Tag: English language

Q: What are the rules on one-sentence paragraphs? I tend to see the regular use of them as a sign of tabloid journalism.

A: Many people seem to have been told, sometime during their school careers, that a one-sentence paragraph is not legitimate. It’s this belief, however, that’s not legit.

Modern dictionaries define a paragraph as a piece of writing consisting of one or more sentences devoted to a single point or topic. It begins on a new line and is usually indented.

(We don’t indent the beginning of paragraphs on our blog. We start them flush left, with a line of white space between them. This seems to be a common convention of online writing.)

As for how many sentences in a paragraph, the writer can use as many—or as few—as the topic requires.

Quite often, as you’ve probably noticed if you read much fiction, a paragraph consists of one speaker’s quoted words. In fact, it might have just a single word:

“Right!”

There are no “rules” of English grammar about the number of sentences per paragraph. This is a matter of style, not grammar.

On our blog, for example, we often use one- or two-sentence paragraphs, confining ourselves to just a few items of information per paragraph.

We think this is easier for people to read, especially in a format consisting of a narrow vertical column with other matter abutting on either side.

But our book Origins of the Specious, with its vacant margins and roomier format, has a more classic style of paragraphing. We used as many sentences per paragraph as we needed to complete a particular point or thought.

Personally, we don’t like extremely long paragraphs, since the eye tends to get lost without a few geographical landmarks as reference points. It’s fatiguing to read a paragraph that takes up page after page, even if it’s legitimately devoted to a single argument.

Many famous writers—Samuel Johnson among them—have written paragraphs of only one or two sentences.

In The History of the English Paragraph (1894), Edwin Herbert Lewis scrutinized dozens of famous writers, examining several hundred paragraphs from the works of each.

For the works he studied, he calculated the percentage of single-sentence paragraphs in Defoe at 62 percent; Bunyan, 61; Laurence Sterne, 55; Spenser, 48; Scott, 45; Dickens, 43; Fielding, 38; Hobbes, 35; Bacon, 32; George Eliot, 27; Johnson, 27. The writers Locke, Lamb, Swift, De Quincey, Addison, Ruskin, Dryden, Sidney, and Milton were in the 18 to 10 percent range. (The novelists among these writers were in some cases using one-sentence paragraphs to quote speakers.)

Paragraphing itself is very old. Lewis said that indented sections of writing can be found in some of the oldest English manuscripts.

“In a manuscript of the sixth century,” he wrote, “quotations are written as in modern paragraphs,—carried in evenly from the marginal line.”

One-sentence paragraphs are found in “every period in English Literature,” Lewis said, but they were more common in the 18th than in the 19th century.

Reading between the lines, it appears that prejudice against the one-sentence paragraph came from 19th-century writers on rhetoric and composition.

Lewis quotes a contemporary of his who believed that “a paragraph is to a sentence what a sentence is to a word.”

And this hierarchy—from word to sentence to paragraph—may have encouraged the belief that a paragraph must be a group of sentences.

Lewis notes that most of the multiple-sentence definitions he found in books of rhetoric and composition “were framed primarily for purposes of pedagogy.”

“This,” he said, “may explain why so much stress is laid upon the idea of a paragraph as a sentence group.”

Teachers, he suggested, wanted to discourage pupils from simply making each new sentence a paragraph.

It seems, though, that they taught their pupils too well.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: Is the expression “I will have none of it” acceptable when referring to someone’s behavior or actions? For example, “His excessive praise is a thinly veiled attempt to jinx my research project and I will have none of it.”

A: Yes, it’s fine to use the expression that way. People have been doing it for more than a century and a half.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the expression as “to refuse or reject something outright.” And that something can be someone’s behavior or actions.

In the earliest example cited, Henry David Thoreau rejects friendship with someone who disagrees with him about right and wrong.

Here’s the citation from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849): “If Friendship is to rob me of my eyes, if it is to darken the day, I will have none of it.”

And we never miss an opportunity to quote P. G. Wodehouse. This is from Very Good, Jeeves! (1930): “Her name was Maudie and he loved her dearly, but the family would have none of it. They dug down into the sock and paid her off.”

