Tag: Grammar

Q: Isn’t the term “all throughout” redundant? Shouldn’t one say “all through” or “throughout”?

A: In most cases, you could use either “all through” or “throughout” instead of a redundant “all throughout.”

But I don’t think we should consider “all throughout” all wrong in all cases. Sometimes we use a little redundancy when emphasis is needed. Some redundancies are less redundant than others.

Take, for example, the use of “ever” in a sentence like “My roses bloomed yesterday for the first time ever.” I talked in a previous blog entry about why this might be justified.

Another example is “different” in an expression like “fourteen different countries.” The word “different” is of course optional. It’s not necessary. But it might be justified, as I argued in another blog entry.

Here’s more on the subject of redundancy, in case you’re still game. There are many redundant adverbs and prepositions in some of our most common idiomatic phrases: “meet up with,” “face up to,” “try out,” “divide up,” “hurry up,” “lose out on,” and many more. Here’s a blog entry that discusses usages like these.

In other words, a redundancy isn’t always (if you’ll pardon the expression) a no-no. 

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Q: Recently I’ve been running across “awarded” used as an adjective: for example, “the most awarded book,” meaning the book with the most awards. Is this new or am I just noticing? I don’t think it’s correct.

A: This is a new one on me, too.

The noun and verb “award” date back to the 1300s, but the only related adjective is the rarely used “awardable.” Here’s a 1622 citation from the Oxford English Dictionary: “No Processe is there awardable against the party.”

I have to object to this new “awarded” usage on the grounds that it’s confusing and ambiguous.

When someone refers to “the most awarded book,” does he mean a book that’s won the most awards, or one that’s been given the most as awards – say, at graduations?

Over the centuries, for example, copies of the King James version of the Bible may have been given to more Sunday school pupils than any other book, making it the “most awarded” book among such students.

But maybe you and I are too picky. When I google “most awarded,” I get over 200,000 hits! Sigh.

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Q: I hear often from Brits the word “whilst,” which is not used in the US. A penny for your thoughts on its usage.

A: “Whilst,” though common in British English, is rarely heard in the United States. And when it is used here, it sounds pretentious and archaic.

“While” is the common usage here, and as matter of fact it’s the older word. The word “while” goes back to about the year 1000 (spelled “hwile”), according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and “whilst” dates from the late 1300s.

The same is true for “amongst” and “amidst.” They’re commonly used in Britain, while Americans use “among” and “amid.”

Again, the American preference happens to be for the older word. “Among” dates to about 1000, and “amongst” to 1250; “amid” is from circa 975, and “amidst” from about 1300.

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Q: I noticed an interesting usage while doing genealogical research in old probate records. An estate inventory from Barnegat Bay, NJ, in 1831 listed “one double barrell gun and one lot of stool (wood) ducks.” I assume from this context that a stool duck was what we would now call a duck decoy. This leads me to wonder if a stool pigeon was originally a hunting decoy too. I’d be interested in your observations.

A: The term “stool pigeon” did indeed once refer to a hunting decoy – in this case, a live pigeon fastened to a stool to attract game birds, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED suggests that this meaning of “stool” may possibly be influenced by an old Anglo-French word, estale, which referred to a pigeon used to entice hawks into a net, and gave us the English noun “stale.”

The dictionary has published references dating back to the mid-1400s for “stale” used to mean a “decoy-bird, a living bird used to entice other birds of its own species, or birds of prey, into a snare or net.” (There’s no indication that the “stales” were tied to stools, however.)

By the 16th century, “stale” was being used figuratively for “a person or thing held out as a lure or bait to entrap a person,” though this meaning is now obsolete. The noun now means the urine of domestic animals, especially horses and camels.

A similar word, “stall,” was used in the 16th century to mean a decoy bird, but this usage is also obsolete. The noun “stall,” though, is still used to mean a ruse or delaying tactic.

I don’t know whether live ducks were ever tied to stools to attract birds for hunters. But John R. Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1859) has this entry: “Stool, an artificial duck or other water-fowl used as a decoy.”

As for “stool pigeon,” by the early 19th century, the expression was being used figuratively, at first tongue in cheek but soon pretty much the way we use it today, according to citations in the OED.

In 1830, a Woodstock, VT, newspaper quoted a jokester who offered for sale “wildbirds domesticated and stool pigeons trained to catch voters for the next Presidency – warranted to suit either party.”

But six years later, Washington Irving wrote in a more serious vein about a man who “was used like a ‘stool pigeon,’ to decoy” others.

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Q: I see “borrow” used a lot when one language adopts a word from another. I always ask myself if there are any plans to return the word. Doesn’t “borrow” mean to temporarily use with the intention of returning the item?

