Q: A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about the firing of a whistle-blower in 2008 reported that Lehman Brothers had said “it let go Mr. Lee … as part of a broader downsizing.” I prefer “let Mr. Lee go.” Care to comment?

A: The verbal phrase “let go” is very old, dating back to around the year 1300. It was first used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to mean “to allow to escape; to set at liberty; to lose one’s hold of; to relax (one’s hold); to drop (an anchor).”

In early usages, the two words were sometimes separated by an object, as in “leit paule … ga” (“let Paul … go,” c. 1375),  “lat the reynes gon” (“let the reins go,” c. 1384), and “we lete hym ga” (“we let him go,” 1440).

But just as often the two words were kept together, as in “Let go your capestan” (1530), “let goe everye Feasaunt and Partridge” (1581), and “let go the anchor” (1727).

And this trend has continued into modern times: “let go” is sometimes kept intact and sometimes divided. 

The phrase was first used in the sense of releasing or dismissing someone from a job in 1871, the OED says. And in the OED citations, as you can see, the words are sometimes separated and sometimes not. 

1871: “If he decides to let you go….”

1924: “yard workers are let go.”

1985: “We cut costs and let go of employees.”

1991: “Clive tells me he’s had to let you go.”

2005: ”Howard had let go of Monique, the cleaner, describing her as an expense they could no longer afford.”

Notice, however, that when the object follows the verbal phrase, the preposition “of” is normally used (“let go of employees” … “let go of Monique”).

Perhaps the construction seems simply too abrupt and unnatural without the preposition (“let go employees” … “let go Monique”).

There’s very little on this particular verb phrase in the grammatical sources we’ve consulted. But our feeling is that the usage isn’t idiomatic in the Wall Street Journal’s article about the dismissal of Matthew Lee, a senior vice president.

As far as we can tell, the typical idiomatic constructions are “Let Mr. Lee go” or “let go of Mr. Lee” or “Mr. Lee was let go,” not as the Journal writer said, “let go Mr. Lee.” (Elsewhere in the article, the writer uses the more idiomatic “was let go” version.)

In another use of “let go,” meaning “to neglect one’s appearance, personal habits, etc.,” the two words are nearly always divided by a reflexive pronoun, as in these citations from the OED.

1960, from Woman magazine: “The first step towards ‘letting yourself go.’ ”

1970, from Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch: “She tries not ‘to let herself go,’ keeps young-looking.”

1971, from Ruth Rendell’s novel One Across, Two Down: “I wouldn’t want Ethel to think I’d let myself go.”

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Q: Here’s a sentence in a note from a friend and his siblings about the death of their mother: “For those of you who knew her, on all of our behalves, we thank you for loving our mother.” Is “behalves” correct here? I’d have used “behalf,” but maybe I’m out of it.

A: In modern usage, “behalf” is an invariable noun and has no plural form. The old plural “behalves” is considered obsolete and has been for some time.

It’s labeled “obsolete,” for example, in my 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition).

If your friend and his siblings wanted to use such an expression, they should have written “on our behalf” instead of “on all of our behalves.” But in fact, no such phrase was necessary.

We don’t usually thank people “on our behalf”; we simply thank them. It’s implied that a thank-you note from several people is giving thanks on behalf of all the writers.

Now, if the writers had been thanking people on somebody else’s behalf, then a “behalf” expression might have been appropriate.

For example, a son and daughter may be writing thank-you notes for their newly widowed mother, who’s too ill to write them herself.

They might write: “We’d like to thank you on our mother’s behalf for the lovely flowers you sent to Dad’s funeral.”

But back to “behalves.” Right or wrong, the obsolete plural is still alive and kicking in legal terminology.

We found this passage in a petition filed in a privacy lawsuit against AT&T in the state of Illinois:

“Plaintiffs Terkel, Currie, Geraghty, Gerson, Montgomery, and Young bring this action on their own behalves and on behalf of a statewide class of all individuals who ….”

And here’s another example, from a legal website:

“The women asked that the court issue the injunction not just on their own behalves, but on behalf of all women in Massachusetts.”

And yet another, in reference to a suit in Texas:

“Plaintiffs have filed suit on their own behalves and on behalf of all similarly situated employees.”

It’s understandable that in a legal document, it might be necessary to make clear that the petitioners have separate interests (or “behalves”).

But legal language is one thing and real English is another. It ill behooves us non-lawyers to use “behalves.”

On a related subject, people sometimes ask us whether the proper usage is “in behalf of” or “on behalf of.” Both are correct, but traditionally they’ve been used in different ways – at least by sticklers.

We wrote a blog item about this nearly four years ago. As we explained then, the traditional meaning of “in behalf of” is “for the benefit of” or “in the interest of,” while “on behalf of” is supposed to mean “in place of” or “as the agent of.”

Here’s an example: “The Red Cross was given a donation, on behalf my family, to be used in behalf of Haitian relief.”

But that old distinction is going by the wayside (if it isn’t gone already).

In Britain, the sole, all-purpose version is “on behalf of.” Both the “on” and the “in” versions are still used in the US, but most Americans now use them interchangeably, ignoring the traditional difference.

This is according to The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (3d ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

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Q: I have a question about these two question sentences: 1. “Will you close the door?” 2. “Won’t you close the door?” Both elicit the same response (“Yes”) while they (seem to) have opposite meanings. How did these “opposite” sentences get identical meanings?

A: Sometimes a question that’s cast in the negative in fact implies a positive, as in “Isn’t she pretty?” … “Won’t you join us?” … “Aren’t they the clever ones?” … “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” … “Didn’t I tell you this would happen?”

It’s a long-established form of expression in English. In this case, a negative interrogative sentence only poses as a question. In fact, the speaker is biased in favor of a “yes” answer, so it’s more of a suggestion than a real question.  

We wrote a blog item a while back that touches on this phenomenon.

Some kinds of “Why not?” questions act the same way, as in “Why not go to the movies this afternoon?” or “Why not tell the truth?”

But not all negative interrogative sentences are biased in favor of a “yes” answer. Some of them imply that the answer is “no.”

Examples would be “Can’t you do anything right?” and “Didn’t you save your allowance?”

As the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says, “Questions with negative interrogative form are always strongly biased.”

The bias “can be towards either the negative or the positive answer.” 

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Q: I’m hoping you can clear up something for me. I was reading a video game review in the New York Times, and the author used the phrase “far be it for me.” I’ve always thought it was “far be it from me.” Please let me know which is the proper usage.

A: The correct expression is, as you say, “far be it from me.” The Oxford English Dictionary says the phrase is “a form of deprecation” equal to “God forbid that (I, etc.).”

The usage is very old, and in fact appears in the first English translation of the Bible, the Wycliffe Bible of 1382. Here’s the quotation, from Genesis 44:17: “Josephe answerde, Fer be it fro me, that Y thus do.”

This is rendered in the King James version as “And he said, God forbid that I should do so.”

The author of the Times review you mention may be spending far too much time playing video games, but we can’t blame the overuse of joysticks for his boo-boo.

A search of the Times archive finds 15 other examples since 1986 – in the national, arts, opinion, style, and sports sections.

To be fair, though, scores of other Times writers (or their editors) got it right during that time.  

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Q: I was going to ask you about the origins of the phrase “out of pocket,” but instead searched for it on your site first. I found that you posted back in 2007, but had no real evidence on how the “unavailable” meaning evolved. I wonder if you’ve been able to find anything out since then? I’ve had two people use the phrase in the past week, and it has made me curious.