The most recent OED example of the usage is from Swing Hammer Swing! (1992), a novel by Jeff Torrington: “I tried to coax the old woman into her apartment but she was having none of it.”

The pronoun “none” is one of the oldest words in English. We’ve written several times on the blog about the myth that it always means “not one” and always is singular.

If you disagree and are having none of it, take a look at our latest posting on the subject.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: The NYC parks commissioner considers a “concrete boardwalk” an oxymoron, but he argues that the usage is OK because the word “boardwalk” had become eponymous. As I see it, he’s using the words “oxymoron” and “eponymous” incorrectly. If I’m wrong, you can bet I won’t tell anyone I consulted you!

A: Thanks for sending that New York Times article about the fight to keep the boards in the boardwalk at Coney Island.

In the article, Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, is quoted as saying last year that a concrete boardwalk is an “oxymoron.”

He’s also quoted as saying  that “boardwalk has become eponymous, in the way Kleenex is for paper tissue. It is a generic term for an elevated oceanfront walkway, and other communities use concrete.”

We think the parks commissioner is being a little loose with his terms, misusing both “oxymoron” and “eponymous.”

The phrase “concrete boardwalk” may be a misnomer, though that’s debatable, but it’s not an oxymoron.

The word “oxymoron,” as we’ve said before on our blog, is a figure of speech with a pair of opposite or markedly contradictory terms. Wood and concrete are different building materials, but they aren’t opposites or markedly contradictory.

And it may be true that “boardwalk” is now a generic term, as the parks commissioner says, but it’s definitely not eponymous.

The adjective “eponymous,” which we’ve also written about on the blog, refers to the person something is named for. For example, Hamlet is the eponymous hero of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

Perhaps the parks commissioner meant that “boardwalk” is ubiquitous—that is, found everywhere. Many people confuse the words “eponymous” and “ubiquitous,” but as we’ve also pointed out on the blog, they’re not synonymous.

One thing we can say for “boardwalk” is that it’s an all-American word. We associate it with Coney Island, Atlantic City, and similar American vacation spots, and as it turns out the word was born in the USA.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for “boardwalk” is from a letter written in 1872 by Frances M. A. Roe, author of Army Letters From an Officer’s Wife:

“We reached a narrow board-walk that was supposed to run along by her side fence.”

Notice that the word wasn’t originally associated with waterfronts. But a 1906 citation from a story by Abby Meguire Roach in Harper’s Magazine has a whiff of salt air:

“A few days later, on the board walk at the seashore, she came face to face with Hugh Wilberding.” (A later version of Roach’s story, collected in a book, has “on the board-walk at Atlantic City.”)

As for what a boardwalk should be made of, the word was—and still is—defined by the OED as “a footway or walking-path constructed of boarding.”

Though the OED doesn’t say so, boardwalks these days are sometimes built of things other than wooden boards.

Perhaps if Coney Island’s boarding continues to be replaced with concrete, the OED will revise its definition.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: Just the other day, I saw a “POSTED: NO HUNTING” sign at a nature preserve. It made me wonder why the word “posted” appears in signs forbidding hunting, fishing, trespassing, etc. Doesn’t the fact that the sign was actually posted make the inclusion of the word at best redundant?

A: In our area of rural New England, we see endless examples of “POSTED: NO HUNTING,” “POSTED: NO TRESPASSING,” and so on. The signs are there, so obviously somebody “posted” them—why underscore the fact?

The short answer is that there’s no short answer.

If you regard a sign as a simple communications tool, the “posted” part is of course redundant. But if you regard it as a legal notice, the wording is another matter.

As you might imagine, this business of sign posting has become a thorny issue involving the rights of hunters on one side and landowners on the other. So, naturally, sign requirements vary widely from state to state.

In some states no signs are necessary, because a hunter must get permission before hunting on private property. In other states, hunting is allowed unless a sign is posted that says otherwise.

