Tag: Word origin

Lexical pageantry

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date April 4, 2016

Q: While I was in Texas for the recent MLA convention, the subject of beauty pageants came up at a dinner conversation. When did this secular use of “pageant” develop from the term’s medieval religious origins?

A: The word “pageant” didn’t become associated with beauty contests until the 20th century.

In the Middle Ages, a “pageant” was a mystery play (or an act or a scene in one). Mystery plays were dramas depicting biblical events, and they were especially popular in Europe from about the 12th through 16th centuries.

In fact, modern Christmas and Easter pageants are echoes of that medieval usage, since they include tableaus and scenes representing biblical stories.

The ultimate source of the English word is a bit blurry. It has “multiple origins,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, since it’s “partly a borrowing from French” and “partly a borrowing from Latin.”

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology gives “pagyn” as the earliest English example, recorded in 1386-87 “in an Anglo-French context.” The OED’s earliest example, spelled “pagent,” is from a 1403 document—and it’s notable that the quotation is mostly in French.

The word’s cousins in French (pagin, pagant), Anglo-Norman (pagin, pagine, pagyn), and post-classical Latin (pagina, pagens, pagenda) had various meanings: a stage, a play in a cycle of mystery plays, or a tableau.

Unfortunately, the source of the late Latin pagina is unclear. As the OED says, it may or may not be the same word as the earlier, classical Latin pāgina (page):

“Perhaps, if the sense ‘scene displayed on a stage’ were the original sense, it might be developed from ‘page’ or ‘leaf’ of a manuscript play, but if so there is no evidence to support this.”

Another explanation is that the post-classical pagina could have come from the classical Latin pangere (to fix), giving rise to the meaning “framework,” the OED suggests. By comparison, Oxford cites the classical Latin pēgma (a framework, movable stage, or scaffold in a theater).

However it developed, “pageant” in English originally meant a mystery play or part of one, whether we date it from the late 1300s or the early 1400s.

Some mystery plays, especially Easter pageants, have been criticized for their depiction of Jews. In “Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays,” a 1979 paper in the journal Comparative Drama, Stephen Spender describes the plays as “vehemently anti-Jewish.”

By 1450, the OED says, “pageant” was recorded in a newer sense: a stage on wheels.

Here’s Oxford’s definition: “A stage or platform on which scenes were acted or tableaux represented.” Particularly in earlier usages, it meant “a movable structure consisting of stage and stage machinery, used in the open-air performance of a mystery play.”

That 15th-century usage is now seen only in historical writings. This 20th-century example is a good illustration:

“In the Middle Ages a pageant was the rough stage mounted on a cart on which the Mysteries and Miracles were played. To-day we have similar exhibitions in the tableaux arranged for the Lord Mayor’s Show, and it is easy to see how the word transferred from the moving stage to the whole procession.” (From Volume 5 of Harold Wheeler’s Waverley Children’s Dictionary, 1927-29.)

At around the same time, circa 1450, “pageant” was used to mean a tableau or “dumb show,” either fixed in place or erected on a movable float. This sense of “pageant” is rare today, the OED says.

The use of “pageant” widened around the beginning of the 19th century to mean “a brilliant or stately spectacle arranged for effect; esp. a procession or parade with elaborate spectacular display; a showy parade,” the OED says.

Oxford’s earliest example is from Robert Southey’s epic poem Madoc (1805): “Embroidered surcoats, and emblazoned shields, / And lances whose long streamers played aloft, / Made a rare pageant, as with sound of trump, / Tambour and cittern, proudly they went on.” (We’ve expanded the citation to get in more of the pomp.)

This less celebratory example is from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820), by Washington Irving: “Few pageants can be more stately and frigid than an English funeral in town.”

Later in the 19th century, “pageant” was first used in connection with historical dramas. The OED’s definition: “A commemorative play depicting scenes from history (esp. local history), usually performed outdoors in the form of a procession in elaborate, colourful costumes.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from 1883, but we like this 1970 example: “A great many pageants have been so gruesome—Merrie Englande with rain—the form has earned itself a bad reputation.” (From New Directions: Ways of Advance for the Amateur Theatre, by Peter Burton and John Lane.)

Finally, the use of “pageant” for a beauty contest originated in the US in the early 20th century and is still chiefly American, according to the OED.

The dictionary’s first citation is a pithy headline from a 1911 issue of the Syracuse (NY) Herald: “Pick blondes for beauty pageant.”

Here’s another example, from a 1929 issue of the Zanesville (Ohio) Signal: “The district winner chosen at Buckeye Lake next Thursday … is to be entered directly in the ‘Miss America’ pageant at Baltimore, Md. in September.”

In the US these days, “pageant” has almost replaced “beauty contest,” which was first recorded in 1880. As this example shows, “pageant” has become a byword in the beauty-contest biz.

“The former Little Miss Colorado’s wardrobe for 1997 was to have included half a dozen outfits for the different categories of ‘pageants’—the term that organisers prefer to ‘beauty contests’—in which she would compete.” (From the Independent, London, 1997.)

A historical aside: Most early spellings of “pageant” (“pagyn,” “padgean,” “padgin,” “padgion,” and others) didn’t end in “t.” The “t” became established later, either for reasons of euphony or by analogy with “ancient,” which was spelled “auncien” or “auncian” in Middle English, ancien in French, and antiān in late Latin.

We’ll close with a look at “pageantry,” which Shakespeare is credited with using first in writing. Here’s the OED’s earliest citation, from Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609):

“What pageantry, what feats, what showes, / What minstrelsie, and prettie din, / The Regent made … / To greet the King.” (We like the phrase “prettie din,” don’t you?)

Originally, “pageantry” meant what Shakespeare intended: “pageants or tableaux collectively,” or “the public performance or display of these,” says the OED.

But later in the mid-1600s, Oxford says, “pageantry” acquired the meanings it has today, both negative and positive: (1) empty display or “show without substance,” and (2) “gorgeous, colourful, or spectacular show; pomp.”

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Sizing up YOOGE

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date April 1, 2016

Q: Is the Bernie Sanders/Donald Trump pronunciation of “huge” as YOOGE strictly a New York thing?

A: The usual pronunciation of “huge” is HYOOGE, according to most of the standard dictionaries we’ve checked. The “hy” sound at the beginning is a consonant cluster that combines the sounds produced by the letters “h” and “y.”

In the pronunciation you’re asking about, the “hy” sound at the beginning of “huge” is reduced to a “y” sound, resulting in the variant YOOGE.

Several standard dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.), accept the YOOGE pronunciation as an equal variant alongside HYOOGE.

However, the Dictionary of American Regional English says YOOGE occurs primarily in New York City and Long Island, NY, though it’s also heard in some other parts of the East Coast.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, which linguists generally use in referring to these sounds, the “hy” cluster is written as /hj/ and the “y” sound as /j/.

Phoneticians, linguists that specialize in the sounds of speech, would say that the phoneme, or unit of sound, represented by the consonant cluster /hj/ is replaced by the phoneme /j/ when someone pronounces “huge” as YOOGE (judʒ in the IPA alphabet).

This process is similar to what linguists refer to as glide cluster reduction, in which the “wh” cluster (originally spelled “hw”) is reduced to “w” in words like “which,” “whether,” and “where.” We wrote about such “wh” words in our recent post about “h”-dropping.

To keep things as simple as possible here, we’ll use “hy” and “y” for the /hj/ and /j/ sounds, except when we quote linguists or lexicographers using the IPA alphabet.

The earliest evidence in DARE for the YOOGE pronunciation is from the early 1940s, but we suspect that the pronunciation is much older, perhaps dating back to the 1700s, and may have been more widespread.

The dictionary’s first citation for YOOGE is from a 1942 issue of the journal American Speech: “NYC, Long Island, Omission of initial [h] before [ju] … huge … This is a somewhat greater loss of [h] than in upstate speech.”

However, DARE has a much earlier example indicating that the word “humor” (now usually pronounced HYOO-mur) was pronounced YOO-mur in American English in the late 18th century.

In Dissertations on the English Language (1789), Noah Webster criticizes the pronunciation of “human, and about twenty other words beginning with h, as tho they were spelt yuman. This is a gross error.”

Webster doesn’t list the 20 other words, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they included “huge.”

Interestingly, Webster adds that the word “humor” should begin with a “y” sound: “The only word that begins with this sound, is humor, with its derivatives.” In other words, he considered the YOO-mur pronunciation of “humor” to be standard English.

In a footnote, Webster singles out for criticism the Scottish lexicographer William Perry, author of The Royal Standard English Dictionary (1775), which says “human” should be “pron. as if began with a y.”

“I am surprized that his pronunciation has found so many advocates in this country, as there is none more erroneous,” Webster says.

It’s apparent from Webster’s remarks that the “hy” pronunciation of “humor” and some similar words was unsettled in the late 18th century on both sides of the Atlantic, probably because of the difficulty some people had in pronouncing the cluster.

In fact, several 18th-century British language authorities agreed with Webster that “humor“ (“humour” in the British spelling) should be pronounced YOO-mur.

In An Essay Towards Establishing a Standard for an Elegant and Uniform Pronunciation of the English Language (1766), for example, James Buchanan endorses the YOO-mur pronunciation, as does John Walker in A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791).

Several readers of our blog have asked if the pronunciation of “huge” as YOOGE by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (both native New Yorkers) is similar to the “h”-dropping in cockney, the working-class speech of England.

We don’t think so. In cockney, the “h” sound disappears and is not replaced by anything (as in “house” reduced to OUSE). In the New Yorkish pronunciation of “huge,” the consonant cluster “hy” is replaced by a “y” sound.

If the “h” in “huge” were a normal consonant, the word would be pronounced HOOGE, and dropping the “h” would result in the pronunciation OOGE. That’s not what is happening here.

Interestingly, people speaking the Norfolk dialect in England do change the “hy” sound in “huge” to “h,” resulting in the pronunciation HOOGE. Linguists refer to this phenomenon as yod-dropping, from the name of the Hebrew version of the letter “y.”

In fact, yod-dropping is heard on both sides of the Atlantic, but it’s more common in the US and helps differentiate standard American pronunciation from Received Pronunciation, the standard British accent.

Most Americans, for example, usually pronounce “tune” and “news” as TOON and NOOZ, while someone speaking RP pronounces them TYOON and NYOOZ. (In parts of the American South, people also say TYOON and NYOOZ, as we’ve written on the blog.)

We could go on—and on and on. There’s much to be said about yod-dropping, an ongoing process that the linguist John C. Wells dates from the early 18th century, but we’ll leave that for another day.

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The truth about truism

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 30, 2016

Q: Vivian Gornick wrote this in the NY Times Book Review: “It is a truism that every great book survives the literary and cultural conventions of its time and place because the emotional intelligence in it speaks to a reader a hundred years down the road.” My dictionary says a truism is something too obvious to mention, but I found Gornick’s statement very much worth mentioning. Your thoughts?

A: We agree with you that Vivian Gornick’s comment in the Feb. 14, 2016, issue of the Times Book Review was well worth making. We’ll go further and say that it was indispensable to her essay—complete with the word “truism.”

On a literal level, a “truism” is an obvious or self-evident truth, and many standard dictionaries give that definition first. But they usually add that it “especially” means a statement so obvious as to be unimportant. Some other dictionaries, in fact, give that as the only definition, but we think that’s too narrow a view.

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition: “A self-evident truth, esp. one of minor importance; a statement so obviously true as not to require or deserve discussion. Also: a proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied in any of its terms.”

We think that in her “Critic’s Take” column, Gornick used “truism” in the sense of a statement that’s self-evident: A book survives the limits of its own time because it has meaning to a later time.

Such a statement is certainly obvious, but it has a special significance in Gornick’s essay, which takes a fresh look at the novel Howards End in light of what we now know of E. M. Forster.

We know that when his novel appeared in 1910, Forster, then 31, “was a closeted homosexual and a virgin who knew nothing of how erotic relations worked—with any combination of partners,” Gornick writes. His time and place “terrorized him into picking up a pen forever dipped in code.”

“It was this sense of frozen solitariness, I now realized, that had colored all of Forster’s thought and feeling, and in time supplied him his signature concern: ‘Only connect!’ Rereading Howards End, it was now easy to see that it is the writer’s own arrested development that haunts Forster’s work, and that makes it moving.”

So a truism that’s obvious may help us understand a truth that isn’t so obvious.

But let’s get back to “truism” and its origins. As the OED explains, the word was “formed within English, by derivation” from the adjective “true,” which is Germanic in origin.

The earliest written use recorded in Oxford is dated 1714: “I abhor Tyranny … and upon this Subject could vent as many Truisms as Mr. St— —le hath done upon Liberty.” (From an anonymous political pamphlet, “Hannibal Not at Our Gates.”)

And here’s the OED’s most recent example: “It is a television truism that, when we wish to celebrate a national event, we loyally turn to the BBC.” (From the British magazine Private Eye, 2012.)

Separately, Oxford lists another use of “truism”: as a mass noun (rather than a specific example).

The dictionary’s earliest citation for this sense of the word is from sometime before 1770: “Nonsense, truism, falsehood, and absurdity, are so curiously blended in every part of the pamphlet.” (From an essay on ruptures and trusses by Timothy Sheldrake.)

And here’s a modern example: “Rather than playing down the melodrama … it heightens it, with words that hover dangerously close to truism.” (From a British newspaper, the Independent, 2009.)

We’ll conclude with the definition of “truism” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.): “An undoubted or self-evident truth; especially: one too obvious or unimportant for mention.”

Especially, but not always. Even truths that are self-evident are sometimes worth stating.

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A sneak peek

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 28, 2016

Q: I’ve always used “at” with “sneak peek,” as in “I had a sneak peek at episode 8.” Lately, I’ve heard people use “of” instead of “at.” That sounds wrong to my ear, perhaps only because of what I’m used to. Is there a preference?

A: There are differences of opinion here. Our research shows that most people prefer “sneak peek at,” but a sizable number would choose “sneak peek of” instead.

Our own preference is for “at.” To our ears, “Take a sneak peek at this” sounds more natural than “Take a sneak peek of this.”

But as we’ve written many times before, the use of prepositions is highly idiomatic, and common usage ultimately determines what is considered standard English.

Why, for instance, do most of us say “a glance at” but “a glimpse of”? Chalk it up to common usage. As with “sneak peek at/of,” we can only examine preferences; we can’t declare one usage right and the other wrong.

Writers of books seem to support our own preference for “sneak peek at” by a wide margin. It’s also preferred among the population as a whole, but not by as wide a margin.

The Google Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in millions of books, shows “sneak peek at” outnumbering “sneak peek of” by a margin of about seven to one as of 2008, the latest year available.

The graph tracks each phrase as a percentage of all three-word sequences.

It also shows that “sneak peek at” (like the narrower phrase “sneak peek”) first showed up in books in 1951, and that “sneak peek of” followed in 1988.

As you can see, by 2008 the line for “sneak peek at” was sharply higher than that for “sneak peek of.”

We also did ordinary Google searches, which are broader and more up to date but don’t include as many books as the Ngram Viewer. The result is that “sneak peek at” leads “sneak peek of” by a margin of roughly five to four.

The numbers are very fluid, changing from hour to hour, but they always show “sneak peek at” in the lead.

We wondered why the “at” version seems more idiomatic to most people, and we found a couple of hints in the Oxford English Dictionary.

While the OED has no separate entry for the noun phrase “sneak peek,” it has one for the noun “peek,” defined as “a peep, a glance; a quick or furtive look.”

And if you substitute “a peep” or “a glance” or “a furtive look,” the following preposition in the sense we’re discussing would normally be “at” and not “of.”

Furthermore, none of the OED’s citations for the noun “peek,” which was first recorded in 1636, show it accompanied by “of.” When there’s a preposition at all, the noun appears with “at,” “in,” “into,” “through,” or the compound preposition “out of.”

Here are the relevant citations: “one peeke into heaven” (1636); “I jest give a peak in for a minit” (1844); “frequent ‘peeks’ through the slide” (1869); “a peek into the … brooding-room” (1884); “take an occasional peek at these other guys’ hands” (1938); “a sneak peek out of the window” (1969); “get a peek at the land register” (1993).

Similarly, the OED’s entry for the verb “peek,” which showed up in the 14th century, suggests that “at” is the preferred adverb.

Here’s the verb’s definition: “to look through a narrow opening; to look into or out of an enclosed or concealed space; (also) to glance or look furtively at, to pry.” (Note the “at” in italics.)

None of the dictionary’s examples show the verb followed immediately by “of.” The citations, which date back to 1390, show it used with “about,” “at,” “in,” “into,” “in at,” “inside,” “on” (Middle English), “out,” “out of,” “out from beneath,” “over,” “up,” “up in,” and “upward.”

