Tag: Linguistics

Q: While dating my wife-to-be 14 years ago, I was introduced to a new phrase: “Lucky strike extra.” Her family used it for a bonus gift that’s given at Christmas along with the main gift. Can you tell me something about this phrase?

A: A “Lucky Strike extra,” something given as an unexpected bonus, got its name from Lucky Strike cigarettes, sponsor of “Your Hit Parade” on radio and television during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

The show regularly played the top 10 or 15 songs then current (the number varied over the years). But it also threw in other notable tunes, often old favorites, that the producers felt deserved air time.

These songs were called “Lucky Strike extras” in a nod to the show’s sponsor.

Later, the phrase became a synonym for any kind of bonus or extra goodie, particularly in advertising when a star improvises an additional comment or two in delivering a commercial.

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Q: I’d like to hear your thoughts on the use of “being that” in a sentence like this: “It’s not my responsibility being that I only started working here a week ago.”

A: “Being that” is generally not considered good English when used in place of “because” or “since.” I’d call it excessively informal or dialectal rather than incorrect, though.

It also sounds awkward and clunky, to my ear at least.

However, I should mention that the usage is widespread, has been around for several hundred years (even in literary writing), and probably won’t go away soon!

Here’s an example, from 1641, in a book on farming by Henry Best: “They went all for halfe gates, beinge that they coulde not bee discerned.”

And here’s a passage from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering (1815): “being that he was addicted unto profane and scurrilous jests.”

(The examples here are given in the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Sometimes “being” is used without “that” (as in “Being I was going, I offered him a ride.”). And sometimes the variation “being as” is used instead.

The result is the same: a usage that’s not the best English.

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[Note: Later posts on this subject appeared in April 2019 and June 2019.]

Q: At almost every morning meeting in my new job, someone uses the word “concept” as a verb meaning to conceive. When a colleague begins a sentence by saying “I concepted a storyline,” it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Is this another example of the lazy “verbification” of nouns?

A: The verbing of nouns isn’t necessarily lazy; it’s a long and honored tradition in English. However, some instances are more welcome than others. The use of “concept” as a verb strikes us as one of the more awkward ones.

What’s wrong with “conceive” or “imagine” or “create” or “devise” or “fancy” or whatever? We have many, many perfectly acceptable ways of saying this without resorting to “concept.”

We wrote a blog item about this two years ago, but a little googling suggests that quite a few other people, especially in the advertising industry, disagree with us and like the concept.

In fact, an advertising copywriter, Ray del Savio, began a campaign a few years ago to get the verb “concept” into Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. He set up a blog and an online petition to press his case.

But the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s, the eleventh, still lists “concept” as a noun or an adjective, not a verb. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) has it only as a noun.

The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for “concept” as a verb, but it means to conceive in the womb, not in the office. And there’s only one published citation for it in the OED, from 1643, suggesting the usage was never all that popular.

Another OED obscurity is the participial adjective “concepted,” meaning conceived or produced, but it too has only one citation, from 1665.

Finally, there’s also a lone citation, from 1594, for “concepted,” meaning “conceited,” but that’s a different animal.

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Q: Sometimes we Americanize a foreign term and sometimes we pronounce it like the original. Shouldn’t we always pronounce a word like “quixotic” or “homage” the foreign way? And shouldn’t we pronounce a name like “Diaz” or “Du Bois” the old way, even if the person so named disagrees? Do people own their names? Finally, what’s your take on having a Language Academy to tell us if a usage is kosher?

A: We’re sorry, but in general we must disagree with you.

It’s in the nature of a language to adopt words from other languages and make them its own. Spanish, for example, has adopted words from English that are often pronounced as Spanish speakers would naturally say them. That’s how it should be.

We’re not annoyed when we hear the phrase “Nueva York.” A Tijuana resident should not be offended when English speakers say MEX-i-co instead of MAY-hee-co. And a Parisian should not be miffed when we say PAR-is instead of pa-REE.

We English speakers adopted the word “toilet” from the French toilette, but we don’t pronounce it twa-LET because for centuries it’s been a bona fide English word. Common English usage has determined its pronunciation in English.

Same with a much older word: “homage.” It entered English in the 1200s, and the pronunciation has naturally become Anglicized. In English, it’s HOM-idj or OM-idj. Anyone who says oh-MAHZH is speaking French, not English.

On the other hand, we DO pronounce some words derived from other languages pretty much the way they’re pronounced in the originals (“rendezvous,” “piñata,” “zeitgeist”).

In the case of “quixotic,” it wasn’t even an adjective in Spanish when the word first showed up in English. It was coined by the British and popularized by an American president, John Adams.

The word “quixotic” first appeared in print in 1718, a shortened version of an earlier English adjective, “quixotical,” first published in 1657.

The definition, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “characteristic of or appropriate to Don Quixote; demonstrating or motivated by exaggerated notions of chivalry and romanticism; naively idealistic; unrealistic, impracticable; (also) unpredictable, capricious, whimsical.”

The pronunciations in English are kwik-SAH-tik and kwik-SAH-ti-kul.

