Tag: Usage

Categories
Etymology Usage

A mariner to the bitter end

Q: I am a professional mariner with two decades under traditional sail. Despite your doubts, I feel that the nautical use of “bitter end” must be the source of its common usage. In days of old, when a ship in danger of being blown ashore got to the bitter end, the holding power of the anchor could be increased no more. If the hook did not hold, one would likely be on the way to a watery grave.

A: We appreciate your belief that the nautical “bitter end” led to the everyday usage, but until further evidence turns up, we’ll stick with what we wrote in our posting last May.

There are two uses of the phrase, the nautical and the everyday, and it appears that the similarity between them is a matter of coincidence, or serendipity.

(1) Nautical use: As we said in our posting, a “bitter” is a single turn of the line around the bitts. And the “bitter end” is the end of the line that’s attached to the ship. In the 17th century, we quoted one seafarer as calling this “the bitters end,” meaning the line had reached the end of the bitters. It’s true, as you say, that a ship in this position might be in great peril and might indeed meet a bitter end in the everyday sense of the word.

(2) Everyday use: As the OED says, this sense of the phrase means “to the last and direst extremity” or “to death itself.” But it was first recorded IN THIS SENSE in the 19th century in other than nautical contexts, and might instead have been a reference to biblical citations. In the final analysis, the OED says the expression’s “history is doubtful.”

So, as we said, until further written evidence—from old books, diaries, letters, ship logs, or whatnot—surfaces, we can’t say more than this.

You may be right that the first use of the phrase led to the second, but unfortunately there’s no solid evidence at the moment.

Lexicographers take a very scientific approach in tracing etymological histories, and speculation or intuition has to give way to written evidence.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Linguistics Usage

Can an idiom make sense?

Q: I was taught that the meaning of an idiom cannot be derived from the meaning of its words. For instance, “kick the bucket,” which refers to dying, not to kicking or buckets. But many expressions are called idioms even though they make some literal sense (“to keep an eye on,” for example). Doesn’t an idiom have to be nonliteral?

A: Your definition of “idiom” is a bit narrow. An idiomatic expression isn’t always nonliteral.

Broadly speaking, an idiom is simply a peculiarity of language. It’s an expression or some characteristic of speech that’s peculiar to a language, a region, a dialect, or a group of people.

For example an idiom can be, as you say, an expression that can’t be interpreted literally (as in “it’s raining cats and dogs,” or “he reached for the stars”).

But it could also be a speech form that’s grammatically unusual or that just doesn’t parse (“I could care less,” “that dress isn’t you”).

An idiom could be a specialized language or vocabulary used among a particular group of people—like doctors or journalists. Or it could be a particular regional or dialectal speech pattern.

And “idiom” is sometimes used in reference to artistic forms of expression (as in “the idiom of Greek Revival architecture” or “the idiom of Abstract Expressionism”).

The word “idiom” came into English in the 16th century from the French idiome, but its ultimate source is the Greek idioma, meaning a peculiarity or a peculiar phraseology. The root of the word is the Greek idios (one’s own).

In classical Latin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, idioma meant a “special term or phrase used by an individual or group.”

In post-classical Latin (from the 7th to 13th centuries), idioma came to mean a language, a peculiarity, a special property, a dialect, or a spoken form of language, the OED says.

When “idiom” first came into English, in 1573, it meant the individuality or character of a language.

But today when we use “idiom” in the linguistic sense, we generally mean (and here we’re quoting one OED definition) “a form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., used in a distinctive way in a particular language, dialect, or language variety.”

The dictionary’s first citation for the word used in this sense is from a sermon, delivered by John Donne sometime before 1631, that cites “amen” as an example of an idiom:

“There are certaine idioms, certaine formes of speech, certaine propositions, which the holy Ghost repeats severall times, upon several occasions in the Scriptures. … How often does our blessed Saviour repeat his Amen, Amen?” (We’ve expanded the  citation.)

Donne was right. “Amen” (which we’ve written about on our blog) is a pretty good example of a form of expression used in a distinct way.

The OED does include the more specific sense of “idiom” you’re asking about: “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words.”

In other words, the nonliteral truth!

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Pronunciation Usage

Comp time

Q: I’m an accountant in the office of the NYC Comptroller. When I look up the word “comptroller” in my dictionary, it simply says, “Variant of controller.” Isn’t “comptroller” a word?

A: Yes, “comptroller” is a word, but most dictionaries list it as a variant of “controller,” an officer who audits accounts and oversees the finances of a corporation or government agency.

In fact, the word “comptroller” began life as an illegitimate spelling back in the 15th century. Like many misspellings, it entered English through the back door, with a little help from meddlesome scribes.

We discuss this in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions.

The first English version of the word, borrowed in the 1200s from a French dialect, was “countreroullour,” someone who kept a counter-roll— a duplicate set of financial records against which the original figures were checked.

Over the next few centuries, we say in Origins, the word appeared in various forms, such as “conterroller,” “ counteroller,” “countrollour, “controwler,” and finally “controller.”

All those spellings had one thing in common: The first part of the word had something to do with a counter, or duplicate, set of records.

The beginning was derived from the Latin contra, meaning opposite or against, as in a copy that you check an original against.

In those days, however, scribes loved to tinker with English spellings at every opportunity, and the tinkerers often screwed up.

In this case, some misinformed scribblers thought the first part of the word had to do with counting rather than countering. So they decided to emphasize the numerical angle by beginning the word with “compt,” like the verb “count” in French (compter) or Latin (computare).

In 1486 a new spelling appeared: “comptroller.”

Some scholars believe the scribes were trying to Frenchify the word to make their bosses— the official auditors of the day— seem classier. Others think the intent was to make English more like Latin.

Either way, the scriveners were mistaken.

To this day, the word “comptroller” reeks of officialdom. Think Comptroller General, Comptroller of the Currency, Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. And, of course, Comptroller of the City of New York.

Although you can find “controllers” and “comptrollers” in both government and business, the more bureaucratic-sounding word seems at home in the public sphere.

Both words are legit. But if we had a choice, we’d go for “controller” (pronounced con-TRO-ler). Simpler is better.

If you work for a comptroller, though, you don’t have a choice. Or, rather, the only choice you have is how to pronounce your boss’s job.

COMP-tro-ler or comp-TRO-ler?

Either one is OK.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

How intimate is Dear Mr. Smith?

Q: There’s a debate on an editors’ listserv about the use of “dear” in salutations for business letters. Is it too intimate to address a client as “Dear Mr. Smith”? And what is the history of this word in correspondence?

A: We’ve had a small flurry of questions about letter-writing lately, including one about indenting the salutation and the following paragraphs. Maybe the epistolary tradition is having a comeback!

There’s nothing wrong with using “dear” in letter salutations, even in business correspondence. The use of “dear” doesn’t necessarily imply an intimate or affectionate connection, as we’ll explain.

The adjective “dear” is an ancient word. It was recorded (as deoare) in Old English as far back as around 725, when it meant precious, valuable, or costly.

But it has even older cousins in other Germanic languages. The ancestor of them all is a prehistoric Proto-Germanic word that scholars have reconstructed as deurijaz (costly), according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The word “dear” (or its Old English equivalents) was applied to people early on, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest meaning was esteemed or valued, not loved, the OED says, “but the passage of the one notion into the other is too gradual to admit of their separation.”

In addressing one another, English speakers have been using “dear” since the Middle Ages. And then, as now, the word could be used either intimately or formally.

For example, the OED has citations for its use “in addressing a person, in affection or regard,” dating back to the 1300s or perhaps earlier (as in “Father dear,” or “my dear friend”).

But the “dear” that we use in letters (and, if we’re so inclined, in emails) can be regarded as either intimate, friendly, or formal, depending on the context.

The tradition of using “dear” in letters dates from the mid-15th century.

It was first recorded, according to OED citations, in a letter beginning “Right dere and welbeloved,” written in 1450 by Queen Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI.