A: Since we wrote that blog entry, the Oxford English Dictionary has come up with an antedating – that is, an earlier appearance in print – of the phrase “out of pocket” in the sense of “out of reach, absent, unavailable.”

We previously reported that this sense of the phrase dates from 1946. But now the OED has found the expression in an O. Henry story, “Buried Treasure,” published in Ainslee’s magazine in July 1908.

Here’s the quotation: “Just now she is out of pocket. And I shall find her as soon as I can.”

So there’s an earlier date for the phrase, but we have nothing new to offer as far as the derivation.

We can only repeat that the expression “to have someone in your pocket,” which dates from the early 1600s, means to have him under your control.

And maybe that’s why someone who’s no longer under your control or scrutiny is said to be “out of pocket.” Just speculation on our part.

At any rate, we all seem to have cell phones in our  pockets these days, so it’s rarer to actually be out of pocket.

[Update, April 24, 2014. A reader writes: I can back you up on the reporter’s use of ‘out of pocket’ for being away from a phone. I was the Tulsa UPI bureau chief in the late ’70s and whenever we were out of the office and away from a phone (this was way before cell phones and just barely after radio telephones), we would message the Dallas Com Center on the teletype: ‘outta pocket.’ Another phrase I remember is ‘outstepping lunch.’ No clue as to the origin of ‘out of pocket,’ but I got the feeling it was an expression common among the old time Unipressers.”]

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Q: I caught only part of Pat’s discussion of “Dutch uncle” on WNYC, so I don’t know if she mentioned this. I grew up in rural Indiana in a German-American community where “Dutch uncle” referred to someone who told you something you needed to hear, but didn’t want to hear.

A: We had a blog entry a few years ago about the many “Dutch” expressions in English, but we left out a lot of them, including “Dutch uncle.” Thanks for giving us a chance to update the post.

Your explanation of “Dutch uncle” is pretty much the same as the definition in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang: “one who talks severely and critically, who lays down the law; usu. in the phr. talk like a Dutch uncle.”

Cassell’s dates the expression from the mid-19th century.

Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English concurs. It says that to talk to someone like a “Dutch uncle” (circa 1830) means “to lecture in a way didactic and heavy-handed, yet kindly meant for the person’s own good.”

Partridge says the phrase is a reference to “the Dutch reputation for extremely rigorous discipline.”

As we say in our earlier blog item, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the many derisive “Dutch” expressions in English to the rivalry and enmity between the English and the Dutch in the 17th century.

With apologies to the Dutch, here are a few more expressions, all from Cassell’s, Partridge, or the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang:

“Dutch auction (or sale)”: one in which the price reductions are imaginary, or in which the starting price is outrageous.

“Dutch bargain”: a one-sided transaction or one arrived at while drinking.

“Dutch bath”: a cursory washing.  

“Dutch cap”: contraceptive device.

“do a Dutch”: go AWOL or desert.

“Dutch concert”: one in which everybody plays a different tune.

“Dutch courage”: it comes from a bottle.

“Dutch feast”: one in which the host is the first to get drunk.

“in Dutch”: in trouble.

“Dutch leave”: time off taken without permission.

“Dutch nightingale”: a frog.

“Dutch palate”: a coarse or crude sense of taste.

“Dutch reckoning”: a bill that gets higher the more one complains.

“Dutch widow”: a prostitute.

Again, our apologies to the Dutch, who we’re sure are exemplary people and a credit to their nation!

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Q: If you fall down and get up by yourself, which expression is grammatically appropriate: “When I fall down, I rise myself” or “When I fall down, I raise myself”?

A: This sentence is correct: “When I fall down, I raise myself.”

The verb “raise” here requires an object, the thing (or, in this case, the person) being raised.

However, the verb “rise” does not need an object. So this sentence would also be correct:  “When I fall down, I rise.”

If you want to emphasize that you get up without any help when you fall down, you could say: “When I fall down, I rise by myself.”

The construction “rise myself” is ungrammatical.

If you’d like to read more, we’ve discussed “raise” vs. “rise” before on the blog, as well as another confusing pair of verbs: “set” and “sit.”

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Q: Is it correct to say, “I need to clean house” when what you really mean is “I need to clean THE house”?

A: The phrasal verb “clean house” is pretty well established in English. Like many verb phrases, it’s idiomatic, which means it may not look exactly right when parsed literally, though in fact it’s perfectly acceptable.

A couple of other “the”-less examples from housekeeping are “do laundry” and “cook dinner.” No article is needed.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) notes that the phrasal verb “clean house” also has a meaning in slang: “To eliminate or discard what is undesirable. The scandal forced the company to clean house.”

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Q: I’m bothered by a new (and dare I say sloppy) way of expressing oneself that I hear on radio and TV: “first off” as opposed to “first of all.” This is a pet peeve of mine and it’s like chalk scratching on a blackboard. I wonder what your take is.

A: The adverbial phrase “first off” is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “colloquial,” meaning that it’s more commonly used in speech than in writing.

It originated in the United States, the OED says, and means “at the first blush, in the first place, to begin with.”

Mark Twain was apparently the first to use the expression in print, in his novel A Tramp Abroad (1880): “First-off, I thought it would certainly give me the botts.” (By “botts” he meant worms or a similar bowel complaint.)

“First off” soon established itself as a familiar idiomatic expression. The OED has these other citations:

1897, from William Dean Howells’s novel The Landlord at Lion’s Head: “First off, you know, I thought I’d sell to the other feller.”

1910, from a novel of the Old West, William Macleod Raine’s Bucky O’Connor: “Four’s right. First off Neil, then the fellow I took to be the Wolf.”

1915, from the Nation: “Men of science … no longer admit first off what simple good sense shows to us.”

A similar adverbial phrase, “first of all,” the one you prefer, is much older.

It was first recorded in print in 1553, according to the OED, in Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique: “[He] must fasten his mynde firste of all, upon these five especiall pointes.”

In our opinion, both expressions are dull. We wouldn’t recommend beginning a speech with either one (or with  “first and foremost”).

But as for your pet peeve, “first off” is thoroughly entrenched in the language and it’s here to stay. You don’t have to use it yourself, but you’ll have to live with the sound of chalk scratching on a blackboard.

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Q: Is it correct to use a comma before “and” in these sentences? (1) “The wide-eyed, baby-faced Beaubois continues to work hard in practice, and has begun to make his mark in a crowded and deep rookie class”; (2) “The Bobcats have spent much of the season with the NBA’s best defense, and are likely to make the playoffs”; (3) “Despite the setback, however, Milwaukee remains in solid position to nab a surprise playoff berth, and could find itself seeded as high as fifth.” If I’m not mistaken, a comma may only be used before “and” to separate two independent clauses.

A: It’s sometimes legitimate to use a comma in a sentence in which two verbs share a single subject. We might do this, for example, if the sentence is long and complicated, or if a comma would avoid confusion.

So, yes, it may be proper to use a comma before “and” to separate parts of a sentence that aren’t independent clauses. A clause, as you know, is a group of words with its own subject and verb.

Here’s how The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.) describes this use of the comma:

“A comma is not normally used between the parts of a compound predicate – that is, two or more verbs having the same subject, as distinct from two independent clauses – though it may occasionally be needed to avoid misreading or to indicate a pause.”

This is the example given in the style guide: “She recognized the man who entered the room, and gasped.”

