Tag: Usage

Q: I was having a very pleasant brunch with two friends when the subject turned to the rules for using numbers. Friend One, a medical transcriptionist, complained that the style manual for her profession insisted that all numbers be expressed as numerals. Friend Two, a college librarian, offered that style manuals differed about numbers but one should follow the style for one’s profession despite objections. My contribution was that consistency should be the rule. I’d like to hear what you think. Do manuals of style rule in ordinary usage? How about manuscripts, novels, short stories? Help!

A: I do recommend using a style guide for ordinary usage as well as anything you write for a publisher. As far as the writing of numbers goes, the guidelines in Garner’s Modern American Usage, by Bryan A. Garner, make sense to me.

In general, unless you’re writing something technical, Garner suggests spelling out all numbers of ten and below, and using digits for 11 and above. But he gives several exceptions (“$9 million,” “9 inches,” “4 p.m.,” “8 percent,” etc.) and recommends spelling out any number that begins a sentence.

If you consult his book you’ll find other exceptions. The style recommended by Garner is similar in many ways to that used in newspaper writing.

On the other hand, if you’re writing a scholarly article or book, you might be better off using The Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition). Its style is very different (though it includes a chapter by Garner on grammar and usage).

The Chicago Manual generally spells out numbers one through one hundred, centuries, physical quantities and measurements, plus all round numbers in the hundreds, thousands, millions, and so on. (I wouldn’t use Chicago‘s style for numbers in personal writing, though; it’s much too cumbersome for correspondence and such.)

Different book and magazine publishers have their own styles for using numerals vs. words. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Use the publisher’s style manual if you have it. Otherwise, use your own judgment and be consistent. The publisher will change the style to suit itself.

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Q: In The American Way of Birth, Jessica Mitford writes, “It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word ‘travel’ is derived from ‘travail,’ denoting the pains of childbirth.” Does “travel” really come from “travail”? And does it have anything to do with childbirth?

A: Yes, “travel” is derived from “travail,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and it originally meant “Bodily or mental labour or toil, especially of a painful or oppressive nature; exertion; trouble; hardship; suffering.”

We got the word from the Old French travail, meaning suffering or trouble. The first published reference in the OED (spelled trauail) is from the Old Kentish Sermons (circa 1250), a collection of Old English sermons and proverbs.

And, yes, the word did once refer to the pain of childbirth. An OED citation from 1297 uses the phrase “in travail” pretty much the way we would use “in labor” today.

In spite of the word’s painful beginnings, the noun “travel” was being used to mean the act of traveling by the late 1300s. It was spelled all sorts of ways (“travall,” “trawaile,” ”trauaille,” “travale,” and so on) before “travel” became the dominant form in the 1600s.

The verb “travel” has a similar pedigree since entering English in the late 13th century. It has meant, among other things, to torment, to work, and to make a journey.

It’s interesting that a word for suffering or trouble in Old French has evolved over the years to mean work in modern French and travel or trouble in modern English. But I’m not sure what, if anything, that says about our two languages.

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Q: Your thoughts, please, about the past tense of “sneak.” I tend to use “snuck.” I also hear “sneaked,” but it sounds wrong to my ear. (I must admit that seeing “snuck” spelled doesn’t seem so right either, but it sounds fine.)

A: In formal written English, the traditionally accepted past tense (and past participle) of “sneak” is “sneaked.”

“Snuck” cropped up in the 19th century as a nonstandard variant, first recorded in print in a New Orleans weekly in 1887.

Since then, “snuck” has become so common in the US that American dictionaries now accept it without comment (that is, without calling it slang or nonstandard or dialectical or whatever).

Usage experts, who are stricter than lexicographers, list it as nonstandard but generally say it’s now acceptable in informal speech and writing.

“Snuck” is more common in the US and Canada, but it is on the rise in British and Australian English. Currently it appears about as often as “sneaked” in North America, but “snuck” may eventually replace it.

“Snuck,” in the opinion of Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage, “stands a good chance to become the dominant form.”

I don’t use “snuck” myself (simply because I’m in the habit of saying “sneaked”), but I have nothing against it.

The “sneak/snuck” pattern (though relatively new) has a familiar Anglo-Saxon ring, along the lines of “drive/drove,” “stick/stuck,” “weave/wove,” “speak/spoke,” and similar verbs from Old English.

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Q: A former boss once vehemently argued with me that the verb “assist” was used correctly in these examples: “They were asked to assist Dave learn math” and “I will need to assist you write that memo.” I had learned that “assist” followed by a noun needed either “in” or “to” before a verb. I was sure he was incorrect, but he was the boss, so I tried to find other ways to write sentences rather than write them incorrectly.

A: There are several ways to use “assist” correctly, but your former boss’s isn’t one of them. Here are the correct meanings and uses.

(1) to be present (this takes the preposition “at”), whether as a participant or supporter or just a spectator: “He will assist at the wedding.”

(2) to give assistance to (without a preposition): “Please assist that elderly woman.” … “His guide dog assisted him.”

(3) to give assistance (with a preposition): “His wife assisted in his success.”