As the OED says, uses of “dear” in letters—as in “Dear Father,” “Dear John,” and so on—“are still affectionate and intimate, and made more so by prefixing My.”

But, Oxford continues, “Dear Sir (or Dear Mr. A.) has become since the 17th c. the ordinary polite form of addressing an equal.”

And not just equals.

Our handy copy of Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, by Judith Martin, recommends that letters to dignitaries include greetings like “Dear Governor Stately,” “Dear Mr. President,” “Dear Mayor Tuff,” and (to a corporate bigwig) “Dear Mr. Pious.”

Who would dare argue with Miss Manners?

By the way, people still occasionally use “dear” in the old sense of pricey, as in “This Hermès ‘Kelly’ bag is gorgeous, but at $10,000 it comes very dear.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

We’re on deadline

Q: I was thumbing through my M-W 11 for the fun of it (I’m easily entertained) when I noticed  that the first definition of “deadline” in the dictionary is “a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot.” Whoa! I thought a deadline was when something must be done. Why is that only the second definition?

A: The next time you thumb through your dictionary, take a moment to look at the explanatory notes at the beginning. This may not be the most entertaining part of the dictionary, but it has its attractions.

You’ll learn, for example, that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) lists its definitions in historical order, not in order of popularity.

We’ve written about “deadline” in our book Origins of the Specious. It’s in a section about old words that have lost their original meanings and are now used figuratively.

The original deadline, it turns out, was a four-foot-high fence that defined the no-man’s-land inside the walls around the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville, GA, during the Civil War.

Any captive Union soldiers who crossed the deadline were shot.

The word first appeared in an inspection report written in August 1864 by a Confederate officer, Lieut. Col. D. T. Chandler: “A railing around the inside of the stockade and about 20 feet from it constitutes the ‘dead-line,’ beyond which the prisoners are not allowed to pass.”

After the war ended in 1865, Capt. Henry Wirtz, the commandant of the camp, was tried and hanged for war crimes.

Not until the early 20th century did “deadline” come to mean a time limit. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation is in the title of a play about the newspaper business, Deadline at Eleven (1920).

This usage may have been influenced by a somewhat earlier sense of the word: a guideline marked on the bed of a printing press.

These days, as we all know, journalists aren’t the only ones with deadlines to meet.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Pronunciation Usage

SHTREET wise

Q: On one of Pat’s WNYC segments, she was asked about the pronunciation of “street” as SHTREET. She mentioned that you have a posting on the blog about this, but I wonder if the pronunciation may have been influenced by German.

A: You bring up a very interesting point.

In standard German, the letter combination “st” is pronounced SHT at the beginning of a syllable. You can hear this when a German speaker says a word like strahlen (to shine), or a compound like überstrahlen (to outshine).

The same thing is true, by the way, with the German “sp,” which sounds like SHP at the beginning of a syllable. You can hear this in words like sprechen (to speak) and besprechen (to discuss).

This shushing, as if an “h” had been inserted, wasn’t always part of standard German. It apparently developed as a regional pronunciation in Upper Saxony and spread to other German dialects several hundred years ago.

Like most language changes, this shift in pronunciation met resistance along the way. In fact, we found a 1935 article showing that the SHT and SHP pronunciations were being discouraged by German-language instructors as late as the mid-19th century.

The article, written by Charles T. Carr and published in the Modern Language Review, examined books on German intended for English audiences in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Several of the grammar books and readers said that “st” and “sp” should be pronounced just as written, and warned against the Upper Saxon pronunciations SHT and SHP.

Yet for some reason the pronunciation not only thrived but is now standard German. Could this happen in English? Ours is a Germanic language, so this is certainly a legitimate question.

Already, as we said in our blog posting on the subject, many American speakers pronounce “st” as SHT and this is considered fairly common. Research has shown that this speech pattern is not regional but widely spread.

Nevertheless, we won’t go out on a limb and say this pronunciation is likely to become the standard, as it has in German. But we’ve observed a couple of interesting things about it.

First, for a lazy tongue it’s easier to say SHT than ST. That’s no doubt why people who’ve had a bit too much to drink tend to slur words like “street” as SHTREET and “spell” as SHPELL and “history” as HISH-try.

Second, one is apt to slur these words when speaking through clenched teeth, tough-guy style, as in gangster movies of the ’30s.

Did those Saxons of long ago speak with teeth clenched or jaws tensed, and is this how the pronunciation crept into German? Like you, no doubt, we’d love to know the answer!

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology

Taking aim at loopholes

Q: I saw this headline in the Orlando Sentinel the other day: “Time for Florida to close the Internet sales-tax loophole.” That got me to thinking. Why is a way to evade taxes called a “loophole”?

A: In the 1300s a “loupe,” later called a “loop hole,” was a small vertical slit in a castle wall for spotting enemies and shooting arrows at them.

The earliest published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is from William Langland’s narrative poem Piers Plowman, written in the second half of the 14th century.

Here’s the citation in Middle English: “Eche chyne stoppe, þat no light leope yn at louer ne at loupe.” (Translation: “Let chain close every chink, so no light leaps in at louver or loophole.”

The word “loupe” probably came from a Middle Dutch word, lupen, meaning to lie in wait, watch, or peer, according to the OED.

The OED’s first citation for “loop hole” (later, “loop-hole” or “loophole”) is from William Garrard’s Art of Warre (1591): “That not one of the towne do so much as appeare at their defences or loop holes.”

In those days, an archer in a besieged town would shoot through a loophole in the defensive walls at the surrounding forces.

Today, of course, a loophole is usually an omission or ambiguity that gives you an opening to evade a legal provision.

This figurative sense of the word showed up in the 1600s, but we’ll cite an 1807 example from the writings of Thomas Jefferson:

“What loop-hole they will find in the case, when it comes to trial, we cannot foresee.”

And people have been taking aim at figurative loopholes ever since.

[Update, Feb. 2, 2014. A readers writes: “I am a military veteran. As such I’ve long been familiar with loopholes. You may be interested to know that the military still teaches this as an infantry tactic. It indicates a firing port that is usually deliberately formed in the wall of an edifice when fighting in an urban environment. This can be made between rooms, but the most common application is to allow the firer to shoot to the outside from inside the protection of a building.”]

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Pronunciation

Ode to schadenfreude

Q: During a recent appearance on WNYC, Pat committed one of her rare missteps: she pronounced the first syllable of “schadenfreude” as SHAY rather than SHAH.

A: Right you are. Pat did indeed misspeak on the air. The tongue and mind sometimes go their separate ways during a live radio broadcast.

We’ve written before on our blog about “schadenfreude.” The first syllable, as you point out, is pronounced like the “a” in “father.”

This is the only pronunciation given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word is a compound, from the German schaden (adversity) and freude (joy). The OED defines it as “malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others.”

The OED’s earliest citation for the word in English is from On the Study of Words (1852), a collection of lectures by the philologist and Anglican clergyman Richard Chevenix Trench.

In the lectures, Trench points out a similar word in classical Greek: epikhairekakia. Aristotle uses the term in the Nicomachean Ethics to describe someone who takes pleasure in another’s ill fortune.

In discussing “schadenfreude,” Trench sounds more like a clergyman than a philologist:

“What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing.”

In our earlier posting about “schadenfreude,” we mentioned some of the more waggish takeoffs on the word.

An example is “blondenfreude,” for the glee we feel when a rich, powerful blonde gets her comeuppance.

We’d like to think that if Beethoven came back from the dead, he would compose an “Ode to Schadenfreude.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology

Wildlife preserve

Q: I make ­my own marmalade from oranges, lemon zest, and sugar. The other day I gave a jar of it to my aunt (an English teacher) and she told me that Mary Queen of Scots was responsible for the word “marmalade.” Is this true?

