’t enough, in case of a big-ass attack” (1955, from Thomas Anderson’s Your Own Beloved Sons, a novel of the Korean War).

“Abraham opened the door of his big-ass Cadillac” (1961-64, from Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn).

“He’ll sit there in this big-ass office downtown in Manila” (1977, from John Langone’s Life at the Bottom: The People of Antarctica).

“Somehow it seems daring for a big-assed conglomerate to put an artist in charge of a label’s direction” (1999, from Down Beat magazine).

In short, “big-ass” can be used adjectivally to mean simply big.

In similar adjectival usages, “smelly-ass” just means smelly; “jive-ass” means jive;  “sad-ass” means sad; “skinny-ass” means skinny, and so on. So in a sense, “ass” is a slang intensifier.

Your question gives us an excuse to explain a bit about the etymology of “ass”—or, rather, the etymologies.

Contrary to popular opinion, the two versions of “ass”—one for the posterior and one for the donkey—aren’t the same word. They’re unrelated etymologically and weren’t always identical.

The four-footed “ass” comes from an Old English word, assa, which was recorded sometime before 830 and may have been a diminutive form of an earlier word, esol.

The Old English was similar to words in Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic languages. But whatever its direct source, the Old English probably has its roots in the Latin asinus (donkey), which also gave us the word “asinine.”

The Latin asinus, like its Greek counterpart onos, is thought to have Semitic origins (in Hebrew, “she-ass” is athon).

But on to the anatomical “ass,” which is no relation to the donkey.

This “ass” was originally spelled “arse” (it still is in Britain).

“Arse” has its source in the far reaches of antiquity, a prehistoric Indo-European word that’s been reconstructed as orsos.

As you would expect, “arse” has counterparts from Ireland to Armenia, or “practically from end to end of the geographical range of the Indo-European language family,” as John Ayto puts it in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

The OED has citations for “arse” (spelled aers or ars in Old English) dating back to around 1000. The “ass” spelling and pronunciation originated in the 1930s in the US, where it’s chiefly used today.

Here are a couple of early citations:

“My ass to habeas corpus” (1930, from the John Dos Passos novel 42nd Parallel).

“You give me a pain in the ass” (1934, from John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra).

With that, we will demurely butt out.

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Etymology Grammar Linguistics

You no good rat!

Q: I’m wondering how the use of “you” originated when calling someone a name, as in “You no good rat!”

A: Here the pronoun “you” is being used as a vocative, a word that identifies the one being called out to or addressed.

The word “vocative” comes from the Latin verb vocare (to call), which is also the ancestor of words like “vocal,” “vocalize,” “vocation” (a calling), “evoke” (call forth), and “invoke” (call upon).

When “you” is used as a vocative, it often appears side by side with the noun or noun phrase it refers to, as in your example, “You no good rat!”

In grammatical terms, the vocative “you” is being used in apposition to (roughly, as the equivalent of) the noun phrase “no good rat.”

We’ve written several blog items, including one in 2008, that deal with apposition, a grammatical construction in which one word or phrase is the explanatory equivalent of another.

The word “you” here can be either singular or plural. Both constructions have been around since the 1500s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here are some examples from the OED of the plural usage:

“Farwell you Ladies of the Court” (Thomas Preston, 1569);

“Heare me, you wrangling Pyrates” (Shakespeare, 1594);

“You Lords of Florence, wise Machavil, and You Lord Barbarino” (Sir Aston Cokaine, 1658);

“And you, my daughters” (Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1799);

“You sirs, I said, what are you conspiring about?” (Benjamin Jowett, 1875).

As a singular, “you” is used either once (before the noun) or twice (before and after). The before-and-after version, the OED says, is often meant “in reproach  or contempt.”

Here are citations for the singular usages, some contemptuous and some not:

“My lord and you my lady” (from the French legend Melusine, circa 1500);

“Fie, fie, you counterfeit, you puppet, you” (Shakespeare, 1590);

“You asse you” (George Chapman, 1606);

“You old Sot you” (John Dryden and William Cavendish, 1667);

“You little hussy, you!” (Oliver Goldsmith, 1768);

“You young hangdog, you!” (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1840);

“You scamp not to write before” (Edward Burne-Jones, 1852);

“I love you for trying, you dear” (Bernard Capes, 1919).

By the way, the old singular pronoun “thou” was also used in a vocative way, a usage that dates back to King Alfred in the late 800s.

The Old English citations won’t be understandable, but here’s one from the 15th century: “thow olde dotyng foole” (John Lydgate, c1425).

