Tag: Usage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Q: I’m a cranky old grammar and pronunciation lover who has just finished reading your entire blog. Whew! Now, I’d like to ask you about the proliferation of the long “i.” It finally went beyond tolerance for me when I heard a newscaster talking about ant-eye-freeze. Next, will it be hem-eye-sphere? What’s wrong with the good old short “i”?

A: I haven’t heard this proliferation of the long “i” that you’ve noticed, but I’m going to keep my ears open for it!

As an aside, I should mention that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives both ANT-eye and ANT-ee as correct pronunciations for “anti” before vowels, but ANT-ih (with the second vowel as in “hit”) before a consonant.

So the newscaster should have said ANT-ih-freez.

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Q: I could not find the verb “skeeve” in my dictionary, though I’ve always understood it to mean to cause disgust or to be disgusted. If a guy tells me, “I skeeve you,” is he disgusted by me or am I disgusted by him?

A: The verb “skeeve” is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as American slang from the 1980s meaning (1) to disgust or repel, as in “you skeeve me,” or (2) to loathe or dislike intensely, as in “I skeeve that.” It sometimes appears as “skeeve out.”

So both senses of the verb are correct, and you’d interpret the meaning from the context.

The OED says the word comes from an earlier adjective dating from the 1970s, “skeevy” (disgusting, distasteful, dirty, sleazy).

“Skeevy,” in turn, probably comes from a regional Italian adjective, schifo, used in Tuscany, according to the OED lexicographers.

The American slang version may have originated in Philadelphia. The OED‘s first citation for “skeevy” is from Philadelphia Magazine in March 1976: “The word ‘skeevie’ used by South Philadelphians to indicate something disgusting is from Italian ‘schifare,’ to loathe.”

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[Note: An updated post about “emotional baggage” appeared on the blog on July 7, 2025.]

Q: I was reading Casino Royale and came upon “emotional baggage,” a phrase I never would have expected in an Ian Fleming novel: “Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around.” The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t quote this, or any other use of “emotional baggage” before the novel’s pub date (1953). I wonder if you know of any prior uses.

A: I don’t know of any earlier usages. I checked out several of my references, including the comprehensive Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, but couldn’t find anything.

Interestingly, I did learn of an article in the journal Applied Linguistics that discusses the phrase, but I haven’t read it. The article, “The Emergence of Metaphor in Discourse,” by Lynne Cameron and Alice Deignan, is available (for a fee) through Oxford Journals. Here’s the link.

I’m not sure the OED folks were setting out to print the earliest examples of each of those “baggage” compounds (“cultural baggage,” “emotional baggage,” “intellectual baggage,” and so on). But perhaps you ought to email them with your find in case they’re interested in what they call an “ante-dating” for the phrase. Here’s a link that might be useful.

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Q: I don’t know if you’ve commented on this, but I’m peeved by the mispronunciation of “pundit’ as PUN-dint. I just had a look on Google, and have discovered I’m not alone. A word for the season, in any case.

A: I hadn’t heard the pronunciation PUN-dint, but it’s definitely not standard. The word is pronounced just as written: PUN-dit.

It’s an interesting word. It comes from the Sanskrit pandita, a learned man. Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines it:

“In India: a learned or wise person; a person with knowledge of Sanskrit and Indian philosophy, religion, and law; (also) a Hindu priest or teacher. Sometimes used as a title of respect.”

A year or so ago I read a book called The Far Pavilions, by M. M. Kaye, which takes place in 19th-century India. I remember coming across a passage about someone traveling “in the guise of a Kashmiri pundit.”

Naturally I had visions of a guy in a suit being interviewed on “Meet the Press.”

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Q: With Burma in the news recently, the word “junta” has been showing up a lot. I’ve heard three different pronunciations from newscasters: the “j” is sometimes pronounced like a “j,” other times like a “y,” and still others like an “h.” Which would be considered the most correct?

A: The word “junta,” usually meaning a council of military rulers, can be pronounced all sorts of ways. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives three pronunciations, all of them standard:

(1) HUN-ta (the “u” pronounced as in “foot”);

(2) JUN-ta (the “u” pronounced as in “ugly”);

(3) HUN-ta (the “u” pronounced as in “ugly).

The word is derived from the Spanish junta (pronounced pretty much like No. 1), and ultimately from the Latin juncta (feminine past participle of jungere, to join).