And among those states where a sign is necessary, not all require that it include the word “posted.” (It should be noted that municipalities, too, sometimes enact their own ordinances.)

Mark R. Sigmon wrote in the Duke Law Journal in 2004 that 29 states “have statutes requiring landowners to post their land to exclude hunters; the other states have statutes requiring hunters to get explicit permission from landowners before they hunt.”

In his article, “Hunting and Posting on Private Land in America,” Sigmon said that of the states requiring signs, most “set an exact number of signs that must be posted, their size, what they must say, and even their height off of the ground and their color.”

But even in states where the word “posted” isn’t required, its presence on signs seems to have become a hoary American tradition.

Perhaps a sign that shouts “POSTED” underscores the seriousness of a landowner’s intentions. But it may simply be the kind of sign the hardware and farm-supply stores tend to sell. At any rate, here’s a little etymology.

The noun “post,” meaning a support or column of timber, has been in the language since the days of Old English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was taken from the classical Latin word postis, meaning a doorpost.

When the verb “post” first entered English in the mid-1500s, it meant to cut timber into posts, the OED says. A century or so later, it came to mean “to affix (a notice, poster, etc.) to a post, or in a prominent position.”

In the 19th century, “post” began to be used more generally to mean to put up a notice. Here’s a modern citation from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Bellefleur (1980): “All of the Bellefleur property was posted against trespassers.”

Similarly, the adjective “posted” has been used since the 19th century to mean “set up or fixed in a prominent place; displayed so as to provide information; advertised, made public.”

This adjectival usage is “chiefly” North American, the OED says. The dictionary’s first citation is from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick (we’ve gone to the original to expand the quotation).

In searching for a leaking cask, Ishmael imagines finding deep in the hold of the Pequod a “mouldy corner-stone cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards, vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood.”

Check out our books about the English language

Q: In your 2007 posting about “media,” you write that “data” is now “considered singular by a great many usage experts.” As a consulting economist, I’ve long observed that “data” is usually singular in technical literature.

A: You’re right in observing that in scientific and technical literature, “data” has long been treated as a singular collective noun.

We mentioned this in a discussion of “data” in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions.

Here’s what we wrote:

“ ‘Data’ first appeared in English in the seventeenth century, but it didn’t become a common word until a century or so ago. Since then, people have been arguing about its singularity. In its modern sense—information in the form of facts and figures—is ‘data’ singular or plural? It was first used as a singular in 1902, and the practice soon became widespread, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. But battle lines formed.

“English handbooks reared up in protest over the next couple of decades. Their reasoning? In Latin, data is plural and the singular is datum. But no less an authority than the journal Science joined the fray in 1927 on the opposite side, insisting that ‘ “data” in the sense of facts is a collective which is preferably treated as a singular.’ As Science pointed out, the term ‘datum’ (plural: ‘datums’) is a technical word used in surveying, while ‘data’ means information. Even the revered Webster’s Second of 1934, the dictionary that nobody with back problems should attempt to lift, endorsed the singular ‘data.’ As the usage authors Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans noted dryly in the 1950s, ‘No one should think that he must treat data as a plural merely because Julius Caesar may have done so.’ The lesson? Tempus fugit.

“In Caesar’s day, data referred to things that were given, such as the givens in a scientific hypothesis. (It came from dare, the Latin verb for ‘give.’) But we use ‘data’ more broadly today to refer to factual information in general. In fact, the English word is closer to indicium, the Romans’ word for ‘information,’ than it is to the Latin data. When a Latin word has a life of its own in English (think “audio” or “video”) there’s no reason to treat it as Caesar did.

“Then why do so many people ignore the data on ‘data’? There’s an old joke in journalism that when all else fails, you can always blame the media. And here, it seems, publishers of newspapers, magazines, books, and so on are largely to blame. For decades, the house style for most companies required treating ‘data’ as a plural. That means generations of editors diligently changed ‘data is’ to ‘data are,’ and ‘this data’ to ‘these data.’ ”

As we note in our book, we did this ourselves for many years when we were journalists. Our former employer, the New York Times, changed its house style to favor the singular “data” in 1999.