In summary, we’re not surprised that people sometimes take sneak peeks “of” things like movies and games and apps. But for our part, we’ll stick with the “at” version.

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When an omen isn’t ominous

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 25, 2016

Q: An “omen” can be “auspicious,” but something that’s “ominous” can’t be. Any insight about this surprising divergence?

A: An “omen” has always been neutral—it can be good news or bad—but something that’s “ominous” is a bummer. In fact, by definition “ominous” means inauspicious.

How did this come to be? Blame the Romans.

In classical Latin, an ōmen was “something that foreshadows an event or the outcome of an event,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And ōminōsus meant “inauspicious, portentous.”

When adopted into English in the late 16th century, the two words retained their Latin meanings—one neutral, the other negative.

“Omen,” first recorded in 1582, was (and still is) a neutral word for a prophetic sign. Here’s the OED’s definition: “An event or phenomenon regarded as a portent of good or evil; a prophetic sign, an augury.”

Oxford’s most recent example is positive: “Unlike lots of people I like spiders. They have always been an omen of luck to me.” (From the Weekly News, Glasgow, 1989.)

Yet “ominous,” first recorded in 1589, has always been unequivocally negative. There’s nothing good in the OED’s earliest definition: “Of ill omen, inauspicious; indicative or suggestive of future misfortune.”

This is still among its meanings, as shown in a modern OED example: “The ominous prospects of war could not dampen the enthusiasm of Karen Horney and her group for their new undertaking.” (From Susan Quinn’s A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney, 1988.)

Within a few years of its first appearance, “ominous” took on wider negative senses unrelated to prophecy.

Oxford has citations beginning in 1593 for the word used to mean “menacing,” “awful,” or “unsettling” in reference to an appearance, a sound, an atmosphere, and so on.

The word is used this way even now, as in this OED citation: “There was an ominous, slow-motion replay of McVeigh’s ‘perp walk’ intercut with victims in agony.” (From the New York Times Magazine, June 2001.)

Only rarely (and briefly, from the 1590s to the 1670s) was “ominous” ever used in a positive sense, a usage the OED says is now obsolete.

We can’t explain why “omen” can be good or bad but “ominous” is only bad.

There’s no clue in Latin, according to the OED, which says the etymology of ōmen is unknown.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots says the ō- of ōmen comes from a prehistoric Indo-European root meaning “to believe, hold as true.” But this doesn’t explain the different characters of “omen” and “ominous.”

We do know how “auspice” and “auspicious” developed. It all started with a word from Roman history, auspex, a contraction of avispex (a watcher of birds, from avis, bird, and –spex, an observer).

In Roman times, the OED says, an auspex was “one who observed the flight of birds, to take omens thence for the guidance of affairs.” Consequently, it also meant “a director, protector; and esp. the person who superintended marriage ceremonies.”

(The word “auspex” has been used in English only in reference to ancient Rome. In ordinary English, such a person is an “augur,” a word also derived from the Latin avis and one that we wrote about in 2011.)

In Latin, the word for what the auspex did—the divination or foretelling—was auspicium. And auspicium, the OED explains, gave French the noun auspice in the 14th century.

“Auspice” came into English from French in the 1530s, when it was used in the old Roman way. Here’s the OED’s earliest sense of the word: “An observation of birds for the purpose of obtaining omens; a sign or token given by birds.”

By the mid-17th century “auspice” was used in a more general and more positive way: “Any divine or prophetic token; prognostic, premonition; esp. indication of a happy future.”

Oxford’s earliest citation is a reference to “happy auspices” (1660), and the latest is to “fairest auspices” (1885).

The sense in which we use the word today—usually in the plural—came along in the early 1600s.

This meaning, which is entirely positive, is defined in the OED as a “propitious influence” or “patronage,” especially in the phrase “under the auspices of.”

So it’s no surprise that since its beginnings in the early 1600s the adjective, “auspicious,” has almost always meant of good omen, propitious, or favored by fortune.

We’ll close with a couple of quotes from Shakespeare, who knew a thing or two about portents.

“Thou ominous and fearful owl of death, / Our nation’s terror and their bloody scourge!” (King Henry VI, Part 1, circa 1591.)

“Then go thou forth; / And fortune play upon thy prosperous helm, / As thy auspicious mistress!” (All’s Well That Ends Well, c. 1605.)

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Paying your dues

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 21, 2016

Q: How did the expression “pay your dues” come to mean overcome difficulties to achieve success?

A: To begin at the beginning, the word “due” has referred to a financial or moral debt since it first showed up in Middle English in the 14th century, originally as an adjective, later as a noun, and eventually as an adverb.

English borrowed “due” from the Old French deü, but the ultimate source is the Latin verb dēbēre (to owe), which has also given us the words “debt,” “debit,” and “duty.”

The earliest example for “due” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Cursor Mundi, an anonymous Middle English poem written sometime before 1325, which uses the phrase “dew dett” for a financial debt that is owed.

And the earliest example for “due” used in the moral sense is from Confessio Amantis (1393), a poem by John Gower about the confessions of an ageing lover, which uses the phrase “due love” in reference to something that deserves to be loved.

The noun “due,” which referred to a financial or moral debt when it appeared in the 15th century, has been used in various expressions since then.

Two of them—“give someone his due” (treat him fairly or acknowledge his merits) and “give the devil his due” (acknowledge the good qualities in a bad person)—are in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 1 (1598):

“No, ile giue thee thy due, thou hast paid all there” … “He was neuer yet a breaker of prouerbes: he will giue the diuell his due.”

The earliest examples that we could find for “pay one’s dues” date from the 1600s, when paying dues meant meeting one’s financial or moral obligations.

In The Anatomie of Melancholy (1632), Robert Burton’s advice for coping with depression includes “Give chearfully. Pay thy dues willingly. Be not a slave to thy mony.”

And here’s an example from a 1685 religious tract by John Norris: “For if even when the Laws enforce men to pay their dues to their Ministers, they yet continue so backward in the discharge of them.”

The expression was used in its literal financial or moral sense until the 20th century, when a pair of figurative meanings developed in the US: (1) to suffer the consequences of an act; (2) to undergo hardships before achieving success.

The OED labels these usages slang, but the American version of Oxford Dictionaries online (a different entity from the OED) lists them without comment—that is, as standard English.

Oxford Dictionaries has several examples for each of the new usages, including (1): “he had paid his dues to society for his previous convictions” and (2) “this drummer has paid his dues with the best.”

Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged online agrees with Oxford Dictionaries and includes the two new senses without comment.

Finally, the use of “due” in referring to points of the compass (the only surviving adverbial sense) showed up in the early 1600s, according to citations in the OED.

The dictionary’s first example is from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (circa 1601): “There lies your way, due West.” We can’t sign off without mentioning another “due” or two.

There’s the adjective meaning expected (“the baby is due in September”), which showed up in the 19th century, and the one meaning proper or adequate (“driving with due care”), which appeared in the 14th century.

Then there’s “due to,” often used to mean “because of.” As we wrote in a 2012 post, it’s widely used but frowned upon by sticklers (who might even say it’s “not due form”).

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A “bona fide” pronunciation?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 16, 2016

Q: A supercilious acquaintance looked down his nose at me when I pronounced “bona fide” as BOH-nuh-fied. He says the authentic pronunciation of this phrase borrowed from Latin should be boh-nuh-FEE-day. How would YOU pronounce it?

A: Like you, we say BOH-nuh-fied, as do most Americans. Your snooty friend’s pronunciation may be heard in Latin classes, but it isn’t found in English dictionaries in either the US or the UK.

The two most common English pronunciations of “bona fide,” according to the six standard dictionaries we’ve consulted, are BOH-nuh-fied (the end rhymes with “fried”), and boh-nuh-FYE-dee (the end rhymes with “tidy”).

The three-syllable version is more common in the US. In fact, it’s the default audible pronunciation given online by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

To hear it, go to their sites and click on the little loudspeaker icons.

The four-syllable pronunciation is standard in the UK, according to all the British dictionaries we’ve checked. To hear it, go to the UK English version of Oxford Dictionaries online.

Although the three-syllable pronunciation is more common in the US, American dictionaries also accept the four-syllable version, as well as some less common variations. The first vowel can also sound like the “o” in “bonnet,” for example. And the final vowel in the four-syllable version can sound like the “e” in “the.”

But while boh-nuh-FYE-dee is accepted by American dictionaries, it may not be advisable.

As Bryan A. Garner writes in Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.), it’s “pedantic outside the law and precious even in legal contexts.”

Your friend’s pronunciation, boh-nuh-FEE-day, roughly corresponds to the Latin, but we’re talking about English here. (We doubt that your friend pronounces “Caesar” as KYE-zar or “vice versa” as WEE-keh WARE-sah, as the Romans once did.)

In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary, in its etymology of “bona fide,” says that even “classical scholars sometimes preserve the Latin quantity of the vowels … without the Latin vowel sounds.”

In Latin, bona fide means “with good faith.” In English, the OED says, it was originally an adverb meaning “genuinely,” “with sincerity,” or “in good faith.”

The adverb dates back to the time of Henry VIII, the dictionary says, when it was recorded in the Acts of Parliament for 1542-43: “The same to procede bona fide, without fraude.”

But “bona fide” has also become an English adjective meaning “genuine,” “sincere,” or “done in good faith.”

The OED’s earliest citation for the adjective is from John Joseph Powell’s An Essay Upon the Learning of Devises (1788): “Act not to extend to bonâ fide purchasers for a valuable consideration.”

“Bona fides,” the noun version, came into English in the mid-19th century. (The usual pronunciation, in both the US and the UK, is boh-nuh-FYE-deez. However, American dictionaries also accept a less-common, three-syllable variation whose ending rhymes with “tides.”)

The OED describes “bona fides” as a singular noun used in the law to mean “good faith” or “freedom from intent to deceive.” The dictionary’s only two examples are from 19th-century legal usage.

This one, from 1885, is a good illustration of the legal use: “It was said that this shewed bona fides on their part” (from Law Reports, Chancery Division).

In the mid-20th century, the noun “bona fides” developed a plural sense that the OED defines as “guarantees of good faith.”

The first example in the dictionary is from a 1944 issue of the journal Notes and Queries: “I notice in one of our best sellers the remark ‘If Mina’s bona fides are once questioned.’ ”

The OED regards this plural usage as a mistake: “Erroneously treated as pl. form of bona fide (assumed to be n. sing.)”

However, Oxford Dictionaries (a different entity from the OED) describes the usage as informal and gives this example: “‘Now, however, the bona fides of some of those ordinations are in question.”

And most of the other standard dictionaries we’ve checked accept without reservation the use of “bona fides” as a plural noun meaning good intentions, authentic credentials, proofs of legitimacy, and so on.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate has this example: “the informant’s bona fides were ascertained.” And American Heritage has an example that describes a singer whose “operatic bona fides were prominently on display.”

In addition, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has citations that mention phrases like “the bona fides of a Soviet defector,” “social bona fides,” “literary bona fides,” and “his bona fides on this issue.”

In “this now-established new meaning,” the M-W usage guide says, the noun “very often occurs in contexts where it does not govern a verb.”

But when it is the subject of a verb, M-W adds, “the verb is usually plural,” as in this example: “Fritz Kolbe’s bona fides were unambiguously established” (from the New York Times Book Review, 1983).

OK, this use of “bona fides” is legit. But why use it at all? In our opinion, “bona fides” is a stuffy noun, and a word like “credentials” or “authenticity” or “legitimacy” would do a better job.

Bryan Garner, in his usage guide, agrees that the plural term has an “air of affectation.” And he adds: “Making bona fides singular sounds pedantic; making it plural is likely to offend those who have a smattering of Latin.”

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Is “if you will” a verbal tic?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 14, 2016

Q: Is there any legitimate use for the phrase “if you will,” which I hear overused and abused on TV and radio? I’ve been wondering about this since hearing John Sununu repeatedly use it as filler the other day.

A: We once wrote a post in which we mentioned a few expressions that are “used to death in the media.” We included “in the final analysis,” “hit the ground running,” “on the ground,” “when all is said and done,” “at the end of the day,” and “if you will.”

We jokingly used the last one in a sentence: “First I take off my left shoe, and then, if you will, my right.”

Joking aside, “if you will” is much overused by interview subjects on the air and in print. The linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum, writing on the Language Log, has compared it to the use of “like” as a filler.

In his article, Pullum plucks more than a dozen sentences from the Wall Street Journal, containing what seem to be “quotes from educated and prosperous middle-aged persons—CEOs and so on.” And in each case he replaces the speaker’s “if you will” with “like.”

For example, the statement “They are, if you will, this country’s governing body” becomes “They are, like, this country’s governing body.” You get the idea: “if you will” is to pompous baby boomers what “like” is to their kids.

As Pullum says, “The people who grouse about like are myopic old whiners who haven’t looked at their own, like, linguistic foibles, if you will.”

In fact, “if you will” isn’t always empty filler. Before it became the annoying and meaningless tic it often is today, it had a legitimate usage (and it still does, among more careful speakers).

The Oxford English Dictionary says the expression is “sometimes used parenthetically to qualify a word or phrase” and can be interpreted as “if you wish it to be so called” or “if you choose or prefer to call it so.” (The OED doesn’t comment on the use of the phrase as mere throat-clearing.)

Similarly, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines “if you will” as meaning “if you wish to call it that,” and gives a literary example: “a kind of preoccupation, or obsession if you will” (Louis Auchincloss).

This is not the “will” that’s an auxiliary of the future tense. This is the verb that means to desire or wish, as well as to intend or propose “that something be done or happen,” as the OED says.

This sense of “will” is a remnant of an obsolete or archaic use that dates back to the 10th century in writing, one in which “will” is used transitively—that is, with an object (as in “she willed him to speak” or “your father wills it”). However, in the case of “if you will” the object is unstated.

The OED has this late 17th-century example: “Gravity … depends entirely on the constant and efficacious, and, if you will, the supernatural and miraculous Influence of Almighty God” (from William Whiston’s The New Theory of the Earth, 1696).

This 19th-century example is from the works of John Ruskin: “Very savage! monstrous! if you will” (from St. Mark’s Rest: The History of Venice, 1876).

Notice how the writers in those examples use “if you will” to qualify words, like “supernatural” and “monstrous,” that a reader might otherwise find startling. In effect, the meaning is “you might even say supernatural,” “you might even say monstrous.”

But “if you will” is also used in other ways, as in polite formulas like “Pass the salt, if you will,” “Imagine, if you will, a rustic cottage,” and “Tell the jury, if you will, where you were on the night of ….”

In those examples, “if you will” means something like “if you please.” (The OED’s definitions of “if you please” include “if it be your will.”)

Finally, “if you will” can be used in the sense of “if you desire” or “if you wish.”

The OED has an example from Sir Walter Scott. In a scene from the novel Kenilworth (1821), the Earl of Leicester’s wife makes a wish—that he would don the russet-brown cloak of a peasant. The Earl replies: “The sober russet shall be donned to-morrow, if you will.”

This usage is a cousin to a couple of old phrases in which the verb “will” has only an implied object: “if God will” and the later “God willing.”

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When “I don’t care” means “Yes”

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 11, 2016

Q: I came across a startling idiom while living in southern Missouri. If I asked someone a favor, the response would be “I don’t care,” but the meaning would be “I’m willing.” Can you help clarify?

A: What you heard in Missouri is an American regionalism that dates from the early 20th century, but it has roots in a usage that showed up in England in the 1500s.

To begin at the beginning, the verb “care” has meant, among other things, to be concerned about something since it appeared in Old English.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Beowulf, an epic poem that may date from as early as 700: “Na ymb his lif cearað” (“Nor cares about his life”).

We still use the verb “care” that way. The latest OED example is from Play Therapy, a 1947 book by the psychologist Virginia Mae Axline: “Fall on the floor, damn you! See if I care.”

In the early 16th century, the verb in negative constructions took on a sense similar to the one you’re asking about.

“Not to care,” according to the OED, came to mean “not to mind (something proposed); to have no disinclination or objection, be disposed to.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from Pylgrimage of Perfection, a 1526 treatise by the English monk William Bonde: “Some for a fewe tythes, with Cayn, careth nat to lese the eternall ryches of heuen [heaven].”

The OED adds that when the usage is seen now “care” is accompanied by the preposition “if” or “though.” However, the dictionary’s most recent citation is from the mid-19th century.

Here’s an “if” example from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 (1600): “I care not if I doe become your phisitian.”

And here’s one from Clarissa, a 1748 novel by Samuel Richardson: “Will you eat, or drink, friend? … I don’t care if I do.”

As for the usage you heard in Missouri, the Dictionary of American Regional English says the verb “care” is used in the negative to mean “to be willing, to be pleased,” usually “in response to an invitation.”