A: No, but a lot of people believe that Mary Queen of Scots was indirectly responsible for the name of this fruit preserve.

In fact, the actor Michael Caine fell for this story and mentioned it during a BBC interview a few years ago.

When Mary was ill, according to legend, her French-speaking attendants would bring her citrus preserves and say, “Ma’am est malade.”

In some versions, the attendants said, “Marie est malade.” And sometimes the sufferer was Marie Antoinette.

The truth is that the word “marmalade” was around long before either Mary or Marie.

The first appearance of the word in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in a 1480 letter about a gift of oranges and marmalade, apparently sent to a student at Exeter.

So where does the word “marmalade” come from? It’s derived from marmelo, the Portuguese word for “quince,” which is what marmalade was originally made of.

“Close medieval trading relations between England and Portugal may account for the very early borrowing of the Portuguese word in English,” the OED says.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Linguistics Usage

Is Google a linguistic hit?

Q: You repeatedly use Google frequency as an indicator of word value. On July 11, for example, you wrote that “insoluble” is more popular than “indissoluble” because it gets umpteen times as many hits. Why is Google now the language arbiter? Because it’s of linguistic value? Or because you (like most of us) find it’s easy?

A: By no means is Google a “language arbiter” or “an indicator of word value.” And we never say as much.

We consult Google for only one reason: it can provide evidence of written usage. If a particular usage gets a million-plus hits, this is certainly evidence that it’s in common use.

It’s possible for a language researcher to fine-tune a Google search and get some very interesting data.

For example, using the Google Ngram Viewer, you can research the use of a particular word or phrase in books (which, unlike the Internet as a whole, are edited).

You can then compare those results with the phrase’s frequency on the Internet as a whole. This would give you a rough idea of the phrase’s frequency in common usage as opposed to edited publications.

And Google Books is a very handy repository of searchable older (and sometimes newer) books.

We use it almost every day to find early examples of a usage or to expand on citations from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Google Timeline is another useful tool to find early examples of a usage, though it’s a bit clunky and you have to verify each citation before using it.

A recent search for the earliest appearance of the word “television,” for example, produced an inconceivable 1880 hit. Why?

It turns out that the word “television” and the date “1880” both appeared in a 1992 article in the Baltimore Sun about an upcoming biography of H. L. Mencken:

“He was born in 1880, when Geronimo was at his height, and he died after we had television and radio.”

Getting back to your question, does Google have linguistic value? In our opinion, it does.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology

Muggy waters

Q: The weather forecast in Iowa City is for warm and muggy followed by the arrival  of … hot weather. We are wondering where the term “muggy” comes from.

A: There’s only one good thing we can say about “muggy”—it’s appropriate. It’s a dank and oppressive word for dank and oppressive weather.

The definition in the Oxford English Dictionary sums up “muggy” pretty well: “extremely humid; (unpleasantly) close and warm.”

“Muggy” probably has its origins in an obscure old verb, “mug,” meaning to drizzle or lightly rain.

The verb dates back to around 1400, the OED says, when it appeared in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Translated into modern terms, the citation reads: “Mist mugged on the moor.”

An equally obscure English noun, “mug,” dating from the early 1700s, means a mist or fog or drizzle as well as a dull, damp, or gloomy atmosphere.

Both forms of “mug,” the verb and the later noun, have their roots in early Scandinavian and are still heard as regionalisms in parts of Scotland and England.

The OED suggests that ultimately they came from the same Germanic root as “muck”—which also seems appropriate!

But getting back to “muggy,” it first showed up, according to OED citations, in the papers of White Kennett, a historian and bishop of Peterborough who lived from 1660 to 1728.

The bishop kept a manuscript collection of provincial words in which he wrote: “In Kent we call close cloudy hot weather, muggy weather.”

Before people used “muggy,” they might have used “muggish,” an adjective first recorded in 1655 and meaning damp and musty.

In A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson defined “muggy” as meaning “moist; damp; mouldy.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Pronunciation Usage

Routing slips

Q: A question came up on the Leonard Lopate Show about the pronunciation of “route.” Pat said either ROOT or ROWT is correct. I beg to disagree. I am English. And, as any Englishman will tell you, there is only one proper pronunciation: ROOT.

A: The word “route” can be pronounced either ROOT or ROWT in the US.

This is true for both the noun, meaning a course or path, or the verb, meaning to send something by a specific course or path.

In Britain, though, only the first pronunciation is common for the noun and verb. But the British once had both versions too.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the second (ROWT) disappeared from standard British English sometime during the 19th century, “but is still widespread in North America.”

The noun “route” is very old, and was probably first recorded around 1225, the OED says.

It came into English by way of Anglo-Norman and Old French (rute or rote or route). But its ultimate source is the Latin rupta, which the OED says is short for the phrase via rupta (a broken way, or a road opened by force).

The Oxford editors, in commenting on the etymology of the word, also note that the Latin verb rumpere means to break, and rumpere viam means to open up a path.

Our word “routine” is a relative of “route.” And the English word “rut,” which originally meant the track left by a wheel, may have begun as a variant of “route,” according to etymologists.

The figurative sense of “rut,” meaning a narrow, dull, and habitual course or life or action, came along in the mid-19th century, the OED says.

The verb “route” is a relative newcomer, first showing up in the 1880s, according to published references in the dictionary.

The first citation in the OED is from an 1881 guide for stationmasters on the London & North Western Railway:

“To other passengers the old set of tickets, routed via Caledonian Railway, is to be issued.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Is capitalizing “I” an ego thing?

Q: I’m an American living in Norway. My Norwegian wife wonders why “I” is the only English pronoun that’s capitalized. Is this an ego thing?

A: English pronoun usages are interesting, to say the least! But there’s no egocentric reason why we capitalize the first-person pronoun “I.”

It’s written this way only because in a wilderness of letters, a small “i” might get lost or overlooked.

But this wasn’t always the case. In its earliest forms, the Old English pronoun was ic, ih, or ich.

Citations in the Oxford English Dictionary show that as the word developed, it had a great many spellings, some starting with “h” or “y” in addition to “i,” but these were eventually shortened to a single, lowercase letter (i).

The capitalized “I” first showed up about 1250 in the northern and midland dialects of England, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

Chambers notes, however, that the capitalized form didn’t become established in the south of England “until the 1700s (although it appears sporadically before that time).”

Capitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it more distinct, thus “avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, offers an interesting historical note: “Essentially all the Indo-European languages share the same first person singular pronoun, although naturally it has diverged in form over the millennia.”

“French has je, for example, Italian io, Russian ja, and Greek ego,” Ayto continues. “The prehistoric German pronoun was eka, and this has produced German ich, Dutch ik, Swedish jag, Danish jeg, and English I. The affirmative answer aye ‘yes’ is probably ultimately the same word as I.”

And, as we’re sure you know, “I” is jeg in Norwegian.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Mad Mentality

Q: In one of the scenes from Mad Men, purportedly set in a bar in 1964, some guy says, “Can I get a Dewar’s with water?” Now, I don’t remember people saying “Can I get” a drink back then. It sounds more 21st century to me.

A: It may sound 21st century to you, but people have been using “Can I get” that way since at least the late 19th century.

For example, an article in the June 20, 1880, issue of the Daily Arkansas Gazette includes this example of the usage:

“A footstep didn’t arouse the young lady. It was a voice that said: ‘Can I get a drink of water?’ Two arms and the chin of a tramp leaned on the fence.”

For a boozier example, a brief item in the Oct. 12, 1889, issue of the Knoxville Journal has this presumably fictional exchange:

“Traveler (from Kentucky): ‘Madam, can I get a drink here?’

“Lady of the House: ‘Certainly, there’s the well.’

“Traveler (with a courtly gesture): ‘Madam, you misunderstand me. I don’t want to wash my hands; I want a drink.’ ”

From what we can gather, the expression has been in steady use since then, so there’s nothing anachronistic about hearing it on Mad Men.