The word has been in English since 1623, when it referred to a council in Spain or Italy, but it wasn’t used in the military sense until the early 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the summer of 1808, the OED says, the term was used for the local councils established in different districts of Spain to conduct the war against Napoleon. Later in the year, a central junta was formed.

An alternative spelling, “junto,” has been in English since the mid-17th century. The OED describes it as an “erroneous form,” but Merriam-Webster’s simply defines it as “a group of persons joined for a common purpose.”

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Q: I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your detailed response to my question about “hunky-dory.” If I am permitted a follow-up, did GIs bring back the word “honcho” from Japan after World War II? In Japanese, hon usually means main or central, and cho can be a suffix that means ultra or most.

A: The word “honcho” was adopted from the Japanese word hancho, meaning “group leader,” and it first showed up in English (in print, anyway) in 1947, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED‘s first citation is from a book by James Bertram, The Shadow of War: A New Zealander in the Far East, 1939-1946: “But here comes the hancho. This boat must be finished to-night.”

The earliest published reference with the spelling “honcho” is from a 1955 article in the journal American Speech. The article defines the term as “man in charge,” and adds:

“This is a Japanese word translated roughly as ‘Chief officer,’ brought back from Japan by fliers stationed there during the occupation and during the Korean fighting.”

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Q: Your Eminences, what is the derivation of “oops”? And what about “whoops”?

A: There’s more to this “oops” and “whoops” business than meets the eye. And the ultimate answer may go back to Jonathan Swift in the 18th century.

The word “oops” is an interjection expressing “apology, dismay, or surprise, especially after an obvious but usually minor mistake,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says it’s perhaps a natural expression or possibly a shortening of an earlier expression, “upsidaisy,” which is now usually spelled “upsy-daisy” when it appears in standard dictionaries.

The OED‘s first citation for “oops” in print is from a 1922 caption (not sure whether it was for an illustration or a photo) in the Washington Post.

The related interjection “whoops” is considered a variation of “oops.” It often appears in a more elaborate version, “whoopsie-daisy,” also derived from “upsidaisy.”

The OED‘s first “whoops” and “whoopsie” citations are from the 1920s and ’30s. In 1925, for example, the New Yorker printed a caption reading “Whoopsie Daisy!” And in 1937 Ezra Pound wrote in a letter: “Whoops! And do I envy you. I do.”

Now, on to “upsy-daisy.” The OED gives “upsidaisy” as the primary spelling and lists a whole batch of variant spellings: “oops-a-daisy,” “upsey-daisy,” “upsa daesy,” “ups-a-daisy,” “upsy daisy,” and so on.

These started appearing in the mid-19th century. Here are some of the OED‘s earliest citations:

1862, C. Clough Robinson, The Dialect of Leeds and Its Neighbourhood: “Upsa daesy! a common ejaculation when a child, in play, is assisted in a spring-leap from the ground.”

1904, Saturday Review: “There is little Freddy waiting … to be lifted – ‘upsidaisy’ – into his perambulator.”

1912, John Sandilands, Western Canadian Dictionary and Phrase-Book: “Ups-a-daisy, the tender words of the fond father when engaged in baby-jumping.”

1934, Dorothy L. Sayers, Nine Tailors: “Hoops-a-daisy, over she goes!”

And here are some shortened forms:

1922, James Joyce, Ulysses: “Hoopsa! Don’t fall upstairs.”

1928, E. M. Forster, The Life to Come: “Upsa! Take care!”

“Upsidaisy” and its variants are all considered outgrowths of an earlier interjection, “up-a-daisy,” which the OED describes as “an exclamation made to a child on encouraging or assisting it to rise from a fall, etc., or to surmount an obstacle, or when raising it in the arms or jerking it into the air.”

Jerking? Oh well. Anyway, here are its earliest appearances in print.

1711, Jonathan Swift, The Journal to Stella: “So – up a-dazy.”

1756, William Toldervy, The History of Two Orphans: ” ‘Up-a-daisey,’ said Miss Bella, and then … gave him a push behind.”

1854, A. E. Baker, Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases: “Up-a-daisy, a fondling expression of a nurse to a child whilst lifting it from the ground, encouraging it to assist itself in rising.”

If this doesn’t answer your question, I can only say “oops!”

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Q: Some time ago, I read that “hunky-dory” was a corruption of a Japanese word by American sailors. It was apparently the name of a red-light district, and I guess the sailors felt hunky-dory after visiting it. Is there any truth to this?