A: If using the verb “borrow” instead of “adopt” is a sin, then I’m guilty. But “borrow” has been used in this looser sense since the 13th century.

When the verb first entered English around the year 1000, it meant to take something “on pledge or security given for its safe return,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But by the 1200s, it could mean to make temporary use of a physical thing – say a neighbor’s plow – or to adopt as one’s own an immaterial thing: thoughts, expressions, words, customs, and so on.

An early published reference in the OED, for example, refers to borrowing the light of the sun. In Shakespeare’s King John (1595), Philip the Bastard tells John that “inferior eyes” shall “borrow their behaviors from the great.”

Interestingly, philologists, etymologists, and other language types often use the term “loanword” to refer to a word that one language borrows from another.

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Q: What is the difference between “dependence” and “dependency”?

A: Traditionally, “dependence” is the state of being under the influence or control of another, while a “dependency” is something that’s under the control of something else. But modern dictionaries now give “dependence” as one meaning of “dependency.”

Here’s an example of the two words at work in the traditional way: When the Colonies were a dependency of Britain, the colonists bridled at their dependence on the mother country.

The word “dependence” is also commonly used for a drug addition: Despite evidence to the contrary, Watson denied that Holmes had a narcotic dependence.

We got both “dependence” and “dependency” in the 16th century from the French, who have given us more than a quarter of our words. You might say that English has had a dependence on French for a lot of its lexicon.

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Q: My daughter and I are wondering if you can tell us why the word “patient” is both an adjective for waiting calmly as well as a noun for someone who sees a doctor.

A: The key to all this is the ultimate source of “patient,” the Latin patiens, meaning able to endure suffering. So, a patient is someone who’s suffering, and someone who’s patient can endure suffering.

Both the noun and the adjective entered English in the 14th century via the French spoken by the Anglo-Norman rulers of England.

The first citation for the adjective in the Oxford English Dictionary, dating from around 1350, refers to being “patient” through “tribulaciouns.” In a few decades, though, the adjective was also being used to mean able to wait calmly.

The noun “patient” showed up about the same time. Here’s a quote from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387-95): “He kepte his pacient a ful greet deel / In houres by his magik natureel.”

Modern dictionaries define the adjective as stoical, calm, tolerant, persevering, deliberate, and so on. The noun, which still means one who receives medical treatment, has generally lost its sense of suffering (though going to the doctor still has its tribulations!).

Thanks for sending an interesting question, and for being so patient.

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Q: A recent New York Times article said Al Gore “had purposefully stayed on the sidelines during the long Democratic primary fight.” It seems to me that the Times should have said “purposely,” which to me means on purpose, instead of “purposefully,” which I see as with a purpose. Is this an example of the corrosion/evolution of meaning? Or is the article just wrong?

A: I usually use “purposely” to mean deliberately and “purposefully” to mean with a purpose, which is pretty much the way you see them.

That’s more or less the traditional way the two words have been used since “purposely” entered English in 1495 and “purposefully” showed up in 1854, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But entries for the two words in modern American dictionaries overlap quite a bit: “purposely” can mean with a purpose, and “purposefully” can mean deliberately. In fact, I even see some overlap in my unabridged Webster’s New International Dictionary (2d ed.) from the 1950s.

Yes, this is an example of the evolution of English. Is it for the worse? I’d say so, since it makes the language fuzzier. But I have just one vote in this. All the people who speak the language ultimately decide what’s good English and bad.

Was the article in the Times wrong? That depends. Did the writer mean that Gore stayed on the sidelines with a purpose (say to maintain party unity) or that he did it deliberately (that is, intentionally, rather than indecisively)?

I guess you’d have to ask the former Vice President for an answer.

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Q: Can you help me find references about historical slang? I’m working on a book set in 1932 and need to know when words and phrases came into use. I’m thinking specifically about “bust,” meaning a police raid, and “pissed off” for angry. Is there a book or website with this kind of information?

A: I’ll begin with the two terms you’re interested in.

The use of “bust” for a police raid first appeared in print in 1938. The earliest published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the New Yorker: “One whiff,” said Chappy, “and we get a bust.” (The “whiff,” of course, is of marijuana.)

The first citation for “pissed off” comes from Artist at War (1943), a book by George Biddle, a painter who worked for the War Department during the Second World War: “When I’m pissed off, I always get that starry look.”

Both “bust” and “pissed off” were probably in use for quite a few years before they appeared in print, so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to put them in the mouths of characters living in 1932.