Very soon after the Cervantes novel was published, English speakers had absorbed the hero’s name into English. In fact, the noun “quixote” has been used in English since 1644, and still is, to mean someone who acts like a Don Quixote.

The English pronunciation is KWIK-set or kee-HO-tee, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

And by the way, the name Quixote was an allusion by Cervantes to the Spanish word quijote (or the obsolete quixote) meaning a cuisse, the thigh-piece of a suit of armor.

Yes, people DO own their names, and they can pronounce them any way they like. If an English speaker named Diaz (in Spanish, it’s Díaz) wants to pronounce the name DIE-us, that’s his business.

We once got a question from a reader asking why people pronounce the NFL quarterback Brett Favre’s name as though the “r” comes before the “v.”

We answered that names don’t operate like normal words. We can pronounce our names any way we want to, no matter how they’re spelled.

And Brett Favre pronounces his last name to rhyme with “carve.” Who are we to argue with a quarterback?

The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, part of the Library of Congress, maintains a Web page to help those who record Talking Books for the Blind. The guide, called “Say How? A Pronunciation Guide to Names of Public Figures,” explains that Brett Favre’s last name is pronounced FARV.

In verifying pronunciations of names, the library service says, “the major source, whenever available, must be the person him/herself.” It goes on to say:

“For instance, the surname Moreno is commonly said as either mor-EEN-o or mor-AIN-o, but Rita Moreno pronounces her name mor-ENN-o. And despite the spelling, Brett Favre says his name is pronounced FARV. So FARV it is, and mor-ENN-o it is, and that’s that.”

We’ve also written a blog item about a variation on this question: whether names ending in “stein” should be pronounced STINE or STEEN.

One final note. We’re against the idea of an “Academy” that would attempt to control the development of English. At any rate, it wouldn’t work.

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Q: I have an item for your consideration – a really egregious business neologism. I emailed Home Depot about a problem with a pet door and got this reply: “We have carefully reviewed your concern and found it necessary to escalate it to our Resolution Team.” So now we’re escalating customer service, not just war.

A: This use of “escalate” is entirely new to me. (Not to mention rather bizarre!) But a bit of googling finds that it’s common among customer-service types.

In the lingo of customer service (no, I won’t say “customer care”), the word “escalate” is routinely used in the sense of referring a complaint to a higher authority or moving it along to the next step.

Well, this customer doesn’t buy it.

The verb “escalate” originated in the early 20th century as a back-formation from the noun “escalator.” (A back formation is a word formed by dropping a real or imagined part from another word.)

The noun “escalator” started out as a trade name for the moving stairs introduced by the Otis Elevator Company in 1900.

The verb showed up in 1922 and originally referred to climbing or traveling on an escalator, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the mid-20th century, the verb took on the figurative meaning of “to increase or develop by successive stages.”

The first published reference in the OED for the figurative usage is from a 1959 item in the Manchester Guardian that discusses the “possibility of local wars ‘escalating into all-out atomic wars.’ ”

Most of the OED citations use the verb in a negative sense. Thus, things like wars, threats, accidents, drug abuse, and even pompous language are said to “escalate.”

Because of these negative associations, it seems jarring to me to have a customer-service representative use the verb to refer to the handling of a customer complaint.

If this usage bugs you enough, perhaps you should escalate your complaint to the “corporate communicators” at Home Depot’s Public Relations Department.

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Q: Recently, I heard an NPR reporter use “sanguine” to mean pessimistic, not hopeful, as my Webster’s unabridged defines it. I’ve heard “sanguine” used this way many, many times, and each time my blood pressure rises. Is there something I’m missing about the meaning of this word?

A: No, “sanguine” means optimistic, hopeful, or confident, not pessimistic, but it’s a colorful word with an interesting history. Your question gives me a chance to write about it.

The adjective “sanguine” is related to the Latin sanguis (“blood”), and originally meant “blood-red” when it showed up in English in the 14th century. In fact, it can still mean reddish or ruddy today.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites this early example of the reddish usage from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale (circa 1386): “His colour was sangwyn.”

The association of the word with a ruddy complexion, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, led to the use of “sanguine” to mean cheerful, hopeful, or confident.

Why? Because a “sanguine” complexion was once believed to indicate “the predominance of blood over the other humors.”

In medieval physiology, the four humors (or fluids) of the body were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile).

These supposedly determined a person’s temperament as well as his physical and mental health. Imbalances among the humors were blamed for pain and disease.

A temperament governed by blood was buoyant, by phlegm was sluggish, by choler was quick-tempered, and by melancholy was dejected, according to this system.

The OED says “sanguine” has meant what it does today –”disposed to hopefulness or confidence of success” – since 1509.

But “sanguine” has another meaning as well: bloodthirsty. It’s had this sense since the early 18th century, though the usage is now considered poetic or rhetorical, according to the OED.

Never, as far as I can tell, has “sanguine” meant its opposite: lacking in hope or confidence. Although you’re right about this, I hope you watch your blood pressure when you hear the word misused.