A: Over the years, a few word sleuths have suggested Japanese connections for “hunky-dory,” but others have pointed out holes in these theories.

In 1877, for example, John Russell Bartlett suggested in his Dictionary of Americanisms that the expression was derived from a street or bazaar in Edo (he spelled it “Yeddo”), a former name for Tokyo.

He said the phrase was believed to have been introduced in the US around 1865 by Thomas Dilward, a black minstrel performer known as Japanese Tommy.

But scholars have raised doubts about the existence of a street named “hunky-dory” (see below), and the only thing Japanese about Tommy, as far as I can tell, was his stage name.

Other language types have theorized that the expression comes from “honcho dori,” the name of a street in Yokohama frequented by American sailors visiting Japan in the 19th century.

Anatoly Liberman, a University of Minnesota etymologist, has said this idea “deserves some credence” because many people in Japan believe it. But Liberman, commenting on an Oxford University Press blog, then went on to point out two big holes in the theory.

First of all, according to Liberman, “honcho dori” isn’t exactly the name of a street in Yokohama. It means, he said, something like “the street where the head honcho lives.” Second, the first part of the expression, “hunky,” may very well have Dutch, not Japanese roots.

So what is the origin of “hunky-dory”?

The Oxford English Dictionary says the first part comes from the Dutch word honk, meaning the goal in a game, and can be traced to earlier Germanic words for a home, a place of refuge, or a safe abode.

The Dutch, of course, had a great influence on the English spoken in New York (aka New Amsterdam). In the mid-19th century, New York schoolchildren used the phases “to reach hunk” or “to be on hunk” to describe being safe or reaching home in games.

The word “hunk” soon came to mean safe or in good condition, as in this 1856 citation from the New York Tribune: “Now he felt himself all hunk, and wanted to get this enormous sum out of the city.”

The OED says the origin of the second part of “hunky-dory” is unknown. The first published reference in the dictionary for the full phrase (more or less) is from an 1866 article in Galaxy magazine: “I cannot conceive on any theory of etymology … why anything that is ‘hunkee doree’ … should be so admirable.”

Sorry I can’t be more definitive.

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Q: A few of my friends and I wondered if you could address this question: Where did the word “dude” come from? When did people start using it in everyday language to refer to either a woman or a man? Thanks!

A: “Dude,” meaning a swell or a fop or a dandy (in other words, an overdressed, showy person), originated in the US in the latter part of the 19th century.

Its first appearance in writing, as far as we know, was in an 1877 letter by the artist Frederick Remington: “Don’t send me any more [drawings of] women or any more dudes.” This is according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

“The etymology is a mystery,” according to Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. But Partridge suggests it may be from the word “dud” (a weakling or a useless person), with some influence by the word “attitude.”

It’s also been suggested that “dude” may have come from “Yankee Doodle.” Or perhaps the use of “duds” to mean clothes could play a part. After all, to “dude up” was to dress up. A “dude wrangler” was a cowboy on a “dude ranch” who entertained the “dude” tourists.

At any rate, “dude” has changed a lot over the years, and in more modern times has shed its pejorative beginnings.

A 1993 addition to the Oxford English Dictionary has nine citations since 1918 for “dude” in the sense of “any man who catches the attention in some way; a fellow or chap, a guy. Hence also approvingly, esp. (through Black English) applied to a member of one’s own circle or group.”

These days the word is generally used to refer to a male person, though the plural “dudes” has been used on college campuses to refer to people of both sexes, much the way “guys” is sometimes used today.

I hope this sheds a little light, dude!

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Q: I was on a hike in Manhattan with the Urban Rangers and had a dispute about the word “amphibian.” I said “amphi” means both, so an amphibian is comfortable on land and water. Another hiker insisted “ambi” (as in “ambidextrous”) means both, so “amphi” couldn’t. I dropped the subject, since I wanted to hear the guide discuss the geology of Inwood Hill Park. An interesting note: Fordham in the Bronx has a lot of gneiss and Inwood Hill a lot of schist. Or, as the guide put it, “Fordham is gneiss, but Manhattan is full of schist.”

A: Thanks for the interesting geology lesson.

As for “ambi” and “amphi,” the two of them are Latin prefixes meaning both, around (that is, both sides), or about. They’re derived from the Greek prefix amphi, which has the same meanings.

So, for example, “amphibian” means having two kinds existence, and “ambidextrous” means able to use both hands with equal ease.