Now, on to those references. The best source for US slang is the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, by Jonathan E. Lighter. Unfortunately, only the first two volumes ( A-G and H-O) have been published so far.

Two other helpful reference books are Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green, and The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor. If you find the Partridge too expensive, there’s a cheaper concise version.

You might also check out Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which is available online at Bartleby.com.

The OED, the granddaddy of all language references, is also available online – for a price. Here’s how to subscribe.

There are several online slang dictionaries, but they generally don’t give dates for when the words and phrases first showed up. You might, however, find the Online Etymology Dictionary helpful.

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Q: I’ve been looking into a usage issue that will be relevant to a book I’m working on. Perhaps you can help. At what point did the term “ghetto” begin to be used to describe black neighborhoods?

A: The word “ghetto,” which originally referred to the section of an Italian city where Jews had to live, first appeared in English in the early 17th century.

The origin of the word is uncertain, but it may be derived from getto, Italian for foundry, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. (The first “ghetto” was established in 1516 on the site of a foundry in Venice.)

The OED’s earliest published reference for “ghetto” is in a 1611 book by Thomas Coryat, an English travel writer who visited Venice: “The place where the whole fraternity of the Iews dwelleth together, which is called the Ghetto.”

Venetian Jews were required to live in the ghetto, which was surrounded by canals and linked to the rest of Venice by two bridges that were closed at night.

By the late 19th century, the term was being used in a more general way for any city slum occupied by an isolated or segregated group of people, though most of the OED citations well into the 20th century referred to Jewish sections.

The word “ghetto” began being used for African-American areas of US cities in the first half ot the 20th century.

The first published reference that I can find is from the Chicago Defender, an influential black newspaper. An Oct. 31, 1925, article says, “Baltimore, Dallas, St. Louis, Louisville, and some eight or ten other municipalities enacted ordinances designed to confine Colored people to certain restricted areas in those cities, creating Negro ghettos.”

Within a couple of decades, the term was being used by the mainstream press. An Aug. 8, 1943, article in the New York Times, for example, said Detroit had only one major park “near enough to the Negro ghetto to be of any use to its inhabitants.”

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Q: When I watch television, especially sports programs, I hear the term “thus far” used instead of “so far,” and it grates on my ears. My daughter tells me that she hears university lecturers using the term. I would appreciate clarification on this small matter.

A: I find the expression “thus far” a bit stuffy, but there’s nothing wrong with using it to mean “so far.”

Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) list “so” as one of the acceptable meanings of “thus.” And M-W gives the phrase “thus far” as an example of “thus” used to mean “so” or “to this extent.”

In fact, this usage isn’t a new one either. The Oxford English Dictionary has citations going back to Anglo-Saxon days for “thus” used to mean “so” or “to this point.” The first citation is from Beowulf, but you’d have a hard time making out the Old English.

Here’s a more accessible example from the chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599):

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursu’d the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

I hope this helps clarify things for you.

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Q: I recently read an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times that said Big Brown’s trainer had “a list of violations longer than most anyone else’s in the history of the sport.” Is “most” beginning to replace “almost”?

A: I don’t believe “most” is about to replace “almost,” but it’s being used quite a bit these days to modify pronouns like “all,” “any,” “every,” “anyone,” and adverbs like “always,” “anywhere,” and “everywhere.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) describes the usage as informal and gives this example: “Most everyone agrees.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says the usage is heard often in speech, but appears less often in written English. M-W notes, however, that the usage “is considered by some to be unacceptable.”

In other words, a lot of people do it, but the usage isn’t quite ready for prime time (though it’s often heard there).

Interestingly, the use of “most” to mean “almost” isn’t all that recent. The Oxford English Dictionary has published references going back to the early 17th century. A 1770 entry in George Washington’s diary, for example, refers to “the Tassels of most all the Corn.”

In fact, the phrase “most all,” meaning for the most part or nearly, was alive and well in Anglo-Saxon times (it was mæst ealle in Old English). And the word “almost,” which dates from around the year 1,000, was originally formed by combining the Old English words for “all” and “most.”

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Q: We seem to have lost a “that” (“The conference made clear [that] the two sides were divided”) and gained an “is” (“The thing is … is that I forgot to add the baking soda”). How do you explain these two phenomena?

A: Quite often, “that” is optional. I discussed this in a March 7, 2008, blog item, so you might want to take a look.

As for the “is … is” business, here’s my feeling. The speaker gets as far as the first verb (“The thing is …”), hesitates, and then continues, forgetting that a verb has already been used ( ” … is that I forgot to add the baking soda”).

People who do this are essentially treating a clause like “the thing is” or “the point is” or “the problem is” as the subject of the sentence as a whole.