A sanguine complexion isn’t necessarily considered a good sign these days.

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Q I know there’s a word for this, but I just can’t find it. I’m thinking of a category for words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently and have different meanings. For example, a “bow” as in a fancy ribbon rosette vs. a “bow” as in a reverential bending from the waist. Do you know what words like these are called?

A: Words that have the same spellings, but different meanings and sometimes different pronunciations, are homographs. Example: to “sow” (plant seeds) and a “sow” (female pig). The Greek roots of “homograph” mean same writing.

Words that have the same pronunciations and often the same spellings, but different meanings, are homonyms. Examples: a “bank” (embankment) and a “bank” (depository). “Homonym” means same name.

Words that have the same pronunciations, but different meanings and often different spellings, are homophones. Examples: “night” and “knight.” “Homophone” means same sound.

As you can see, the definitions (those above are from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed.), leave some latitude as far as interpretation, so there may be a little overlapping.

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Q: My question pertains to the letters “d” and “m.” Has there ever been a time when they were interchangeable between English and Arabic? For example, the English prefix “deca” and the holy city of Mecca.

A: There’s no correspondence between the letter “d” in English and the Arabic equivalent of “m,” but that’s only the beginning of the story..

The Saudi Arabian holy city of Mecca, whose name (with a lower-case “m”) has become a secular synonym in English for an ideal destination, is Makka or Makkah in Arabic.

The name’s origin is uncertain but it might be related to the Arabic mahrab or “sanctuary,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. There are other theories as well.

“Deca” and “dec,” the English prefixes meaning ten, come from the Greek deka. No connection with Arabic here.

However, there does seem to be an etymological connection between the holy city of Mecca and the record label Decca. It goes back to Decca’s founding in Britain.

The trademark “Decca” was created in 1914 by an Englishman named Wilfred S. Samuel of Barnett Samuel & Sons, a British manufacturer of musical instruments.

Samuel patented a portable record player he named the Decca Dulcephone, which became popular with British troops sent overseas during World War I. His son Edgar later wrote about the origin of the name:

“He told me that he wanted a word for exports, which could be easily recognised by illiterates and which would have the same pronunciation in all languages. It seems to have been a merger of Mecca with the initial D of their logo ‘Dulcet,’ or their trademark ‘Dulcephone.'”

Decca Records was established in 1929 when Barnett Samuel & Sons, renamed Decca Gramophone, was sold to Edward Lewis.

Decca went on to become one of the largest record labels in the world. Wilfred Samuel, meanwhile, became a scholar of Jewish history (as did his son Edgar) and a founder of the Jewish Museum in London.

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Q: I’d like to know why there are so many synonyms in English. Take, for instance, the many words that mean very good: “stupendous,” “wonderful,” “marvelous,” “incredible,” “unbelievable,” etc. Each of these must have had a separate meaning at one time. Now, they all mean pretty much the same thing.

A: This isn’t an easy question to answer in a single blog posting. There are quite a few reasons why English has so many synonyms. I’ll touch on two of them.

(1) The first has to do with the sources of English words. English is a Germanic language, and much of its vocabulary comes from older (and in some cases defunct) Teutonic languages.

But because the Anglo-Saxons were invaded in 1066 and thereafter ruled by Anglo-Norman speakers for a few hundred years, English acquired a vast number of words from French and Latin as well.

This grossly oversimplifies the story, but the short version is that English has two principal strains from which it has acquired the bulk of its words – Germanic languages and Romance languages. As a result, it has gotten a double dose of vocabulary words.

In addition, English has adopted words from many other languages – Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Yiddish, Algonquian, etc. – as Britain colonized, traded with, and absorbed people from other parts of the world.

What this means in practice is that quite often English has retained synonyms (or near synonyms) acquired from different sources. Examples: “increase” (Old French), “augment” (Latin), and “grow” (Old Teutonic).

At the same time, some words that seem identical (the “ear” that you hear with vs. an “ear” of corn, for example) have different meanings because one came from Latin (the one for hearing) and one is Germanic (the one that means a spike of grain). That accounts for some identical words that have dual meanings.

And some very different words that sound alike (“right” and “write,” for example), come from different sources (“right” is from Latin and “write” is Germanic).

(2) Once words are absorbed into English, their meanings tend to shift with common usage. That’s why “cute,” which once meant sharp or shrewd, has now come to mean daintily attractive.

That is also how negative words become positive and vice-versa: “awful” used to mean awe-inspiring, and “wonderful” used to mean wonder-producing (and was often negative). And “incredible,” which once meant literally “not credible,” has come to mean very good in the mouths of some speakers.

If you’d like to read more, I wrote a blog entry recently about how the meanings of words shift.

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She’ll be speaking at 2 PM in the Port Washington Public Library, One Library Drive, Port Washington, NY. Admission is free.

Hear her answer questions like these: Do the British really speak better English than Americans? Why don’t French women wear brassières? Does “ain’t” deserve its bad rep? You may be surprised. Or as the Gershwins wrote, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

Ask her if that pet peeve of yours should be making you peevish. She’ll also sign copies of the new third edition of her grammar book Woe Is I as well as her recent book about language myths, Origins of the Specious.