Interestingly, the first citation for “amphibian” in the OED, from 1637, uses the term in a figurative way to refer to some doubtful characters in ancient Rome: “A certaine Amphibian brood, sprung out of the stem of the Neronian tyranny.” The term wasn’t used for cold-blooded vertebrates like frogs, toads, or salamanders until the mid-19th century.

The first published reference for “ambidextrous,” from 1646, is a comment about “ambi-dextrous and left handed men.”

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Q: If you give a talk with no audience participation, are you giving a monologue or a discourse?

A: I wouldn’t use either word.

“Monologue,” according to both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), would imply a dramatic soliloquy, a series of comic stories or jokes delivered by a comedian, a performance by a single actor, or a long speech given by a windbag who’s monopolizing a conversation.

And “discourse” doesn’t have to mean a talk by one person. It can be a conversation, a long discussion, or simply verbal expression in speech or writing.

How about a “lecture” or perhaps even a “talk”?

The noun “talk,” by the way, comes from talu, the Old English word for “tale.” That, in turn, comes from an even older Old English word, tellan, which gave us the verb “tell.”

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She’ll be at the Mid-Manhattan branch, 40th St. and Fifth Ave., just down Fifth from the main library, at 6:30 PM. She’s speaking about the myths and mysteries of English.

Q: Perhaps this is a shot in the dark, but I wonder if you have any information on the use of the word “grotesque” in the mid-19th century in reference to a costume or a “fancy dress.” I’m doing research on a series of masquerades in Brooklyn during the Civil War, and newspapers of the day often use the term “grotesque.” Does it just mean elaborate, strange, and operatic? Or might there be a more specific connotation? Any thoughts would be very welcome.

A: The word “grotesque” (as both a noun and an adjective) got its start in the 16th century. It literally meant “grotto style” (as in “grotto-esque”), and comes from the style of painting on the walls of grottoes (once a popular term for the ruins of ancient Roman buildings that had been excavated).

That sense of the word is defined this way in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A kind of decorative painting or sculpture, consisting of representations of portions of human and animal forms, fantastically combined and interwoven with foliage and flowers.”

Works of art done in this style were called “grotesques,” and were sometimes referred to in the Italian form, grottesco (singular) or grotteschi (plural).

The Restoration poet Sir William Davenant wrote many court masques. In his Works (about 1668) is a piece called simply “Masque” that has the line: “And in the midst was placed a large compartiment composed of Groteske work.”

A little later, the meaning was widened to include representations that were so elaborate as to be distorted or unnatural. And eventually the word came to be used not just for artworks, but also for anything fantastical or wildly ornamental.

One of the later meanings common in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to the OED, was “ludicrous from incongruity; fantastically absurd.”

I can’t find any 19th-century citations in the OED for “grotesque” that specifically mention costume or fancy-dress balls.

But I did find this reference from an 1860 book or publication (don’t know which) called Heads & Hats: “The women wore absurdly high coiffures; and the men vied with them in their height, if not in their grotesqueness.”

And here’s one from Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839 (published in 1863): “You can conceive nothing more grotesque than the Sunday trim of the poor people.” She probably meant something like “absurdly overdone.”

And the OED has a couple of 19th-century references to the use of “grotesque” as a noun meaning a clown or buffoon.

Oxford didn’t pick up many of its early citations from popular sources like newspapers and broadsides, unfortunately. So it may have missed this sense of “grotesque” as applied to exaggeratedly fanciful or elaborate costumes.

The big Webster’s New International Dictionary (unabridged 2d ed.), from the 1950s, has some interesting comments on the meaning of “grotesque.” An excerpt:

“The grotesque is distinguished from the ugly in that it affords a positive aesthetic satisfaction. The ugly is the opposite of the beautiful; the grotesque is the complement of physical beauty representing in the material world a distortion of aesthetic relations.”

Things changed a lot in the following 10 years. During the Beatlemania era, “grotty” (formed from “grotesque”) became a slang word meaning disgusting, ugly, or just plain bad.

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Q: I’m curious about an expression that’s recently caught my eye: “a rye wit.” I can’t find anything in my dictionary on the word “rye” beyond its use as a noun for a grain, a whiskey, or a male gypsy. Am I misspelling it?

A: The adjective you want is spelled “wry.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as meaning “dryly or obliquely humorous; sardonic, ironic.”

Oddly, though, the word wasn’t used in precisely this way until the 20th century. The OED‘s first citation for this meaning is from Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1928): “He smiles with a wry amusement for a second.”