In case you’re interested, we wrote a blog item not long ago about a similar usage, “I’ll do a” (as in “I’ll do a Dewar’s with water”).

As you probably know, finding linguistic anachronisms in Mad Men has become something of an indoor sport among the show’s fans.

The linguist Ben Zimmer wrote an entertaining column on the subject a year ago in the New York Times Magazine.

Zimmer spoke with Matthew Weiner, the creator, executive producer, and head writer of the AMC show, who acknowledged that goofs do indeed slip into Mad Men.

For example, the character Joan used the saying “The medium is the message” in the first season, set in 1960, four years before Marshall McLuhan introduced it in print.

You’ll enjoy this YouTube video featuring Mad Men excerpts mentioned in Zimmer’s column.

Cheers!

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Home invasion

Q: I was wondering why newscasters (mostly) have begun using the term “home invasion.” Why isn’t it called a “break-in” any longer?

A: The phrase “home invasion” isn’t just another way of saying  “burglary” or “break-in.”

A “burglary” or a “break-in” refers to the act of entering a building with the intent to commit a crime. This crime can be committed when nobody’s home.

But in a “home invasion,” the house is occupied at the time. And often it involves the use of weapons and some kind of assault on the residents.

Several states have legally defined the crime of “home invasion,” though the definitions of the crime and its severity (first degree, second degree, and so on) vary.

The expression has been in use since 1973, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. It originated in the US and is chiefly used in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

The OED defines “home invasion” as “an act of entering a private dwelling while it is occupied, with the intention of committing a crime (usually burglary, often while threatening the resident); the action or offence of doing this.”

In the US, Australia, and New Zealand, the dictionary adds, “home invasion is a legally defined offence. Entry need not be forced, and may even be under invitation, if the offender later remains on the premises when requested by the resident to leave.”

The OED’s first citation for the use of the term is from a 1973 article in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Wilmette police were seeking the robbers in an apparently unrelated home invasion that occurred early Thursday.”

The phrase, as you’ve noticed, is becoming more widely used in the media these days.

For example, we found a news report from KFDM-TV in southeast Texas about armed men who broke into a home, locked the family in a laundry room, ransacked the house, and stole a car.

The report begins, “A home invasion has disturbed the peace in a West Beaumont neighborhood.” It ends with “If you have any information about the home invasion, call ….”

We hope this answers your question. And keep your door locked!

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Pronunciation Usage

Some initial thoughts

Q: I live in acronym-crazy NYC (SoHo, Dumbo, TriBeCa, and so on). But what about abbreviations that are pronounced as letters, not words (NYC, for example). I’ve coined a word for them: “abbrevonym.” I look forward to your response.

A: We also like “abbrevonym,” a word that’s been suggested now and then by language types. But unfortunately, there’s already a word for this: “initialism.”

An initialism is an abbreviation that’s spoken as letters, like “FBI,” “PTA,” “NAACP,” and “NCAA.” Here’s a more detailed definition, courtesy of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.):

“An abbreviation consisting of the first letter or letters of words in a phrase (for example, IRS for Internal Revenue Service), syllables or components of a word (TNT for trinitrotoluene), or a combination of words and syllables (ESP for extrasensory perception) and pronounced by spelling out the letters one by one rather than as a solid word.”

An acronym, on the other hand, is usually defined as an abbreviation that’s spoken as a word, like “radar” ( for “radio detection and ranging”), “laser” (“light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation”), and “NATO” (“North Atlantic Treaty Organization”).

We had a posting on the blog a couple of years ago about acronyms and initialisms

The New York neighborhoods you mention are indeed examples of acronyms, because they’re spoken as words.

The craze for geographical acronyms in the city began with SoHo (for “south of Houston”), moved on to TriBeCa (“triangle below Canal”), and now includes such whimsies as NoHo (“north of Houston”), Dumbo (“down under Manhattan Bridge overpass”), NoLIta (“north of Little Italy”), and even NoMad (“north of Madison Square Park”). Some have suggested that last one should instead be known as SoMa (“south of Macy’s”).

We’ve also written about the “h” in “SoHo”—that is, why “Houston” is pronounced HEW-ston in Texas but HOW-ston in New York.

As for what to call an abbreviation spoken in letters, frankly we prefer “abbrevonym” to the boring “initialism.” Who knows? It could catch on. Until then, though, we’ll stick with the old stick-in-the-mud.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

Has anyone lost their pit bull?

[Note: An updated post on this subject was published on May 22, 2017.]

Q: A friend of mine (and I mean it) insists that “they/them/their” can be used in place of “he/she/him/her,” etc. For instance: “Has anyone lost their pit bull?” This sounds wrong to me. Can you help me persuade my friend that it’s wrong?

A: It sounds wrong to us too, though we’d be more concerned about that lost pit bull than about the questionable grammar.

Actually, this is a more complicated question than you think!

Granted, “they/them/their” are third-person plural pronouns. But many, many people use them in a singular sense, especially in reference to unspecified or indefinite people (as in “If someone calls, tell them I’m out”).

Furthermore, this usage, while considered a misusage for the last 200 years or so, has some history on its side. We’ve written about this several times in the past, including in the New York Times Magazine.

For centuries, we wrote, “they” was a universal pronoun. Writers as far back as Chaucer used “they” and company for singular and plural, masculine and feminine, and nobody seemed to mind.

We’ve also written about this subject in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions, as well as on our blog in 2011 and 2008.

As we point out in Origins of the Specious, traditionalists find nothing wrong with using “he” to refer to an anybody or an everybody, male or female.

But this is a relatively recent usage, as these things go, and is considered inappropriate by modern linguists.

By the way, it wasn’t cooked up by a male sexist grammarian. If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Is “a lot of” sort of a sin?

Q: During a recent appearance on WNYC, Pat used two phrases that caused my wife and me some consternation: “a lot of” and “sort of.” Shouldn’t that have been “many” and “similar to” or “almost” or “possibly”?

A: Yes, Pat does say “sort of” and “a lot of” on the air, but we see nothing wrong with this.

On the radio show, she and Leonard Lopate are conversing, and consequently their style is informal or colloquial.

We wouldn’t use these phrases in the most formal writing (say, an article for a scholarly journal), but we’d use them in casual or informal writing (like this, for example) and of course in speech.

When the two of us speak, we use “sort of” in the sense of “rather” or “somewhat.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this adverbial use of the phrase as meaning “in a way or manner; to some extent or degree, somewhat; in some way, somehow.”

By the way, this usage isn’t a modern interloper. It dates back to the late 1700s.

Oxford describes the phrase as “colloquial,” a label that it defines elsewhere as meaning “characteristic of or proper to ordinary conversation, as distinguished from formal or elevated language.”

The OED also says the phrase “sort of” has passed into use “as a parenthetic qualifier expressing hesitation, diffidence, or the like, on the speaker’s part.”

The phrase “a lot of” dates back to the late 1500s, says the OED, which defines it this way:

“A number of persons or things of the same kind, or associated in some way; a quantity or collection (of things); a party, set, or ‘crew’ (of persons); also, a quantity (of anything). Now only colloq., except with reference to articles of commerce, goods, live stock, and the like. Often with some degree of depreciation, either implied, or expressed by an epithet.”

Both “sort of” and “a lot of” are standard in spoken English. They are NOT grammatically incorrect or substandard. However, they’re informal in style and, like any other phrase, they shouldn’t be used monotonously.

We’ve had several items on the blog about “sort of” and “a lot of,” including postings in August, September, and November of 2008.

Here it might be helpful to insert a note about formal versus informal English. Never confuse the informal (or colloquial) with the ungrammatical!

As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out, the word “colloquial” is not a pejorative label, and “was probably a poor choice of term for describing ordinary everyday speech.”