So in this sense, “I don’t care to” would mean “I’m willing to” or “I’d be pleased to” or simply “Yes.”

DARE identifies this as a regionalism of the Midlands section of the country. Here are the examples on record, with the locations listed first.

Southern Indiana: “People might think you were brash if you answered straight out ‘Yes’ to an offer of food or drink, so to be polite you said ‘I don’t care.’ ” (From 1980 DARE records of a usage current “as of c1900.”)

Southeast Missouri: “Care…. In negative ‘not to care’; a common expression denoting consent. ‘Will you go to dinner with me?’ ‘I don’t care.’ (Not meant to be indifferent.)” (From the journal Dialect Notes, 1903.)

Northwest Arkansas, southeast Missouri, southeast Kentucky: “Care (with negative)…. To be willing. ‘If I had a horse and carriage I wouldn’t care to take you to Boring.’ ” (From Dialect Notes, 1907.)

Central Kentucky: “I hope to live my life out so people won’t care to look at me, and I won’t care to meet nobody…. You don’t have to be hateful. You can be kind. And people don’t care to look at you.” (From Ellesa Clay High’s Collection of Terms Recorded in the Red River Gorge, 1981, describing a usage current “as of c1930.”)

West Virginia mountains: “ ‘Come and set?’ ‘I wouldn’t keer to.’ The rising inflection of the guest’s voice indicated her willingness, so together they dropped down in the cool grass.” (From Alberta Hannum’s novel Thursday April, 1931.)

Western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee: “ ‘She don’t care to talk’ [means] she doesn’t mind talking, i.e. she is a great talker.” (From the Joseph Sargent Hall collection of dialect materials, 1937.)

West Virginia: “One of the most baffling expressions our people use … is ‘I don’t care to….’ To outlanders this seems to mean a definite ‘no,’ whereas in truth it actually means, ‘thank you so much, I’d love to.’ ” (From West Virginia History, 1969, at the state Department of Archives and History.)

And this is an example from much farther north: “Maine Circumlocutions … such as, ‘I don’t care for him’ when the meaning is, ‘I have no objection to him.’ ” (From Down East: The Magazine of Maine, 1971.)

The verb “mind” has been used similarly in negative constructions to mean “to care, trouble oneself,” according to the OED.

Here’s an example from Foreign Parts, a 1994 novel by Janine Galloway: “We can sit here for a while if you like. Whatever, Cassie said. I don’t mind. Whatever.”

Finally, we have the negative use of “mind” in the expression “I don’t mind if I do,” which the OED defines as “a humorous circumlocution accepting an invitation, esp. the offer of a (usually alcoholic) drink.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from The Round of Wrong, an 1847 play by William Bayle Bernard: “Reu. You’ll have some tea? / Duc. Well, I don’t mind if I do.”

And this alcoholic example is from Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley: “ ‘Take another glass,’ urged Moore. Mr. Sykes didn’t mind if he did.”

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In kilter or out of it?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 9, 2016

Q: I was lying in bed last night when I started thinking about the phrase “out of kilter.” I deconstructed it mentally, wondering whether something could be in kilter as well as out of it. Do you have any insights about this one?

A: It’s nice to know that other people toss around in bed trying to decipher English phrases!

The short answer is that things can be “in kilter” or “out of kilter,” though they’re usually out of it. Here’s the longer version.

The noun has been spelled both “kilter” and “kelter” since it showed up in the early 1600s, but “kilter” is now the spelling in standard dictionaries in the US and the UK.

The Oxford English Dictionary, a historical dictionary whose entry for the word hasn’t been fully updated, still uses “kelter” as its principal spelling.

The OED defines the term as “good condition, order; state of health or spirits,” and says it’s used “in the phrases out of kelter, in (good, high) kelter, to get into kelter.”

Only 2 of the 15 Oxford citations use the term positively (the last positive example is from the early 1820s). And only one of the six standard dictionaries we’ve checked has a positive example.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) includes an example that refers to efforts to bring the “country’s economy back into kilter with the Western economic system.”

Etymologists have been stumped about the origins of “kilter.” The OED says says the etymology is obscure, but adds that the usage is “widely diffused in English dialect from Northumbria and Cumberland to Cornwall.”

The first written use of the word, according to Oxford, is in a 1628 letter cited in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation:

“Hithertoo ye Indeans of these parts had no peeces nor other arms but their bowes & arrowes, nor of many years after; neither durst they scarce handle a gune, so much were they affraid of them; and ye very sight of one (though out of kilter) was a terrour unto them.” (We’ve gone to the original and expanded the OED citation for context.)

It’s interesting that Bradford uses “out of kilter” in reference to firearms, because some other early mentions also concern them. Here are a couple of examples, including a positive one:

“Their Gunnes they … often sell many a score to the English, when they are a little out of frame or Kelter” (from Roger Williams’s Key Into the Language of America, 1643).

“Mending, cleansing and keeping in good kelter the firelocks left with his Honour” (from Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 1722).

Any association with firearms may simply be coincidental, though, since “kilter” and “out of kilter” were used early on in reference to other things as well.

An early definition reads this way: “Kelter or Kilter, Frame, order.” It comes from John Ray’s A Collection of English Words, Not Generally Used (1674). We should note here that “in frame” was an old expression for “in order” or “in good form.”

This sampling from Oxford’s citations, which includes the last positive one, shows how widely these expressions have been used:

“If the organs of Prayer are out of kelter, or out of tune, how can we pray?” (from a sermon by the English theologian Isaac Barrow, delivered sometime before 1677).

“The seats some burned and others out of kilter” (from a 1681 quotation given in an 1898 article in New England Magazine).

“I found all of my family well excepting the poor pale Johnnie; and he is really a thing to break one’s heart by looking at—yet he is better. The rest are in high kelter” (we’ve expanded this citation from a May 20, 1828, entry in The Journal of Sir Walter Scott).

“I must rest awhile. My brain is out of kilter” (from a letter written in 1862 by James Russell Lowell).

“Jack’s death sort of knocked you out of kilter” (from The Four of Hearts, an Ellery Queen mystery, 1938).

“There [in Northern Ireland], an allotment of 12 seats at Westminster is based upon electoral quotas wildly out of kilter with the quotas for England, Scotland, and Wales” (from the Times, London, 1973).

We’ll end with a modern example of “kilter” used positively. In Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game (2008), George Vecsey describes the reaction of baseball junkies to the Yankees’ victory over the Braves in the 1996 World Series:

“Yankee fans were relieved to find the moon and stars finally back in kilter, but Yankee-haters, in their own tortured way, felt relieved to finally be oppressed again in familiar fashion.”

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Baby, it’s cold outside

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 7, 2016

Q: Greg Easterbrook recently complained in the NYT about “freezing temperatures.” In his words, “Temperature is a mathematical measure: Numbers don’t freeze. Temperatures can be high or low; air is what’s hot or cold.” Greg’s a smart guy, but is he right?

A: No, Greg is wrong. Sometimes people of a literal bent go to ridiculous extremes, throwing common sense out the window. Our advice to Greg: Chill out.

Writers, including scientists, have been using “freezing temperature” or “freezing temperatures” for hundreds of years to mean the degree of coldness at which something freezes.

What’s not to understand here? In weather parlance, this generally means a temperature at which water is converted to ice.

Oxford Dictionaries online defines “temperature” as the “degree or intensity of heat present in a substance or object, especially as expressed according to a comparative scale and shown by a thermometer or perceived by touch.”

In medicine, according to Oxford, the term refers to the “degree of internal heat of a person’s body,” and, informally, to a “body temperature above the normal; fever.”

The dictionary says “temperature” can also mean the “degree of excitement or tension in a discussion or confrontation.”

Oxford gives these numberless examples: “strong winds and freezing temperatures” … “I’ll take her temperature” … “he was running a temperature” … “the temperature of the debate was lower than before.”

Although “temperature” is often expressed numerically, a number isn’t necessary. One can say, “My temperature is normal” or “My temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit” … “The temperature outside is freezing” or “The temperature is 0° Celsius.”

In its entry for “freezing,” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged online says the adjective means “being at or below freezing point,” and it gives this example: “the temperature is freezing.”

In fact, Merriam-Webster’s offers a second definition in which “freezing” is used loosely to mean merely “very cold,” a usage that we found in four other standard dictionaries.

So lexicographers don’t seem to mind referring to “temperatures” as “freezing.” And they don’t have a mental picture of numbers turning to ice.

We use “boiling” in the same way: “The water in the teapot often reaches boiling temperature within five minutes.” Here the adjective “boiling” means sufficient to make something boil.

People commonly use “-ing” participles adjectivally. Every day we use perfectly normal English constructions like “frying pan,” “playing field,” “walking pace,” “crying shame,” and so on.

We don’t mean that the pan is frying, that the field is playing, that the pace is walking, or that the shame is crying.

In searches of online databases, we’ve found many examples for “freezing temperature” or “freezing temperatures” in scientific and other writing dating back to the 18th century. Here are a few early examples:

“When the air was at or near the freezing temperature, the logarithmic differences gave the real height,” from Observations Made in Savoy (1777), a treatise by Sir George Shuckburgh on measuring the height of mountains.

“When salt-water ice floats in the sea at a freezing temperature, the proportion above to that below the surface, is as 1 to 4 nearly,” from the April 11, 1818, issue of the Literary Gazette in London.

“We also know that eggs from perfectly healthy worms, if they be kept at one time in a warm place, and at another in a very cold place, sometimes in warm stove rooms, then in cold, freezing temperatures … will be very certain to produce worms subject to the yellows,” from an 1839 issue of the Journal of the American Silk Society.

By the way, the noun “temperature” had nothing to do with heat or cold, whether expressed numerically or not, when it showed up in English in the mid-1500s.

English adopted the word from Latin, where temperāre meant to moderate or mix, and temperātūra referred to moderation or a proper mixture.

That sense of moderation in temperāre and temperātūra has given English the words “temperance” and “temperate,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

In English, “temperature” initially referred to mixing and moderating, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but that sense of the word is now considered obsolete.

The sense you’re asking about (which the OED defines as the “state of a substance or body with regard to sensible warmth or coldness”) didn’t show up until the late 17th century.

The dictionary’s earliest example is from the title of a 1670 tract by the chemist and physicist Robert Boyle: Of the Temperature of the Submarine Regions as to Heat and Cold.

The use of “temperature” for a “degree of excitement or tension” showed up in this example from Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church (1863): “The temperature of the zeal of the different portions of the nation.”

And the use of the word for a fever appeared in Percy White’s 1898 novel A Millionaire’s Daughter : “Do you think I have a temperature?”

The adjective “freezing,” which ultimately comes from the Old English verb fréosan (to freeze), showed up in Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline (which the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare says was produced as early as 1611):

When we are old as you? when we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December, how,
In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse
The freezing hours away?

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How permission is expressed

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 4, 2016

Q: It bothers me when a form reads, “By signing this you are giving your express permission for us to use your information.” Shouldn’t that be “expressed permission”?

A: In contemporary English, one usually gives “express permission,” not “expressed permission.”

We’ve checked six standard dictionaries and not a single one includes the adjectival use of the past participle “expressed” in this sense. In fact, Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.) describes it as a misuse.

All six dictionaries have entries for the adjective “express” used in transportation (“an express train”) and mail (“an express letter”), as well as the meaning you’re asking about and a related sense.

Oxford Dictionaries online, for example, includes these two adjectival senses:

(1) “Definitely stated, not merely implied: it was his express wish that the celebration continue.”

(2) “Precisely and specifically identified to the exclusion of anything else: the schools were founded for the express purpose of teaching deaf children.”

In your example (“By signing this you are giving your express permission for us to use your information”), the word “express” is being used in sense No. 1 to mean definite or explicit.

Although “expressed” is sometimes seen in this sense, “express” is overwhelmingly preferred, according to our online searches. Here’s the Google scorecard: “express permission,” more than 3.3 million hits; “expressed permission,” 356,000.

The Oxford English Dictionary (a historical dictionary that’s a separate entity from Oxford Dictionaries online) does indeed include the adjectival use of “expressed” to mean “express,” but its most recent citation is from the early 1700s.

When the adjective “express” showed up in written English in the 1300s (two centuries before the adjectival use of “expressed”), it meant explicit or definite, according to citations in the OED.

The dictionary’s first two examples are from “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” in The Canterbury Tales (circa 1386). Here’s one of them:

“Wher can ye seen in any maner age / That highe God defended mariage / By expresse word?”

And this is a 1765 legal example from William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England: “Express contracts are where the terms of the agreement are openly uttered and avowed at the time of the making.”

Finally, here’s an 1877 example from The American Commonwealth, by James Bryce: “Sometimes by express, more often by a tacit understanding.”

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Why “children,” not “childs”?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date March 2, 2016

Q: Your recent post about why “chicken” is singular has left me wondering where “-en” plurals such as “oxen,” “brethren,” “children,” “men,” “women,” and the archaic eyen come from.

A: In Old English, nouns that followed certain patterns formed their plurals with -n rather than –s.

These included the one you mention, eyen (“eyes”), as well as earan (“ears”), tungan (“tongues”), fon (“foes”), housen (“houses”), shoen (“shoes”), treen (“trees”), and oxan (the original plural of “ox”).

During the Middle English period (roughly 1100-1500), both the –en and the –an plurals that had come from Old English were spelled with –en.

Meanwhile, Middle English writers extended the -en spelling, applying it to words that didn’t originally have plurals ending in –n.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “the termination -en came to be regarded as a formative of the plural, and its use was extended in southern Middle English to many other words of Old English and French origin.”

Charles Barber, Joan C. Beal, and Philip A. Shaw note in The English Language: A Historical Introduction (2nd ed.) that Middle English had “forms like devlen ‘devils’ and englen ‘angels,’ where Old English had deoflas and englas.”

This -en ending was so popular in Middle English that it was even added to existing irregular plurals, so that brethre (plural of “brother”) became brethren and childer (plural of “child”) became children.

You might say that the –en of “brethren” and “children,” added to words that were already plural, formed in each case a sort of double plural. (The modern “brothers” wasn’t commonly used until the end of the 16th century.)

For a time, –n and –s rivaled each other as the typical plural ending in English, Thomas Pyles and John Algeo write in The Origins and Development of the English Language (4th ed.).

In general, the -n ending was favored in the south of England and the –s in the north.

But nearly all of the –n plurals eventually disappeared as the –s plurals became dominant. By around 1400, say the authors of The English Language, the –s plurals were “almost universal.”

The only original –n plural from Old English that has survived to this day is “oxen.” And even this plural had a run for its money. It competed for a time with “oxes,” which the OED says “has survived only in regional and nonstandard use.”

(The plurals “men” and “women,” by the way, don’t fall into this category. They were formed in Old English by a change of vowel, as is also true of “feet,” “geese,” “teeth,” “mice,” and “lice.”)

We should mention a couple of other points about –en endings in English.

As we wrote in our “chicken” post, the –en suffix has been used to form diminutives. This is the case with the –en of “chicken,” “kitten,” and “maiden.”

And –en has been added to nouns to form adjectives in the sense “pertaining to” or “of the nature of,” the OED says. In Germanic languages, adjectives formed this way “chiefly indicate the material of which a thing is composed,” Oxford adds.

Only a few of these adjectives survive today in English, including “golden,” “wooden,” “leaden,” “oaken,” “woolen,” “earthen,” and “wheaten.”

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Why do the English drop aitches?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 26, 2016

Q: Is there a linguistic relationship between the missing “h” sound in French and Eliza Doolittle’s aitch-dropping in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady?

A: The English have been dropping their aitches in speech and in spelling since Anglo-Saxon times, but the process accelerated as Old English gave way to Middle English in the 11th century.

Is French responsible for this “h”-dropping in English?

Well, Anglo-Norman, spoken by the Francophile upper classes in England for several hundred years after the Norman Conquest, is responsible for some of the “h” loss in Middle English, but not for Eliza’s cockney “h”-dropping.

Anglo-Norman, as well as Old French and Middle French, clearly influenced the absence of the “h” sound in some loanwords of Latin origin in Middle English, such as “honor,” “honest,” and “hour.”

But it’s uncertain whether Anglo-Norman, a Romance language formed from various French dialects, is responsible for any of the “h”-dropping in Middle English words of Anglo-Saxon origin.

One problem for linguists is determining how much of the “h”-dropping in Old English and Middle English writing reflected “h”-dropping in speech.

Some linguists have argued that the increase in “h”-dropping in Middle English texts was merely the result of errors by scribes who spoke Anglo-Norman, with its silent “h.”

But other linguists have said that the “h”-dropping in Middle English writing reflected “h”-dropping in speech, and that this was the result of the inherent weakness and instability of the phoneme, or unit of sound, represented by the letter “h.”