Q: I’m reading Origins of the Specious, your book about language myths, and I wonder if the words “specious” and “species” are related. Perhaps there’s a myth involved here.

A: Not exactly a myth, but an interesting etymological twist or two.

Believe it or not, “specious” began life in English around 1400 as an adjective meaning beautiful or pleasing to the eye, an adaptation of the Latin speciosus (fair, beautiful).

Although the Oxford English Dictionary has published references for this usage from around 1400 until the early 1800s, it’s now considered obsolete.

Not until the 1600s, according to the OED, did “specious” come to mean deceptively attractive or plausible.

Digging deeper into the word’s history, its ultimate source is – yes – the Latin species (appearance, form, kind), which of course gave us the English word “species.”

The English noun originally referred to appearance or outward form, the OED tells us, but in the 1600s “species” came to mean a class, as of plants or animals.

That’s about when “specious” began acting deceptively.

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Q: I always use “bad,” not “badly,” when I feel bad about someone or something. But I hear other people (my son, for instance) use “badly.” I think you said recently on WNYC that one could feel “bad” or “badly,” depending on the meaning. Please explain.

A: “Feel” (meaning to sense rather than to touch) is a linking verb, along with “be,” “appear,” “become,” “grow,” “look,” “remain,” “seem,” “smell,” “sound,” and “taste.” Linking verbs are modified by adjectives (like “bad”) rather than adverbs (“badly”).

I usually explain the use of linking verbs when the “good/well” or “bad/badly” debate comes up on the air, but for some reason I didn’t get into it this time.

A linking verb differs from other verbs in that it conveys a state or condition, rather than an activity.

It’s called a linking verb (or copula) because it merely links (or couples) the subject with the complement, as in “He seems tired.”

In other words, the complement is an adjective rather than an adverb; in effect, it modifies the subject rather than the verb.

If you use “feel” to mean touch, however, then it’s NOT a linking verb, and it would take an adverb (“His fingertips are numb from the cold, so he feels badly”).

Many listeners emailed me their long-ago memorized lists of the 11 linking verbs. Never underestimate the power of rote learning! I’m a big believer in it.

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Q: Just when I’ve begun to tolerate “heart,” either word or symbol, as a verb, another verb has popped up. In a poster showing lovingly clasped hands, the caption is “Friend me forever.”

A: This use of “friend” may sound jarring to modern ears (at least those not used to its online social meaning), but once upon a tyme it was routine.

The Oxford English Dictionary‘s entry for “friend” as a verb has published citations going back to 1225! Its original meaning was “to gain friends for.”

In the 1300s, its meaning widened to include “to make (persons) friends or friendly; to join in friendship.”

It was commonly used in the sense “to be friended,” as in this example from Thomas Usk’s medieval allegory The Testament of Love (1387-88): “Charitie is love, and love is charity. God graunt us al therin to be frended!”

In the mid-1500s, the verb “friend” acquired the meaning it has regained in the Facebook age: “to act as a friend to, befriend (a person, cause, etc.); to assist, help.” Here are a couple of examples:

1600, from Philemon Holland’s translation of Livy’s history of Rome: “They had undertaken the warre upon king Philip, because he had friended and aided the Carthaginians.”

1676, from William Row’s supplement to the autobiography of his father-in-law, Robert Blair: “Reports came that the King would friend Lauderdale.”

The most recent citations in the OED for the use of “friend” as a verb are from the 19th century. As you point out, though, it’s having a rebirth in the 21st.

Maybe our old friend will stick around this time, like the one in the Carole King song: “Winter, spring, summer or fall / All you have to do is call / And I’ll be there / You’ve got a friend.”

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Q: I have always been confused about “toward” and “towards.” Is there a difference between them? A different usage? A different history?

A: The short answer is that both “toward” and “towards” are fine.

The preposition “toward” is more common in American English and “towards” in British English. So an American is likely to say “toward me” and a Briton “towards me.” The meanings are identical, and both versions have been around for more than a thousand years.

I’m also asked a lot about “forward/backward” versus “forwards/backwards.”

In American English, the words in each set are interchangeable and the ones without the “s” are more common.

In British English, there’s a slight difference between “forward/backward” and “forwards/backwards.”

The words in the first set (those without the “s”) are used as adjectives (“forward motion,” “backward glance”), while the others (with the “s”) are used for the most part as adverbs (“move forwards,” “run backwards”).

There are signs, though, that “forward” is gaining in popularity as an adverb in the British Isles. But the last time I looked, Yeats’s rough beast was still slouching “towards” Bethlehem to be born.

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Hear her answer questions like these: Do the British really speak better English than Americans? Why don’t French women wear brassières? Does “ain’t” deserve its bad rep? You may be surprised. As the title of her talk suggests, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

Pat will be speaking at 6:30 PM at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library, 40th Street and Fifth Avenue. Admission is free.