For that reason, most standard dictionaries and usage guides now use the word “informal” instead. And informal English is not substandard or grammatically incorrect.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), which now uses the label “informal” rather than “colloquial,” says:

“Speakers of standard varieties of the language use both formal discourse and informal or conversational discourse.”

The dictionary classifies both “sort of” and “a lot of” as “informal.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar Usage

Only the lonely

Q: It drives me nuts that most people put “only” way up front in a sentence so it acts as an adverb and not as an adjective. Example: “I only want to ask you one question.” Translation: I have only one want, and I don’t care which of the collective you answers me.

A: A few years ago, a reader of the blog scolded Pat for misplacing an “only” during one of her appearances with Leonard Lopate on WNYC.

Pat agreed that “only” should generally be placed as close as possible to the word it modifies (noun, verb, adjective, etc.), especially if there’s a chance of being misunderstood.

But in many cases, if not most, the placement of “only” won’t be misunderstood, she noted, and a sentence may sound better with “only” placed near the front.

Let’s take a look at your example: “I only want to ask you one question.”

Most people would understand that sentence to mean the speaker has only one question to ask. And most would probably feel that putting “only” before “one” would sound too formal.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) remarks in a usage note that “there are occasions when placement of only earlier in the sentence seems much more natural, and if the context is sufficiently clear, there is no chance of being misunderstood.”

Although Pat’s grammar and usage guide Woe Is I recommends putting “only” before the word or phrase being singled out, it notes that the “whole point of putting only in its place is to make yourself understood.”

In informal writing and conversation, the book says, “if no one’s likely to mistake your meaning it’s fine to put only where it seems most natural—usually in front of the verb.”

Your question got us wondering, however, why many language authorities are so insistent on the “proper” placement of “only,” even when there’s no chance of being misunderstood.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says this concern about “the misplaced only has been around for over two centuries.”

The first language maven to raise the issue was apparently Robert Lowth, the guy who popularized the myth that it’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition.

In A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1763), Lowth writes: “Thus it is commonly said, ‘I only spake three words’: when the intention of the speaker manifestly requires, ‘I spake only three words.’ ”

Although many usage authorities have endorsed this view, many writers have ignored it.

“Who are the writers who misplace only?” Merriam-Webster’s asks, and then proceeds to answer its own question.

The miscreants include John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Tobias Smollett, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Lewis Carroll, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Ruskin, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, James Thurber, Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, Evelyn Waugh, and E. L. Doctorow.

We’ll let H. W. Fowler, the language maven’s language maven, have the final say on this:

“For He only died a week ago no better defence is perhaps possible than that it is the order that most people have always used & still use, & that, the risk of misunderstanding being chimerical, it is not worth while to depart from the natural.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Heart-to-heart talk

Q: I’m bewildered by all those T-shirts that proclaim, “I ♥ ME.”  Why is “me” capitalized? And why isn’t it “myself”? I’m from Maine, and to me the message is “I love Maine.”

A: We can’t believe that you’re REALLY bewildered by the uppercase “ME” in that message.

Nobody with an Internet connection could be. We’ve been driven virtually deaf by now from all the capital letters that scream at us for emphasis in cyberspace.

Is there too much of it? Yes. Can we do anything about it? No, except perhaps to show a little restraint ourselves.

As for “I ♥ ME,” you can find it on hats, bags, compacts, valentines, stickers, cards, lighters, etc., in addition to T-shirts.

You can also find a lot of “I ♥ Maine” items. Most of them spell out “Maine” in upper- and lower-case letters, though some use all caps and others refer to the state as “ME.”

You may be interested in a posting we had a few years ago about the use of the word “heart” in place of the ♥ symbol. It turns out that the use of “heart” as a verb isn’t a modern phenomenon.

In fact, the first published reference for the verbing of “heart” dates from around 897, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Anglo-Saxon days, to “heart” meant to give heart to or inspire someone.

Last January the online OED added a draft entry on the colloquial use of “heart” as a verb meaning to love or be fond of.

The dictionary says the usage is of US origin, and adds, “Originally with reference to logos using the symbol of a heart to denote the verb ‘love.’ ”

The first OED citation for this sense of the word is from a Nov. 16, 1983, Associated Press article:

“From Berlin to the Urals, teen-agers wear T-shirts reading, ‘Elvis,’ ‘Always Stoned,’ and ‘I (heart) New York.’ ”

As for “me” versus “myself,” we’ve written about this business several times on the blog, beginning with a posting in 2006.

It would be OK to use either “me” or “myself” on the T-shirt you’ve asked about, though the shorter one is punchier and could do double-duty Down East.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Usage

Indented servitude

Q: If you start an email with “Hi Sylvia,” do you indent the salutation?

A: No, you don’t generally indent a greeting in email or, for that matter, in snail mail.

And you don’t necessarily need to indent the first lines of the paragraphs that follow, either online or off.

We write all our email (and our blog posts) with the paragraphs beginning flush left and with a line of white space between paragraphs.

This seems to have become the usual convention of email writing. Generally paragraphs are flush left (that is, not indented), with space between them for greater readability.

But there’s no law against indenting if you want to. This is a style issue. Go with whatever suits your style.

As a general rule, you should indent either all or none of your paragraphs after the greeting. Consistency makes your email easier to read.

So if you indent the first paragraph after the greeting, then indent each successive one.

We also like to use a comma before the name in a greeting (“Hi, Sylvia”), though many people follow your practice and omit it. We explained this usage in a blog entry a while back.

Of course many people don’t use greetings in email. We think, however, that a greeting at the beginning of a message adds a human touch. Again, this is a style issue, and it’s your call.

You might want to look at a column we wrote for the New York Times magazine about email. It appeared in 2002, a couple of lifetimes ago in Internet time, so some of our advice may seem a bit old fogyish now.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Yay, yea, and yeah

Q: There’s a debate in my home that’s getting tiresome: Is the word that means yippee and often precedes “team” spelled “yay,” “yea,” or “yeah”? There are conflicting answers on the Web, but I’ll trust you with the definitive answer.

A: This is something we’ve often wondered ourselves: How do you spell the joyous interjection that starts with a “y” and rhymes with “day”?

The answer is “yay.” That’s the word from the editors at the Oxford English Dictionary and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.).

American Heritage says the interjection is “used as an exclamation of pleasure, approval, elation, or victory.” The OED describes it as a slang “exclamation of triumph, approval, or encouragement.”

The spelling evolved, American Heritage says, as an alteration of the old word “yea,” which goes back many centuries to the Old English gea or gæ.

The older “yea” is pronounced like “yay” but it’s not a mere interjection. It can be an adverb or a noun, according to American Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

As an adverb, “yea” can mean “yes,” “aye,” “truly,” or “indeed.” And as a noun, it can mean either an affirmative statement or vote, or the person casting such a vote.

Example: “He hurried, yea, galloped to the poll to cast his yea vote, and as a result the yeas outnumbered the nays.”

The third member of the trio, “yeah,” is classified as an adverb meaning “yes.”

There are three common pronunciations of “yeah,” all of which include a diphthong (two vowels elided into a single syllable). The diphthong begins with a vowel sound like that in “pet” or “pat” or “pate,” followed by “uh.”

There’s some disagreement about the origin of “yeah.”

American Heritage says “yeah” developed as a variant of the old “yea,” but Merriam-Webster’s and the OED say it’s an alteration or casual pronunciation of “yes.”

Now for some chronology.

As we said, the old “yea” is by far the oldest of the three. The earliest form of the word was recorded in writing in the year 731, according to the OED, which makes it nearly 1,300 years old!

By comparison, “yay” and “yeah,” which appear to be American inventions, are practically brand-new.

The OED’s earliest citation for “yay” is from 1963, and its first example of “yeah” is from 1905 (Merriam-Webster’s has a slightly earlier date, 1902).

But we’ve found what look like 19th-century usages of both words. We’ll cite just one instance of each.

There are some jubilant examples of “yay” in Mary W. Watts’s introduction to her book Nathan Burke, a fictionalized biography of the Mexican war general.