Today, “h”-dropping is associated with the cockney speech of working-class Londoners, but this loss of the “h” sound in words like “hammer,” “hat,” “house,” and “behind” is common in most regions of England, according to linguists.

In fact, “h” dropping is not unknown in Received Pronunciation, the standard British accent. In addition to dropping the “h” sound in the Gallic loanwords mentioned above, RP speakers used to drop it in “historic,” resulting in uses like “an ’istoric.”

RP speakers now pronounce all the letters of “historic,” but they’ve kept the indefinite article “an,” even though the article “a” would be standard before a word beginning with a sounded “h,” the phonetician John C. Wells writes in Accents of English (1982).

In A Course in Phonetics (1982), the phonetician Peter Ladefoged says “h” acts “like a consonant, but from an articulatory point of view is simply the voiceless counterpart of the following vowel.”

“It does not have a specific place of articulation,” he writes, “and its manner of articulation is the same as that of a vowel, only the state of the glottis is different.” (The glottis is made up of the vocal cords and the opening between them.)

As the linguist Larry Trask explains, “h” is “a very weak consonant, almost the last trace of anything we can call a consonant at all, and it disappears very easily.”

In classical times, Trask points out in a contribution to the Linguist List, the “h” sound “was completely gone in popular Latin speech by the first century BC, though it may have been retained for a while by a few pedants.”

“The Romance languages sometimes continue to write this long-lost /h/ in their orthographies,” he adds, “but this is purely for old times’ sake.”

However, the “h” sound was alive and well in Old English, according to linguists who have reconstructed Anglo-Saxon speech based on things like the rhyme in verse, the spelling of Latin loanwords, and related words in other Germanic languages.

The letter “h” had several pronunciations in Old English, which was spoken from about the 5th through the 11th centuries:

● In front of vowels, “h” sounded much as it does today.

● In front of consonants, it had a breathy sound.

● After a vowel pronounced at the front of the mouth (like “e” or “i”), “h” sounded like the “ch” in the German ich.

● After a vowel pronounced at the back of the mouth (like “a” or “o”), it sounded like the “ch” in the Scottish loch.

The use of “h” before consonants at the beginning of words began dying out in Old English and Middle English texts, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

For example, the noun “ring” (the finger ornament), was hringae, hringiae, etc. in early Old English, but came to be spelled ringce, ryngc, ring, and so on in later Old English.

The noun “nut” (the seed) was originally hnut- or hnute- (in compounds) in Anglo-Saxon writing, and then nut-, nute, etc., in later Old English.

The adjective “loud” was hlúd in Old English and then lud(e), loude, lowd(e), and so on in Middle English.

The “h”-dropping in Old English texts presumably reflected the loss of the “h” sound in speech, according to phoneticians, linguists who specialize in phonetics.

However, scholars have debated the cause of the “h” loss in Middle English writing.

The 19th-century philologist Walter William Skeat attributed the loss of the letter “h” in Middle English writing to spelling errors by Anglo-Norman scribes.

But James Milroy, a 20th-century linguist, believed the scribes were representing the “h”-dropping in speech.

Milroy, who exhaustively studied “h”-dropping in England, writes in the Cambridge History of the English Language that in certain regions of medieval England “the syllable initial [h] was not present, or only variably present,” in speech.

Trask, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, raises an interesting point on the Linguist List about contemporary “h” dropping in working-class speech in England.

Although the “h” sound in words of Anglo-Saxon origin (like “hair,” “heart,” “harm,” and “hit”) is “completely gone in the vernacular speech of almost all of England,” Trask writes, there’s no sign of such “h”-dropping in North America.

(The “h”-less US pronunciation of “herb” is not an American version of cockney “h”-dropping. It’s the original pronunciation in Middle English, when the Old French loanword was usually spelled “erbe.” As the OED notes, in British speech “the h was mute until the 19th cent.”)

Why is cockney-style “h”-dropping common among the English, but unknown among Americans?

In Accents of English, Wells, a professor emeritus at University College London, suggests that the American colonists didn’t take such “h”-dropping with them to the New World because they left before its widespread appearance in England.

“The fact that H dropping is unknown in North America strongly suggests that it arose in England only well after the American colonies were founded,” he writes.

Although “h”-dropping did occur in Old English and Middle English, as we’ve said, it apparently wasn’t common enough in England to get the attention of language commentators and novelists until the latter half of the 18th century.

In Talking Proper (1995), Lynda Mugglestone, an Oxford historian of the English language, says the first language writer to complain about “h”-dropping was the actor-educator Thomas Sheridan.

In A Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762), Sheridan criticizes “the omission of the aspirate in many words by some, and in most by others.”

And in Propriety Ascertained in Her Picture (1786), a pronunciation and spelling guide, James Elphinston condemns the “lowliness” and “impropriety” of pronunciations like “uman,” “umor,” and “umbel” (for “human,” “humor,” and “humble”).

Later, Lindley Murray’s influential English Grammar (1795) describes the “h” sound as a requirement for “educated” speech, and blames “the negligence of tutors” and “the inattention of pupils” for its loss.

As for fiction, Winifred Jenkins, a maid in Tobias Smollett’s last novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), drops her aitches on and off, referring to “heart” as “art,” and “harm” as “arm.”

By the mid-19th century, working-class characters routinely dropped their aitches in novels. As Uriah Heep says in David Copperfield (1850): “I am well aware that I am the umblest person going.”

(Although “humble” was the standard spelling of the word in Dickens’s day, its original spelling in Middle English was “umble.”)

We can’t conclude this discussion of “h”-dropping without mentioning the many Old English words that began with “hw” but now begin with “wh,” including hwæt (“what”), hwanne (“when”), hwǽr, (“where”), hwæs (“whose”), hwā (“who”), hwí (“why”), hwelc (“which”), hwæðer (“whether”), and so on.

The OED says the “normal Old English spelling hw was generally preserved in early Middle English,” and the “modern spelling wh is found first in regular use in the Ormulum,” a 12th-century religious work in which whillc is used for “which.”

“In Old English the pronunciation symbolized by hw was probably in the earliest periods a voiced bilabial consonant preceded by a breath,” according to the dictionary. (A voiced bilabial consonant is one in which the vocal cords vibrate and the air flow is restricted by the lips.)

Interestingly, the words that began with “hw” in Old English have given us two types of “wh” words today: those in which the “w” sound predominates (“why,” “where,” “when,” etc.) and those in which the “h” sound predominates (“who,” “whole,” “whose”).

In case you’re wondering, “whore” was originally spelled hóre in Old English, and retained its “h” pronunciation when the “wh” spelling of the word arose in the 16th century.

An 1830 edition of Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary gives two pronunciations, “höör, or höre,” and adds: “If there can be a polite pronunciation of this vulgar word, it is the first of these, rhyming with poor.”

If you’d like to read more, we’ve written several posts about “herb” and “historic,” including Herbal remedies in 2009 and Historic article in 2012.

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English English language Etymology Grammar Usage Word origin

On chicks and chickens

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 24, 2016

Q: In a book about exotic chickens, I read that linguistic purists say “chicken” is plural for “chick,” akin to “children” and “child” or “oxen” and “ox.” What say you?

A: That book is wrong. The word “chicken” is singular and has been since Old English. As we’ll explain, the “-en” in “chicken” was originally a diminutive, not a plural ending.

Only in rural dialects, mostly in the 19th century in the southwest of England, has “chicken” ever been used as a plural for “chick.”

We found this explanation in an 1895 grammar book: “Chicken is not a plural word, though it is used as such in country districts” (from English Grammar for Beginners, by Alfred S. West).

The Oxford English Dictionary quotes this regional definition: “Chicken, in Mid-Sussex used as the plural of chick” (from William Douglas Parish’s A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect and Collection of Provincialisms, 1875).

In fact “chicken” dates from around 950 and perhaps as early as 700. But “chick” didn’t appear in writing until 1320, as an abbreviation for “chicken.”

“Chicken” (spelled cicen, ciken, and ciccen in Old English) is similar to words in other Germanic languages.

“Chicken is a widespread Germanic word,” John Ayto writes in the Dictionary of Word Origins.

The OED notes versions in such Germanic languages as Dutch (kieken, kuiken), German (küchlein), Old Norse (kjúklingr), Swedish (kjukling), and Danish (kylling).

The ultimate source of these words, etymologists believe, is a prehistoric Proto-Germanic word reconstructed as kiukinan (or kiukinam).

This ancient word was “imitative, like Old English cocc, of the sound of the bird,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The ancient kiukinan was formed, Ayto says, by adding a diminutive to the root keuk-. And some etymologists, according to the OED, suggest that this root was a form of kuk-, the source of “cock.”

“If that is so,” Ayto comments, “a chicken would amount etymologically to a ‘little cock’ (and historically the term has been applied to young fowl, although nowadays it tends to be the general word, regardless of age).”

The diminutive notion makes sense, considering that the earliest meaning of “chicken” in the OED is “the young of the domestic fowl.”

This sense of the word was first recorded in the Lindisfarne Gospels, an illuminated manuscript that the OED dates from around 950 (though some scholars trace it to as early as circa 700).

Here’s a relatively reader-friendly 1526 citation: “He … cherissheth vs, as the egle her byrdes: the broode henne her cheykyns” (from William Bonde’s treatise The Pylgrimage of Perfection).

In the early 19th century, “chicken” came to mean “a domestic fowl of any age,” the OED says, although the abbreviation “chick” kept its older meaning: a young bird.

However, “chicken” has retained its youthful associations in some senses.

Since the early 18th century, according to the OED, it’s been used in writing to mean “a youthful person: one young and inexperienced.” Thus “no chicken,” the dictionary says, can mean “no longer young.”

The OED’s earliest citation for this sense is from Richard Steele, writing in the Spectator in 1711: “You ought to consider you are now past a Chicken; this Humour, which was well enough in a Girl, is insufferable in one of your Motherly Character.”

This later citation shows how “no chicken” was (and sometimes still is) used: “He must have been well forward in years—or at all events, as they say, no chicken” (from Edward Walford’s Tales of Our Great Families, 1877).

In case you’re wondering, “spring chicken” referred to a young fowl when the phrase first appeared in the late 18th century.

A “spring chicken,” the OED says, simply meant “a small chicken (esp. a roasting bird)” or more specifically “one aged between eleven and fourteen weeks.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of the phrase used literally is from a 1770 entry in the diary of an English clergyman, James Woodforde: “We had for dinner … three nice Spring Chicken rosted.”

The figurative use of “spring chicken” to mean a young person—and of “no spring chicken” for someone not so young—was an American invention, the OED says.

Oxford’s earliest citation is from a 1910 issue of the National Police Gazette: “She wasn’t a Spring chicken, by any means, yet she wasn’t old.”

But we’ve found several earlier examples, and they aren’t all American. The first two are from boys’ adventure novels written by a Scot and published in London:

“I’m going on for fifty. That ain’t a spring chicken” (from Wild Life in the Land of the Giants, by Gordon Stables, 1888).

“And you wouldn’t be wrong in calling her ‘old’ either. My mither’s no’ a spring chicken, but—she’s a marvel. Ay, mither’s a marvel” (from Our Home in the Silver West, by Gordon Stables, 1891).

“He ain’t no spring chicken, Bert ain’t” (from A Little Norsk, a novel by the American writer Hamlin Garland, 1892).

“I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation” (from “The Pen,” a short story of prison life by Jack London, Cosmopolitan, 1907).

Finally, we should mention that the slang use of “chick” for a girl or young woman showed up in the US in the early 20th century, according to citations in the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel Elmer Gantry: “He didn’t want to marry this brainless little fluffy chick.”

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English English language Etymology Phrase origin Usage Word origin

When push comes to shove

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 22, 2016

Q: “When push comes to shove” does not come up in my QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins. What do you have to say about the evolution of this phrase?

A: The expression “when (or if) push comes to shove” originated in 19th-century African-American usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED labels it colloquial—more likely to be found in speech than in formal writing—and says it means “when action must back up words” or “if or when one must commit oneself to an action or decision.”

People generally talk about a problem before finally doing something about it. So think of talking as the “push” and acting as the “shove.”

The expression wasn’t recorded until the 1890s, according to OED citations, but no doubt it was used conversationally for years before it ever showed up in print.

Oxford gives a hint of the reasoning behind the saying in this 1873 citation from Thomas De Witt Talmage, writing in the United Methodist Free Churches’ Magazine:

“The proposed improvement is about to fail, when Push comes up behind it and gives it a shove, and Pull goes in front and lays into the traces; and, lo! the enterprise advances, the goal is reached!”

A version of the expression that used “pinch” instead of “push” appeared in a February 1897 issue of a Georgia newspaper, the Macon Telegraph:

“But, ‘if pinch comes to shove’ as old Sol … was wont to say, will these gentlemen put on the habilaments of war and prove ‘more than a match’ for British ironclads or Spanish machetes?”

The same newspaper printed the more familiar version in February 1898: “When ‘push comes to shove’ will editors of the Yellow Kid organs enlist?”

A prominent African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, printed the expression in 1924 (“what Uncle Sam can do if push comes to shove”), and in a 1948 piece by the poet Langston Hughes:

“Civilizations, like clocks, have a way of running down—only to be replaced by new versions. One can always buy another clock, or even tell time by the sun, if push comes to shove.”

While the expression originated in the United States, it’s not unknown elsewhere. The OED’s citations include examples from Canada and Scotland:

“If push comes to shove, make good the threat.” (From an Alberta newspaper, the Calgary Herald, 1970.)

“I can see you taking legal advice on your position so that you’ll know what to do if push comes to shove, but you’ll try to work things out first.” (From the Sunday Post, Glasgow, 1997.)

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English English language Etymology Pronunciation Spelling Usage Word origin

The 3 “ch” sounds: sh, tch, k

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 19, 2016

Q: Do English words with “ch” pronounced as sh (e.g., “Chicago,” “chute”) generally have French origins?

A: The short answer is yes—but there’s more to the story.

As you know, there are three ways to pronounce the letter combination “ch” in English.

It can sound like k (as in “chasm” or “school”), like sh (as in “charade” or “brochure”), and like tch (as in “champion” and “child”).

The “ch” words with the k sound are derived from classical Greek, while the “ch” words with the sh sound come from modern French.

Most of the “ch” words with the tch sound come from Old English and are Germanic in origin (like “child,” “church,” and “each”).

However, some tch-sound words (such as “chase,” “challenge,” and “chance”) are derived from Old French, where “ch” was pronounced tch.

The “ch” letter combination didn’t exist in Old English, which used the letter “c” for both k and tch sounds, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

After the Norman Conquest, Middle English scribes introduced the Gallic “ch” spelling. It was used in words from Old French that were already spelled with “ch,” as well in Old English words pronounced with tch and formerly spelled with “c.”

“French spelling habits were applied to native English vocabulary,” the American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style says, “and the word spelled cild in Old English, for instance, came to be spelled child in Middle and Modern English.”

Interestingly, the “ch” letter combination pronounced tch in Old French later came to be pronounced sh in modern French. But the English words with “ch” that came from Old French tended to retain the earlier tch pronunciation.

Finally, US place names in which “ch” is pronounced sh (like “Chicago” and “Michigan”) generally come from French versions of American Indian names.

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English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

How traditional is a tradition?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 17, 2016

Q: I recall reading that a tradition is a custom passed from one generation to the next. But I often hear people referring to customs (esp. within families) that are typically only a few years old, as in “We traditionally have pizza on Christmas Eve.”

A: How traditional is a tradition? Most of the standard dictionaries we’ve checked say “tradition” can refer to a long-established custom as well as one passed on from generation to generation.

However, “tradition” did indeed have the generational sense when the noun showed up in Middle English in the late 1300s.

At that time, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it meant a “belief, statement, custom, etc., handed down by non-written means (esp. word of mouth, or practice) from generation to generation.”

By the late 1500s, the dictionary says, the word was being used for “any practice or custom which is generally accepted and has been established for some time within a society, social group, etc. (in later use not necessarily one passed down from generation to generation).”

It’s unclear from the OED citations exactly when a “tradition” came to mean any long-established custom, “not necessarily one passed down from generation to generation.”

It obviously occurred sometime between the dates for the oldest and newest examples of the word in the dictionary.

Here’s the OED’s earliest example: “Throw a way respect, / Tradition, forme, and ceremonious duetie,” from Shakespeare’s Richard II (1597).

And here’s the most recent: “The release in 1998 of The McGarrigle Hour … established an intermittent tradition of hootenanny-style get-togethers,” from the Jan. 20, 2010, issue of the Independent (London).

English borrowed the word from Anglo-Norman and Middle French, where a tradicion or tradition referred to the handing over of an object or the transmitting of an idea.

The Latin source of the word is the verb trādere (to hand over, deliver, or entrust), but the ultimate source is the reconstructed Indo-European root dō- (to give).