By the way, as you probably noticed in that 2007 posting about whether “media” is singular or plural, we advised readers to “stay tuned.”

“Many usage experts,” we wrote, “have predicted that in a generation or two ‘media’ will be considered acceptable as a singular noun.”

This has now come to pass, at least when “media” refers to the world of mass communications as a whole, as we wrote last year in an updated blog entry.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: L.L. Bean sells something called a “bug bivy,” a mini-tent made of mosquito netting for keeping out insects. No dictionary I have access to has an entry for “bivy,” and not even the Bean people could give me a definition. Have you ever heard of it? I went on an etymological flight of fancy and decided that it’s a diminutive of “bivouac.”

A: Your instincts are right on track.

“Bivy,” more commonly spelled “bivvy,” originated during World War I as army slang, short for the older “bivouac.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “bivvy” as “a temporary shelter for troops; a small tent.”

The OED’s first citation for its use in print is from The Anzac Book (1916), which was written and illustrated in Gallipoli by the men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps: “We lays down in the open / W’en our ‘bivvies’ isn’t dug.”

Here are a few more OED citations.

1918: “We arrived at our allotted spot, somewhere in Palestine, and erected our bivvies” (from the Chronicles of the N.Z.E.F., a journal published for soldiers of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force).

1920: “The Egyptian Camel Corps and Gurkhas arrived, bringing ‘Bivies’ and other luxuries” (from Blackwood’s Magazine).

1925: “That word was ‘tambu’, meaning a rough and ready shelter made of branches, planks, corrugated iron, a ‘bivvy’, in fact” (from the Glasgow Herald).

But L.L. Bean isn’t using a military term. As it happens, “bivvy” later acquired a more peaceful meaning as a slang word among mountaineers, climbers, and backpackers.

This sporting sense of the word was first recorded as a verb in 1943 and as a noun in 1961, according to citations in the OED.

As a verb, the dictionary says, to “bivvy” is “to spend the night in the open air without a tent (esp. in a bivvy bag); to camp with little or no shelter.”

The verb also appears with prepositions, so a camper can “bivvy down,” “bivvy out,” or “bivvy up.”

As for the noun, the OED says a “bivvy” is “a night spent in the open air without a tent” or “an open air encampment.”

In mountaineering slang, a “bivvy sack” (1977) or “bivvy bag” (1982) refers to a waterproof sleeping bag used outdoors instead of a tent, according to the OED.

And in L.L. Bean slang, a “bug bivy” is a lightweight, waterproof, and bug-proof shelter for “the minimalist outdoor adventurer.” 

The original “bivouac” has had many similar meanings over the years.

The noun was first recorded in 1706, when it meant a “night-watch by a whole army under arms, to prevent surprise,” Oxford explains.

In today’s military usage, the dictionary says, it means “a temporary encampment of troops in the field” without tents.

The nonmilitary meaning of “bivouac,” which came along in the mid-19th century, is simply “an encampment for the night in the open air” or “a camping out.”

The verb “bivouac” was first recorded in 1800, when it meant to remain, especially overnight, in the open air with no shelter.

As for its etymology, the word comes from the French bivouac and bivac, terms that the OED says are “generally said to have been introduced during the Thirty Years’ War” (1618-48).

But ultimately “bivouac” probably comes from beiwacht, an old term in Swiss German dialect. It was used in the cantons of Aargau and Zürich in the Old Swiss Confederacy to mean a nighttime citizens’ patrol for keeping order.

As the OED says, “This remaining of a large body of men under arms all night explains the original sense of bivouac.”

Check out our books about the English language

Q: I’m a copy editor who’s often wondered why the style guide where I work considers it a cardinal sin to use “over” in place of “more than.” The rationale is that “over” can only convey position. But it seems to me that its use to mean “more than” is pretty darned ingrained, and certainly sounds right to my ear. Am I nothing more than a victim of new-fangled language or is there some overarching history to be had?

A: No, you’re not a victim of new-fangled language. And, yes, you’ve got history on your side. This is something we’ve written about before.