Her introduction is dated 1908, but in it she records the cheers she heard at a military parade 40 years earlier as a child in Ohio: “Yay, Yay, Yay! Fighting Burke! Fighting Nat Burke! Yay, Yay, Yay!”

And we found many examples of “yeah” in an 1863 adventure novel by Edward Sylvester Ellis, On the Plains, which is set in the Black Hills.

Here’s a  brief bit of dialogue: “ ‘I’ve done you some good turns, hain’t I?’  ‘Yeah, and I’ve allers felt good’eal of gratertude fur it.’ ”

We found other uses as well, thanks to the miracle of digitization. Is it a boon to research? Yeah!

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Linguistics

Etymology unloosed

Q: I’ve read that the prefix “un-” sometimes serves to intensify rather than to negate, but the only example I know of is “unloose,” meaning to loosen or set free. Are there others? And, if so, are there rules for the usage?

A: The Oxford English Dictionary considers this use of “un-” to be redundant rather than intensifying.

Although the redundant “un-” isn’t seen much now, it’s quite old, with roots in Anglo-Saxon times.

The Old English words liesan and unliesan, for example, meant, among other things, to set free.

“The redundant use of un- is rare, but occurs in Old English unliesan, and Middle English unloose, which has succeeded in maintaining itself,” the OED says.

The earliest citation for “unloose” in the OED is from Piers Plowman, the 14th-century allegorical poem by William Langland.

But let’s skip Langland’s Middle English and go with an example from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (circa 1602):

“Sweet, rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid / Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold.” (We’ve expanded the OED citation.)

The dictionary gives several examples of this “un-” usage that are now considered obsolete, rare, or dialectal.

In the 17th century, the verb “unsolve” meant to solve. And from the 16th to the early 20th centuries, “unstrip” meant to strip.  From the 16th to the 19th centuries, “unbare” meant to lay bare.

In some modern dialects, according to the OED, “unempt” means to empty  and “unthaw” to thaw.

One redundant (or perhaps extended) example of “un-” that’s seen a lot today is the use of “unpeel” to mean peel off.

The earliest example of this usage in the OED is from a 1904 letter by the philosopher and psychologist William James:

“The original ‘that’ may vanish in the infinitely regressive superposition of human ‘whats’—we can’t today unpeel them wholly.”

(We wrote postings in November and December of 2009 that discussed word pairs like “peel”/“unpeel,” “thaw”/“unthaw,” “bone”/“debone,” and others.)

Are there rules, you ask, for using “un-” this way? We don’t know of any, which is understandable, considering the rarity of the usage.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar

The sporting news

Q: I recently saw the following in an online sports report (“sports’ report”? “sport’s report”?): “We’re not trying to pull the wool over Damien Hardwick’s or the Tigers’ eyes.” Is it correct to use two possessives? I would have used only the second one.

A: You have two questions here: one about the possessives in that sports report about the Australian Football League, and one about the phrase “sports report” itself. Let’s address them in that order.

First, the writer quoting Guy McKenna, coach of the Gold Coast Suns, was correct in using two possessives.

McKenna was talking about the eyes of Damien Hardwick, coach of the Richmond Tigers, as well as the eyes of the Richmond players.

The Richmond coach and his 22 players may see things alike, but not through the same eyes. Hence, two apostrophes: one for the coach’s eyes and the other for the Tigers’ eyes.

Did McKenna pull the wool over the eyes of Hardwick and the Tigers? We don’t know, but the Suns did beat the Tigers 85 to 70 on July 16.

(We won’t get into the intricacies of Australian rules football, except to say that it’s a version of football played Down Under.)

As for whose name gets the possessive apostrophe when there are two or more owners, we had postings about this in 2011 and 2008.

When a single thing is jointly owned by two or more people, we wrote, the last-named owner gets the possessive apostrophe (“Mom and Dad’s house is for sale”).

But when things are owned separately, then each owner gets a possessive apostrophe (“Mom’s and Dad’s eyes are failing”).

So McKenna was right (at least grammatically) in saying he wasn’t “trying to pull the wool over Damien Hardwick’s or the Tigers’ eyes.”

Finally, we get to your question about the phrase “sports report.” Does it needs an apostrophe? And if so, where does the apostrophe go?

The plural “sports” isn’t a possessive here, so it doesn’t need an apostrophe. It’s legitimately used as an adjective (technically an attributive noun) in “sports report.”

Here are some other examples: “sports team,” “sports fans,” “sports drink,” “sports car,” “sports pages,” “sports section,” “sports equipment,” “sports medicine,” and so on.

And the word sometimes teams up with others to form the first element in compounds, as in “sportsman” and “sportswear.” Now that’s sporting of it.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Do we dignify this usage?

Q: I use the verb “indignify” in the sense of to insult or disgrace, but I can’t find it in my dictionary and whenever I type it in an MS Word document a red line pops up under it indicating a misspelling or a nonexistent term. Am I wrong to use it?

A: If you don’t mind sounding a bit quaint, go right ahead and use the verb “indignify.” You may get puzzled or even indignant looks, however.

Such a word does exist, but it hasn’t been used much since the 19th century. We found a few hundred examples in a recent Google search, but many of them were on language sites.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “indignify” means “to treat with indignity; to dishonour; to represent as unworthy.” The dictionary says the word is now obsolete.

It was coined in the 16th century, but not in the way you might expect—by adding the negative prefix “in-” to the verb “dignify.” Instead, it was formed from the suffix “-fy” and the Latin adjective indignus (unworthy).

The verb “dignify” also entered English in the 16th century. It was borrowed from Old French (dignefier or dignifier), which in turn came from the medieval Latin word dignificare (to honor or make worthy).

So “dignify” and “indignify” made their way into the language independently, though they’re related through a common Latin ancestor, dignus (worthy).

In fact, English once had two related adjectives, “digne” (worthy or honorable) and “indign” (unworthy or undeserving), from that same Latin ancestor. But those words, which were older than “dignify” and “indignify,” are now obsolete or archaic.

The OED’s first citation for “indignify” is from a long pastoral poem by Edmund Spenser, Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe (1595):

“I deeme it best to hold eternally / Their bounteous deeds and noble fauours shrynd, / Then by discourse them to indignifie.”

(We’ve gone to the original to expand on the citation. The word “shrynd” here means venerated. In later printings of the poem, “then” is changed to “than.”)

The OED’s last citation, dated 1743, is from Edward Poston’s The Pratler, a collection of essays and letters: “The very Idea … is greatly indignified, even by our aiming or pretending to understand it.”

However, we’ve found some 19th-century usages, and even a few strays in 20th-century writing, aside from the more recent sightings on Google.

Today, you’ll find “indign” in many contemporary standard dictionaries (labeled “archaic” or “obsolete”), but “indignify” is a rarity. The only entry for it we find is in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, where it’s listed as obsolete.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Usage

Shortly later, alligator

Q: We have a usage question in the office about these two phrases, “shortly later” and “a short time later.” Is one correct or incorrect? Is one preferred?

A: “Shortly later” doesn’t strike us as idiomatic English. We’d say “shortly” or “later” or “a short time later.”

However, a lot of people like the usage. When we googled “shortly later,” we got 277,000 hits.

Perhaps they’re confusing it with the more common adverbial phrase “shortly after,” as in “The fireworks began at nine and we arrived shortly after.”

As for “shortly,” “later,” and “a short time later,” all three are adverbial usages (as in “I returned shortly” … “I returned later” … “I returned a short time later”).

The first two are straight adverbs and the third functions as an adverbial phrase. All three are perfectly fine.

It’s not unusual to have one adverb modifying another (as in “rather soon” or “relatively later”), but a combination like “shortly later” sounds clunky to our ears.

If we wanted a more informal way of saying “a short time later,” we’d go with “a little later” or “a bit later” or “somewhat later.”