Ask her if that pet peeve of yours should be making you peevish. She’ll also sign copies of the new third edition of her grammar book Woe Is I as well as her recent book about language myths, Origins of the Specious.

Q: I’m pretty certain the political use of “transparency” is European in origin, quite possibly of academic origin. I first noticed it about 15 years ago in UN speak and in the name of an NGO (non-governmental organization) called Transparency International (it’s dedicated to openness in government and fighting corruption).

A: Well, the usage does indeed seem to be of European origin, but it may be a lot older than you imagine – a century and a half older if you count Thomas Carlyle’s use of it to make a political point.

The Scottish man of letters uses the term in Past and Present (1843), a work in which he argues that authoritarianism, not democracy, is the remedy for political corruption.

In the book, Carlyle compares the chaotic democracy of industrial Britain in the 19th century with the ordered, hierarchical life of the English monastery Bury St. Edmunds in the 12th century.

He writes that Jocelyn de Brakelond, a monk at Bury St. Edmunds, chronicled life at the monastery with “child-like transparency, in its innocent good-humour, not without touches of ready pleasant wit and many kinds of worth.”

Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary credits Shakespeare with being the first to use the adjective “transparent” in a figurative way to mean “frank, open, candid, ingenuous.”

Here’s the citation, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590): “Transparent Helena, nature shewes art, / That through thy bosome makes me see thy heart.”

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[Note: The following question comes from Florenz Eisman, whose husband, Hy, writes and draws the Popeye comic strip.]

Q: Our dictionary says “Brussels sprout” is the correct spelling for this often disliked veggie, but we feel otherwise. Is it ever spelled “brussel sprouts”? This is for a gag where Hy is putting the words into Wimpy’s mouth. (Since Wimpy has 33 college degrees, the spelling must be correct.)

A: It’s properly called “Brussels sprouts.” The first word is capitalized because the vegetable is named after the city of Brussels, Belgium, and the second word is usually plural because we seldom eat only one sprout!

Here’s the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: “Brussels sprout (almost always pl.), the bud-bearing Cabbage (Brassica oleracea gemmifera), a variety producing buds like small cabbages in the axils of its leaves.”

The OED gives these published citations:

1796, from Charles Marshall’s A Plain and Easy Introduction to the Knowledge and Practice of Gardening: “Brussels sprouts are winter greens growing much like boorcole.” [If you don’t have the OED handy, “boorcole” is better known these days as kale; the word probably comes from a Dutch term for peasant’s cabbage.]

1861, from Eugene S. Delamer’s The Kitchen Garden: “And from the bud at the root of the foot-stalk of each, will appear a miniature cabbage, which is the Brussels sprout.”

“Sprouts,” according to the OED, are “young or tender shoots or side-growths of various vegetables, esp. of the cabbage-kind.”

But Wimpy, with his 33 college degrees, knows this stuff already, we’re sure!

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Q: While watching baseball on TV, I repeatedly hear announcers talk about RBIs. The abbreviation “RBI” is short for “run batted in.” The plural is “runs batted in,” not “run batted ins.” So why should the abbreviated plural end with an “s”?

A: Some abbreviated phrases (such as “POW”) form the plural by adding “s” to the end (“POWs”), even though the unabbreviated phrases pluralize a principal noun that’s not at the end (“prisoners of war”).

Other abbreviations with a principal noun that’s not at the end – like “rpm” (“revolutions per minute”), “mph” (“miles per hour”), and “mpg” (“miles per gallon”) – don’t add an “s” because they’re understood as plurals already.

If in doubt about the plural of an abbreviation, check your dictionary.

As for “RBI,” it can be pluralized either way (with or without an “s” at the end), according to the new third edition of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. But that’s just the short answer.

Dickson cites the work of the late baseball researcher Charles D. Poe, who found a confusing collection of written plurals for the abbreviation: “RBIs,” “RBI,” “rbi’s,” “RBI’s,” “R.B.I.,” “R.B.I.’s,” and “rbi.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has both “RBIs” and “RBI” as standard plurals, but it lists the “s” version as slightly more common.

I prefer “RBIs,” and that’s the plural I hear the most. But I’ll let E. J. Dione Jr. (writing in the Oct. 19, 1997, issue of the Washington Post) have the last word:

“To refer to RBIs is redundant, strictly speaking. Yet those who decline to pluralize it (‘He has 120 RBI’) sound a little strange.”

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Q: Please take on the use of the terminally vague word “midair” to describe airborne collisions between aircraft. I had thought it was eliminated years ago for vagueness, but everyone, including the government, seems to have re-embraced it lately.

A: Yes, “midair” is about as vague as a word comes. What’s “mid” about “midair” – that is, what midpoint is being referred to, if any?

The word “midair,” a noun often used adjectivally, is no more precise than “air” or “airborne.” Besides, it seems unnecessary. Unless planes collide on a runway, collisions between them necessarily happen in the air.

Nevertheless, “midair” is well established, probably because “air collision” doesn’t have the punch of “midair collision.”

I can find nothing against it, either in the style books of the Associated Press or the New York Times, or in general usage guides.