If we were editing those sentences you quote, would we have kept the final commas? Yes and no. We could make a case for the commas in sentences 1 and 3, which seem to need pauses, but not in #2.

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Q: While editing a friend’s blog, I happened upon two words that I feel do not belong in professional writing: “nobody” and “anybody.” I consider them colloquial, and believe “no one” and “anyone” should be used instead. Is this pet peeve of mine justified?

A: The “body” pronouns (“nobody,” “anybody,” “somebody,” “everybody”) are not colloquial. They’re standard English, and they’re every bit as legitimate as the “one” versions (“no one,” “anyone,” “someone,” “everyone”).

Centuries ago, the word “body” was often used to mean “person.” Think of the Robert Burns poem: “Gin a body meet a body / Comin thro’ the rye, / Gin a body kiss a body, / Need a body cry?”

When the “body” pronouns entered English, most of them around the 14th century, they were written as two words, and over time became single words.

In the case of “nobody,” the Oxford English Dictionary says, it was “frequently written as two words from the 14th to the 18th centuries, and with hyphen in the 17th and 18th.”

Is one set of pronouns better for formal writing than the other?

Among the many usage guides we checked, only Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) sees any difference: “No one is somewhat more formal and literary than nobody.” But Garner’s doesn’t say why, or explain how that judgment was arrived at.

As for the other sets of words (“somebody” vs. “someone” and so on), Garners’  finds them interchangeable and equally acceptable. The usage guide says euphony – the agreeableness of sound  – should govern the choice.

We checked several other references about this “one/body” business, but they mention only one pair of these pronouns: “someone/somebody.”

The Columbia Guide to Standard American Usage says there’s no difference between them: “Someone is not necessarily a more polished choice than somebody; use whichever word makes the most effective, rhythmically satisfying sentence.”

The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, in its entry for “somebody” and “someone,” says both “have been in constant parallel use since the beginning of the 14c.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says the two are “equally standard; use whichever one you think sounds better in a given context.”

Our conclusion is that all the “body” pronouns, including “nobody” and “anybody,” are good  for all occasions. But if you think “no one” and “anyone” sound smoother on occasion, then let your ear be your guide.

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Q: I’ve been collecting words where the “ed” ending is pronounced ID. Here’s my list, but I know I’m missing a few: “crooked,” “dogged,” “jagged,” “legged,” “peaked,” “ragged,” “rugged,” “supposed,” and “wicked.” Can you come up with any more?

A: Several adjectives have an “ed” ending that’s pronounced as a separate and distinct syllable. These include the ones you mention, as well as the following:

“aged,” “beloved,” “blessed,” “learned,” “naked,” “ragged,” “rugged,” “sacred,” “supposed,” “wretched,” sometimes “striped,” and the old poetical usages “cursed,” “accursed” and “winged.”

Yet when some of these show up as verb forms, they merely end in a “d” or “t” sound that’s not a separate syllable:

“he aged fast” … “she blessed the child” … “he crooked his finger” … “we cursed our fate” … “they dogged his footsteps” … “we learned a lot” … “I supposed as much” … “the bird winged its way home.”

The Oxford Guide to English Usage has a section devoted to these words (pages 44-45). And Pat discusses “aged” in the pronunciation chapter of the new third edition of her grammar and usage guide Woe Is I. Here’s the paragraph:

AGED. This has one syllable, except when it’s an adjective meaning “elderly.” Here, only the first aged has two syllables: My aged grandmother, who aged gracefully, took a liking to aged cheese when she was a child aged ten.

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Q: Lately, I have noticed a trend to use “is” in contractions that I think are inappropriate. For example, “Jodi’s going to the party.” Is this becoming acceptable? Am I the only one annoyed by it? 

A: There’s no reason to be annoyed.

The verb “be” can properly be contracted with its subject (a pronoun, a common noun, or a name) as well as with the word “not.”

This has long been standard usage. In fact, contractions were used in Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons. The Old English nis, for example, is a contraction of ne is (“is not”).

So it’s grammatically correct to contract “is” with a pronoun (as in “she’s not going”), a common noun (“the building’s on fire”), a name (“Jodi’s not going”), or “not” (“Jodi isn’t going”).

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Q: In your Jan. 7, 2009, posting, you cite the tongue-in-cheek title of Pat’s grammar book Woe Is I as an example of hypercorrection, and say “woe is me” has been good English for generations. How did “woe is me” come to be accepted? Did it evolve from “woe is to me”?

A: Linguists say “woe,” that unhappy word, has been used as an exclamation of lament since before writing was invented.

It’s believed to come from prehistoric Indo-European, and it has been used in English, spelled in a variety of ways (wa, wae, way, etc.), since at least as far back as the 700s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Similarly, “woe is me” has long been a common lament in English usage and a frequent refrain in literature. But why “me” instead of “I”?

We know that subject pronouns like “I” and “he” have traditionally followed linking verbs like “be.” (The title of Pat’s book Woe Is I was intended as a humorous riff on taking this old grammatical rule too far.)

So why is the familiar expression “woe is me” instead of “woe is I”? Here’s how the OED explains it:

Pronouns in the old dative case (objects like “me,” “him,” “us,” “them,” and so on) were once used with the word “woe,” either “with or without a verb of being or happening, in sentences expressing the incidence of distress, affliction, or grief.”

The first citation in the OED is in Old English and it comes from Beowulf, written in the early 8th century: Wa biedh thaem (“woe be them”). Here are a few similar expressions and the dates they were recorded:

Wo ys him (“Woe is him” 1300); wo thee be (1390); wa is yow (“woe is you,” 1400-50, also around 1560); “Woe were us” (1583); “Woes us” (“Woe is us,” 1680); and ”Woe is him” (1636).

Note: We’ve used italics for the Old English and Middle English citations; thee and yow are objects in the examples above.

Of course the woeful expression most frequently seen, and the one that’s survived, is “woe is me.” And yes, “woe is me” is the common form, though it has occasionally been rendered as “woe is to me” or “woe is unto me.”

It means, says the OED, “I am distressed, afflicted, unfortunate, grieved.”

The earliest citations, all spelled wa is me or wais me, are from around 1205, 1240, 1375, and 1400-1450. Wo is me was recorded around 1400 and 1480, as well as in 1729; “wayis me” in 1513; “wae is me” in 1579, and “Waes me” in 1785 (Robert Burns).

We finally encounter “woe is me” itself in 1570, 1587, 1596 (in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene),  around 1599 (in Shakespeare’s Hamlet), 1780 (Robert Burns again), 1798 (Wordsworth), 1837 (in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution), 1842 (Tennyson), and so on into present-day English.

Biblical citations for the expression can also be found. We’ll excerpt a few here, from the King James Version:

Psalms 120:5 (“Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!”); Isaiah 6:5 (“Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone”); Jeremiah 4:31 (“Woe is me now! for my soul is wearied because of murderers”).

Also, Jeremiah 10:19 (“Woe is me for my hurt! my wound is grievous”); Jeremiah 15:10 (“Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife”);  Jeremiah 45:3 (“Thou didst say, Woe is me now!  for the LORD hath added grief to my sorrow”); and Micah 7:1 (“Woe is me!”).

Many people have suggested that “me” is used instead of “I” in the expression because there’s a missing but understood preposition. They assume that “woe is me” is short for ”woe is unto me” or “woe is to me” or “woe is upon me.”