And with that we’ll say, “See you later, alligator.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology

Who put the duck in duck sauce?

Q: Why is duck sauce called “duck sauce”? There’s no duck in this sweet sauce associated with Chinese food and I’ve never seen it served with duck. Any insights?

A: The “duck sauce” found in Chinese-American restaurants (and in those little plastic take-out packets) was indeed originally intended to go with duck.

But today it’s brought to the table no matter what you order. It goes with almost everything Chinese—and with many things that aren’t, like hamburgers.

We’re skeptical, however, about how Chinese this Chinese sauce actually is.

The use of the name “duck sauce” for this condiment appears to be an American brainchild, and so does the sauce itself or at least the orange stuff you now get in those plastic packets.

From what we can gather, the original duck sauce was what the Chinese would call plum sauce (plum, vinegar, brown sugar, ginger, etc.) or perhaps an Americanized version of it.

The Chinese chef Grace Zia Chu, in her book Madame Chu’s Chinese Cooking School (1975), has this to say about the birth of duck sauce:

“The name ‘duck sauce’ was created in the United States because this sauce was originally served with deep-fried pressed duck, which had no sauce of its own.”

She includes a recipe for duck sauce that combines Chinese plum sauce, apricot preserves, peach preserves, applesauce, dry mustard, garlic powder, and chili sauce.

The food writer Rhonda Lauret Parkinson, in The Everything Chinese Cookbook (2003), offers her version of the birth of duck sauce:

“Plum sauce was nicknamed ‘duck sauce’ after Western Chinese restaurants began serving it with Peking Duck, under the mistaken impression that this was an authentic practice. In reality, Peking Duck is traditionally served with hoisin sauce.”

However, the earliest published reference for Chinese “duck sauce” that we could find (thanks to the word sleuth Barry Popik and his Big Apple website) suggests that it was originally served with all kinds of duck dishes.

The citation, from Henry Low’s Cook at Home in Chinese (1938), describes “duck sauce” as a “kind of chutney good with any kind of duck.”

But let’s back up a bit. When we speak of duck sauce, we’re broadly referring to two kinds of sauce.

One is used in European-style cooking and is made with oranges. The other is used in Chinese-American cooking and may or may not be made with oranges.

Let’s start with the European version, which came first. This sauce used to be—and sometimes still is—referred to as “bigarade sauce,” and the dish associated with it as “duck (or duckling) bigarade.”

The word “bigarade,” which was first recorded in English in 1658, is the name of a sour orange, sometimes called the Seville orange, used in cooking, flavorings, and essential oils.

The essence for Grand Marnier liqueur, for example, comes from the rind of bigarade oranges.

It isn’t often that we go to the bookcase in our kitchen to research a language question, but our old copy The New Doubleday Cookbook came in handy here.

One recipe for roast duckling appears under three names. The cookbook says it’s known as “duckling with orange sauce,” “duckling à l’orange,” or “duckling à la bigarade.”

The recipe calls for a sauce on the side made with orange rind, sugar, orange and lemon juices, water, and brandy.

“To be strictly authentic,” the cookbook says, “this recipe should be made with bitter Seville oranges.”

English borrowed the word “bigarade” directly from French, but the ultimate source is probably an old Occitan word, bigarrada, meaning multicolored, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

(Occitan, in case you’re curious, is a Romance language spoken in parts of France, Italy, Spain, and Monaco.)

“Bigarade” originally meant the orange itself. But in the 19th century it also came to mean “a sauce made with bigarade oranges, and dishes, esp. roast duck, served with this sauce,” the OED says.

Oxford’s first citation for the word used in this sense is from an 1833 edition of The Cook’s Dictionary, and House-Keeper’s Directory, by Richard Dolby.

A recipe in the book for fillets of wild duck à l’orange says, “Arrange them in a dish, and serve with bigarade sauce under them.”

We looked up the recipe, and the sauce calls for the rind of a Seville orange. (It also says that wild ducks should be fresh: “if not fresh, on opening the beak they will smell disagreeable.” Maybe we won’t try this recipe after all.)

In Britain and the United States, the sauce served with roast duck has sometimes been called “orange gravy” or “orange sauce.” As far as we can tell, however, it is not commonly referred to as “duck sauce.”

The OED cites an 1845 recipe from Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery in All Its Branches (1845), which has a recipe for “orange gravy, for wild fowl.”

The recipe involves boiling “half the rind of a Seville orange” with “a small strip of lemon-rind,” then straining the liquid and adding port or claret.

More recently, the OED cites a 1950 advertisement in the New York Times offering “Tender and succulent Roast Stuffed Long Island Duckling … Served with Orange Gravy.”

In Chinese-American cooking, the term “duck sauce” refers to a similar but not identical concoction. As we said earlier, it may or may not contain oranges.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines the term “duck sauce” as “a thick sauce in Chinese cuisine that contains fruits (as plums or apricots), vinegar, sweeteners, and seasonings.”

We’ll stick with Madame Chu’s recipe.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar Usage

Me and my shadow

Q: I’m constantly hearing “Me and (fill in any name) went to wherever.” I feel like an old school marm (which I am), but I’m astounded that the phrase is even commonplace in TV commercials. Is this now acceptable grammar? Am I missing something?

A: We can’t say that we hear this as often as you do—but then, we seldom watch television (too much to read and too much work to do!). However, we do encounter this misuse from time to time.

Pat was once invited to appear before a large group of school teachers and administrators in suburban New Jersey. A high school principal and one of his colleagues approached her beforehand to apologize because, as the principal said, “Me and him have to leave early.”

This is a true story. We have witnesses!

No, using “me” as the subject of a sentence is not considered acceptable grammar. It’s nonstandard English and widely regarded as a grammatical faux pas. What’s more, we don’t sense any change in the wind.

(We’ll have something to say later about why the practice persists, including one usage authority’s lukewarm defense of it.)

Language does change, of course. Variations in spelling, pronunciation, and meaning come along with some regularity, and if they persist in common usage they eventually gain acceptance. This is a natural process in the development of a language.

But grammar is much more resistant to change, as we’ve written before on the blog. The cases of English pronouns are well established, and “me” is an object, not a subject.

A much more frequent misuse in English is the mirror image of this one. Many people use “I” where they should use “me,” as in “That’s up to you and I.” We’ve written about this problem too, including posts in 2010 and 2009.

Getting back to this business of using “me” as a subject, why do so many people prefer “me” to “I”?

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage suggests that politeness may be a factor here.

Although “I and someone” and “someone and I” are the traditional subjects, Merriam-Webster’s says,  “I and someone seems a bit impolite.”

So, M-W adds, “in actual practice we also find me and someone and someone and me.”

Of the two constructions, the M-W editors say, “me and someone does have the minor virtue of putting the me in the emphatic position, where it is slightly less noticeable.”

Really? It seems to us that putting “me” in front makes it more noticeable, not less so.

In the end, M-W acknowledges that you’ll make a poor impression by using either “me and someone” or “someone and me” as a subject:

“Both are speech forms, often asociated with the speech of children, and are likely to be unfavorably noticed in the speech and writing of adults except when used facetiously.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology

Raise taxes? Read our lips

Q: Isn’t it ambiguous to speak of “raising taxes”? The verb “raise” has two meanings: (1) increase (“The bank raised interest rates”) or (2) collect (“We raised money for the Red Cross”). So “raising taxes” can mean either increasing or collecting them, right?

A: The verb “raise” has a lot more than two meanings, of course.

Since entering English around 1200, it has meant, among other things, to revive someone from the dead, stir up or instigate, lift up, build or erect, and cause dough to rise.

The word “raise” has roots in early Scandinavian, in which the runic word ræisa meant to erect a stone monument.

In Old Icelandic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, reisa meant to erect, build, start, rebel, cause to rise, and many other things.

But getting back to your question, the English verb “raise” came to mean to collect taxes, rent, money, and so on in the 14th century.