After a small plane and a sightseeing helicopter collided over the Hudson River last Aug. 8, killing nine people, both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (and I’m sure many other papers as well) described the incident as a “midair collision.”

The accident happened at about 1,100 feet – a low altitude, by aviation standards, but probably high enough to qualify as “midair,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED defines “mid-air” (it uses the hyphen) as “a part or region of the air not close to the ground (or some equivalent surface).”

Other dictionaries are also imprecise about how high “midair” is.

In Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), “midair” is “a point or region in the air not immediately adjacent to the ground.”

And in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), it’s merely “a point or region in the air.” That’s a lot of latitude in terms of altitude.

The OED‘s first published citations for the word are from the 17th century and have nothing to do with aircraft.

The earliest use, in the form of a noun, is from a 1605 translation by Josuah Sylvester of a work by Guillaume du Bartas, referring to “Th’ excessiue cold of the mid-Aire.”

The first use of the phrase “in mid-air” is from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Zophiel, of Cherubim the swiftest wing, / Came flying, and in mid Aire aloud thus cri’d.”

The OED‘s first citation that has anything to do with aviation comes from a letter written by the English art critic and Bloomsbury figure Roger Fry in 1928: “Reports of aeroplanes that catch fire and grill the passengers in mid-air.”

However, I found a few earlier aviation citations myself (probably not the first) in a casual search of the New York Times’s online archives.

This headline appeared on March 6, 1912: “MAN STRANGLES IN MIDAIR. / Runaway Airship Carries Foreman Off with Rope Around His Neck.”

The following year, another German airship accident was described in the Times as a “Midair Tragedy.”

Less grim was an 1890 article headlined “WEDDING IN MIDAIR,” announcing a marriage ceremony that had taken place on a balloon flight.

The word seems to have been used steadily ever since in aviation journalism. This is a representative citation from the Guardian (1970): “If something is not done soon about these near misses, there is bound to be a mid-air collision.”

By the way, what people mean by “near miss” is “near collision.” But over the years, “near miss” has become so common that it’s gained acceptance as an idiomatic expression.

Of course it’s not literally correct – a plane that’s had what we call a near miss doesn’t nearly miss disaster, it DOES miss it! But the phrase is now accepted even by dictionaries as meaning “a narrowly avoided collision.”

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Q: I’ve recently noticed that the names of seasons are not being capitalized. Is this something new? Or was I just absent the day it was discussed in school? I see on WikiAnswers that a season should be capitalized when paired with a noun (e.g., “Spring semester”). What do you say?

A: Beware what you find on reference wikis! Collaborative websites are only as good as their collaborators. Some contributors are good and some aren’t. In this case, you can forget the advice.

In contemporary English usage, the names of seasons are not capitalized, even if used adjectivally (as in “spring semester” or “fall harvest”).

The exception, of course, would be (as WikiAnswers notes) when the word comes at the beginning of a sentence.

You can find evidence for this in many usage guides, including Garner’s Modern American Usage and The Chicago Manual of Style (look under “capitalization”), as well as in dictionaries (look up the entries for the individual seasons).

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Q: I had a thought while reading your blog post on the “barbeque” spelling of “barbecue.” I don’t know which came first, but could the variant “q” spelling have developed out of “BBQ”? Thanks for letting me put my two cents in.

A: Thanks for your suggestion. And it’s definitely worth more than two cents.

The earliest citation for “BBQ” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1938 advertisement in the Los Angeles Times: “Rambling Ranch $14,500 – Rail fence and olive trees! Built around a large brick patio with BBQ, wonderful for parties!”

However, the OED has an even earlier example for “Bar BQ.” Here’s the 1926 citation from the Mansfield (Ohio) News: “The Bar BQ Ranch is jest over that rise.”

And a search of the America’s Historical Newspapers databank suggests that an abbreviated form of the word was popular in the late 19th century.

Here’s an intriguing Oct. 4, 1898, snippet from the Wilkes-Barre (Pennsylvania) Times: “As to these elaborate preparations for the peace jubilee,” remarked Rivers, “it seems to me that there isn’t any too much time. Whatever is done ought to be done p. d. bar b. q.”

This item seems to be an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune. I guess the Wilkes-Barre editors were amused by the mushing together of “p.d.q.” and “bar b.q.”

As I said in my earlier blog item, the OED doesn’t have any published references for the “barbeque” spelling, but a search of America’s Historical Newspapers finds lots of examples from the early 1920s. Here’s one from an AP article in the Nov. 11, 1922, issue of the Miami Herald Record:

“Mayor J. C. Walton of Oklahoma City, next governor of Oklahoma, today announced plans for a monster inaugural party, the features of which will be a barbeque and old-time square dance at the state house.”

Interestingly, the word is spelled “barbecue” in the headline: “Will Slaughter 300 / Cattle for Barbecue / At His Inauguration.” Perhaps the Associated Press writer preferred one spelling and the Miami editors another, and somehow the AP spelling slipped into the paper. (The current AP style is “barbecue.”)