(4) to give assistance (with the infinitive form of a verb): “She assisted to get him promoted.”

The two sentences you give are examples of the fourth kind, where “assist” should be followed by an infinitive: “They were asked to assist Dave to learn math” and “I will need to assist you to write that memo.”

I believe your former boss was using “assist” the way “help” is normally used. When “help” is followed by an infinitive, it doesn’t need “to.”

For instance, we can say either “He helped me to move,” or “He helped me move.” In both cases, “move” is in the infinitive.

But with “assist,” the infinitive must be accompanied by the preposition “to,” as in “He assisted me to move.”

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Q: What’s the origin of the phrase “happy as a clam”? I don’t see what clams have to be happy about. If ever an expression doesn’t make sense, this is the one.

A: The expression makes sense, according to my 1970 edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, if we think of it as a shortened version of “happy as a clam at high tide.”

“In America especially, clams are esteemed a delicacy and are gathered only when the tide is out,” the dictionary explains.

Many language sleuths who’ve looked into the subject agree with Brewer’s, and I have no reason to doubt this explanation. But the earliest published reference for the phrase in the Oxford English Dictionary is the clipped version.

Here’s the citation from an 1834 issue of the short-lived undergraduate literary journal Harvardiana: That peculiar degree of satisfaction, usually denoted by the phrase “as happy as a clam.”

A fuller phrase (though not the exact one cited by Brewer’s) shows up 10 years later in a book of fictional essays by Ann Sophia Stephens: They seemed as happy as clams in high water.

Another near-miss appears in John R. Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1848): “As happy as a clam at high water,” is a very common expression in those parts of the coast of New England where clams are found.

In fact, the exact phrase mentioned by Brewer’s doesn’t show up in print as far as I know until an 1873 book by John Hanson Beadle that describes a visit to Galveston, Texas: A thousand or more negroes thronged the streets “happy as clams at high tide.”

An 1898 edition of E. Cobham Brewer’s dictionary, though, does include an entry for “happy as a clam at high tide” with the following comment: The clam is a bivalve mollusc, dug from its bed of sand only at low tide; at high tide it is quite safe from molestation.

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Q: A friend emailed me about a Canadian New Wave group from the 1980s. Should he have said Martha & The Muffins’s [or Muffinses’] record “Metro Music”? In my reply, I want to mention another Canadian New Wave group. Should it be The Spoons’s [or Spoonses’] “Arias & Symphonies”?

A: Whether a musical group is singular or plural depends on whether its name is singular or plural. The Arrows are plural. Platinum Blonde is singular. The Spoons are plural. Martha & the Muffins are too.

If the band’s name is already a plural word ending in “s,” then just add an apostrophe to the end to make it possessive: Martha & the Muffins’ record “Metro Music” … The Spoons’ “Arias & Symphonies” (many fans drop the article and refer to the band simply as Spoons).

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Q: Which is better: “I’m going to loan you $500” or “I’m going to lend you $500”? Many thanks.

A: Let me begin by citing the “lend/loan” entry from my book Woe Is I:

“Only the strictest grammarians now insist that loan is the noun and lend is the verb, a distinction that is still adhered to in Britain (Lend me a pound, there’s a good chap). American usage allows that either loan or lend may be used as a verb (Loan me a few bucks till payday). To my ears, though, lend and lent do sound a bit more polished than loan and loaned.”

To this I might add that both verb forms are very old, with “loan” dating from the 1200s and “lend” from the 1400s.

As John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins: “Originally there was no d. The Old English verb ‘lend’ was laenan, which in Middle English became lene.”

“But gradually during the Middle English period,” Ayto adds, “the past form lende came to be reinterpreted as a present form, and by the 15th century it was established as the new infinitive.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says the adoption of “lend” may have been influenced by the “preponderance of analogy,” citing similar verbs like “bend,” “rend,” “send,” and “wend.”

Which word is better, “loan” or “lend”? It’s your call. But “lend” seems to be the more popular, at least in Google land. I got more than 9 million hits for “to lend” and not quite 2.9 million for “to loan.”

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Q: I sometimes hear people use “what” where I’d expect “that.” For example, “I need to make a list of the things what I want to buy,” or “This is the book what he gave me.” Is this acceptable? It sounds horribly wrong to me.

A: No, your instincts are right and those sentences are wrong. They could correctly be written as follows:

(1) “I need to make a list of the things that I want to buy.”

Or: “I need to make a list of what I want to buy.”

(2) “This is the book that he gave me.”

Or: “This is what he gave me.”

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Q: I’m a reporter at a newspaper where an argument recently erupted between a copy editor and an assignment editor over how a person’s height should be designated. Is someone “5-foot-6” or “5-feet-6”? I would argue that it’s “5-feet-6” on the analogy that someone doesn’t weigh “150 pound.” Thanks for your help.

A: There’s no absolute right-vs.-wrong way to state dimensions in numbers (spell them out or not? use hyphens or not? pluralize the noun or not?). It’s a style issue, and one that’s likely to vary from publisher to publisher.