Previously, a “wry” smile was one made with a facial expression of distaste or dislike. But the adjective was used in different senses when it first entered English in the 16th century. It originally meant bent or twisted or distorted from the straight and narrow.

The adjective can be traced to a very old and mostly obsolete verb from old Germanic sources: “wry,” first used in the 800s. It originally meant to turn or wend, and later to swerve or turn aside or twist. This is where we get the adjective and adverb “awry,” as in “Everything went awry.”

Some other words believed to be related are “writhe,” “wrist,” “wrench,” and “wriggle.”

The word “rye” (the food grain) has been traced all the way back to the year 725! We get it from Old Norse.

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Q: My mother and I have a running bet ($50 is at stake). Which is correct: “much” noodles or “many” noodles? I say “many” and she says “much.” I hope you can settle this.

A: An interesting question! And a lot depends on whether “noodles” is singular or plural.

If you think of it as a pasta dish, the word is singular. So you can say, “Noodles is my favorite dish,” though I’d prefer “My favorite dish is noodles.”

If you think of “noodles” as ribbon-shaped pieces of pasta, the word is plural. So you can say, “The noodles are going to be ready in six minutes.”

Now on to the specifics of your question. The adjective “much” refers to a lot of something (singular) while the adjective “many” refers to a lot of things (plural).

If you think of “noodles” as a bunch of those ribbon-shaped things, you can say, “My diet won’t let me eat many noodles.” On the other hand, if you think of “noodles” as a pasta dish, you can say, “I left over much of the noodles.”

If you use “much” with a plural word (like “noodles”) that’s acting in a singular way, you have to put “of the” between them. But you don’t need “of the” if you use “much” with a singular collective noun that acts in a plural way: “I left over much pasta.”

So, you win, but your mom comes in a close second. Maybe you should split the $50 and take each other out to dinner!

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[Note: This post was updated on Oct. 5, 2021.]

Q: Excuse me for inflicting my current bugbears – “robust” and “leafy.” Everything is “robust”: speeches, economies, food, campaign itineraries, etc. Very tired! As for “leafy,” every time someone is murdered in the suburbs, the news media mention the “leafy streets.” In the city, the victim is just murdered. I see this as a putdown – a suggestion that suburbanites are rubes for thinking they’re safe.

A: Where did this infatuation with “robust” come from? We wish we knew. But you’re right – it’s everywhere. If we had to hazard a guess, we’d say it was influenced by (or has a nose of) the world of wine reviewing.

A search with Google’s Ngram view shows that occurrences of “robust” in digitized books spiked in the late 1970s and rose sharply, peaking around 2000.

It’s sad to see a sturdy old word like “robust” become wimpy from overuse. When it entered English in the late 1400s it meant “strong and hardy; strongly and solidly built, sturdy; healthy,” to cite the Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition.

The adjective took on other meanings in the 16th through 19th centuries, according to the OED, with published references for a things like “robust title of occupancy,” “robust language,” “robust exercises,” as well as colors, sounds, tastes, and smells described as “robust.”

The first OED citation for the word used in a culinary sense is from a 19th-century article about (you guessed it) wine: “The Tintara is a robust, sustaining wine” (The Times, London, April 17, 1873).

Applied to food or drink, Oxford says, “robust” means “having a strong taste or smell; (esp. of wine) full-bodied, rich.” And more generally, the adjective can designate “such a taste or smell.”

The dictionary’s later examples of “robust” tastes and smells refer to “robust” fruit, cheese, cooking aromas, perfumes, and again wine: “A cassoulet needs no accompaniment, save a robust and artisanal red wine” (from The River Cottage Meat Book, 2004, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall).

As for its origins, English inherited the word “robust,” first recorded in 1490, from the Latin robustus, meaning strong, hardy, or made of oak. And since healthy, robust oaks are leafy, this brings us to your second bugbear.

We’re sorry to hear that you feel “leafy” is now being used as a slap at the suburbs. We don’t see it as a put-down, but rather as further evidence that reporters are running out of adjectives for describing suburbia.

The word “leaf” itself is very, very old, dating from Old English writing of around the year 850, according to the OED.

The adjective “leafy” first appeared in the mid-1500s. Here’s a 1697 citation from Dryden: “Soft Whispers run along the leafy Woods.” Nothing pejorative about that!

What’s not to like about leaves (aside from having to rake them in “autumn,” the season originally known as the “fall of the leaf”)?