As we said in a blog entry in 2007, “over” and “more than” have been used interchangeably for six centuries or more, and there’s no reason to think this is wrong.

But we didn’t say much in that post about the origin of the belief that “over” shouldn’t be used to mean “more than.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, which has an excellent entry on the subject, says, “Disapproval of over meaning ‘more than’ is a hoary American newspaper tradition.”

The objection, according to M-W, began with William Cullen Bryant’s book Index Expurgatorius (1877).

It was picked up in Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right (1909), the usage guide says, and from there “passed into almost all of the newspaper handbooks.”

What was Bryant’s beef with using “over” to mean “more than”? He never said, according to the M-W editors.

We checked Bierce’s book, and he never explained it, either.

You’re right, however, that many editors believe “over” should refer only to position, but that belief is waning.

We have an old Associated Press stylebook that insists “over” refers to “spatial relationships” and “is not interchangeable with more than.” But the latest AP stylebook doesn’t include this bugaboo.

Here’s what the editors at the Merriam-Webster’s usage guide conclude: “There is no reason why you need to avoid this usage.” We agree.

[Update, March 24, 2014: The Associated Press has officially changed its policy. Last week, the editors of the AP Stylebook announced at a session of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) Conference that in reference to a quantity, “over” may now be used. “We decided on the change because it has become common usage,” said Darrell Christian, the editor of the AP Stylebook. “We’re not dictating that people use ‘over’—only that they may use it as well as ‘more than’ to indicate greater numerical value.”]

Check out our books about the English language

Q: Pat had a brief discussion on WNYC of why “we” has been insinuated so much into professional writing. I tried—but was not fast enough—to email and remind her that the noun for this procedure is “nosism,” taken (I believe) from the French for “we.”

A: Thanks for calling this rare and interesting noun to our attention. And “our” in this case really does refer to two of us—Pat and Stewart. It’s not an example of nosism!

“Nosism” is the practice of referring to oneself in the plural, as when a writer calls himself “we” instead of “I.” The word comes from the Latin nos (“we”), so it literally means we-ism.

When it was first recorded in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “nosism” was the use of “we” in reference to a self-centered group rather than to an individual, so it meant something like clubbiness.

The OED’s first citation comes from Black’s Edinburgh Magazine (1819): “The egotism or nosism of the other luminaries of the Lake School, is at times extravagant enough, and amusing enough withal.”

It didn’t take long for “nosism” to mean the use of “we” by an individual.

The earliest example is from an 1829 issue of the Examiner, a 19th-century British weekly: “We will be consistent according to the fashionable virtue of the day in nos-ism.”

And here’s how Ben Zimmer used the word in a 2010 On Language column in the New York Times Magazine:

“Given the accumulated resentment of ‘nosism’ (using we for I, from the Latin pronoun nos), it’s little wonder that modern literary writers have rarely tried to write narratives in the first-person plural.”

The noun “nosism” may be rare, but the practice of nosism isn’t. The use of “we” for “I” dates back to early Old English, according to the OED.

One of the purposes of this usage, the dictionary says, is “to secure an impersonal style and tone, or to avoid the obtrusive repetition of ‘I.’ ”

The earliest example of the usage in the OED is from an Old English translation of a 5th-century Christian history written in Latin by Paulus Orosius, a student of St. Augustine.

In more modern times, this sense came to be known as the editorial “we” because it was used by journalists writing unsigned articles and editorials.

But, as the OED says, “This practice has become less usual during the 20th cent. and is limited to self-conscious and humorous contexts.”

Here’s an example from Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): “We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect, with which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy days.”

We have to disagree with the OED about the use of the editorial “we” today by journalists. The practice isn’t all that unusual, especially in signed articles that refer to the author.

A New York Times reporter, for example, used it repeatedly in a recent nightlife column, including a mention that Gwyneth Paltrow “agreed to an interview if we waited while she and Molly Sims schmoozed.”

Another kind of we-ism is sometimes called the royal “we” because of its use by sovereigns and rulers.