They then have to give that subject a verb, so they forge ahead with another verb (“is that etc.”), mentally shifting gears and grinding them in the process. This often happens when the clause after “is” starts with “that.”

Two linguists, Michael Shapiro and Michael C. Haley, wrote about the subject in the journal American Speech in 2002, calling this kind of “is is” a “reduplicative copula.” (A copula is a linking verb, like “is.”)

The simple double copula, on the other hand, isn’t grammatically incorrect. Examples: “What that is is an armadillo,” or “What he is is a felon.” (Or, to use an example quoted by Shapiro and Haley: “What the problem is is still unclear.”)

But the kind of sentence we’re talking about (“The problem is is that I’m too busy”) is grammatically incorrect, or, as Shapiro and Haley would say, it’s a “nonstandard syntactic construction.” The phenomenon is recent but not particularly new. The two linguists cite examples going back to 1993.

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Q: I think “without” should be capitalized in titles, but when I use it with an upper-case “w,” Microsoft Word lectures me with a wavy green line and a general explanation about some words this and some words that. I don’t know who designated Microsoft the über-grammarian. If I mail rotten eggs to the Capitals Committee in Redmond, WA, will the Post Office charge me postage?

A: This business about capitalizing or not capitalizing prepositions in headlines and titles and such is just a style convention, one that varies from company to company.

As you may have noticed, some book publishers lowercase all prepositions in titles, a practice that (in my opinion) makes words like “without” and “about” look silly.

At the New York Times, where I used to work, all nouns, pronouns, and verbs, as well as all other words of four letters or more, are capped in headlines and book titles (no matter what they look like on the books’ title pages).

Other words always capped in headlines and titles are “no,” “nor,” “not,” “off,” “out,” “so,” and “up.” Also capped are smaller prepositions when they take on the role of adverbs (as in “Cabbie Fills In as Maternity Nurse” or “Prepositions Take On New Role”).

Never mind what Microsoft Word tells you about capitalization in titles. I find the spell-checker helpful at catching typos, and I get a lot of laughs when it suggests off-the-wall changes for legitimate words. But you can forget the grammar-checker. I turn mine off.

Nobody (except perhaps the grammar cop in your computer) will throw the book at you if you do the reasonable thing and cap all prepositions of more than three letters in titles.

I don’t think, though, that the Post Office would appreciate the rotten eggs. If you’re charged, it probably won’t be for postage.

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Q: I’m a Brit and I take issue with the way one-eyed Americans spell the metal that the rest of the world calls “aluminium.” Look at the periodic table. Can you find another element ending in “um” instead of “ium”?

A: You’re right that Americans are in the minority on this one, but we’re not entirely alone. Canadians, for example, call the metal “aluminum” too.

And there are several other elements in the periodic table that end in “um”: molybdenum, tantalum, platinum, and lanthanum. But the fact that most of the other elements end in “ium” isn’t much of an argument.

So why do the Americans use one “i” and the Brits two for this word? Here’s the story.

In 1808 Sir Humphry Davy, the British chemist who discovered the metal, named it “alumium.” With just one “i” and an “ium” ending, it straddled the two competing versions we have today.

Four years later, however, Davy changed his mind and gave the metal the name “aluminum” (yup, the one-“i” American version). In his book Elements of Chemical Philosophy, published in 1812, Davy wrote, “As yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state. “

But later that same year other scientists decided “aluminum” didn’t sound sufficiently Latin, so they began calling it “aluminium.” Here’s a quote from the Quarterly Review: “Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound.”

The scientists also perhaps believed the “ium” ending was more consistent with other elements. However, “aluminum,” as we know, isn’t the only element to break the “ium” pattern. Not to mention the elements with entirely different names, like gold, copper, zinc, nickel, sulfur, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, boron, argon, krypton, iron, tungsten, neon, mercury, iodine, tin, and others.

At any rate, throughout the 19th century, both “aluminum” and “aluminium” could be found in the US as well as in Britain, though the “ium” ending was predominant in British English.

This was such a rare metal in the 1800s, though, that we’re not talking about a common household word; it was mainly known among scientists.

Only at the turn of the century, when production on a large scale became practical, did the name of the metal start becoming a familiar word. And that’s when Americans – after some to-ing and fro-ing, of course – began to clearly prefer the simpler “aluminum” (which had been favored, incidentally, by Noah Webster).

Eventually “aluminum” became the standard name for the metal in North America and was officially adopted in the 1920s by the American Chemical Society.

Elsewhere, though, scientists generally use “aluminium.” The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry uses “aluminium” as the standard international spelling but also recognizes “aluminum” as a variant.