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Q: I was reading your recent blog entry on nicknames and got to wondering where mine comes from. Did “Jack” evolve from “Jacques”?

A: “Jack,” a nickname for “John,” first appeared in tax rolls and other official documents in England in the 13th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

For the first couple of hundred years, the spelling was all over the place: “Iakke,” “Iacke,” Jakke,” “Jacce,” “Jacke,” and so on. “Jack” began showing up in the 16th century, especially when linked with the female name “Jill.” By the 18th century, the modern spelling was firmly established.

The origin of “Jack” is in dispute. Although it’s been “generally assumed” that the nickname comes from “Jaques,” the Old French version of the modern “Jacques,” it might actually have originated in England, according to the OED.

The dictionary says “a strong case has been made” by E.W.B. Nicholson, a former librarian of the Bodleian at Oxford, “for its actual origination as a pet-form” of “Johan,” “Jan,” or “John.”

I should mention that early on the familiar nickname was used (as a proper noun, capitalized) in a generic way to refer to any common man of the people. For example, Shakespeare, in The Taming of the Shrew (1596), refers to a “mad-cap ruffian and a swearing Iacke.”

This usage has survived into modern times. Even now, some people (primarily men, I notice) will address a stranger as “Jack.” A related usage is the expression “every man jack” to mean every individual.

In the 1400s, the word “jack” was used to refer to the little mechanical man that periodically emerged from a clock and struck the hour or half-hour or whatever. It was sometimes called the “jack of the clock” and sometimes just the “jack.”

This use of “jack” as a mechanical contrivance, the OED says, led to another meaning: a device that takes the place of a man or saves labor.

From the 1500s on, all kinds of labor-saving tools were called “jacks”: things for turning spits to roast meats, tools with rollers and winches, rack-and-pinion devices for lifting weights, a “bootjack” for pulling off one’s footwear, a “jack” for raising the chassis of a carriage, and finally the “jack” found in every car trunk.

As for Jack cheese (uh-oh, I’m thinking about food again), it’s full name is Monterey Jack. The OED says the cheese is named for David Jacks (who was born David Jack and lived from 1822 to 1909). He was a Scottish-born dairyman who first produced the cheese in Monterey County, California, in the 1880s.

I’ll bet the Gold Rush prospectors loved it, every man jack of them.

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Q: In the “Living Dead” chapter of your grammar book Woe Is I, you say it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition and you mention that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton all did it. Could you back that up with some examples from their texts?

A: Here are a few:

Chaucer:

“But yit to this thing ther is yit another thing y-ioigned, more to ben wondred upon.” (From his translation of Boethius, Book IV.1)

Shakespeare:

“And do such bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on.” (Hamlet)

“… the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.” (Hamlet)

“And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of?” (Hamlet)

” … those eyes / Which thou dost glare with.” (Macbeth)

” … some life / Which action’s self was tongue to.” (Henry VIII)

Milton:

“…ever held allowable to deal so by a tyrant that could no otherwise be dealt with.” (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates)

” …what a fine conformity would it starch us all into!” (Areopagitica)

There are many more examples, but these are the closest I have at hand for the three authors you asked about.

You can find such “terminal prepositions” in Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, as well as in the works of other great writers: Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, Spenser, Congreve, Fielding, Defoe, Austen, Tennyson, Thackeray, Swift, Carroll, James, Kipling, Twain, Joyce, and many others.

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Q: Have you read The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester? I’m finding it fascinating, but it doesn’t answer this language question: how do you pronounce the word “lambaste”? My dictionary has two pronunciations.

A: You’re right. The Professor and the Madman, the story of the Oxford English Dictionary, is a wonderful book. As for “lambaste,” I can’t remember using it lately. On the infrequent occasions that I used it in the past, I accented the second syllable and rhymed it with “fast.”

This is fine, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), which says standard English allows four pronunciations. Either syllable can be accented, and the second “a” can be either short (as in “fast”) or long (as in “haste”).

M-W even allows a variant spelling: “lambast.” (Kipling, for example, spelled it “lambast” in The Light That Failed, according to the OED.)

However, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) takes a narrower view. Only one spelling: “lambaste.” And only one pronunciation: the second syllable gets an accent and a long “a” (lam-BAIST).

In case you’re interested, the OED says the word may be a combination of two 16th-century verbs: “lam” (to beat, literally to “lame” someone), and “baste” (to thrash or cudgel).

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