Why did a verb meaning to hand over or give inspire the noun “tradition”? Because etymologically, a tradition is something passed on, given, handed down.

Interestingly, “tradition” once meant a betrayal, but that sense is now considered obsolete or archaic.

When used in this negative way, the OED explains, “tradition” referred to “the action or an act of surrendering a person into the power of another; betrayal.”

The dictionary notes that the term was also used in the early Christian church in reference to the “surrender of sacred books and vessels to the Roman authorities in times of persecution, esp. during the persecution under the emperor Diocletian in the early 4th cent. a.d.”

However, the OED doesn’t have any Old English or Middle English citations for “tradition” used in the sense of surrendering a person or a sacred book, which suggests that the dictionary is referring here to the classical Latin or late Latin ancestors of “tradition.”

In classical Latin, a trāditor is a “traitor, betrayer,” according to Oxford, and in late Latin it’s a “person who hands over sacred books to their persecutors.”

And, yes, trādere (to hand over, give, entrust) is the classical Latin source of both “tradition” and “traitor.”

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English English language Linguistics Pronunciation Usage

Why do we con-VICT a CON-vict?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 15, 2016

Q: Why do words such as “refuse” and “project” have one pronunciation as a verb and another as a noun?

A: The usual pattern with these pairs is that the noun is accented on the first syllable while the verb is accented on the second, as with CON-vict (n.) and con-VICT (v.), REC-ord (n.) and re-CORD (v.).

[Note: A later post, on the pronunciation of “concept” as a verb (con-SEPT), appeared in June 2019.]

This is a long-established convention of English pronunciation, one that 18th-century lexicographers commented on.

Samuel Johnson, in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), had this to say about such two-syllable pairs:

“Of disyllables, which are at once nouns and verbs, the verb has commonly the accent on the latter, and the noun on the former syllable.”

He gave several examples, including con-TRACT (v.) and CON-tract (n.).

“This rule has many exceptions,” Johnson added. “Though verbs seldom have their accent on the former, yet nouns often have it on the latter syllable,” he said, as with de-LIGHT and per-FUME.

There are scores (we’ve seen lists with more than 150) of these two-syllable pairs in English. They’re often called heteronyms or heterophones, a subject we wrote about in a 2012 post.

Obviously, there’s an advantage in having different pronunciations. The speaker can distinguish one word from the other and avoid ambiguity, an advantage that we don’t have in written English. (A linguist would say the differing pronunciations serve to “disambiguate” the words.)

Occasionally, as with the noun “record,” the accent varied in early pronouncing dictionaries, and only later did the first-syllable stress become the norm.

Johnson, in the entry for “record” in his 1755 dictionary, was on the fence: “The accent of the noun is indifferently on either syllable; of the verb always on the last.”

Thomas Sheridan, in A General Dictionary of the English Language (1780), stressed only the second syllable of the noun (re-CORD).

And John Walker, in A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), stressed the first syllable of the noun (REC-ord).

Walker noted that “the noun record was anciently, as well as at present, pronounced with the accent either on the first or second syllable,” but he urged speakers to accent the first.

Accenting the second syllable, he said, “is overturning one of the most settled analogies of our language, and … it would be to the advantage of pronunciation to lean to the obvious analogy in disyllable nouns and verbs of the same form.”

The convention of accenting the nouns and verbs differently, Walker said, “seems an instinctive effort in the language … to compensate in some measure for the want of different terminations for these different parts of speech.”

In the case of “record,” Walker’s advice was somewhat slow to take hold. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Examples of stress on the second syllable can still be found in verse in the 19th cent.”

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English English language Etymology Pronunciation Usage Word origin

Phobias, inside and out

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 12, 2016

Q: If people who spend all their time inside suffer from “agoraphobia,” do people who spend all (or much) of their time outside suffer from “claustrophobia”?

A: If “agoraphobia” is defined as fear of open spaces and “claustrophobia” as fear of closed spaces, then the two words would be opposites.

Those are the most common definitions in standard dictionaries, but some dictionaries have expanded on them to make the meanings overlap to a considerable degree.

Cambridge Dictionaries Online, for example, has the usual definitions, with “agoraphobia” defined as “fear of going outside and being in open spaces or public places” and “claustrophobia” as “fear of being in closed spaces.”

The online Oxford Dictionaries, however, defines “agoraphobia” as “extreme or irrational fear of crowded spaces or enclosed public places,” and “claustrophobia” as “extreme or irrational fear of confined places.”

We don’t see all that much difference between those Oxford definitions: “crowded spaces or enclosed public places” could well be described as “confined places.”

The Oxford English Dictionary (a different entity from Oxford Dictionaries online) expands the definition of “agoraphobia” further to include fear “of leaving one’s own home.”

The OED defines “agoraphobia” as “fear of entering open or crowded places, of leaving one’s own home, or of being in places from which escape is difficult.” It defines “claustrophobia” as “a morbid dread of confined places.”

So what do the two terms really mean? With dictionaries at odds, it’s your call. Pick whichever dictionary definition you’re comfortable with.

Getting back to your question, we might use those terms loosely to describe pathological fears that would keep people inside (“agoraphobia”) or outside (“claustrophobia”).

The noun “agoraphobia” was borrowed from the German agoraphobie, a term coined by Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal in 1871, according to the OED. The word appeared later that year in the British journal Clinic:

“Agorophobia [sic].—With this name Westphal denotes a neuropathetic affection which he has recently occasionally encountered. Its most essential symptom, is a most acute anxiety or fear, experienced in open places, long passages, theatres, concert saloons, etc., with no other cerebral disturbance.”

Westphal originally conceived of “agoraphobia” as simply the fear of large open spaces, though the word soon acquired wider meanings in psychiatric terminology.

The German psychiatrist formed it from the Greek agora (a public open space or marketplace) and –phobia (fear of).

“Claustrophobia” also has classical roots. It was formed from the Latin claustrum (confined space), the source of “cloister,” according to the OED.

The noun was coined by an English-born French medical professor, Benjamin Ball, in his article “On Claustrophobia,” published in the British Medical Journal in September 1879.

It’s interesting that in his paper, which was published shortly afterward in Paris under the title “De la Claustrophobie,” Ball compared the two disorders.

He characterized “claustrophobia” as “a state of mind in which there was a morbid fear of closed spaces … apparently different from, but in reality similar to, agoraphobia or the dread of open spaces.”

One last point. The pronunciation of “agoraphobia” has evolved in recent years for many speakers, with the secondary accent moving from the first syllable (AG-or-a-PHO-bi-a) to the second (a-GOR-a-PHO-bi-a).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says in a usage note that the “variant has quickly gained acceptance” and is now accepted by almost three-quarters of its usage panel.

American Heritage now accepts both pronunciations. However, five of the other standard dictionaries we’ve checked list only the traditional pronunciation (AG-or-a-PHO-bi-a).

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

A risky preposition

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 10, 2016

Q: I see both “risk of” and “risk for” regularly, particularly in the health context. “Risk for cancer,” “risk of dying prematurely,” etc. How do you know when to use “of” or “for”? Are both acceptable?

A: There’s no clear answer here. Both “risk of” and “risk for” are used by educated writers, and many of them—medical writers in particular—seem to use the two interchangeably.

In searches of scholarly databases, we found scores of books and articles in which both “risk of” and “risk for”—or “at risk of” and “at risk for”—appear in otherwise identical phrases.

Some examples: “assessing risk of violence” and “assessing risk for violence” (2010) … “at high risk of death” and “at high risk for death” (2001) … “risk for dementia” and “risk of dementia” (1999) … “at risk of falling” and “at risk for falling” (1998) … “at risk for school failure” and “at risk of school failure” (1989) … “the risk of reinfection” and “the risk for reinfection” (1986).

We have the impression that in some cases the writer (or editor) alternated the pattern merely for the sake of variety.

Scholarly usage aside, people in general tend to prefer “risk of” to “risk for,” whether or not the phrase is preceded by “at.” Google hits for “at risk of” outnumber “at risk for” by almost two to one.

If there’s a pattern here, it may have to do with the noun or noun phrase that follows “of” or “for” and whether it represents the danger itself or whatever is in danger.

We’ve concluded that both “risk of” and “risk for” are common when the object of the preposition is the noun or noun phrase for the danger—the disease or other misfortune.

But “risk of” is more popular, especially when the object is a gerund (an “-ing” word), as in “Climbers run the risk of falling” … “He spoke up at the risk of sounding foolish.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “risk” has many citations, from the 1660s to the present, in which “risk of” precedes the noun or noun phrase for the hazard or misfortune.

A sampling: “an heavy Risk of wickedness” (1660) … “the Risque of being hang’d” (1697) … “the Risque of an Insult” (1740) … “the risk of flooding” (1934) … “great risk of wildfire” (2003).

In fact, within its “risk” entry the OED has no citations at all for “risk for.” However, elsewhere in the dictionary are numerous examples of “risk for,” all from the 20th century or later and almost all from medical writing.

So it would appear that “risk for” is a relatively recent usage, at least in the sense that we’re discussing. (We’re ruling out constructions like “he ran a risk for her sake” or “he put his life at risk for his country.”)

On the other hand, when the “risk” phrase precedes the thing at risk, not the hazard or misfortune, we generally find “risk to” (sometimes “risk for”), as in “Strong chemicals are a risk to (or for) nail salon workers” … “Pollution poses risks to (or for) the environment.”

Oxford has many examples in which “risk to” precedes what’s in danger: “at great risk to himself” (1805) … “at risk to their lives” (1905) … “a risk to others” (1979) … “at grave risk to his career” (2002) … “a risk to himself and others” (2002).

In 2011 the linguist Mark Liberman wrote an article on the Language Log in rebuttal to a reader who insisted that “at risk for cancer” is grammatically incorrect.

In his article, which he filed under “Prescriptivist Poppycock,” Liberman suggested the reader’s peeve was an “individual quirk.”

A couple of comments suggested that “at risk for” became established largely because of its use in epidemiology. Another noted, “Once ‘at risk’ becomes an expression that stands on its own, it becomes quite natural to use ‘for’ to specify what they are at risk for (eh, of).”

The noun “risk” first appeared in written English in the 17th century, according to OED citations.

Its ancestors were recorded in medieval Italian (rischio) and post-classical Latin (resicum, risicum, etc.), but can’t be traced back further than the mid-1100s (as Oxford puts it, “further etymology uncertain and disputed”).

The noun came into Middle French in the 16th century as risque, meaning “danger or inconvenience, predictable or otherwise,” the OED says. And English speakers borrowed the word from French in the following century.

The first known example in writing is from The Wise Vieillard, or Old Man, an anonymous 1621 translation of a work by the French theologian Simon Goulard:

“The couetous [covetous] Marchant to runne vpon all hazards and risques for a handfull of yellow earth.”

The OED notes that the noun appears “freq. with of.” The earliest such example is from John Sadler’s mock-utopian work Olbia (1660), in a reference to “an heavy Risk of wickedness.”

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Strove Monday

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 8, 2016

Q: A recent editorial in the Washington Post says many of Donald Trump’s “rivals have strove to mimic him.” Shouldn’t that be “have striven”?

A: “Strove” or “strived” is the past tense of the verb “strive.” The past participle (used with forms of “have”) is “striven” or “strived.”

So the Post’s editorial writers should have said Trump’s rivals “have striven” or “have strived” to mimic him.

Although the use of “strove” as a past participle has been around for several hundred years, it’s not considered standard English today.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “strove” appeared as a past participle “in the 17th cent., and remained somewhat common down to the middle of the 19th cent., but is now confined to illiterate use.”

The OED compares this use of “strove” to “stroven,” which appeared as a past participle in the 16th and 17th centuries. (The dictionary’s last citation for “stroven” is from the early 1600s.)

When the verb “strive” showed up in Middle English in the 13th century, it meant to be in a state of hostility.

The English word was adapted from the Old French estriver (to quarrel or contend). The OED says the French verb is “of disputed origin,” but it’s “commonly believed to be of Germanic etymology.”

The OED has a questionable citation for the verb from the Ancrene Riwle (circa 1225), an anonymous guide for monastic women. The earliest definite example is a 1297 entry in The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester: “he striuede wiþ his wiue” (“he strived with his wife”).

Meanwhile, “strive” took on the sense of to contend or carry on a conflict. The OED’s earliest example, dated around 1290, is from The South English Legendary, a Middle English collection of writings about biblical and other religious figures:

“And striuede for holi churche aȝen þe kinge and his” (“And strived for holy church against the king and his”).

The verb took on its usual modern sense (to endeavor or exert much energy) in the 14th century. The earliest Oxford example is from the the Wycliffe Bible of 1384, an English translation from Latin:

“And therfore we stryuen [L. contendimus] whether absent, whether present, for to plese him.”

As for those two past tenses, “strove” appeared somewhat earlier than “strived,” according to the OED, but “strived” would “be normal for a verb adopted < French, and has always been more frequent of the two.”

In Google searches, however, “he strove” appears three times as often as “he strived.” The six standard dictionaries we’ve checked include both past tenses, though “strove” is always listed first.

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When “less” is “minus”

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 5, 2016

Q: Is it OK to use the phrase “less than” when teaching numeracy in elementary school? Example: “What is one less than five?” I suspect that many children confuse “less than” (meaning “smaller than”) with “less” (meaning “minus”).

A: We’ve written several times on the blog about “less” vs. “fewer,” including posts in 2014 and 2010, but there’s more to be said about “less.”

The word “less” has had many meanings since it showed up in Old English in the ninth century, and one of the oldest, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, involves its use as “minus” in subtraction.

However, an even older meaning—the oldest example for “less” in the Oxford English Dictionary—is “fewer,” a usage that was acceptable for hundreds of years but is frowned on today.

The “fewer” sense of “less,” which the OED observes is “freq. found but generally regarded as incorrect,” first showed up in writing in King Ælfred’s Old English translation (circa 888) of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae:

“Swa mid læs worda swa mid ma, swæðer we hit gereccan magon” (“So we may prove it with less words as with more, whichever of the two”).

Over the years, as we’ve said, “less” took on other senses, including “to a smaller extent” (c. 900), as in “none the less”; “inferior” (c. 950), as in “no less a person”; “not so great an extent” (c. 1000), as in “less time to eat”; and “a smaller amount” (c. 1330), as in “less money.”

The use of “less” to mean “minus,” the OED explains, indicates “that the number or quantity indicated is to be subtracted from a larger one mentioned or implied.”

This sense of “less” first showed up in writing in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an Old English work believed to have been updated regularly from the late 9th to the mid-12th centuries.

Here’s the citation, which the OED says was written sometime before 1160: “He rixode twa læs .xxx. geara” (“He ruled for 30 years less two”).

In early writing, “less” followed the number being subtracted (as in “twa læs” above), but it now precedes the number (as in “less two”), according to the OED.

All the modern examples in the dictionary show the unsubtracted quantity (the “minuend”) followed by “less” and then the amount to be subtracted (the “subtrahend”).

This modern example is from the March 25, 1930, issue of the Times (London): “A full year’s dividend on the Preference Shares, less tax, absorbing £16,800.”

The latest OED example of the usage is from the Sept. 2, 1972, issue of the Times (London): “Cost of paint … Less VAT input tax … £500.”

We also checked six standard dictionaries and all their examples show “less” by itself following the minuend and preceding the subtrahend. Here’s an example from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.): “Five less two is three.”

Getting back to your question, is it OK for a teacher in primary school to ask pupils, “What is one less than five?”

When we were learning subtraction in elementary school many moons ago, our teachers would have said “What is five less one?” (or “five minus one” or perhaps even “five take way one”).

We think “five less one” or “five minus one” is the simplest and clearest way of expressing “5 – 1” in words, because the words follow the order of the numerals and the minus sign. And the use of “less than” here might lead to confusion between the minus sign (–) and the “less than” sign (<).

A perfect example of such confusion can be seen in an Aug. 19, 2001, question to the Math Forum, a website sponsored by Drexel University in Philadelphia:

“Why is this expression driving me crazy when at first it seems so simple: ‘three less than a number’? I believe it is x – 3 but I am being challenged that it is 3 – x.”

The response by the Math Forum’s staff includes this comment: “Many people get confused by this sort of expression, because they expect to translate directly from English to Mathish, word for word. Then ‘three (3) less than (–) a number (x)’ would seem to be ‘3 – x.’ But it isn’t. What’s even more confusing is that ‘3 less a number’ does mean ‘3 – x’ because ‘less’ as a preposition means the same as ‘minus.’ ”

We’d be wary of using “less than” in teaching subtraction to young children. But our online searches suggest that elementary school teachers generally distinguish between the use of “less” and “less than.”