In effect, they’re inventing an apology for “woe is me” because they see it as ungrammatical.  We don’t see it that way.

No apology in the form of imaginary prepositions is necessary.

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Q: A friend invites me over to “look” at his new TV and “watch” a movie on it. Am I right in concluding that we “watch” something that has a duration, but “look” at something that’s momentary?

A: That’s pretty much the way we understand “watch” and “look” too. Generally, people watch something that’s happening, but look at something that’s stationary.

The verb “look” entered English more than a thousand years ago. In Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, it was locian, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Its earliest meanings, in the 9th and 10th centuries, were to “direct one’s sight,”  to “direct one’s attention to,” and to “take care, make sure” (in the sense of seeing that something is done).

We get many meanings by adding prepositions and other words to “look,” resulting in such expressions as “look into,” “look over,” “look after,” “look sharp,” “look out,” and “look forward to.”

Others examples include “look askance,” “look down upon,” “look back on,” “look around”  (explore), “look daggers” (frown), “look in on” (visit), “look up” (find), and “look up to” (admire).

The verb “watch” ultimately comes from waeccan, an Old English word closely related to wacian (to wake or become awake).

When “watch”  first appeared in English in the 10th century, according to the OED, it meant to stay awake for devotional purposes – that is, to keep a vigil.

(You can see a parallel with the noun “wake,” which was the subject of a blog item of ours a few years ago.)

Later, in the 13th century, “watch” took on another meaning, “To be on the alert, to be vigilant; to be on one’s guard against danger or surprise,” the OED says.

A bit later it was used to mean to be on the lookout, or to keep something or someone in sight. That led to another meaning: to guard or keep under surveillance

It wasn’t until the 16th century that our modern sense of “watch” was recorded: “to keep (a person or thing) in view in order to observe any actions, movements, or changes that may occur.”

The first citation in the OED for this sense of the verb is from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590), where Oberon says,  “Having once this juice, I’ll watch Titania, when she is asleepe, And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.”

People have been using “watch” this way ever since, meaning to keep one’s eyes (whether figuratively or literally) on something that moves or could change.

And people have been using “look” to mean simply to direct one’s gaze at something; there’s much less scrutiny involved.

That’s why “We’re being watched” sounds so much more ominous than “We’re being looked at.”

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Q: My daughter is in medical school, where she has encountered an odd terminology. When a senior doctor asks questions of an intern or a medical student, the “asking” is referred to as “pimping.” No one (from med student to professor to practicing doctor) seems to know the origin of this rather strange usage for an educational exercise. Can you shed any light? 

A: Most of us (those who haven’t gone to medical school) probably think of the word “pimping” in its usual sense – procuring a sexual partner for another – or in one of its recent slang incarnations, such as taking advantage of someone or customizing something in a flashy way.

Nobody, though, seems to be sure about the origin of “pimp” itself, the source of all this pimping.

Some have suggested that the noun and verb “pimp,” both dating from the early 1600s, may have been influenced by the French pimper (to dress elegantly). The present participle pimpant means alluring or seductive in dress.

But the Oxford English Dictionary says any similarities to French are coincidental, and the origin of “pimp” is unknown.

A somewhat unusual adjectival meaning of the word “pimping” is insignificant, paltry, petty, or sickly. (There are similar words with similar senses in German and Dutch.)

One can see how this meaning of “pimping” might apply in the case of a young medical student, aggressively questioned by a superior and made to feel intellectually puny.

As it happens, Frederick L. Brancati, MD, wrote an article for the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1989 on the pimping of medical students by attending physicians. We’ll excerpt a few paragraphs:

“Pimping occurs whenever an attending poses a series of very difficult questions to an intern or student. The earliest reference to pimping is attributed to Harvey in London in 1628. He laments his students’ lack of enthusiasm for learning the circulation of the blood: ‘They know nothing of Natural Philosophy, these pin-heads. Drunkards, sloths, their bellies filled with Mead and Ale. O that I might see them pimped!’

“In 1889, Koch recorded a series of ‘Puempfrage’ or ‘pimp questions’ he would later use on his rounds in Heidelberg. Unpublished notes made by Abraham Flexner on his visit to Johns Hopkins in 1916 yield the first American reference: ‘Rounded with Osler today. Riddles house officers with questions. Like a Gatling gun. Welch says students call it “pimping.” Delightful.’

“On the surface, the aim of pimping appears to be Socratic instruction. The deeper motivation, however, is political. Proper pimping inculcates the intern with a profound and abiding respect for his attending physician while ridding the intern of needless self-esteem. Furthermore, after being pimped, he is drained of the desire to ask new questions – questions that his attending may be unable to answer.”

The slang use of “pimping” in the sense of customizing was of course popularized in the US by the TV program “Pimp My Ride,” which was first broadcast in 2004. But the term was around before the arrival of the show about restoring and customizing dilapidated cars.

The first published reference in the OED is from a March 13, 2000, posting to an Internet newsgroup: “They have to pimp their ride up.”

The next citation is from a Nov. 14, 2002, issue of Rolling Stone: “I pimped out the Bentley with white-and-blue-striped interior.”

Pat recalls another sense of the term that dates from her college days (she won’t say how long ago this was, but Stewart notes that our country was at war in Southeast Asia).

If you were deliberately irritating or prodding or teasing someone or putting him on, according to Pat, you were said to be “pimping” him. The victim might reply, “Oh, you’re just pimping me,” or “Stop pimping me.”

Finally, an  actor once wrote us that in improvisational theater, “pimping” means asking another actor an unexpected question on stage. This is extremely rude, he said, because springing a question on someone during an improvised performance unfairly puts the other actor on the spot.

Not unlike putting an unsuspecting medical student off balance.

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Q: Why do we say “after dark” when what we really mean is “after light” – that is, the darkness that follows the light?

A: The full meaning of “after dark” is “after dark comes” or “after darkness falls.” It doesn’t mean “after dark is over with.”

The Oxford English Dictionary includes “nightfall” among its definitions of the noun “dark.”

So “after dark” could be interpreted as meaning “after nightfall.” At least that’s clearly what people mean by it. 

The phrase “after dark” appears in dozens of references in the OED. Here are a couple from the 18th century as well as a more recent one:

“Not till after dark” (1718); “One evening after dark” (1771), and “whip-poor-wills calling shortly after dark” (2002).

Here are two 19th-century citations from the novels of Charles Dickens:

“I seldom go out until after dark” (The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840), and “After dark there come some visitors, with shoes of felt” (Dombey and Son, 1848).

We’re especially fond of this one, from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe (circa 1882): “I heard the minx remark, / She’d meet him after dark, / Inside St. James’s Park, / And give him one!”

Many of the references are spooky, as you might imagine: “It was long after dark” (1832); “never stirring abroad till after dark” (1854); “they call on their victims after dark” (1966); “After dark nothing would induce them to pass the mangrove-swamps” (1885).

Also, “afraid to go out after dark” (1979); “packs of wolves were reinforced after dark by solitary werewolves” (1988); “Don’t go out there after dark” (1991).

And to conclude on a lighter note, there’s this one from a British newspaper: “from before daybreak until after dark, people use the park for doggies to do whoopsies in” (1986).

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Q: Everything tells me that this sentence is correct: “They fulfilled the request more quickly than they forecasted.” Yet, the use of “forecasted” here sounds a little discordant. Does my grammar or my hearing need fine-tuning?

A: The usual past tense and past participle of the verb “forecast” is “forecast.” Example: “He forecast an inch of snow yesterday, and he has forecast three more inches for tomorrow.”  