But none of the OED’s citations for “raise” used in the sense of collecting taxes actually use the word “taxes.”

The earliest example of this usage in the dictionary is from a 1389 ordinance of an English guild: “It schal ben reysed and gadered be ye alderman and his felas.”

And here’s a 1688 example from a collection of pamphlets and official papers issued by the colonial government in Massachusetts: “Impowered to make Laws and raise moneys on the Kings Subjects.”

When the verb “raise” and the noun “taxes” are used together, it generally means to increase taxes, not collect them.

This sense of “raise” (to increase taxes, rents, prices, etc.) showed up in the 16th century.

The earliest OED citation is from the Coverdale Bible (1535), the first complete printed translation of the Bible in English: “Acordinge to the multitude of the yeares shalt thou rayse the pryce.”

The dictionary’s entry for this sense of the word doesn’t include any citations for raising taxes, but the OED does include several examples of the usage in other quotations, including this memorable 1988 example from President George H. W. Bush:

“Congress will push me to raise taxes and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, ‘Read my lips: no new taxes.’ ”

No, we don’t think there’s any ambiguity about “raising taxes.” It means increasing them.

And we’re sure the present occupant of the White House as well as the present Congress would agree with us.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Is a one-sentence paragraph OK?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Are you having none of it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Is a “concrete boardwalk” an oxymoron?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Pronunciation

It’s NYOOZE to us

Q: Your posting on pronouncing “news” as NYOOZE reminded me of my undergraduate music studies. As a voice student, I had to take a one-semester course in diction, where we learned that NYOOZE was the correct pronunciation. In fact, we learned that whenever a long “u” sound follows any of the consonants in the phrase “Daniel Sitteth,” it should be pronounced with a “y” sound. So words like “lute” and “tune” should be pronounced LYOOT and TYOON. This comes from  Madeleine Marshall’s book on diction for singers.

A: Thanks for the interesting footnote. We weren’t familiar with Marshall’s book, The Singer’s Manual of English Diction, which was first published in 1953. It’s still in print and widely used.

When she died in 1993, at the age of 93, her obituary in the New York Times described the work as “a standard guide on the subject.”

We found an online overview of the book that has this advice for choral singers (the “j” in the pronunciation key is a “y” sound):

“Syllables spelled with u or ew, where the u or ew comes after the consonants d, n, l, s, t, or th (mnemonic device: ‘Daniel Sitteth’) are pronounced [ju], e.g., duty, due, dew, during, new, knew, lute, prelude, suit, assume, tune, stupid, student, enthuse. (See Chapter 36 for these rules and further examples).”

Madeleine Marshall Simon, who was known professionally as Madeleine Marshall, was a singing coach and concert pianist. She taught diction to singers at Juilliard for more than half a century, from 1935 to 1986.

Her pupils, according to her obituary, included Lily Pons, Leontyne Price, and Lauritz Melchior. Her husband was Robert A. Simon, a writer, a librettist, and a longtime music critic for The New Yorker. He died in 1981.

Of course, there’s singing pronunciation and there’s spoken pronunciation.

We’re pretty sure that Marshall would not have advised students of speaking elocution to pronounce “lute” as LYOOT or “tune” as TYOON. But clarity and uniformity of pronunciation are especially important in vocal music.

In discussing the value of clarity, Marshall laments the singer who sounds “as if he had a hot potato in his mouth …. as if he had a mouthful of mush … as if his mouth were full of marbles.”

“One of the purposes of this manual,” she writes, “is to help singers remove the potatoes, mush, and marbles from their songs in English. … It’s a book about singing in English and isn’t tended as a guide to anything else.”

Her pronunciation manual, she says, also aims at uniformity. In performance, each word must be pronounced exactly the same way by every singer.

If different characters in an opera, for instance, say the same word differently, she writes, “This disparity in pronunciation is disconcerting to an audience.”

But she stresses that she’s not concerned with ordinary spoken English: “The recommendation of this English for singing is, of course, no criticism of the English spoken in any given area.”

“Your personal speech,” she says, “is your own prerogative.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Pronunciation Usage

Is a comma before “and” a serial crime?

Q: When I was in junior high in the ’40s, I was taught that an apostrophe in a word denoted a missing character and a comma in a series denoted a missing word. But I often see a comma before “and” in a series. Wouldn’t this mean “and and”?

A: We’ll discuss this comma business first. No, the comma doesn’t represent a missing or implied word.

Commas, like other marks of punctuation, bring meaning to strings of words, organizing them for readability and clarity.

As the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language puts it, commas “mark boundaries within a sentence”—boundaries between clauses and between words in a series.

When used in a series, commas separate each part from the next, as in these examples: “knives, forks, and spoons” … “eating, drinking, and making merry” … “rude, abrupt, and insensitive” … “quickly, politely, and accurately.”

Here we’ve used a comma before each “and.” This is sometimes called the “serial comma” or “Oxford comma,” and though it isn’t required, we think it’s a good idea.

As we’ve said before on our blog, a final comma before “and” can make a sentence clearer.

We used this sentence as an example of one that could use another comma for clarity: “The biggest influences on my career have been my sisters, Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey.”

But your email made us curious. Apparently there was once a belief that each comma in a series represented a missing “and.”

In “Certain Fashions in Commas and Apostrophes,” a 1945 article in the journal American Speech, Steven T. Byington called this a “popular misconception.”

“There exists a widespread belief that one of the functions of the comma is to take the place of an omitted word, especially of an omitted coordinating conjunction,” Byington wrote.

This belief “has had a very perceptible influence” on the debate about the use of the final comma in a series like “A, B, and C,” he said. “A good-sized minority will mentally argue, ‘The purpose of the comma after A is to take the place of the omitted conjunction; consequently it is illogical to use it also after B, where the conjunction is expressed.’ ”

Newspapers may have encouraged the belief that a comma was equivalent to “and.”

In a 1940 article in American Speech, “The Serial Comma Before ‘And’ and ‘Or,’ ” R. J. McCutcheon wrote:

“An author informs me that in newspaper work he observed that the comma between the last two members of a series was habitually omitted, probably on the theory that the word and took its place and that the use of both the comma and the word and was redundant. Many syndicated articles in newspapers, however use both in series constructions.”

American Speech surveyed several US newspapers, magazines, and publishing companies on the subject for McCutcheon’s article.

It found, McCutcheon wrote, that “the ‘serial comma’ is omitted by the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun, the New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Sun, Times, and World-Telegram. The Boston Christian Science Monitor employs the comma.”

The magazines surveyed had differing opinions on the serial comma, as did book publishers.

In 1940, McCutcheon wrote, The Chicago Manual of Style recommended using the final serial comma. (It still does.)

“The University of Chicago Press, following its influential A Manual of Style, seems to be inflexible,” McCutcheon said. “They inform me that for material edited by them or bearing the press imprint they insist upon the comma before the final member of a series of three or more.”

Today the Chicago Manual, now in its 16th edition, says: “When a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series of three or more, a comma—known as the serial or series comma or the Oxford comma—should appear before the conjunction. Chicago strongly recommends this widely practiced usage, blessed by Fowler and other authorities, since it prevents ambiguity.”

No one would dispute the presence of the last comma in this example from the Chicago Manual: “She took a photograph of her parents, the president, and the vice president.”

As for the apostrophe, it signifies a missing letter or letters only when used in a contraction (like “it’s” for “it is,” or “tho’ ” for “though”).

Byington, in his American Speech article, wrote that in newspaper punctuation, “the latest aberrant tendency is that of using apostrophes before monosyllabic words which are falsely supposed to be abridgments of forms with prefixes.”

As examples he cites words written as ’round, ’though, ’way, and ’til on the assumption that they’re short for “around,” “although,” “away,” and “until.”

If you’d like to read more, we’ve discussed “until” & company on our blog.

Check out our books about the English language