From looking at educational websites that discuss basic subtraction, our sense is that the traditional wording (“five minus one” or “five less one”) is used in speaking about actual subtraction. The “less than” wording is used to compare two numbers, rather than to subtract one from the other (“four is one less than five” or “one less than five is four”).

Despite the possible confusion between “less” and “less than” in teaching subtraction, educators have been using “less than” for comparisons for nearly two centuries, according to our searches of online databases.

Here’s an example from A Manual of Instruction for Infants’ Schools, an 1829 book by William Wilson, the vicar of Walthamstow in northeast London: “Four are one less than five; four are two less than six; four are three less than seven, &c.”

And this example is from A Manual of Elementary Instruction for Schools and Normal Classes (1862), by Edward Austin Sheldon, M. E. M. Jones, and Hermann Krüsi: “The class may repeat, ‘Five is one more than four; four is one less than five.’ ”

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Apostrophic illnesses

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 3, 2016

Q: I’m a physician who’s irritated by the increasing tendency for writers to omit the apostrophe in a disease named for a person, as in “Parkinson disease.” I resist this, and write “Parkinson’s disease,” which I think is correct.

A: You’re in an unfortunate position here. As a doctor, you’re caught between the recommended usage in the medical profession and standard usage everywhere else.

The AMA Manual of Style (10th ed.), for example, recommends dropping the ’s in such diseases, as does the 27th edition of Stedman’s Medical Dictionary.

Although Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary (30th ed.) says the ’s “is becoming increasingly less common,” it includes some diseases with the ending and some without to “reflect this ongoing change in usage.”

However, Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary, which is intended for a broader audience, generally considers the ’s versions the usual forms, though it sometimes includes the stripped-down forms as acceptable variants.

As for common usage, the six standard dictionaries we’ve checked usually list only the ’s versions for these terms, though bare versions are sometimes given as acceptable or equal variants.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), for example, lists only “Parkinson’s” while The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) gives “Parkinson’s” as more common, but includes “Parkinson” as an acceptable variant.

The American Medical Association’s style guide acknowledges that the issue is still somewhat controversial, but says that the use of the ’s in medical eponyms, the technical term for things named after people, is a thing of the past.

“There is some continuing debate over the use of the possessive form for eponyms, but a transition toward the nonpossessive form has taken place,” the AMA guide says.

The AMA editors recommend dropping the ’s to represent “the adjectival and descriptive, rather than possessive, sense of eponyms” and to “promote clarity and consistence in scientific writing.”

We take issue here with the AMA editors. Technically, the ’s here is not possessive but genitive. As we’ve written before on our blog, genitives show associations and relationships much broader than ownership.

In a genitive construction like “last night’s mashed potatoes,” we’re not talking about ownership. The ’s here means “associated with” or “related to,” not “possessed by.”

Nevertheless, the misconception persists. The National Down Syndrome Society, in its Preferred Language Guide, gives this explanation for opposing the ’s:

“Down syndrome is named for the English physician John Langdon Down, who characterized the condition, but did not have it. An ‘apostrophe s’ connotes ownership or possession.”

In fact, the AMA stylebook cites the Down Syndrome Society’s language guide in support of its belief that a transition toward non-genitive eponyms has taken place:

“A major step toward preference for the nonpossessive form occurred when the National Down Syndrome Society advocated the use of Down syndrome, rather than Down’s syndrome, arguing that the syndrome does not actually belong to anyone.”

Other critics argue against medical eponyms whether they have apostrophes or not, saying the names may credit the wrong people or are out of date.

Victor A. McKusick, for example, says in Mendelian Inheritance in Man (11th ed.) that “often the person whose name is used was not the first to describe the condition … or did not describe the full syndrome as it has subsequently become known.”

Although “Down syndrome” is now more common than “Down’s syndrome” and standard dictionaries prefer the shorter form, most other medical eponyms still have the ’s in dictionary entries.

Of the 11 eponyms we’ve checked, “Alzheimer’s,” “Addison’s,” “Parkinson’s,” “Bright’s,” “Crohn’s,” “Hansen’s,” “Hodgkin’s,” and “Raynaud’s” diseases usually have the ’s. Only “Down,” “Munchhausen,” and “Tourette” syndromes are usually bare.

In fact, searches with Google’s Ngram viewer indicate that medical eponyms with ’s are overwhelmingly more popular in books than the stripped-down versions.

However, medical toponyms (diseases named after a place) don’t have apostrophes. For example, “Rocky Mountain spotted fever” or “Lyme disease” (named for Lyme, CT).

Note that the capitalized name in a medical eponym or toponym is traditionally followed by a lowercase generic term, as in “Lou Gehrig’s disease” or “West Nile virus.”

The old tradition of naming diseases or parts of the body for their discoverers dates back to the use of Latin medical terms.

An example is tuba Fallopii for the structures first described by the 16th-century anatomist Gabriele Falloppio, also known by his Latin name, Fallopius. Today we say “fallopian tubes,” which many standard dictionaries give with a lowercase “f.”

Since you are a physician, you may be interested in an excellent article we came across on the history of medical eponyms.

John H. Dirckx, a doctor who has written frequently about the language of medicine, says such terms “are cherished by most physicians who have a sense of history.”

Besides, he writes in a 2001 issue of the journal Panace@, they “are often embraced as a pleasant relief from polysyllabic terms derived from classical languages.”

They also have a “value as euphemisms,” he adds. A term like “Hansen’s disease,” for example, is a welcome replacement for “leprosy” and all that it conveys.

As for the ’s, he writes, “Some of the arguments offered by editors and others to justify exclusion of the genitive from eponyms are simply ludicrous.” (He mentions the objections we noted above, that the person didn’t have the disease or possess it.)

Such critics, Dr. Dirckx writes, “display ignorance of linguistics, a superficial and mechanistic view of language, disdain for tradition, and, sometimes, the arrogance of authority.”

He concludes, probably with tongue in cheek: “Will even the homely lay term Adam’s apple (nuez, prominentia laryngea) eventually come under the universal ban?”

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Quite frankly

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date February 1, 2016

Q: What is the origin of the phrase “quite Frankly,” and why do I brace myself when somebody begins a sentence with it?

A: Why do you brace yourself? Because “quite frankly,” which means “in an honest, open, or candid manner,” is often used to introduce an opinion that might not be welcome.

The phrase itself is relatively new, showing up in the 19th century, but the words “quite” and “frankly” are quite old, dating back to the Middle Ages.

Before going on, we should mention that there’s no reason to capitalize the “f” of “frankly” (as you’ve done), though it’s ultimately derived from a proper noun in medieval Latin.

“Frankly” is an adverbial form of the adjective “frank,” which Middle English got from franc in Old French around 1300. At that time, both the English and French adjectives meant free.

The French in turn got the word franc from francus, a medieval Latin word used as an adjective for free and as a noun for a member of the Frankish tribes that conquered Roman Gaul and gave France its name.

The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s “usually believed that the Franks were named from their national weapon,” the javelin, which is frankon in reconstructed prehistoric Germanic.

So how did the Latin word for a member of a Germanic tribe come to mean free in French and English?

After the Franks conquered Gaul in the fifth century, “full political freedom was granted only to ethnic Franks or those of the subjugated Celts who were specifically brought under their protection,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

“Hence, franc came to be used as an adjective meaning ‘free’—a sense it retained when English acquired it from Old French,” Ayto writes.

The OED notes confusion as far back as the Middle Ages over which came first, the use of the Latin francus for an ethnic Frank or in the sense of free:

“The notion that the ethnic name is derived from the adjective meaning ‘free’ was already current in the 10th century; but the real relation between the words seems to be the reverse of this.”

Ayto explains that the “free” sense of the adjective “frank” in English “gradually progressed semantically via ‘liberal, generous’ and ‘open’ to ‘candid.’ ”

The “candid” sense of “frank” and “frankly” showed up in the 1500s, according to citations in the OED.

We’ve already discussed the adverb “quite” on the blog, noting that it was an intensifier (meaning completely or to the utmost degree) when it showed up in Middle English around 1300 or perhaps earlier.

In the early 19th century, English speakers began using it as a “moderating adverb” as well, meaning somewhat, rather, relatively, and so on.

In the phrase “quite frankly,” the word “quite” is being used as an intensifier to emphasize “frankly.”

So while the adverb “frankly” by itself means “honestly, openly, or candidly,” the adverbial phrase “quite frankly” says the same thing more emphatically.

Like “quite frankly,” the word “frankly” is often “used for emphasizing that what you are about to say is your honest opinion, even though the person you are talking to might not like it,” according to the online Macmillan Dictionary.

The phrase “quite frankly” can be used adverbially in two different ways:

(1) It can modify a particular verb, as in “He spoke quite frankly about his past” or “The doctors said quite frankly that it was hopeless.”

(2) It can modify the entire sentence or clause that follows, as in “Quite frankly, I was happy to see them go,” or “I returned the dress because, quite frankly, it was too expensive.”

Generally, when “quite frankly” appears at the beginning of a sentence or clause as in #2, it’s being used as what’s called a sentence adverb. (We wrote about sentence adverbs in a 2011 post.)

The OED doesn’t have an entry for “quite frankly,” but we’ve found examples of the phrase dating back to the early 1800s.

The earliest example we found in searches of online databases uses the phrase simply to modify an individual verb.

In the citation, from Rebuilding a Lost Faith (1826), John L. Stoddard writes that some Anglican clergymen take oaths to accept the faith’s doctrines, and then reject their literal meaning:

“Such clergymen, however, say quite frankly: — ‘The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Prayer-Book do not mean what you think they mean.’ ”

The use of “quite frankly” as a sentence adverb didn’t emerge until many decades later.

The earliest example we found is from an anonymous poem, “To Maud,” published in Punch on Feb. 17, 1894:

“Here’s a Valentine for you—lace, tinsel, and satin,
With Cupids all over it up to such tricks;
There’s gauze in profusion, and, oh, it is pat in
The language of love!—for it cost three-and-six.
Quite frankly I wouldn’t be thought to defend it
(Though I swear that I bought it as perfectly new);
And the reason, in fact, why I happen to send it,
Is to have an excuse for a letter—to you.”

And here’s a less romantic example, from “My Methods in Breeding Poultry,” a 1900 pamphlet by Henry P. McKean: “Quite frankly, I am a great believer in Mr. Darwin’s little phrase, ‘Like begets like.’ ”

We’ve also found several examples dating from the 1860s of sentences and clauses beginning “to speak quite frankly.” The writers used the longer phrase much like a sentence adverb, to modify everything that followed.

Was this the forerunner of the sentence adverb “quite frankly”? Perhaps. Quite frankly, we can’t say for sure.

We should mention that “quite” is used to modify many sentence adverbs besides “frankly.” The OED has a citation for “quite seriously” used this way as early as 1872, and we found one for “quite honestly” from 1893.

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Is “wussy” milder than “pussy”?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 29, 2016

[Note: A May 29, 2020, post includes earlier examples for the use of “wussy.”]

Q: You might have mentioned in your recent “pussy” post that “wuss” and “wussy” are common substitutions to make the sense of a weak person more acceptable.

A: We didn’t mention “wuss” and “wussy” in our post about “pussy,” but etymologists think these words may be related.

The noun “wuss” is perhaps a blend of “wimp” and “puss,” and the noun and adjective “wussy” could be a combination of “wimp” and “pussy.”

Here “wimp,” first recorded in American slang in 1920, means “a feeble or ineffectual person,” or “one who is spineless or ‘wet,’ ” the Oxford English Dictionary says.

And, as we discussed in our earlier post, the popular slang senses of “puss” and “pussy” convey, among other things, notions of cowardice, weakness, and effeminacy.

Both the OED and Green’s Dictionary of Slang propose these senses of “pussy” as the possible sources of “wuss” and “wussy.” But while Green’s is more positive, the OED says the exact etymology remains uncertain.

It appears that “wuss” and “wussy” were products of 1970s American college slang. Oxford labels them “colloquial”—that is, found more often in speech than in formal writing.

The two words are defined similarly in the OED, but with a slight (or not so slight) difference.

“Wuss” means simply “a weak or ineffectual person,” the OED says. But “wussy” has an extra component.

The adjective “wussy” can mean either “weak, ineffectual” or “effeminate,” according to the dictionary, while the noun “wussy” can mean “a weak or ineffectual person” or “an effeminate man.”

It strikes us that “wuss” or “wussy” is milder, and less offensive, than “pussy” because it doesn’t seem to convey the genital association of “pussy.”

The OED’s earliest citations for “wuss” are dated November 1976. They were recorded in a typescript entitled “Campus Slang,” compiled at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: “Come on you wuss, hit a basket” and “John’s a wuss.”

Later American citations include these:

“You ought to meet her first, you wuss” (from Cameron Crowe’s 1981 book Fast Times at Ridgemont High).

“Everybody thinks I’m a wuss. And I don’t impress any of the stunt women at all” (from the Washington Post, August 1984).

But the usage is exclusively American no longer. The OED includes this Australian example: “Give us y’lunch, Hooper, you great wuss!” (a caption in the Brisbane Courier-Mail, January 1996).

The OED’s citations for “wussy” begin at around roughly the same time as “wuss,” and in college slang. We’ll begin with the adjective:

“Soccer! … What kind of wussy sport is that!” (from the Harvard Crimson, September 1977).

“They [New Zealanders] really don’t have any sense of what American football is. They think it’s a wussy sport because you put on helmets and pads. They say real men play rugby” (Washington Post, January 1985).

And here are some citations for the noun, beginning with the earliest:

“Kong’s a wussy. … That wasn’t him climbing the Empire State Building; that was a stunt ape” (Washington Post, July 1981).

“Those pampered, effete, ungrateful, deodorant-averse European wussies” (Vanity Fair, March 2003).

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PEE-a-nist or pee-A-nist?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 27, 2016

Q: When I was growing up, almost everyone pronounced “pianist” as PEE-a-nist. But these days, even on classical music stations, it’s pee-A-nist. Is this a misguided attempt to avoid saying something that sounds slightly rude?

A: The word “pianist” has been pronounced both PEE-a-nist and pee-A-nist since the 19th century.

Today, American dictionaries include both pee-A-nist and PEE-a-nist as standard pronunciations, while British dictionaries list only PEE-a-nist.

The earliest example of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Jan. 5, 1820, issue of the Times (London): “An accomplished Theorist, emphatic Pianist, and elegantly chaste Articulative Vocalist.”

The oldest dictionary we’ve found that includes the term is Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), which gives PEE-a-nist as the only pronunciation.

However, most of the other dictionaries we’ve seen from the 19th and early 20th centuries give pee-A-nist as the only pronunciation.

For example, A Dictionary of the English Language Exhibiting Orthography, Pronunciation and Definition of Words (1861), by Arnold J. Cooley, gives the pronunciation as pee-A-nist.

Similarly, the Etymological and Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language (1874), by James Stormonth and P. H. Phelp, has pee-A-nist.

A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1881), by John Walker, with a 5,000 word supplement by Edward Smith, gives the pronunciation as pee-A-nist.

And a 1904 edition of the Stormonth-Phelp dictionary, updated by William Bayne, also offers only the pee-A-nist pronunciation.

Two of the most important standard dictionaries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—The Century Dictionary (1889-91) and Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)—also pronounce “pianist” as pee-A-nist.

However, James Murray’s early version of the Oxford English Dictionary lists PEE-a-nist as the only pronunciation.

Murray included the pronunciation in his June 1906 “Ph-Piper” fascicle, or installment, of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, which became the first edition of the OED. (Volume VII of the NED, covering the letters O and P, was published in 1909.)

Interestingly, the “pianist” entry in the online OED, which was updated in 2006, still accents the first syllable, PEE-a-nist, though the vowels are slightly different in the US and UK versions.

Finally, we’ve seen no evidence that prudery has had anything to do with the pee-A-nist pronunciation. A more likely influence may have been the pronunciation of the instrument itself, pee-A-no.

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English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Is there evil in Eve?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 25, 2016

Q: Could there POSSIBLY be a linguistic connection between “Eve” and “evil”? Or is it just too slick an idea?

A: Nope, there’s no connection between “evil,” which comes from old Germanic sources, and the name “Eve,” which is derived from Hebrew. The similarity in sound is purely coincidental.

“Evil,” written as yfel in Old English, was definitively recorded as a noun around the year 825 and as an adjective in 897, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But it could be even older, since the plural form ylfa occurs in Beowulf, which may have been written as far back as 725.

During the Middle English period (roughly 1100-1500), the word was written as iuele, uvel, üvel, and finally evel, predecessor of the modern spelling.

It appears that in English, “evil” acquired a worse reputation than it had in the Germanic languages it came from.

The word has been traced to an Indo-European root, reconstructed as upo-, one of whose meanings was “over.” In prehistoric Proto-Germanic, this root developed into ubilaz, or “excessive.”