However, “forecasted” is listed as an acceptable variant (though not the preferred one) in both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

This acceptance isn’t unanimous, however.

Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) says, “Forecasted is poor usage.” Garner’s also prefers the past tense and past participle “broadcast” over “broadcasted,” another usage that the dictionaries recognize.  

We also prefer “forecast” and “broadcast” because of the parallel with the verb “cast.” Its past tense (as well as its past participle) is simply “cast,” as in “He cast [or “has cast”] a wide net in his search for a law clerk.”

Although your grammar can be defended here, we think you should follow your ears and fine-tune that sentence.

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Q: I have some theories about words beginning with “wr,” “kn,” or “qu.” My impression is that “wr” words are generally related to twisting, specifically at the wrist, while “kn” words have to do with fingers (we knock with our knuckles). I’ve read that “qu” words were once spelled “cuu.” Perhaps ancient scribes got tired of writing three letters and turned them into two. I’d love any insights you have about our bizarre spelling.

A: Many words starting with “wr” have to do with twisting, though not all. And many  starting with “kn” are cousins to “knuckle.” Let’s begin with the “wr” words.

A prehistoric Indo-European root reconstructed as wer (meaning to turn or bend) is the ancestor of our words “wreath,” “writhe,” “wring,” “wrangle,” “wrench,” “wrinkle,” “wrist,” “wrest,” “wrestle,” “wrap,” and scores of others. 

(There are seven other Indo-European roots reconstructed as wer, with seven other meanings.)

Another Indo-European root, g(e)n, meaning to compress into a ball, is the ancestor of many Germanic words that start with “kn” and have to do with knobby projections or sharp blows.

This has given us “knuckle,” “knob,” “knock,” “knot,” “knoll,” “knife,” “knead,” and even a food name like “knackwurst.”

The words “knee,” “kneel,” and others come from another root, genu, meaning angle. And “knack” is of uncertain origin, but could be related to the German knacken, meaning to solve a puzzle. 

This information comes from the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology and The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (2d ed.), edited by Calvert Watkins.

If you’re interested in etymologies, the American Heritage book is worth having and it’s cheap enough ($13.60 in paperback from Amazon.com). Very enjoyable browsing!

But back to spellings. We’ve written blog entries in the past about why, for instance, a word like “knife” has a “k,” and why “gh” has different pronunciations in different words. The latest posting was last December.

And we’ve written about words beginning with the letters “sn” ( like “sneeze”), which often have something to do with the nose. 

As for words beginning with the “kw” sound that’s now spelled “qu,” the usual spelling in Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, was cw, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

As the OED explains, early Old English writings sometimes represented the “kw” sound as qu, an adoption of Latin spelling. However, the normal Old English spelling for this sound was cw. (It was also sometimes spelled cu and occasionally cuu.)

After the Norman Conquest in the 11th century, French and Latin qu spellings gradually worked their way into English. By the end of the 13th century, “qu” was the usual English spelling.   

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Q: I am a retired English teacher, and I have been tutoring a Korean boy.  His mother is also interested in learning English, and she asked me this question. In the sentence “I laughed when I saw her fall,” why is the verb “fall” and not “fell,” since “laughed” is in the past tense? I posted this question on a grammar forum, but no one has responded.  Can you enlighten us?

A: In the clause “I saw her fall,” the verb “fall” is in the infinitive: the simple, uninflected form of a verb. (A clause, as you know, is a group of words with its own subject and verb.)

In English, this is a very common pattern: one verb followed by a second in the infinitive. It’s often the case when the first verb is one involving sensory perception (“see,” “feel,” “hear”).  

Here are a few examples of the kinds of verbs that are often paired with infinitives (the infinitives are underlined):

“I helped her walk” … “They saw us go” … “We felt it move” … “He heard her cry” … “You need not worry” … “Dare we ask?” … “I would rather die” … “We will let it rest” … “Let there be light.”

In addition, the auxiliary “do” is often used with an infinitive to form a question: “Do you smoke?”  … “Did they drive?”

And the modal auxiliary verbs (“can,” “may,” “must,” etc.) take infinitives as their complements: “She may smoke” [or “May she smoke?”] … “We must leave” [or “Must we leave?”].

In all of these cases, the second verb is in the infinitive because it needs no inflection. (An inflected verb changes in form to indicate number, tense, and so on.)

Many people don’t recognize these verb forms as infinitives because they expect infinitives to be preceded by “to.” As you can see, that’s often not the case. 

Even when the “to” is present, it’s not actually part of the infinitive. It’s a prepositional marker indicating that the infinitive is coming up. So you can’t “split” an infinitive, no matter what anyone tells you. We’ve written before on the blog about the “split infinitive” myth.

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Q: All my life I’ve heard the word “inaugurate” pronounced with a “y” sound in the third syllable. Suddenly, I’m hearing on TV about politicians being in-AW-guh-rated. Is this part of Barack Obama’s “change” platform, or have I just not been listening carefully enough in the past?

A: The only pronunciations of “inaugurate,” “inauguration,” and “inaugural” we’ve ever heard have a “y” sound in the third syllable: in-AW-gyuh-rate … in-aw-gyuh-RAY-shun … in-AW-gyuh-rel.

But then, we don’t watch a lot of TV.

Those are also the only pronunciations given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.).

However, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) includes the non-“y” pronunciations as equal variants: in-AW-guh-rate … in-aw-guh-RAY-shun … in-AW-guh-rel. That last one sounds to us like “doggerel.”

The “y”-less pronunciations may be a relatively recent development, since my 1956 printing of the unabridged Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary (2d ed.), known as Web II, has only the “y” pronunciations.

American Heritage isn’t the only language authority that still doesn’t accept the“y”-less ones. The latest Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.), published in 2009, notes that  the penultimate syllable of “inaugural” is pronounced with a “y” sound.

But since the “y”-less pronunciations are getting around so much that they’re already accepted without reservation by Merriam-Webster’s, they probably have a future.

If you don’t like ’em, don’t use ’em (We certainly won’t).

In case you’re interested, we had a blog entry last year about another aspect of “inaugurate” – whether a frying pan can be inaugurated by making latkes!

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Q: In your May 21, 2009, comments, you suggest that “try and” is as acceptable as “come and”  and “go and.” I see a big difference here. We link “come” and “go” with separate acts. For example: “Come and visit us” or “Go and see if it’s there.” But “try” is a synonym for “attempt,” and one wouldn’t say “Attempt and fix the situation.” Finally, “try and” may be older than “try to,” but that doesn’t make it correct today. Wasn’t “ain’t” once acceptable?

A: You’re right, insofar as there isn’t an exact parallel between “try and” and verbal expressions like “come and” and “go and.” The principal difference is that “try and” isn’t used in other verb forms or tenses.

One doesn’t say “tries and,” “tried and,” or “trying and”; here, one uses “to” instead of “and.” But there are no such restrictions on “go and” or “come and.” (Example: “I have no objection to going and seeing him.”)

However, we don’t buy your argument that “try and” isn’t legit because it’s synonymous with “attempt and.” We could make the same argument using synonyms for “come” and “go” (for example, “approach and visit us,” “leave and see if it’s there”).

In our opinion, at bottom all three expressions imply a single, blended act rather than two separate acts.

No, the fact that an expression is age-old doesn’t mean it’s acceptable usage today (as with “ain’t,” which is quite old but which has been strongly  disapproved since the mid- to late 19th century). 