And here’s a later one: “Thou lyest, thou iesting [jesting] Monkey thou” (Shakespeare, 1610). 

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Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage

Is this a superlative idea?

Q: Recently a friend referred to one of his two daughters as “eldest.” His wife corrected him with “elder.” All six of us present then argued over whether to use “er” or “est” here. We choose you as the final arbiter.

A: Your friend’s wife is an adherent of a very common belief: the idea that you shouldn’t use a superlative adjective like “eldest” when speaking of only two things.

Is she right? As with many of the questions we answer on the blog, this one deserves both a “no” and a “yes.”

Everyone agrees on the general idea. A comparative adjective (one ending in “er,” like “elder”), allows us to compare two things, while a superlative (ending in “est”) lets us compare several.

In its definitions of the grammatical terms, the Oxford English Dictionary says a “comparative” is used “in comparing two objects,” while a “superlative” is used “in comparing a number of things.” 

Clearly, when speaking of three or more things, one would have to use a superlative.

But the question is, can “two” go either way? Do two objects qualify as “a number of things”? If so, then it would be legitimate to use either a comparative or a superlative when speaking of two.

As we wrote in a blog entry a couple of years ago, “er” and “est” suffixes (or versions of them) have been used to compare things since the earliest days of Old English.

The practice was handed down from older Germanic languages and ultimately from ancient Indo-European.

However, the belief that a superlative shouldn’t be used for comparing two things originated much later, in the late 18th century.

And at least one language authority questioned the new rule as early as the mid-19th century, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

M-W quotes the grammarian Goold Brown as saying in 1851 that this rule “is not only unsupported by any reason in the nature of things, but is contradicted in practice by almost every man who affirms it.”

The dictionary agrees that the rule against using a superlative for two “has never reflected actual usage,” adding:

“Among the writers who found the superlative appropriate for two are Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Addison, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Chesterfield, Austen, Bryon, Scott, Irving, Hawthorne, Thackeray, Disraeli, Ruskin, Emerson, Stevenson, Thoreau, and James Russell Lowell.”

By the turn of the 20th century, M-W says, more grammarians began to come around to Goold Brown’s point of view.

Today, the M-W editors say, grammarians no longer subscribe to the old rule, though “hard-line commentators” do.

For example, the generally conservative Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) calls the superlative for two a “blunder.”

Where does that leave us? With the “no” and the “yes” we mentioned above.

Here’s M-W’s conclusion:

“The rule requiring the comparative has a dubious basis in theory and no basis in practice, and it serves no useful communicative purpose. Because it does have a fair number of devoted adherents, however, you may well want to follow it in your most dignified or elevated writing.”

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Etymology Usage

Clichégate

Q: The Watergate scandal wasn’t about a gate (or, for that matter, water), so why has the press (and the public) decided that “-gate” is a negative suffix? For example, “Troopergate” “Filegate,” etc.

A: The Watergate scandal has had a lot of fallout, some of it linguistic.

As you probably know, the story broke when people connected with the Nixon administration were caught breaking into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters on June 17, 1972.

The affair soon became known simply as “Watergate” because that’s the name of the building in Washington where the burglary took place.

A 1972 article in Time magazine, for example, says the Democrats “hope they can make Watergate a devastating—and durable—campaign issue.”

Since 1973, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “Watergate” has also been used to describe any large-scale scandal.

For instance, Doctor Frigo, a 1974 thriller by Eric Ambler, refers to a “Central American Watergate.”

And a 1974 theater review in the Times of London refers to the Sophocles tragedy Oedipus the King as a “Theban Watergate drama.”

The OED entry on “Watergate” also cites examples of the verb to “Watergate,” the verbal noun “Watergating,” and the noun “Watergater.”

And the dictionary has a separate entry on the suffix “-gate” used as “a terminal element denoting an actual or alleged scandal (and usually an attempted cover-up), in some way comparable with the Watergate scandal of 1972.”

The first citation for the suffix used this way is from a 1973 issue of the National Lampoon that refers to a Russian scandal as “Volgagate.”

Other OED citations for the suffix attached to a place associated with a scandal include “Dallasgate” (1975), “Koreagate” (1976), “Hollywoodgate” (1978), and “Irangate” (1986).

The dictionary also includes many citations for the suffix attached to the names of people, organizations, commodities, activities, etc., implicated in a scandal.

Here are some examples: “Motorgate” (1975), “Cattlegate” (1976), “Oilgate” (1978),  “Billygate” (1980), “Hearingsgate” (1983), and “Stalkergate” (1986).

We might add that this usage has become a cliché and ought to be retired.

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