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Q: I was reading Pepys’s diary and saw the word “thence” used time and time again. What’s the correct way to use it today?

A: I don’t think there’s a correct way to use “thence” now, except perhaps to make a humorous point. Bryan A. Garner, in Garner’s Modern American Usage, describes it as an archaism that should be avoided “unless you’re being jocular.”

“Thence” means “from that place” (as in “I went to the opera and thence home”). But it can also mean “from that time” or “from that fact or circumstance” or “from here” (as in “the house is ten miles thence”).

This is a dusty old expression, like “hence,” “whence,” and “thither,” and it’s rarely heard or read today in ordinary American usage. I can’t speak for the Brits, but I don’t suppose they use “thence” much either.

You do find “thence,” however, in things like legal documents, border treaties, property descriptions, and such. You can also find it in religious writing, like the Roman Catholic catechism: “From thence he will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

The term is quite old, dating from the late 1200s. Here’s an example from a June 2, 1665, entry in The Diary of Samuel Pepys: “Thence to visit the Duke of Albemarle, and thence my Lady Sandwich and Lord Crew.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says “thence” is now chiefly literary. The last published reference in the dictionary is an 1895 report of a ship’s leaving Liverpool “on a voyage thence to Melbourne.”

The OED describes the phrase “from thence,” as redundant (remember, “from” is part of the meaning of “thence”).

But the dictionary then goes on to list citations from the 14th to 19th centuries for “thence” used in just that redundant way. Here’s a 1703 example from Pope: “Begin from thence, where first Alpheus hides His wand’ring stream.”

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Q: I noticed a recent usage that might amuse you. Last month, a spokesman for Roger Clemens said the pitcher’s relationship with a 15-year-old girl was “strictly plutonic.” Any comment?

A: Thanks for your tip about “strictly plutonic,” but I suspect this may be another case of a language story that’s too good to be true.

I haven’t been able to find a legitimate news report in which a spokesman for Roger Clemens says his relationship with the country singer Mindy McCready was “strictly plutonic” or, for that matter, “strictly platonic.”

The New York Daily News, which broke the story in early May, quoted Clemens’s lawyer, Rusty Hardin, as saying the pitcher “has never had a sexual relationship with her.” But Hardin didn’t use the word “plutonic” or “platonic” to describe the relationship.

It turns out that the mother of the 33-year-old singer did, however, say her daughter had a “platonic relationship” with Clemens when she was a teenager. Not “plutonic,” though.

Some people commenting online about the situation seem to have messed up the facts and inaccurately said Clemens or his spokesman had referred to the relationship as either “strictly plutonic” or “strictly platonic.”

Nevertheless, I’m glad you wrote me about this. In googling “strictly plutonic,” I got nearly 2,500 hits, many of them meant to be serious. Is this the start of a new usage? Let’s hope not.

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Q: You were discussing the expression “a tissue of lies” on the radio some time ago. I think it may come from un tissu de mensonges, French for “a tissue of lies.” The noun tissu is the past passive participle of the archaic verb tistre, meaning to weave, according to my Harrap’s Shorter French and English Dictionary. Hence the French expression would indicate a number of lies closely woven together.

A: The word “tissue” (originally spelled “tyssu”) entered English in the mid-14th century. It’s derived from an Old French noun, tissu, meaning “a kind of rich stuff,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In English, a “tissue” originally meant a rich cloth often interwoven with gold and silver.

The first citation for the word in the OED is from The Romaunt of the Rose, an English translation (often attributed to Chaucer) of a French allegory: “The barres were of gold ful fyne, / Upon a tyssu of satyne.”

By the early 18th century, the word “tissue” was being used in a figurative way to mean a network or web of negative things. In 1711, for example, Joseph Addison dismissed some poems as “nothing else but a Tissue of Epigrams.”

In 1762, Oliver Goldsmith referred to the history of Europe as “a tissue of crimes, follies, and misfortunes.” And in 1820, Washington Irving complained about a “tissue of misrepresentations.”

I haven’t researched this usage in a French etymological dictionary, but nothing in the OED suggests that we got the negative use of “tissue” from France. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the French got the usage from us.

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Q: I was brought up with a children’s game in which you had to say “Mother, may I” before you could move. I guess that dates me! Anyway, this is why I’m writing. My impression is that one uses “may” for permission and “can” for ability. But the State of Pennsylvania has signs that say “Bridge may be icy.” Do the bridges need permission to ice up? Or has the meaning of “may” changed?

A: In my day, we said, “Captain, may I?” So that dates me as well!