But “try and” isn’t in the same category as “ain’t.” The fact that a construction has been in use continually for centuries AND the fact that it has been acceptable until recently make us skeptical of the disapproval. 

We see nothing wrong with using “try and” in conversation and informal writing, though we’d use “try to” in more formal writing.

The Oxford English Dictionary calls this usage “colloquial,” which means it’s more appropriate for speech than for formal writing.

Among its entries for the conjunction “and,” the OED has this: “Connecting two verbs, the second of which is logically dependent on the first, esp. where the first verb is come, go, send, or try.”

And among its entries for “try,” the OED has this: “Followed by and and a co-ordinated verb (instead of to with inf.) expressing the action attempted.”

The OED‘s citations for verbs joined by “and” begin with Old English, in a passage from the West Saxon Gospels: farenne & bebyrigean minne fæder (go and bury my father).

Here are some other citations:

“come & se” (come and see, 1325);

“trye and speik” (try and speak, 1599);

“try and express their love” (1686);

“mind and confine myself” (Swift, 1710);

“be sure and call” (Jane Austen, 1811);

“try and keep” (1878);

“send and let her know” (Hardy, 1887);

“go and buy” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925);

“write and thank you” (Flannery O’Connor, 1959);

“mind and get yourself one” (1985).

To us, “try and” feels comfortable, perhaps because “try” is used in other casual expressions. For example, the OED has citations for “try for” and “try at” dating from the 1500s.

It defines them this way: “try for, to attempt to obtain or find (an object), or to reach (a place),” and “try at, to make an attempt upon, endeavour to get at; to attempt to do or accomplish.”

We too were once irritated by “try and” instead of “try to.” But then we decided to stop and think!

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Q: In common usage, “mutually exclusive” refers to things that are totally separate. But in statistics, it refers to characteristics that all converge. Example: 1) over six feet tall, 2) brown eyes, and 3) blond hair. Your thoughts?

A: “Mutually exclusive” has two garden-variety definitions in standard dictionaries.

It can mean simply incompatible (as in “their interests were mutually exclusive”). Or it can mean related in such a way that one excludes or precludes the other (as in “mutually exclusive choices”). 

But “mutually exclusive” also has specialized meanings in logic as well as in probability and statistics.

In logic, two mutually exclusive propositions cannot both be true.

In probability and statistics, two mutually exclusive events (also called “disjoint events”) can’t happen at the same time. The occurrence of one means the other cannot occur, so the probability that both will happen is zero.

In addition, statistical categories are said to be mutually exclusive if an individual or object can be included in only one of them.

In the example you give, the three categories (over six feet tall, brown eyes, blond hair) are not mutually exclusive, since a single individual could theoretically be counted in all three.

Mutually exclusive categories would be, for example, over six feet tall and under six feet tall, or male and female. One individual can’t be counted in both. 

Here’s a citation from the Oxford English Dictionary that illustrates the technical use of “mutually exclusive.” It comes from Douglas Chalmers Hague’s book Managerial Economics (1969):

“To be drawn up correctly, our list of probabilities must be such that if any one event occurs, this automatically rules out the possibility that any other event in the same list could also occur. The events will then be mutually exclusive.”

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Q: I work for a medical examiner in Iowa and have a question about “immediate next of kin.” Specifically, can it apply to someone who is researching her ancestry and wants records concerning a deceased great-great-grandparent?

A: Ordinarily, “immediate next of kin” means spouse, children, parents, or siblings. In the case of a long-dead person who is of genealogical interest, no “immediate” next of kin may still be alive.

But what you need is a legal definition, not a general one. (We assume that the medical examiner you work for has had a request for records of a distant death.) Here is some of the information we’ve been able to gather.

A US Defense Department document, Glossary of Working Definitions, describes a deceased employee’s immediate next of kin as “usually the spouse, child(ren), parents, and siblings under special circumstances.” (The italics are in the document.)

Section 22.7 of the Iowa Code deals with public records that “shall be kept confidential, unless otherwise ordered by a court, by the lawful custodian of the records, or by another person duly authorized to release such information.”

The section lists “medical examiner records and reports” as confidential, it but says “autopsy reports shall be released to the decedent’s immediate next of kin” unless disclosure “would jeopardize an investigation or pose a clear and present danger to the public safety or the safety of an individual.”

Unfortunately there’s no definition of “immediate next of kin” in the section, at least none that we can find.

A website called Iowa Cold Cases says the only relatives entitled to an autopsy report are “the immediate and legal next of kin of the deceased (spouse, adult child, parent, adult sibling, grandparent, guardian).”

This website, however, doesn’t appear to be an official government site so we don’t know how authoritative it is.

What you need to find out is whether Iowa has a legal definition of “immediate next of kin.” We can’t find one. We’d suggest that you ask your county attorney to find out for you.

Logically, a great-great-grandparent might be too old to have any “immediate next of kin” living. In a case like that – one so old that it’s unlikely to jeopardize an investigation or endanger the public – perhaps a simple “next of kin” would do.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) defines “next of kin” as the “person or persons most closely related by blood” to the decedent.

Still, for genealogical purposes, a death certificate is a public record, and that would show the cause and manner of death.

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Q: I’m curious about this sentence: “When the two ingredients were mixed, the resultant material was extremely valuable.” Is it correct to use “resultant” here in place of “resulting”?

A: The adjective “resultant” and the participial adjective “resulting” have pretty much the same meaning: following as a consequence or a result of something.

Both are correct, and we can’t see that one is preferred over another for a particular use.

The first to come along was “resultant,” whose original meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was “issuing or shining by reflection.”

This now obscure sense of the word was first recorded in print in Thomas Adams’s The Spirituall Navigator (1615): “Seeing the resultant light of the starres shining in the water about him.”

The modern sense of “resultant” (meaning “that results, resulting; consequent”) first appeared in writing not long afterward, in a letter of Lord Digby (1639):

“Accepting alike the Faith resultant from the dark mists of the Ignorant, and from the clearest intelligence of the Learned.”

It was also recorded in an essay by the scientist Robert Boyle (1672): “By reason of the figure of the resultant corpuscles.”

But Boyle used “resulting” as well, which the OED defines as “arising, produced, or obtained as a result; resultant, consequent.” Here are two citations:

“The resulting Qualities and Attributes of the small particles of Matter” (1666); and “By putting a much greater, or a much lesser, quantity of Galls, into … the Mineral Water, the resulting colour may be more or less intense” (1684-85).

Like Boyle, you can take your pick, though we think “resulting” sounds more natural and idiomatic.

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Q: I often hear the East Coast of the US referred to as the “Eastern Seaboard,” but I can’t recall ever hearing the West Coast called the “Western Seaboard.” Why do you think that is? Similarly, I hear the mocking term “Left Coast,” but I never hear “Right Coast.” Do you think that’s because both coasts are associated with the Left politically? Just wondering.

A: Although “Eastern Seaboard” is far more popular, “Western Seaboard” is not unknown. We googled both phrases and got more than 1.1 million hits for the eastern term compared with about 91,000 for the western one.

Interestingly, most of the “Western Seaboard” hits refer not to the Pacific shore of the United States but to the West Coasts of Canada, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, and other countries.

We did find some 19th-century references in the New York Times archive to both the Eastern and Western Seaboards of the US, but the western version is rarely seen today.