“Considering these original usages, as meaning ‘over’ and ‘excessive,’ ” Hajime Nakamura writes in A Comparative History of Ideas (1992), “it is not too surprising that some of the world’s greatest traditions developed concepts of a ‘mean’ (nothing to excess) as the absence of evil.”

As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, the ancient ancestors of “evil” conveyed notions of “either ‘exceeding due measure’ or ‘overstepping proper limits.’ ”

Originally, the English word “seems to have signified nothing more sinister than ‘uppity,’ ” John Ayto writes in the Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto notes that “in the Old and Middle English period it meant simply ‘bad’; it is only in modern English that its connotations of ‘extreme moral wickedness’ came to the fore.”

The name “Eve,” on the other hand, is derived from biblical Hebrew, where the name of the first woman is given in Genesis 3:20 as hawwa. This name became “Eva” in Latin and Greek translations of the Bible, and “Eve” in later French and English translations.

As for what the original Hebrew name means, that’s been the subject of much scholarly debate over the years.

A common suggestion is that hawwa means “life” or “living” or “life giver,” assuming a connection with the Hebrew haya (to live) or hay (living).

However, biblical scholars have questioned such a connection, saying there’s no direct linguistic link between hawwa and the other two words.

Some scholars say hawwa may have been a play on those other Hebrew words, or perhaps the words were indirectly connected through other Semitic languages.

“In sound but not derivation, the name Eve in Hebrew resembles the Hebrew word for ‘life,’ ” Leila Leah Bronner writes in her book From Eve to Esther (1994).

But etymologies relying on only sound, she writes, “are popular rather than scientific. Instead of attempting to derive its linguistic root, they create puns around it, relying on its sound to invent its sense.”

Some commentators seeking etymological explanations for hawwa have noted resemblances with an Aramaic word for “serpent,” an Arabic verb meaning to “be empty” or “fail,” and hivi, Hebrew for the Hivites, a Canaanite tribe.

The scholar Victor P. Hamilton, in his biblical commentary The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17, says that as many as 10 etymological explanations have been offered.

Another scholar, Scott C. Layton, an authority on ancient Semitic languages, says some names in the Hebrew Bible are grounded in symbolism rather than etymology (“On the Canaanite Origin of Eve,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, January 1997).

“Symbolic names form part of the rich fabric of biblical narrative by expressing their bearers’ fate, character, or role in the story,” Layton writes.

Sometimes biblical texts themselves, he says, “provide popular or folk etymologies, on the basis of Hebrew, for names whose original meanings lie at the margins of the Hebrew lexicon, or even outside it.”

“Certainly hawwa falls into this category,” Layton says, “and it occasions no surprise that modern scholars have offered several different interpretations of this name.”

That’s all about “Eve.” However, we should mention the other “eve,” the noun for the close of day. It’s short for “even,” an Old English word that meant the same thing—the day’s end.

In ordinary usage, both “eve” and “even” have been replaced by “evening,” which etymologically means the coming on of the eve, the OED says.

The noun “eve,” like “even” in times past, means not only the end of a day, but also the night (often the day as well) before a particular event—as in Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, All Hallows Eve, and so on.

All these words can be traced to a prehistoric Indo-European base with the general meaning of “lateness,” according to Ayto.

Speaking of which, it’s time for us to get to the next question in our inbox.

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English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Hats off to the boggins

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 22, 2016

Q: I’m from upstate NY, but I’ve lived in NC for almost 20 years. When native North Carolinians use the word “toboggan,” they’re talking about a hat. When I use it, I’m talking about a sled. Who’s right?

A: You’re right, but so are your North Carolina neighbors. In American usage, a “toboggan” can be either a sled or a snug knitted cap—one suitable for a chilly toboggan ride.

“Toboggan” is a word with roots deep in the North American wilderness, from a time before Europeans arrived on the continent.

The word comes from “a North American Indian name in Canada of a sleigh or sledge,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED mentions two principal Native American languages with the name: Micmac (tobakun) and Abenaki (udabagan).

Similar words in “other allied Algonquian languages,” the OED says, are the Montaignais word utapan, the Cree otabanask, and the Ojibwa odaban-ak.

The French in Canada adopted the word in the late 1600s, spelling it tabaganne, and it appeared in English writing in the early 1800s.

In English, according to the OED, the word originally meant “a light sledge consisting of a thin strip of wood turned up in front, used by the Canadian Indians for transport over snow.”

Today, the dictionary adds, “toboggan” can mean “a similar vehicle, sometimes with low runners, used in the sport of coasting (esp. down prepared slopes of snow or ice).”

The OED’s earliest English version, spelled “tobogin,” was recorded in Sir George Head’s Forest Scenes and Incidents in the Wilds of North America (1829):

“After leaving Fredericton there was no town nor village at which the required articles could be procured: namely, a couple of tobogins, a tobogin bag, a canteen … two pairs of snow shoes.”

The “toboggan” spelling didn’t arrive until half a century later, in the 1870s. Here’s one example, cited in the OED:

“The little hand-sledge … which the English have christened by the Canadian term ‘toboggan.’ ” (From John Addington Symonds’s Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, 1874.)

In the mid-1800s, soon after the noun “toboggan” came into English, people began using it as a verb. So to “toboggan” meant to ride a toboggan. And what did one wear while tobogganing? Read on.

By the late 19th century, people were using the term “toboggan cap” (and slightly later “toboggan hat”) to mean a stocking cap, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English.

DARE’s examples begin with “toboggan cap” in 1870 (from Minnesota), “toboggan cap” in 1886 (Ohio), and “toboggan hat” in 1908 (Ohio).

As the OED reports, the former item was even offered for sale in a 1902 Sears, Roebuck catalog, which advertised “Toboggan Caps or Toques.”

In the 1920s term for the cap was shortened to “toboggan,” which the OED defines as an American term for “a long woollen cap.”

The OED’s earliest citation for “toboggan,” meaning the cap, is from a 1929 issue of the journal American Speech: “Toboggan, a woolen cap.” The journal gives the example “Take off your toboggan.”

Oxford’s most recent example is from a 1975 issue of the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, in a description of a burglar: “He was wearing a red toboggan and tight pants, police said.”

While the OED doesn’t say the term for a cap is chiefly used in the South, that seems to be the case.

DARE describes this use of “toboggan” (along with “toboggan cap” and “toboggan hat,” plus the shorter “boggan” and “boggin”) as “chiefly South, South Midland; also Inland North.”

We’ll close with another quote from the Raleigh News & Observer, this one from 1995 and cited in DARE:

“What once were tobogganing caps became, over the years, simply ‘toboggans.’ Except we pronounce them, in our own uniquely Southern way, ‘toe-boggins’ or sometimes, in the privacy of our own homes, merely ‘boggins.’ ”

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English English language Etymology Expression Usage Word origin

The light and dark of language

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 18, 2016

(Note: We’re repeating this post for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It originally appeared on the blog on Dec. 16, 2009.)

Q: I teach cultural anthropology at the City University of New York. Some of my students have asked when the negative association with the color black first arose, as in “black sheep” or “black day” or “Black Death.” In other words, why is “angel food cake” white and “devil’s food cake” black? HELP!

A: This is a tall order!

It’s easy enough to say when some of the phrases you mention came into English. But it’s harder to tackle the notion of blackness or darkness as negative. This idea predated English and probably predated written language.

The word “black” has been in English since the earliest days of the language. In Old English in the eighth century it was written as blaec or blec, a word that was often confused with blac (white or shining).

The two words were even pronounced similarly at times, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Middle English (spoken roughly between 1100 and 1500), they were “often distinguishable only by the context, and sometimes not by that.”

The etymological history of “black” is difficult to trace, according to the OED, but it may have come from Old Teutonic roots that originally meant scorched or charred or burned. We can only speculate here. A prehistoric Indo-European root reconstructed as bhleg meant “burn.”

The oldest definition of “black” cited in the OED is the optical one: “the total absence of colour, due to the absence or total absorption of light, as its opposite white arises from the reflection of all the rays of light.” This sense of the word was first recorded in writing in Beowulf in the 700s.

In Old English, the adjective could mean “very evil or wicked; iniquitous; foul, hateful,” according to the dictionary. The earliest Oxford citation is from a scientific and theological treatise written by a Benedictine cleric in the late 10th century.

In the 1300s “black” was first used to mean soiled or stained with dirt, which the OED describes as a literal usage.

It wasn’t until the late 1580s that “black” was used figuratively to mean “having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister,” according to the OED.

The published usages include “black curse” (1583); “black name” and “black Prince” (1599, Shakespeare); “blacke edict” and “blacke victory” (1640); “black moment” (1713); “black enemy” (1758); and “black augury” (1821, Byron).

Around the same time, “black” took on other negative meanings, including horribly wicked or atrocious, as in “blacke soule” (1581); “blacke works” (1592); “blackest criminals” (1692); “blackest Calumnies” (1713); “black ingratitude” (1738, Macaulay); “the blackest dye” (1749, Fielding); and “black lie” (1839).

In the 17th and early 18th centuries, “black” also became identified with sorrow, melancholy, gloom, and dire predictions; a “black” outlook was pessimistic, whereas “bright” meant hopeful.

The word “blackguard” originally referred to dirtiness rather than to evildoing. It originated about 1535, and according to the OED it was first used first to refer to a scullery or kitchen worker, someone who had charge of pots and pans.

“Blackguard” was later used to describe a street urchin who worked as a shoe-black. In 1725, Jonathan Swift wrote of “The little black-guard / Who gets very hard / His halfpence for cleaning your shoes.”

And a 1785 slang dictionary described a “black guard” as “a shabby dirty fellow; a term said to be derived from a number of dirty tattered and roguish boys, who attended at the horse guards … to black the boots and shoes of the soldiers, or to do any other dirty offices.”

Boys who picked up odd jobs in the streets were also called “blackguards,” and in 1736 the term was first used to mean a scoundrel.

“Blackmail,” first recorded in 1552, originally meant protection money.

The OED defines its first meaning as “tribute formerly exacted from farmers and small owners in the border counties of England and Scotland, and along the Highland border, by freebooting chiefs, in return for protection or immunity from plunder.”

In those days, “mail” meant rent or tribute (its ancestor, the Old English mal, meant payment extorted by threats). But we can’t find any explanation for the “black” in the term, aside from the term’s earlier sense of soiled or dirty.

The phrase “black sheep” has been used to mean a bad character since the 17th century; according to legend, there was one in every flock. [Update: We wrote a post on the subject in 2020.]

The term “blacklisted” was recorded as far back as 1437. The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology suggests that the name indicated “edged with black.” The OED says the “black” in the term is from the negative sense of the word and means disgrace or censure.

However, the OED notes elsewhere that such a list was “often accompanied by some symbol actually black,” as in this 1840 citation from Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge: “Write Curzon down, Denounced. … Put a black cross against the name of Curzon.”

Similarly, a “black mark” (meaning a mark of censure) was originally “a black cross or other mark made against the name of a person who has incurred censure, penalty, etc.,” the OED says. The first published use is from a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (1845): “Won’t there be a black mark against you?”

As for the great plague of the 1300s, it wasn’t called the “Black Death” at the time. In the 14th century it was called “the pestilence,” “the plague,” “the great pestilence,” “the great death,” etc.

In English, the “black” wasn’t added until the early half of the 1800s, though it appeared in Swedish and Danish in the 1500s and in German in the 1700s.

The OED says it’s not known why the plague was called “black,” but The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) says it was because the disease caused dark splotches on the victims’ skin.

We can’t find anything in standard etymologies about “devil’s food,” but it may get its name either from its original color (red), or from its heaviness and density as opposed to “angel food,” which is weightless and feathery. A website called The Straight Dope has a good entry on the subject.

The metaphors in question aren’t Western notions, either. From what we’ve been able to find out, they’ve been around since the beginning of time, when people first became aware of the division of their world into day and night, light and dark.

From the point of view of primitive people, day brought with it light, sun, warmth, and of course visibility. Night was colder and darker; it was threatening and fearful, full of unseen dangers and hidden threats.

This ancient opposition between day and night, light and dark, became a common motif in mythology. It’s unfortunate that dark-skinned people, merely by the accident of skin color, have become victims of the mythology.

We’ve found an article that might have some ideas for you to share with your students. In it, the psychiatrist Eric Berne explores the folklore of our conceptions of light and dark, black and white, good and evil, clean and dirty, and so on.

The article is “The Mythology of Dark and Fair: Psychiatric Use of Folklore,” published in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 72, No. 283 (Jan.-Mar., 1959), pp. 1-13. You can get it through JSTOR, assuming CUNY subscribes to its digital archive. Skip the first page and go to the history, which begins on page 2.

Berne notes that the ideas of light=goodness and dark=badness existed in ancient cultures (including Egyptian and Greek), and can be found in Asia and around the globe.

Joseph Campbell, writing in the journal Daedalus in 1959, says it was the Persian philosopher Zoroaster (circa 600 BC) who put the seal on the concept of darkness being evil.

Zoroaster, Campbell writes, saw a “radical separation of light and darkness, together with his assignment to each of an ethical value, the light being pure and good, the darkness foul and evil.”

The Old and New Testaments are full of such dichotomies. In later Christian writings, the bright angel Lucifer transgresses and is thrown out of heaven (which is, of course, flooded with light), to become the dark lord of night.

In Paradise Lost, Milton writes that the flames of hell produce “No light, but rather darkness visible.”

For what it’s worth, we don’t believe that metaphors identifying lightness as positive and darkness as negative are inherently racist. They certainly didn’t begin that way, though these negative connotations have certainly fed into and reinforced racism over the centuries.

Your students may also be interested in a recent item on The Grammarphobia Blog about the word “nigger” and its evolution (for some African-Americans) into a positive term through a process that has been called semantic bleaching.

The blog entry cites a paper by Arthur K. Spears, a linguist and anthropologist at CUNY. We’ll bet he could direct you to other sources of information about the mythology of blackness.

We hope some of this is useful to you.

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Here’s how!

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 15, 2016

Q: Why is the expression “Here’s how!” used as a toast? Nobody I know has an answer, including my martini-loving 94-year-old mom.

A: The expression is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a formula used in drinking healths,” but there’s no clue about what it means.

The OED’s earliest citation is from the late 19th century, when the toast appeared in Rudyard Kipling’s poetry collection The Seven Seas (1896):

“Yes, a health to ourselves ere we scatter. … Here’s how!”

But Green’s Dictionary of Slang has an older example, from The City of the Saints (1861), by the explorer Richard F. Burton:

“We acknowledged his civility with a ‘here’s how,’ and drank Kentucky-fashion.”

Our own searches turned up an example in an 1895 volume of poetry by Richard Henry Savage. His poem “Going Out” is a soldiers’ drinking song with “Here’s ‘how!’ ” as the refrain:

Fill up with merry hearts, dear friends,
And mock the hours too fleeting,
This night for parting makes amends—
I give my final greeting;
May memories of the olden times
Be ever dear as now—
Stand up and drink it every one—
The old times, boys: Here’s “how!”

We’re sorry that we can’t suggest what the toast means—if anything. Perhaps an examination of the following OED citations, plus a few drinks, may help:

“They now say ‘Bungo!’ instead of ‘Here’s how!’ over cocktails.” (From a Massachusetts newspaper, the Springfield Union, Nov. 20, 1925.)

“ ‘Well,’ said Mr. Hull, holding up his glass … ‘here’s how!’” (From J. B. Priestley’s novel Festival at Farbridge, 1951.)

“Martin was clasping a tumbler half filled with whisky. ‘Here’s how,’ said the fat man.” (From Eric Burgess’s murder mystery Divided We Fall, 1959.)

Elsewhere, the OED has an entry for “here’s” as a way of introducing “formulas used in drinking health.”

Among them, in addition to “here’s how,” are “here’s hoping,” “here’s looking (at you),” “here’s luck,” and “here’s to,” which the dictionary says is “elliptical for here’s a health to).” (We’ve discussed a few of the formulas on our blog.)

The earliest of these cited in the OED is from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597): “Heers to my loue.”

As the dictionary notes, two such expressions are found in Ernest Hemingway’s only full-length play, The Fifth Column (1938): “Here’s looking at you” and “Here’s how.”

But Hemingway outdid himself in one of his short stories, “Up in Michigan,” in which we found a litany of boozy toasts:

“Well, here’s looking at you” … “Here’s all the ones we missed” … “Here’s how” … “Down the creek, boys” … “Here’s to next year.”

In its entry for “mud,” the OED mentions another such expression, “here’s mud in your eye” (or “here’s mud” for short).

It’s described as “an informal salutation before drinking,” along the lines of “Here’s to you!” or “Good health!” or simply “Cheers!”

Why “mud”? Some slang lexicographers have suggested the phrase could have originated in military usage, perhaps as a reference to the muddy trenches of World War I.