Anyway, the distinction between “can” and “may” is a bit more relaxed today than when you were playing that children’s game, but careful writers still observe it in formal writing or speech.

For example, the overwhelming majority of the usage panel at The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) rejects the use of “can” in this sentence: “Can I take another week to submit the application?”

Traditionally, “can” means able to and “may” means permitted to. Here’s an example from my grammar book Woe Is I: “I can fly when lift plus thrust is greater than load plus drag,” said Sister Bertrille. “May I demonstrate?”

But grammarians and usage experts are willing to cut people some slack in casual usage. Bryan A. Garner, in Garner’s Modern American Usage, notes that “only an insufferable precisian would insist on observing the distinction in informal speech or writing.”

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if even the most stickling sticklers say “Can’t I help with that?” instead of the stilted “Mayn’t I help with that?” Or “You can’t come in yet” instead of “You mayn’t come in yet.”

However, the “may” in those Pennsylvania bridge signs is another animal altogether. This isn’t the “may” that indicates permissibility. It’s a “may” that indicates likelihood, a term similar to “might.” So “Bridge may be icy” means it’s possible that the bridge will ice up. An entirely different meaning of the word.

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Q: The “Ring a ring of rosy” nursery rhyme I heard growing up in Britain ends with “Atchoo, atchoo, / We all fall down.” The “atchoo” is someone sneezing, I was told, and it’s about the Great Plague. Not a very happy rhyme, is it?

A: Many people believe, as you were told, that the children’s rhyme has something to do with the Great Plague of London in 1665. But the available evidence doesn’t support that theory, according to the language sleuths who’ve looked into the issue.

Hugh Rawson, in his book Devious Derivations, notes that the rhyme wasn’t included in the first book of English nursery rhymes, Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (1744), which was published 79 years after the plague.

In fact, the rhyme didn’t appear in print until well over two centuries after the plague. And when it did appear, sneezing wasn’t mentioned. Here’s the earliest known version of the rhyme, published in an 1881 edition of Mother Goose illustrated by Kate Greenaway:

Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush!
We’ve all tumbled down.

There have been many other versions since then. Here’s the one I heard growing up in Iowa:

Ring around the rosy,
A pocketful of posy,
Ashes, ashes,
All fall down.

Unfortunately, many of the most interesting word or phrase origins turn out to be myths. Well, perhaps not unfortunately, since the subject of my next book will be myths about English.

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Q: I am among thousands of amateur radio operators in the US who use “zed” for the letter “z.” Using “zed” in place of “zee” avoids confusion with “c” and other similar-sounding letters. Any thoughts?

A: Radio operators aren’t the only ones who use “zed” instead of “zee.” In fact, we in the United States are the odd ones out where the word for the last letter of the alphabet is concerned. The standard pronunciation in Britain and all the old Commonwealth nations is “zed.”

H. L. Mencken, in his book The American Language, says that the standard pronunciation “zed” became “zee” in the United States sometime in the 18th century, but he doesn’t speculate as to why.

One possible explanation, according to linguists, is that Americans simply like having their word for “z” sound more like “bee,” “cee,” “dee,” and so on.

The pronunciation “zed” for the letter “z” entered English in the 1400s, borrowed from the Middle French zède, which in turn was derived from zeta, the Latin and Greek name for the letter.

“Zed” and “zee” aren’t the only word for “z” on record.

In Samuel Johnson’s time, the letter was often called “izzard” or “uzzard.” In fact, “izzard” survived in odd pockets of the US well into the 20th century. But it was mainly used as part of the expression “from A to izzard,” and was seldom used by itself.

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Q: If a batter takes too many pitches in baseball or a fielder doesn’t charge a grounder, it’s said that the batter or fielder doesn’t exhibit enough aggression. Every time I hear that, I think it should be “aggressiveness.” It seems to me that “aggression” has more to do with warlike actions and has a darker meaning than “aggressiveness.” Am I wrong?

A: “Aggression” is a lot older than “aggressiveness,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and it seems to be a lot more common too, if one can judge from the number of citations in the OED and the number of hits on Google..

The word “aggression,” meaning an attack, first showed up in English in 1611, borrowed from the French agression. By the early 1700s, it also referred in a general way to the making of such attacks.

The latecomer, “aggressiveness,” which the OED defines as “the quality of being aggressive,” first showed up in an 1859 British comment about “the insatiable aggressiveness of France.”

Although both words are still being used in this bellicose way, “aggression” and “aggressive” took on a new meaning in the early 20th century when psychologists and psychiatrists began using them to refer to hostile or destructive behavior.

The term “aggression,” according to the OED, has been used in a positive way for about half a century to mean a “feeling or energy displayed in asserting oneself, in showing drive or initiative; aggressiveness, assertiveness, forcefulness.”