Why? Beats us. There are a few theories that attempt to explain this, but none of them are very convincing. We can, however, tell you a bit about the history of the word “seaboard.”

Back in Anglo-Saxon days, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “board” meant “the border or side of anything; a hem; an edge; a coast.”

This sense of the word is now considered obsolete except in the word “seaboard,” which entered English around 1400 and had several early nautical meanings.

It eventually took on its coastline sense, first as an adjective in the 16th century and then as a noun in the 18th century. (We discussed “seaboard” at greater length a while ago in another blog entry.)

As for the “Left Coast” business, William Safire wrote an On Language column about it in the Oct. 1, 2000, issue of the New York Times Magazine.

He credited Fred R. Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, with tracking down the earliest “Left Coast” citation – in the title of a 1977 Rolling Stone record review: “Wet Willie Left Coast Live.”

Three years later, a New York Times writer explained the term this way: “If you’re standing in Texas looking north, as Texans frequently do, the Left Coast is where Hollywood is.”

These early usages, Safire wrote, “had no political connotation,” but in the mid-’90s, “a liberal coloration emerged.” The Denver Post, for example, noted that President Clinton “swayed to the left coast and invited gays into the military.”

“The combination of geographical and political direction was irresistible,” Safire added.

Why isn’t the East Coast called the “Right Coast”? We think you’re right that it has something to do with the East Coast’s – or at least the Northeast’s – reputation for liberalism.

In fact, the Safire column cited this quotation attributed to Mr. Conservative himself, Barry Goldwater: “We ought to saw off the Eastern Seaboard and float it out to sea.”

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Q: I read your recent blog post about “don’t know X from Y” and immediately thought of “don’t know so-and-so from Adam.” Where did that one come from?

A: The various sayings about not knowing someone from Adam refer to the biblical Adam, and mean the someone mentioned isn’t recognized.

The expression, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, first appeared in print in the trial court proceedings of the London Sessions (1784): “Some man stopped me, I do not know him from Adam.”

Charles Dickens also used the expression, in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840): “He called to see my Governor this morning … and beyond that I don’t know him from Adam.”

Adam makes appearances in other, lesser-known phrases as well, including “as old as Adam,” which means very old, and “since Adam was a boy,” meaning a long time ago. Here are some OED citations:

“As great races … as have ever been run since Adam was a yearling” (1840, from a New York sporting weekly, The Spirit of the Times). 

“Though old as Adam, love is still the theme that interests all hearts in all countries” (1867, from an Australian publication).

“You hunt up that pen you’ve had since Adam was a boy” (1918, from one of Clarence E. Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy novels).

But Adam wasn’t supposed to appear in the expression “up and at  ’em.” We wrote about that one in a recent blog entry.

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Q: Which one of these is correct: “home school” or “home-school” or “homeschool”?  Also, is “homeschooler” one word, two, or hyphenated?

 A: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English  Language (4th ed.) lists both “homeschool” and “home-school,” in that order, for both the noun and the verb. 

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives only the closed version, “homeschool,” as well as “homeschooler” and “homeschooled.” (M-W says a “homeschooler” is a parent who homeschools or a child who’s homeschooled.)

We’d vote for one word, no hyphen, in all these cases, and we’d add “homeschool” as an adjective as well as a noun and a verb. (Over the years, familiar compounds tend to begin as separate words, then become hyphenated, and finally merge into one.) 

The verb “homeschool,” the adjective “homeschooled,” and the noun “homeschooler” are relatively recent terms, dating from the 1980s, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, the noun “homeschool” (which was written as two words at first) is much older, going back to the mid-19th century. The OED defines it as “a school located in a private home; the fact of educating children, esp. one’s own, in the home.”

The first citation for the noun in the OED is from Margaret Percival in America, an 1850 novel by Edward Everett Hale and Lucretia Peabody Hale: “Margaret saw that she had interrupted a sort of home school. She begged them to go on, saying that she was used to that duty herself, at home.”

Although the adjective “homeschool” (which was hyphenated at first) is also quite old, dating from the early 1900s, it initially referred to the relationship between what a child learned at home and what he learned at school.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the adjective “homeschool” (as well as the newer “homeschooled”) was used to refer to educating a child at home.

The first OED citation for “homeschool” used this way is from a 1981 article in the New York Times: “A few parents appear to be thriving on the home-school arrangement. One mother said she ‘learned as much as her children did.’ ”

And the first cite for “homeschooled” used like this is from a 1985 Times article: “He cited several cases of home-schooled students being admitted to good colleges at early ages.” (The term is hyphenated in most of the OED citations).

One other old term, “homeschooling,” dates from the end of the 19th century. The OED’s first citation (in two words) is from an 1899 article in the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News: “After his home schooling Judge Dawson entered Pennsylvania College at Gettysburg.”

Again, my advice is to use a single word, without a hyphen, for all these terms, but this is a matter of style, not grammar, and some dictionaries may disagree.

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Q: When does one sic the errors of another writer? I’ve had an exchange with an online writer that began with my scolding him for too few sics. He did sic some errors, but not others. His response was along the lines of “I sic ’em when the errors are major but not when they’re minor and the sics would make me look pedantic.” Do you have a rule? Does the NYT?

A: Sic is Latin for “so” or “thus,” and it’s used in quoted material – printed in italics and inside brackets – to indicate that the preceding word or phrase is being quoted as it appears in the original.

A good definition of sic is the one given in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.): “intentionally so written.”

The purpose of sic is not to call attention to a mistake. The purpose is to let the reader know that the material is being reproduced as it originally appeared.

This can be useful, for instance, when it helps to clarify a possibly confusing usage, or when a reader might otherwise think he’s seeing a misprint.

If the New York Times has a policy on sic, we don’t know what it is. There’s nothing about this in the paper’s style manual.

But often the use of sic can make the sic-er look nasty and pedantic, as if he has ferreted out an error and is saying “Gotcha!”

We generally don’t use sic on the blog, where we’re often quoting Old English and Middle English citations that are chock full of odd spellings and usages. Readers know these are being quoted “as is.”

You didn’t ask about the use of the verb “sic” in the sense of chase or attack (“sic ’em, Fang”), but we’ll answer anyway.

The first citation for this usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845), a collection of fictional sketches by Johnson Jones Hooper: “Si-c-k, Pomp – sick, sick,      si-c-k him, Bull.” (We’ve edited the quotation based on texts available online.)

So is it “sic” or “sick” in this sense? The two US dictionaries we use the most – Merriam-Webster’s and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) – list the “sic” spelling first.

Where does this usage come from? The lexicographers at the OED describe it as a dialectal variation of the verb “seek.”

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Q: My wife is from the Czech Republic and she says her native language has more words than English. I’ve always thought that English had more words than any other language. Who’s right?

A: We don’t know much about the Czech language, but from what we’ve read it does indeed have a lot of words. We suspect, however, that English may have more, including a few borrowed from Czech, like “howitzer,” “robot,” “pistol,” and “polka.”

The Czech version of the Oxford English Dictionary is P?íru?ní slovník jazyka ?eskéhoa, a nine-volume work known in English as the Compendious Dictionary of the Czech Language. It’s said to contain about 250,000 entries.

The 20-volume second edition of the OED, on the other hand, has full entries for 171,476 words in current use and 47,156 obsolete words, as well as subsidiary entries for about 9,500 derivative words.

However, those OED figures don’t include all the different senses for the different parts of speech. A word like “trick,” for example, can be a noun as well as a verb. The same goes for “tricks.” And a trick can be a prank, a feat of magic, an act of prostitution, and so on.