The New York Times’s style, for example, is “5 feet 6 inches tall” or “5-foot-6.” The Chicago Manual of Style, on the other hand, recommends “five feet nine,” though it accepts “more colloquially, five foot nine.”

Why does the Times (and many other publications) prefer the singular “foot” instead of the plural “feet” in a statement like “She’s 5-foot-6”? The Times stylebook doesn’t offer an explanation, but here’s my take on this.

When you say, “She’s 5-foot-6,” it’s really a clipped way of saying, more or less, “She’s a 5-foot-6 woman.” So “5-foot-6” here is actually an adjectival phrase (a group of words acting like an adjective).

Just think of the adjectival phrases “five-card” and “seven-card” in the question “Do you want to play five-card or seven-card stud?” You’d answer, “Five-card” or “Seven-card,” not “cards.”

We use singular nouns in nearly all adjectival phrases that indicate durations or amounts: “two-car garage,” “three-week vacation,” “four-bedroom house,” “five-month-old puppy,” “three-year lease,” and so on.

The only exception is with fractions, where the plural is often used in adjectival phrases: “a two-thirds turnout,” “a three-fifths margin,” etc.

Although there’s no hard-and-fast rule about the clipped forms, I think most of us commonly use singular nouns: “What size apartment are you looking for? A two-bedroom or a three bedroom?”

But back to your question about height. The Times style on this seems reasonable and natural to me. There’s nothing wrong with saying “She’s 5 feet 6 inches,” but if you drop the word “inches,” it sounds more idiomatically correct to my ear to say “She’s 5-foot-6.”

Now, the Chicago Manual does appear to be on your side. But this is largely irrelevant in a newsroom, since newspapers don’t follow Chicago style.

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Q: What’s the scoop on “optimal” vs. “optimum”? The company I work for says its technology is designed “to maintain the optimal temperature.” To my ear “optimal” is correct, but our chief scientist, a Brit, prefers “optimum.” Are they interchangeable?

A: As adjectives, “optimum” and “optimal” mean the same thing: most favorable, advantageous, desirable.

“Optimum,” which is also a noun, is the older word. It was borrowed directly from Latin (optimum: the best), and entered English as a noun in the mid-19th century.

The earliest published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary (from 1848) describes the cultivation of mulberry to reach “its maximum of extent and its optimum of quality.”

The word was first used as an adjective in an 1885 work that discusses the “optimum point” at which plant life “is carried on with the greatest activity.”

“Optimal” was formed from “optimum” and entered English in 1890. Again, the first OED citation comes from scientific writing: “There is probably an optimal temperature, or one at which the process proceeds most rapidly or most favourably.”

Both words have been used as adjectives up to the present time. In my opinion, it’s a toss-up. Use either one.

But here’s another opinion. Bryan A. Garner, in Garner’s Modern American Usage, prefers “optimal” to differentiate the adjective from the noun “optimum.”

“It serves the principle of differentiation to distinguish between the two forms,” he writes. He adds, however, that the adjective “optimum” is edging out “optimal” in popularity.

In the end, public opinion will choose the winner.

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She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 P.M. Eastern time to take your phone calls about the English language. (If you missed today’s program, you can listen to it in WNYC’s archive.)

Q: I recently read on Yahoo News that Matt LeBlanc’s ex-business manager had filed a breach-of-contract suit against the former Friends star. In the article, LeBlanc is referred to as an “erstwhile” Friends star. I thought “erstwhile” was an adverb, but I see it in some references as an adjective as well. Is it common for words to do double duty as adjectives and as adverbs?

A: The word “erstwhile” began life in the 16th century as an adverb meaning formerly. The first published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a sonnet by Edmund Spenser: “That which erstwhile so pleasaunt scent did yelde, / Of Sulphure now did breathe corrupted smel.”

But “erstwhile” has been used as an adjective meaning former since the early 1900s. Here’s a 1909 citation from the Westminster Gazette, a London newspaper that later merged with the Daily News: “A tottering pleasure-resort, whose erstwhile patrons look more longingly every year at the pretty and easily reached villages of Normandy and Brittany.”

It is indeed common for words to do double duty as adjectives and adverbs. The technical term for an adverb that has the same form as its related adjective is “flat adverb.”

Some typical examples are “slow,” “sure,” “bright,” “hard,” “right,” and of course “flat” itself (as in “you’re singing flat”).

Flat adverbs were once “more abundant and used in greater variety” than they are today, according to Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage.

You might be interested in an item on The Grammarphobia Blog a year and a half ago about flat adverbs.

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Q: I recently came across this line in a computer book: “Most temporary files are automatically deleted whenever you close an application.” I was wondering if “when” should have been used instead of “whenever.”

A: I don’t think “whenever” is necessary in that sentence. A simple “when” would do.

“When” means “at what time” or “at the time that.” It’s an old word, dating back to the year 1000 or so, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Whenever,” a stronger word, means “at any time when” or “every time that” or “at whatever time, no matter when.” The OED says it came along in the late 1300s.

So the two aren’t interchangeable, and often “when” is enough. However, you’d want something stronger in a sentence like this: “I’ll be happy to see you whenever you can get away.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope this helps clarify things for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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