The first published reference for this sense comes from Summerhill (1960), a book by the Scottish educator Alexander Sutherland Neil: “Well, every child has to have some aggression in order to force his way through life.”

A 1968 citation from the now-defunct British magazine The Listener describes a broadcast as “presented with aggression and self-confidence.”

Curiously, I can’t find any citations in the OED for the use of “aggressiveness” in this positive way, but I think this is an oversight, since the word “aggressive” has been used that way since 1930, when a Canadian help-wanted advertisement sought an “aggressive clothing salesman with ambition.”

So, in answer to your question, one could make an etymological case for using either “aggression” or “aggressiveness” to refer to self-assertion in sports. But I agree with you that “aggressiveness” seems more appropriate than “aggression.”

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Q: When I was growing up, I used to hear people in some African-American and Southern white communities pronounce “ask” as “ax.” Where does this come from?

A: The “ax” pronunciation isn’t limited to some African-Americans or Southern whites. Pat heard it when she was growing up in Iowa, from whites as well as blacks.

In a 19th-century English novel that she’s reading now, the Irish servants use it, and it’s still heard in parts of Britain.

Today this pronunciation is considered nonstandard, but it wasn’t always so.

The verb entered Old English in the 8th century and had two basic forms, “ascian” and “acsian.” During the Middle English period (1100-1500), the latter form (“acsian”) became “axsian” and finally “ax” (or “axe”), which was the accepted written form until about 1600.

Chaucer, in The Parson’s Tale (1386), writes of “a man that … cometh for to axe him of mercy.” And in Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible, there are lines like “Axe and it shal be giuen you,” and “he axed for wrytinge tables.”

In the early 17th century, “ask” (which had been lurking in the background) replaced “ax.”

Though the spelling changed and the consonant sounds were switched in standard English, the old pronunciation survived in some parts of England.

The “ax” version is still heard in the Midland and Southern dialects, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And it’s also heard in the US, as we know.

Some have speculated that perhaps the earlier “ax” was somehow passed on to slaves (which could help explain why it survived among blacks). But there’s no evidence to support that theory. And many whites use the pronunciation too.

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Q: At what point in US history did we stop speaking with a British accent? Did the founding fathers have British accents? Any information you can give me would be helpful.

A: A better question would be, When did the British stop speaking like us?

The accent we recognize as British today developed after Britain and the Colonies went their separate ways (late 18th and early to mid-19th centuries). Americans never spoke this way, and before the late 1700s neither did the British.

The British once spoke much the way we do today. The dropped “r” (“fah” instead of “far”), the broad “a” (“lawf” for “laugh”), the dropped penultimate syllables (“secretry” instead of “secretary”), and so on are all relatively late developments.

An upcoming book about language myths that I’ve written with my husband will cover some of these issues, but it won’t be out for about a year.

In the meantime, you might look at a book called American Pronunciation, by John Samuel Kenyon (George Wahr Publishing Co., 1966). It’s on the scholarly side, and you’ll probably have to buy it used.

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Q: Until I was about 10, I pronounced “upheaval” as you-FEE-val. Maybe that’s why I notice that many people now pronounce the first syllables of “diphthong” and “amphitheater” as DIP and AMP. Are those pronunciations acceptable now?

A: Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) accept two standard pronunciations for “diphthong.” Both list DIF-thong first and DIP-thong second, without comment (which means they’re about equally common).

For “amphitheater,” American Heritage, which is the more conservative of the two, recognizes only AMF. But M-W includes both AM(P)F – the parentheses mean that sometimes the P is sounded along with the F – and “also” AMP. The “also” means the second pronunciation is much less common.

Interestingly, the earliest English spellings of “diphthong,” dating back to the late 1400s, were “diptong” and “diptonge,” suggesting that the word was originally pronounced with a DIP, not a DIF.

In fact, it was adopted from the h-less Middle French diptongue, according to The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology. But the DIF sound is found in the ultimate source of “diphthong”: the Greek diphthongos, meaning double sound.

As for “amphitheater,” we borrowed it in the mid-16th century from the Latin amphitheatrum, which came in turn from the Greek amphitheatron, a theater in the round.

As far as I can tell, “amphitheater” was pronounced with an AMF from its earliest days in English. But as you point out, and Merriam-Webster’s confirms, AMP seems to be creeping into the language.

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Q: I am curious about the expression “to put store by.” I think I understand the gist of the meaning: to believe in or count on. Am I correct? And how do those words come together to create this expression?