If distinct senses are included, according to the OED‘s lexicographers, the total number of English words would probably approach about 750,000. And that’s not including a gazillion or so scientific, medical, and technical terms.

Does English have more words than any other modern language? Ask Oxford, the website of the Oxford dictionaries, says “it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.”

“This does, of course, assume,” Ask Oxford adds, “that you ignore ‘agglutinative’ languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of ‘words.’ ”

In case you’d like to read more, we’ve written a blog item about whether English is growing or shrinking, and another about the myth that it has reached a million words.

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Q: I struggle to understand why we can’t delete “own” from a sentences like this: “He worked hard to remember his own name.” Any guidance you can offer would be helpful.

A: Since early Anglo-Saxon days, the pronoun “own” has been used after possessive adjectives or nouns to emphasize possession or ownership.

The first recorded use in writing dates back to the 700s, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest example of the usage is from the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which has a reference to his agen sunu (“his own son”).

This emphatic “own” has been in use steadily ever since. The OED‘s latest citation is from Kate Atkinson’s novel Human Croquet (1997): “How could a mother leave her own children?”

You’re right technically; a sentence like “Eliza abandoned her children” is grammatically correct and states the facts. But it doesn’t convey the same feeling as “Eliza abandoned her own children.”

The addition of  the emphatic “own” adds a value judgment that colors the entire sentence.

Similarly, “He worked hard to remember his name” doesn’t convey the same sense as “He worked hard to remember his own name.”

For one thing, the first sentence might be taken literally, as if the person has a serious case of amnesia. The second sounds like a slight exaggeration, as the speaker surely intends.

We have many other ways of using “own,” as both a pronoun and an adjective.

For example, we use it to express affection or respect, as in “my own dear Erin.”

We use it to show that we’re in full command of ourselves, as in “He’s his own man.”

We use it to underscore a previously mentioned person, as in “I prefer to do my own cooking” or “She likes to toot her own horn.”

We use it in dozens of other ways too: “My darling, my own!” … “We managed to hold our own in the fighting” … “I want a dog of my own” … “Do you live here on your own?” … “He did it on his own” … “Ralph has finally come into his own.”

It’s a versatile little word, and useful for conveying shades of meaning.

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Q: As a writer for language publications, I enjoyed Origins of the Specious. But I wonder whether you should have included “duck tape” in your bit about the sound confusions known as eggcorns. I’ve heard that such tape was originally called “duck tape,” for its waterproofing qualities, and “duct tape” emerged only after it began to be used for sealing ducts. Care to weigh in?

A: We’ve poked around and poked around, and the result is that we’re not convinced that this is true – that “duct tape” was originally called “duck tape.” We’ve examined what evidence exists for both arguments and the results seem inconclusive.

One thing that muddies the waters is that strips of fabric – linen, silk, cotton, and cotton duck (a heavy, canvas-like cotton that often was called simply “duck”) – were referred to as “tape” from approximately the year 1000 until the early 20th century. This was nonadhesive tape, simply strips of cloth used to tie bundles of papers and such.

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition of “tape” in this sense, which is the oldest definition of the word: “A narrow woven strip of stout linen, cotton, silk, or other textile, used as a string for tying garments, and for other purposes for which flat strings are suited, also for measuring lines, etc.”

Therefore, some early references to “duck tape” are not the heavy, multi-layered, adhesive tape we’re interested in, but merely the old cotton tape. 

“Duct tape,” on the other hand, is defined  by the OED as “a strong cloth-backed waterproof adhesive tape, originally used for sealing joints in heating and ventilation ducts, and (later) for holding electrical cables securely in place, now in widespread general use esp. to repair, secure, or connect a range of appliances, fixtures, and equipment.”

In quotations specifically referring to the thick, rubbery World War II invention we’re talking about, the OED‘s only citation calling it “duck tape” dates from 1996, but two earlier citations, from 1965 and 1973, call it “duct tape.”

Still, the OED also seems uncertain whether there’s a connection. It notes that “duct tape” is “perhaps an alteration of earlier duck tape.”

Meanwhile, another wrench in the works is the fact that there’s a brand of duct tape called “Duck Tape.” As if there weren’t enough confusion already. 

Until there’s better evidence, we have to go along with the conclusions of Michael Quinion, who says on his Word Wide Words website that he isn’t convinced the duck came first: 

“My view is that the original name was duct tape, given informally to it by heating engineers post-war, and that the duck tape version is elision in rapid speech, later capitalised on by a manufacturer. But, as things stand, nobody knows for sure.”

By the way, we’ve written several blog items that discuss those misbegotten words or phrases known as eggcorns, including one that appeared last January.

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Q: My boyfriend and I both love to say “by the way” when we want to change the subject in a relevant way. However, we are curious about the etymology of this phrase. Can you enlighten us?

A: This is a nifty question and the answer requires an etymological journey that takes us back to the earliest days of English and the language’s even earlier Germanic roots.

The word “way” has been used to mean a road or path since Old English, and it’s descended from Germanic roots that go back to prehistory.

When “by the way” (or “by way”) first appeared in the 900s, its meaning was literal, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: “along or near the road by which one travels; by the road-side.”

Around the year 1000, the phrase was first used to mean “while going along, in the course of one’s walk or journey.”

This is how Shakespeare used the expression in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590): “Lets follow him, and by the way let us recount our dreames.”

In the mid-16th century, “by the way” developed another meaning, a figurative one used in conversation and discourse: “incidentally, in passing, as a side-topic.”

Shakespeare used this one as well, in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1598): “Shee is pretty, and honest, and gentle, and one that is your friend, I can tell you that by the way.”

Now we arrive at the modern-day meaning, which the OED says is “used parenthetically to apologize for introducing a new topic, a casual remark, or the like.” This usage was introduced in 1614.

Here’s an example, from Edward Burt’s Letters From a Gentleman in the North of Scotland (circa 1730): “By the Way, altho’ the Weather was not warm, he was without Shoes, Stockings, or Breeches.”

And here’s one from Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): “This, by the way, was another bit of diplomacy.”

In case you’re wondering, a similar phrase, “by the by” (or “by the bye”), came along from a different route.

The first “by” in the expression is a preposition, but the second is actually an obscure noun, one that once meant “a secondary or subsidiary object, course, or undertaking; a side issue; something of minor importance.”

That obscure noun lives on in “by the by,” which was introduced in the 1600s and which means, the OED says, “by a side way, on a side issue; as a matter of secondary or subsidiary importance, incidentally, casually, in passing.”

George Eliot used the phrase this way in her novel Middlemarch (1872): “All these matters were by the by.”

In the 1700s “by the by” acquired its modern meaning, which is more or less a parenthetical “by the way.”

Jonathan Swift is credited with the first use in print, writing as the pseudonymous Isaac Bickerstaff (1708): “I hear my wife’s voice, (which by the by, is pretty distinguishable).”

And here’s another citation, from Charles Kingsley’s novel Hereward the Wake (1866): “By-the-by, Martin … any message from my lady mother?”

Finally, we can’t ignore the word “byway,” which combines the two nouns “by” and “way” and means a side road or a path that’s off the beaten track.

It dates back to Middle English, to Robert Manning of Brunne’s Chronicle (1330). In this passage, Cador takes a byway to Totness:  “By a bywey to Totenes lay, Cador & hyse toke that way.”

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