But the early history of this usage is unclear, the OED says, because some apparent Old English quotations “may rather show an inclusive plural use of the pronoun.”

Genuine uses of the royal “we” from Middle English and later include citations from Henry III (1298), King James I (1603), and King Charles I (1642).

But perhaps the best-known example of the royal “we” is the famous “We are not amused” quotation attributed to Queen Victoria.

Fred R. Shapiro writes in the Yale Book of Quotations that the comment  was first reported in an 1887 newspaper article that cited Victoria’s private secretary, Sir Arthur Helps, as the source.

Sir Arthur, according to this account, said the Queen used the line to snub him for telling a funny story to her ladies-in-waiting in an attempt to enliven a boring dinner.

But we’re not through with we-ism yet! There’s a kind of “we,” the OED says, that’s used “confidentially or humorously” to the person being addressed and that dates back to the early 18th century.

Here’s Oxford’s first such citation, from the playwright John Vanbrugh’s comedy The False Friend (1702): “Well, old Acquaintance, we are going to be Married then?”

It’s this kind of “we” that Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage is talking about when it describes two sub-genres of we-ism.

Quoting a 1972 usage guide, M-W characterizes these as “the kindergarten we (We won’t lose our mittens, will we?)” and “the hospital we (How are we feeling this morning?).”

With that, we’ll sign off—both of us.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: I was visiting a friend the other day and she used “good job” in the sense of fortunately. My friend grew up in Ireland, and it seems that I hear this usage most often from native English speakers who are not American. You had a posting a few years ago that mentioned this odd use of the word “job.” Could you expand on it?

A: We’ll be happy to oblige.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the word “job” entered English in the 16th century (excluding Old English references to the biblical figure in the Book of Job).

It had several early meanings, including a cartload, a stump, a stab, and a piece of work (the sense that led to the usage you’re asking about).

The earliest example of the work sense in the OED is in a document from the Office of Revels during the reign of King Edward VI.

Here’s the 1557 citation (published two years after Edward’s death), in which “jobs” is spelled “iobbes” and capitalized: “Doinge certen Iobbes of woorke.”

(The Master of Revels, in case you’re curious, was in charge of royal festivities. Nice work if you can get it!)

The OED says the origin of the word “job” is uncertain. But the dictionary adds that the early reference to “jobs of work” suggests that “piece,” rather than “work,” may have been the original core meaning of “job.”

Be that as it may, “job” took on a new sense in the 17th century: “A state of affairs, a situation, a set of circumstances.”

And this new sense, the OED says, was frequently modified by adjectives like “good” and “bad.”

The first citation in the OED for this usage is from Thomas Dangerfield’s picaresque novel Don Tomazo (1680):

“ ’Twas an ill jobb for one Misfortune so soon to fall upon the neck of one another.”

Here’s a more recent citation from A Season for Murder (1991), by the British crime novelist Ann Granger:

“All right, keep your hair on. Good job you could call him up.”

In that example, “Good job” is short for “It’s a good job that …” (meaning fortunately or luckily). This is the way your friend used the expression.

Although the OED references for this usage are generally from British sources, we often hear “job” used this way by Americans.

The dictionary also cites several expressions that use “job” in a similar way. We’ll mention only one of them here: “to make the best of a bad job.”

The expression, which means to do the best one can in unfortunate circumstances, first showed up in the early 19th century.

The first OED citation is from Vindiciae Britannicae, an 1821 religious tract:

“You cannot be the dupe of a craft, which after failing to strangle an infant in its birth, merely adopts it, ‘to make the best of a bad job.’ ”

In T. S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party (1950), both Edward and Sir Henry use the expression in conversing with Lavinia:

Edward: “Lavinia, we must make the best of a bad job. That is what he means.”

Sir Henry: “The best of a bad job is all any of us make of it.”

We hope this helps, and you find it a good job!

Check out our books about the English language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yikes!

Check out our books about the English language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out our books about the English language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Check out our books about the English language

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are preposition-free examples:

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

And here are examples with prepositions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out our books about the English language