A: The more familiar forms of the expression are “set store by” or “set store on.” Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines “set store by” as meaning to value highly. Here’s how it came about.

In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “store” (sometimes pluralized as “stores”) meant one’s goods or possessions or money laid up for future use.

Around the same time, this sense of “store” as goods held in reserve for the future gave us another usage: something that lies ahead was said to be “in store” for us.

Later in the 14th century, according to the OED, the word meant a treasure or something precious. Thus it came to be used in phrases having the sense of to value or to prize.

So to value something highly was to “set (great) store by” or to “put (or set) store upon.” Similarly, to “set something at little store” was to devalue it.

Here’s the phrase in action, in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847): “He set store on her past everything.”

The sense of a “store” as a place where goods are sold (more an American usage than a British one) didn’t come into being until the middle of the 18th century.

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Q: In polishing a neighbor’s translation from Japanese to English, I’m finding plurals like “carps,” “salmons,” etc. I want to explain to her that not all English words are pluralized by adding “s,” but I can’t find a rule to explains this. Is there one?

A: Unfortunately, there’s no rule. One just has to get a feel for these idiomatic plurals or else look them up.

Many nouns for animals are both singular and plural: “deer,” “moose,” “vermin,” “elk,” “sheep,” “swine,” and “fish” (also some individual kinds of fish like those you mention).

Some words ending in “s” are also the same in singular and plural: examples are “series,” “species,” and “headquarters.”

What’s more, some words look plural because they end in “s,” but they’re treated as singular: “molasses,” “news,” “whereabouts,” “checkers” (also “billiards,” “dominoes,” and other games); and “measles” (also “mumps,” “rickets,” “shingles,” and other diseases).

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Q: I wonder if you have anything to say about the disappearance of the definite article before phrases like “point is” “trouble is,” “thing is,” and so on. Coming upon this usage in even The New Yorker has led me to send out this APB. Whither “the” and why?

A: In this case, dropping “the” is just a clipped mannerism.

Why is it done? The answer is that fashions in speech come and go, and this one is probably another manifestation of our fast-forward, New-York-minute culture!

It’s like saying “HTH” instead of “hope this helps.” Or, for that matter, “APB” instead of “all points bulletin.”

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Q: I’ve studied German for many years and clearly see similarities in sentence structure with English. But I also see many English words of Latin or Greek origin. Why is English considered a Germanic and not a Romance language?

A: Many centuries ago, what etymologists and linguists now call the Germanic family of languages covered much of northern Europe and included early Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, High and Low German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, English, and Gothic, among others.

Those old Germanic languages were the foundations for modern English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages.

So structurally, English is Germanic. It had its beginnings 1,500 years ago, when the Angles (hence the name “England”) arrived in ancient Britain along with Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, and probably other Germanic tribes. This was the beginning of Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon.

The other major European language group – the Romance family derived from Latin – includes French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Over the centuries, English absorbed huge numbers of Latin vocabulary words, but it has resisted attempts by Latinists to impose Latinate sentence structure as well.

These language categories aren’t as clear-cut as they appear. There’s been borrowing between the language families, as well as between the languages within families. (Latin, for example, derived much of its vocabulary from Greek.)

What’s more, all these languages (Germanic plus Romance), along with some in southern Asia, have a common ancestor: they’re all descended from a prehistoric language, Indo-European.

This accounts for why the words “one,” “two,” and “three,” for example, are so similar in languages as varied as English, Welsh, Dutch, Icelandic, German, Latin, and Greek. And why the verb “bear” (meaning to carry) is strikingly similar in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Old English.

Much of this information comes from a wonderful book, The Origins and Development of the English Language (4th ed.), by Thomas Pyles and John Algeo.

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Q: The Burt Bacharach song “One Less Bell to Answer” can’t possibly be correct, but it sounds more natural than “One Fewer Bell to Answer.” Am I missing something here?

A: Bryan A. Garner has a good explanation of this “one-less” business in Garner’s Modern American Usage. “If, in strict usage,” he writes, “less applies to singular nouns and fewer to plural nouns, the choice is clear: one less golfer on the course, not one fewer golfer.”

The usage is tricky, he adds, “only because less is being applied to a singular count noun, whereas it usually applies to a mass noun.” Burt Bacharach “got it right,” he says, and “most contemporary writers get it right” too.

“Nearly a quarter of the time, however, writers use one fewer, an awkward and unidiomatic phrase,” he goes on, attributing the error to “a kind of hypercorrection induced by underanalysis of the less-vs.-fewer question.”

Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of American Usage agrees. In a discussion of “less,” the editors note: “And of course it follows one.” Examples given include “one less scholarship” and “one less reporter.”

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