But there’s no evidence to support this. Oxford’s earliest citation is from Henry Vollam Morton’s In Search of England (1927): “ ‘Here’s mud in your eye!’ said one of the modern pilgrims, tossing down his martini.”

In fact, most of these bibulous expressions don’t seem to have any deeper meaning. By their very nature, they’re humorous and a bit silly—like “Here’s to the skin off your nose,” which Green’s Dictionary of Slang has traced to 1914.

That last one—or a version of it—was a favorite of P. G. Wodehouse, whom we like to quote whenever possible, so here goes:

“ ‘Skin off your nose, Jeeves.’ ‘Mud in your eye, sir, if I may use the expression.’ ” (The Mating Season, 1949.)

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English English language Etymology Linguistics Usage Word origin Writing

Does that bikini still fit?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 13, 2016

Q: Is there a term for the overly familiar and presumptuous use of “that” and “those” in advertising? For example, “Organize that messy closet” or “Get rid of those unsightly stains in your sink.” It’s as if the ad writers have peered into our homes.

A: You’ve raised an interesting question, one that highlights something most of us are all too aware of: Advertisers use language in ways that ordinary people don’t.

“That” and “those” are good examples.

In your examples, “that” and its plural, “those,” are demonstrative adjectives (some prefer the term “demonstrative determiners”). They modify a noun, in effect pointing at it, demonstrating which one (or ones) the speaker is referring to.

In ordinary sentences like “Sam misses that dog” and “Those sneakers belong to Janet,” the demonstrative adjectives point to the nouns, as if to demonstrate which dog Sam misses, which sneakers belong to Janet.

But in the ad slogans you mention, “that” and “those” aren’t used as in ordinary English.

Normally, “that” and “those” (like “this” and “these”) refer to nouns that actually exist—“that dog,” “those sneakers.” Their existence is a fact, something the speaker and the audience take for granted.

But an anonymous, impersonal voice telling you to “organize that messy closet” or “get rid of those unsightly stains” isn’t pointing to an actual condition in your house.

Instead, the speaker is presupposing its existence and treating it as a fact. So the slogans are examples of what a linguist would call “presupposition.”

As The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says, “The information contained in a presupposition is backgrounded, taken for granted, presented as something that is not currently at issue.”

In these ad slogans, the presupposed information is that you have a messy closet and a sink with unsightly stains.

In a study entitled “Presupposition, Persuasion and Mag Food Advertising” (2012), Tamara Bouso uses the example “Do you expect to fit into that beach bikini in the New Year?”

This sales pitch presupposes not only that the consumer has such a bikini but that she’s probably too fat to wear it.

Another author, Judy Delin, says presupposition “plays an important role in the construction of advertising messages in general” (The Language of Everyday Life, 2000). The use of demonstrative adjectives, she says, is one form of presupposition.

You ask whether there’s a name for demonstrative adjectives used in this presumptuous way. As a matter of fact, a couple of names have been proposed.

In a 2006 paper, “That’s That: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Demonstrative Noun Phrases,” the linguist Lynsey Kay Wolter calls such terms “emotive demonstratives.”

Why “emotive?” Because, Wolter writes, such terms convey a sense that both speaker and listener “share some relevant knowledge or emotion about the referent of the demonstrative”—that is, the noun it points to.

And writing on the Language Log in 2008, the linguist Mark Liberman calls these words “affective demonstratives.” Like “emotive,” the term “affective” implies an emotional element—in this case familiarity or shared experience.

“Affective demonstratives,” Liberman says, “invite the audience onto a common ground of shared knowledge (or perhaps I should say, ‘that common ground of shared knowledge’).”

In response, one Language Log contributor writes, “I’ve noticed this type of device in advertising a lot,” and provides this example:

“By earning more income through our work-at-home program, you’ll be able to afford that new car, to finally take that vacation you’ve been dreaming of!”

It’s no mystery why advertisers are so fond of demonstrative adjectives. Like the definite article “the,” these words presuppose that the accompanying nouns actually exist.

So they hint that the speaker knows you: “that messy closet” points at your closet. In this way, demonstrative adjectives can create a false sense of familiarity, of intimacy with the consumer.

It’s interesting to note that in the neutral examples we mentioned earlier (“Sam misses that dog” and “Those sneakers belong to Janet”), you could say the same thing less demonstratively by substituting “the” for “that” or “those”:

“Sam misses the dog” and “The sneakers belong to Janet.”

But “the” works only when the audience knows which dog or sneakers are referred to. “The” wouldn’t work in the advertising examples, unless the nouns had been mentioned before.

The ad writers would have to use an indefinite article (“organize a messy closet”) or nothing at all (“get rid of unsightly stains”). But then, of course, they’d lose the familiar tone they’re trying to cultivate.

This forced intimacy can strike listeners as intrusive or annoying, especially those with tidy closets and spotless sinks. A presupposition that’s wrong can backfire.

As Lynsey Wolter says in her paper, “Consider a situation in which the speaker assumes that an emotion is shared, but the addressee resists this assumption. In these circumstances an emotive demonstrative … feels intrusive or patronizing.”

As we said above, demonstrative adjectives point to things. And this isn’t always appropriate. After all, weren’t we taught that it’s not polite to point?

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English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Extrovert or extravert?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 11, 2016

Q: I make a point of using “extravert,” not “extrovert,” because that’s how Myers-Briggs spells it. I did the personality test and learned I’m neither an “introvert” nor an “extravert.” I’m right on the line—I call myself an “ambivert.” Your thoughts?

A: We’ve checked six standard dictionaries and all of them list “extrovert” as the principal spelling for someone with an outgoing or gregarious personality, though five include “extravert” as an acceptable variant.

The two spellings showed up in writing at about the same time, “extravert” in 1916 and “extrovert” in 1918, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Etymologically, “extravert” is the term one would expect. In Latin, extra means outside and vertere means to turn. So an “extravert” turns outward.

So where did the “extro-” spelling come from? As the OED explains, it’s “a quasi-Latin prefix” influenced by the “intro-” prefix of the term “introvert.”

Despite the questionable etymology of “extrovert,” speakers of English overwhelming prefer it to “extravert,” which explains why “extrovert” is the principal spelling in standard dictionaries.

The term “extravert” is more at home in the literature of psychology. That’s why the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the personality questionnaire you filled out, lists “extraversion,” not “extroversion,” as a psychological preference.

As Oxford Dictionaries online explains, “The original spelling extravert is now rare in general use but is found in technical use in psychology.”

In fact, standard dictionaries generally define the term one way in the language of psychology and another way in common usage.

In psychology, according to the online Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged, it refers to “one whose attention and interests are directed wholly or predominantly toward what is outside the self.”

In general usage, however, it simply refers to “a gregarious and unreserved person,” Merriam-Webster’s says.

However, the principal spelling in dictionaries is “extrovert,” whether the word is used in the psychological or the general sense.

As for the history of these words, let’s begin with the verb “introvert,” which appeared in the mid-1600s, when it meant to turn one’s thoughts inward in spiritual contemplation.

The first example in the OED, using the past participle, is from Abraham Woodhead’s 1671 translation of the writings of St. Teresa of Ávila: “The Soul being straight, introverted … into itself, and easily conforming to God’s will and time.”

At about the same time, the verb “extravert” showed up in chemistry in the sense of to turn outward and make visible the latent parts of a substance.

The first OED example is from Hydrologia Chymica, a 1669 book by William Simpson: “It is not the moist air that extraverts any preexistent nitrous parts from the body of the minerals.”

It wasn’t until the early 20th century that “introvert” and “extravert” appeared as nouns with their modern meanings in psychology and common usage. (A noun “introvert” appeared in the late 19th century as a scientific term for a body part that can turn inward.)

The nouns “introvert” and “extravert” showed up for the first time in the same sentence in Constance Ellen Long’s 1916 English translation of the papers of Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology:

“An Extravert can hardly conceive the necessity which compels the Introvert to conquer the world by means of a system.”

The adjectival use of the past participles “introverted” and “extraverted” appeared a bit earlier in a 1915 paper that Jung wrote for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology:

“An extraverted individual can hardly understand the necessity that forces the introverted to accomplish his adaptation by first formulating a general conception.”

The OED’s first citation for the “extrovert” spelling is from a paper by Phyllis Blanchard in the April 1918 issue of the American Journal of Psychology:

“Jung’s hypothesis of the two psychological types, the introvert and extrovert,—the thinking type and the feeling type.”

An Aug. 31, 2015, post on Scientific American’s Beautiful Minds blog suggests that Blanchard’s spelling of “extrovert” was “an innocent mistake.”

However, another psychologist, William McDougall, used the same spelling a few years later in An Outline of Abnormal Psychology (1926):

“The characteristic neurosis of the extrovert is hysteria, while that of the introvert is neurasthenia or psychasthenia.”

The author of the Scientific American post is bugged by “extrovert” because it doesn’t conform to Jung’s spelling and to the Latin roots of the word.

But it’s silly to expect an English word, no matter what its origin, to conform to the rules of another language. When English adopts a word from a foreign language, the word develops a life of its own.

That’s why words like “agenda,” “candelabra,” “erotica,” “insignia,” “opera,” “stamina” and “trivia” have become singular in English despite their plural foreign roots. And why we use “perfume” instead of the French parfum or the Old Italian parfumo.

Yes, some words derived from other languages (“rendezvous,” “piñata,” and “zeitgeist,” for example) look and sound pretty much the same as the originals. But we don’t tell the barista at Starbucks that we want “two cappuccini.”

Today, as we’ve said, “extrovert” is the usual spelling while “extravert” is primarily seen in psychological writing.

In fact, all the examples for “extravert” in the OED are from the world of psychology, as is this citation from Psycho-Analysis for Normal People (1926), by Geraldine Coster:

“The extravert goes out to people and things, enjoying contacts and shrinking from solitude and meditation.”

Although “extrovert” is now far more popular than “extravert” in writing, “extraversion” is more common in books than “extroversion,” according searches with Google’s Ngram viewer, perhaps because of its prevalence in technical literature.

“Extraversion” first appeared in the 1915 paper that Jung wrote for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology: “I called the hysterical type the extraversion type and the psychasthénic type the introversion type.”

The “extroversion” spelling showed up in Arthur George Tansley’s The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life (1920): “Extroversion is the thrusting out of the mind on to life, the use of the mind in practical affairs, the pouring out of the libido on external objects.”

As for “ambivert,” a person with a balance of “extrovert” and “introvert” features, the term showed up in writing not long after the other words we’ve discussed.

The earliest example in the OED is from Kimball Young’s Source Book for Social Psychology (1927).

After describing people who are introverted some of the time and extroverted at other times, Young writes: “It is these I have called ambiverts.” (We’ve gone to the original to put the Oxford citation in context.)

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English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Can “once” mean “when”?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 8, 2016

Q: Many people use “when” and “once” interchangeably, as in “We can focus on polishing the text once the content is closer to being final.” I know they sort of sound alike, but is it correct to use “once” when you mean “when”?

A: The short answer is that the two words overlap somewhat and both can be used as conjunctions to mean “as soon as” or “after,” though “once” seems a bit more emphatic than “when” here. Now for the longer version.

The word “once” has worn many hats since it showed up in Anglo-Saxon times. It’s been an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a conjunction.

When “once” first appeared in Old English more than a thousand years ago, it was an adverbial form of the noun “one,” and meant “at one time only.”

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary (with “once” spelled “ænes”) is from the Lambeth Psalter (circa 1000), a manuscript with Latin and Old English text from the Book of Psalms:

“Semel iuraui in sancto meo : ænes ic swor on minum halgan” (“once have I sworn in my holiness”).

The spelling evolved gradually from “ænes” to “ones” to “once.” As John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins explains, the modern “c” spelling reflected “the fact that that once retained a voiceless s at its end, whereas in ones it had been voiced to z.”

The adjective “once” showed up in the mid-1500s, but it wasn’t until the early 1600s that it took on its modern sense of “former.”

The first example in the OED is from Swetnam the Woman-Hater (1620), an anonymous comedy about a misogynist tried by a court of women:

“Magnanimous Ladie, maruell not, / That your once Aduersary do’s submit himselfe / To your vnconquer’d beautie.”

The noun “once” showed up in writing around the same time. The first Oxford example is from A Newyears Gifte, a 1579 poetry collection by Bernard Garter: “Once is no custome.”

The conjunction “once,” the usage you’re asking about, showed up before both the adjective and the noun. The earliest citation in the OED is from Ordinal of Alchemy (circa 1477) by Thomas Norton: “Metalle ons metalle shal not more encrese.”

And here’s an example from Ludus Literarius, a 1612 book by John Brinsley about education: “Once gotten, they were easily kept by oft repetition.”

Finally, this example is from Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa (1747): “No peremptoriness, Clary Harlowe! Once you declare yourself inflexible, I have done.”

We won’t get into the etymology of “when” now, except to note that it’s ultimately derived from an ancient interrogative root reconstructed as qwo-, according to Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto adds that the ancient root has also given English the word “quandary,” which is the source of many of the questions that we answer on our blog.

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Tags English, English language, Etymology, Grammar, Language, Linguistics, Usage, Word origin

English English language Etymology Expression Usage Word origin

Are your socks breathing?

Post author By Pat and Stewart
Post date January 6, 2016

Q: My understanding is that the “-able” or “-ible” suffix refers to a passive condition, the ability to have something done to it. Good air is “breathable,” food is “edible,” etc. In television commercials, though, I hear “breathable” used for fabrics that “breathe.” Should I be bothered by this?

A: “Breathable” can go either way because it has both active and passive meanings—capable of breathing as well as fit to be breathed.

When first recorded in 1731, “breathable” was used passively and meant fit to be breathed or inhaled.

This 19th-century citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is a good example: “How breathable the atmosphere!” (from Blackwood’s Magazine, 1839).

In the mid-20th century, people began using “breathable” in an active sense to describe material or clothing that, in the OED’s definition, “admits air to the skin and allows sweat to evaporate.”

Oxford’s earliest citation is from a 1937 issue of the Hammond (Indiana) Times: “Breathable suede jackets. Water repellent. They’re new!”

Later on, the verb “breathe” itself was used in reference to such nonliving things as uncorked wine (1950s) and materials that let air pass through (1960s).

Naturally these things weren’t actually inhaling; they were said to “breathe” because they absorbed air or allowed it to move freely.

But returning to your question, it’s not true that adjectives ending in “-able” and “-ible” are always used in a passive sense or in reference to a passive condition.

Some denote a capacity for being subjected to something (passive), while others denote a capacity for doing something (active). Not many of these adjectives do both, like “breathable.”

Examples of passive adjectives include “credible” (said of something that can be believed), “audible” (something that can be heard), “preferable” (a thing that’s to be preferred), and “bearable” (something can be borne).

Examples of the active ones include “comfortable” (said of something that comforts), “durable” (a thing that endures), “horrible” (something that horrifies), and “possible” (a thing that can happen).

You may be curious about why some of these adjectives end in “-able” and some in “-ible.” The reasons are rooted in Latin, where verbs with different endings were given different adjectival suffixes (-abilis or -ibilis).

Both kinds of endings passed on into Old French (-able, -ible), but the distinction became muddled when French replaced most of the –ible endings with –able.

The result is that English has both kinds of “-ble” adjectives, but as we wrote in a blog post in 2007, the “-able” words far outnumber the “-ible” words. It’s easy to see why.

For one thing, most of the “-ble” adjectives that English acquired from French end in “-able.”

So do most of those that were formed from native English words. So if a word existed in Old English and later formed one of these “-ble” adjectives, it’s probably an “-able” (like “knowable,” “walkable,” “foreseeable,” “drinkable,” “unspeakable,” “doable,” etc.).

In fact, new adjectives formed in modern English, despite their etymological roots, almost always end in “-able,” like “danceable” (first recorded in 1859), “buildable” (1927), “microwaveable” (1977).

All things considered, it’s a wonder we have as many “-ible” adjectives as we do.

Finally, a point that may surprise you. The suffix “-able” is no relation to the adjective and adverb “able.” So resist the temptation to interpret every “-able” adjective in terms of “able to,” especially the passive ones.

Strictly speaking, “unspeakable,” means unfit to be spoken of, not unable to be spoken of. “Drinkable” means “fit to drink,” not “able to be drunk.” And “eatable” means “fit to be eaten,” not “able to be eaten.”

Though both have come down from Latin, the word “able” and the suffix “-able” are etymologically unrelated.

The word “able” ultimately comes from the verb habere (to hold). The suffix “-able,” as we mentioned, comes from the Latin suffix –abilis, which was used to forms adjectives from verbs ending in –are.

But, as the OED says, an “early association with the adjective able” probably encouraged the notion that a word like “eatable,” with its “-able” suffix, “could be reapprehended as ‘able to be eaten.’ ”

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