Could one of the many abbreviated versions of “barbecue” have led to the “barbeque” spelling? I don’t know, but the chronology seems to be right. If I learn more, I’ll let you know.

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Q: I would like to know why some people pronounce “aunt” like AHNT and others like ANT. I grew up in the Midwest where everyone said ANT, but I now live in NYC where everyone says AHNT. Please explain which is correct.

A: A blog reader wrote in earlier this year with this explanation: an AHNT is a very rich ANT. But, seriously, the word “aunt” has two correct pronunciations: ANT (like the insect) and AHNT.

Both pronunciations are given, in that order, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

The first (ANT) is by far the predominant American pronunciation. The second (AHNT) is common in the Northeast, some Southern dialects, and among African Americans.

British speakers today also prefer the second pronunciation (AHNT), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But many phonologists and other scholars have shown that the pronunciation of “aunt” varies widely in Britain, and that “ant” and “aunt” are pronounced the same by many speakers in the northern counties.

In fact, ANT was once the preferred pronunciation in Britain, so the dominant American pronunciation is actually older, a relic of British usage in the late 18th century.

The linguist and lexicographer M. H. Scargill has written: “Acceptable late-18th-century British pronunciation rhymed ‘clerk’ with ‘lurk,’ ‘caught’ with ‘cot’ and ‘aunt’ with ‘ant,’ and those pronunciations are the ones immigrants brought with them.”

The “a” in words like “after,” “aunt,” “last,” “past,” “class,” “dance,” “path,” and “chance” is pronounced the old way (like the “a” in “bat”) by most Americans, while most British speakers now pronounce it as “ah.”

In its entry for “aunt,” the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary notes that the ANT pronunciation “was brought to America before British English developed the ah in such words as aunt, dance, and laugh.“

“In American English,” Random House adds, “ah is most common in the areas that maintained the closest cultural ties with England after the ah pronunciation developed there in these words.”

If you’d like to read more, I wrote a blog item earlier this year about the pronunciation of “vase.” Yes, once again the typical American pronunciation has history on its side.

I go into much more detail about British and American pronunciation in “Stiff Upper Lips,” a chapter in Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, written with my husband, Stewart.

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Q: I saw this question on Boing Boing: “Let’s say a meeting, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been moved forward two days. What is the new day of the meeting?” It seems that people who say “Friday” are angrier than people who say “Monday.” I’m a good-natured “Monday” person, but I wonder if there’s a linguistic convention for this. Which is most correct?

A: The question here is whether moving an event “forward” means it will happen earlier or later. I say earlier (I must be good-natured too), and I’m surprised that some people think otherwise.

As one who has dealt with deadlines all my adult life, I can assure you that moving a deadline “forward” in a newsroom means moving it closer to the present, or earlier. And moving a deadline “back” means the opposite: away from the present, or later.

In both cases, the deadline is of course in the future; it’s moved either “forward” or “back” in terms of its proximity to the present.

Those who disagree probably picture a calendar in their minds. “Forward” to them means to the right: Friday is to the right of Wednesday, or further into the future. Similarly, “back” means to the left.

In my opinion, this is the wrong perspective from which to view future events that are either in the forefront (earlier) or the background (later).

One of the earliest definitions of “forward,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was “the first or earliest part of (a period of time, etc.).”

This sense was recorded as far back as the year 900, when forewearde neaht (“forward night” in Old English) meant early evening.

As for modern usage, you have to look far and wide to find a dictionary that’s specific about what “forward” means in terms of time.

For instance, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) has this: “At or to a different time; earlier or later: moved the appointment forward, from Friday to Thursday.” In the example, the word means “earlier,” but the definition (“earlier or later”) is noncommittal.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.) is refreshingly unambiguous. Among its definitions of the adverb “forward” is this one: “to an earlier time or date (to move a meeting forward).” It gets my vote. I think this is how the vast majority of people use the word.

I recently wrote an item on my blog about a similar issue: the use of the word “prepone.” It means to move an event ahead in time – that is, the opposite of “postpone.”

If “prepone” catches on, that would solve the problem for people who can’t agree among themselves what moving a meeting “forward” actually means.

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Q: I’m wondering if you can tell me where the idiom “it’s no use crying over spilled/spilt milk” comes from. The Online Etymological Dictionary attributes it to Thomas C. Haliburton in 1836. But why milk?

A: In its first incarnation, in the mid-1600s, the phrase was about “shed” milk. Back then, one of the meanings of the participial adjective “shed” was spilled. (The verb “shed” meant, among other things, to let a liquid pour out by accident.)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase “it’s no use crying over spilt milk” and its many variations as meaning “it is futile to regret what cannot be altered or undone.”

The dictionary’s first published citation comes from a collection of English proverbs by James Howell (1659): “No weeping for shed milk.”

The fact that Howell was recording a proverb rather than inventing something new indicates that the saying had been around long before 1659. Here are some later citations, and their dates, from the OED.

1681, from England’s Improvement by Sea and Land, by Andrew Yarranton, an engineer and industrialist: “Sir, there is no crying for shed milk, that which is past cannot be recall’d.”

1738, from Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation:
“‘Tis a Folly to cry for spilt milk.”

1824, from The Pink Tippet, a story by Lucy L. Cameron: “‘There is no use in crying for shed milk,’ answered Betty.”

1860, from Anthony Trollope’s novel Castle Richmond: “It’s no use sighing after spilt milk.”

1893, from New England Magazine: “His ‘sober second thought’ decided him to face the music, confess his fault and make the best of it, feeling it was of no use to ‘cry for spilled milk,’ and leave the matter to terminate as it might.”

Although the expression is frequently seen with either “spilled” or “spilt” as the participial adjective, the “spilled” version is noticeably more common today, especially in the United States, according to Google searches.

By the way, the verb “spill” itself has an interesting history. In Anglo-Saxon days, spelled spillan, it meant to destroy, kill, or mutilate. We’ve lost most of the violent senses of the word, though we still speak of spilling blood as well as milk, water, and other liquids.

But back to this business of crying over spilled liquids. You ask why milk is spilled as opposed to grog or some other venerable beverage?

Unfortunately, I can’t find any authoritative source that answers the question. Perhaps the original reference was to little children, weeping after spilling their milk (and perhaps fearing their mother’s wrath). We may never know.

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Q: I recently changed jobs and encountered a new usage: my coworkers use “showstopper” to mean something so horribly wrong that a project comes to a screeching halt, heads roll, and nobody sleeps until we find a solution. Who hijacked “showstopper”? And why do people act like linguistic lemmings and turn a perfectly good word on its head?

A: When the term “showstopper” entered English in the 1920s, it referred to a song, an act, or a performance that gets so much applause the show is temporarily stopped.

The scribblers at Variety, who coined such beauts as “boffo,” “flack,” “flopperoo,” and “showbiz” itself, appear to be responsible for this one too.

The first published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary for the usage is from a 1926 issue of Variety that describes “two show-stoppers … the Dixie Four … who stopped the show … with their ‘itch’ dance finish, and Dave Apollon and Co., who stopped it, closing the first half.”

In addition to its literal entertainment meaning, “showstopper” has also been used figuratively in the sense of an especially arresting person or thing that draws attention from others or brings action to a halt.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) include both these senses.

None of the dictionaries I usually consult include the meaning used by your coworkers: “something so horribly wrong the project comes to a screeching halt, heads roll, and nobody sleeps until we find a solution.”

However, a little googling discovers that techies have adopted “showstopper” to describe a computer bug that’s arresting in a very negative way – a bug that’s flopperoo rather than boffo.

The Jargon File, an online glossary of techie and hacker slang, defines “showstopper” this way: “A hardware or (especially) software bug that makes an implementation effectively unusable; one that absolutely has to be fixed before development can go on. Opposite in connotation from its original theatrical use, which refers to something stunningly good.”

I suspect that your fellow workers, especially the techies among them, may have improvised on this computer slang to come up with a colloquial usage more compatible with your company’s line of work.

Why do people act like linguistic lemmings in adopting such jargon? Probably for much the same reason that lemmings act like lemmings. Our two species seem to have a biological urge to follow the crowd.

Interestingly, lemmings don’t commit mass suicide, as many people believe, though these rodents do migrate in large groups. This myth has been popularized by, among other things, the Disney film White Wilderness.

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Q: Why do people say we “can’t underestimate” something significant when they mean we “can’t overestimate” it? People seem to take a liking to such a mistake and never listen to themselves to question whether it makes any sense.

A: You’re right. People do say we can’t underestimate something when in fact they mean we can and do underestimate it!

But would it be more accurate to say, as you suggest, we “can’t overestimate” it? The answer isn’t quite as simple as you think.

The linguist Mark Liberman has written an interesting post on the Language Log about whether the usage you object to is indeed wacky, and why it’s so persistent.

If “can’t underestimate” is illogical, Liberman would argue, it’s because our “poor monkey brains” have a hard time dealing with complex statements, especially those involving more than one negative idea, or because English simply has a lot of nutty idioms (like “I could care less”).

But on the other hand, perhaps it’s not so illogical after all. Liberman also discusses the argument that this usage makes perfect sense if “can’t” is defined loosely as “may not” or “must not” or “should not.”

In other words, when people say we “can’t underestimate” something, what they may really mean is that we “shouldn’t underestimate” it.

Although many usage experts frown on the looser uses of “can,” especially as a substitute for “may,” this usage is common in speech and informal writing. For example, when we say, “Hey, you can’t do that,” we mean it’s not allowed.

I’ve greatly simplified Liberman’s comments. If you’d like to get the full story, check out his post on the Language Log.

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Why do we need another edition of the bestselling grammar classic? Because books about English like Woe Is I have to grow and change along with the language and the people who use it.

Publishers Weekly says this updated and expanded third edition “is as vital as a dictionary for those who wish to be taken seriously in speech, in print or on Facebook.”

Check out the new Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English at your local bookstore, Amazon.com , or Barnes&Noble.com.

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. If you miss a program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.