Tag: Word origin

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Punctuation Usage Word origin

A “sell-through” date

Q: Do you think “sell-through” should be hyphenated when it’s used as a marketing term? One of my associates argues that “sell-through” should only be hyphenated if it’s an adjectival phrase, not a noun phrase.

A: The phrase “sell-through” is hyphenated in most dictionaries. And the hyphen is there whether the phrase is used as a noun (“We were hoping for a quick sell-through”) or as a modifier (“The sell-through numbers were good”).

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster’s Unabridged give the term as hyphenated. So do the Cambridge Dictionaries Online and the Collins English Dictionary.

Only one standard dictionary, as far as we know, disagrees. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) gives it as one solid word, “sellthrough.”

However, we think a hyphen makes the term easier to read, so we’d recommend “sell-through.”

The OED defines the noun phrase “sell-through” as “the retail turnover of a product” or “the proportion of goods (of a particular type) purchased wholesale which is successfully sold to consumers at retail, typically expressed as a percentage.”

The term has been around since the late 1970s, according to citations in the OED. The earliest example is from a 1978 article in Business Week: “The sell-through on our Time-band watches was nearly complete.”

This later example is from a 2001 issue of the New York Times: “We look at the weekly sell-through of our products … and listen to what our customers are saying.”

Oxford describes another meaning of the noun phrase that dates from 1985: “the practice of marketing videotapes or DVDs for retail rather than rental,” or “a videotape or DVD marketed in this way.”

Here’s an early example, from a 1988 issue of the Sun, a newspaper in Brisbane, Australia: “Slackening sales of pre-recorded video cassettes for rental purposes have forced many small video publishing companies to sharpen their focus on ‘sell-throughs.’ ”

And in this 1994 example from the Face, a London magazine, the phrase is used attributively (that is, adjectivally): “Arthouse films have become more readily available on sell-through video.”

If you’re using “sell” as a verb in its usual sense, of course, the words “sell through” aren’t hyphenated: “I sell through eBay” or “His car was sold through Craigslist.”

In such constructions, “sell” is a verb and “through” is an adverb describing the manner of selling.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Grammar Usage Word origin

How fake is a fakir?

Q: I tremble as I step on the tracks of the linguist Mark Liberman, whom you cite in your “nor’easter” post, but “faker” as an adjective of degree just doesn’t sound right to me. And it’s not in the dictionary built into my computer.

A: We don’t see anything wrong with using “faker” as the comparative form of the adjective “fake,” and the spell-checker in our computer doesn’t either.

A bit of googling finds quite a few examples of the usage, such as “faker than the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park” and “faker than a Louis Vuitton bag on Canal Street.”

Is “faker” standard English? Well, most standard dictionaries don’t include the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives.

One that does, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), doesn’t include “faker” and “fakest” within its entry for “fake.” The lexicographers at American Heritage apparently agree with you.

However, we don’t see why “faker” is any less legitimate than “phonier,” a comparative adjective that’s included in the dictionary.

People have been using the suffix “-er” to form comparative adjectives since Middle English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Old English, the comparative suffix was “-ra” or “-re.”

And writers have often stuck “-er” on adjectives to form unusual comparatives for literary effect, as Lewis Carroll did with “curiouser and curiouser.”

As we’ve said, we think the use of “faker” in our “nor’easter” post is legit, though some lexicographers might describe it as informal.

We quote Liberman, who grew up in southern New England,  as saying “nor’easter” seems “faker to me than the lederhosen at the Biergarten in Walt Disney World.”

By the way, Liberman wrote an interesting item on the Language Log about whether the use of “fakir” in the noun sense of “faker” (one who fakes) is an error or a shift in the meaning of the term.

The OED says English borrowed “fakir” in the early 1600s from faqīr, Arabic for a “poor, poor man.”

The dictionary, citing Sir Henry Yule, a 19th-century Orientalist, defines the term this way: “Properly an indigent person, but specially applied to a Mahommedan religious mendicant, and then loosely, and inaccurately, to Hindu devotees and naked ascetics.”

The earliest OED citation is from A True Historicall Discourse of Muley Hamets Rising to the Three Kingdomes of Moruecos, Fes, and Sus, a 1609 work of questionable authorship: “Fokers, are men of good life, which are onely given to peace.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of the noun used to mean a “faker” is from Buckboard Days, an 1882 book by Sophie A. Poe about pioneer life: “Thieves, Thugs, Fakirs and Bunkco-Steerers.”

The most recent Oxford example of the usage is from Devil Take the Hindmost: A Year of the Slump (1932), by Edmund Wilson: “Some listen to a patent-medicine fakir.”

The OED describes this newer sense as erroneous. Liberman, though, says it may have begun life as an eggcorn, the misinterpretation of one term for another, but it should now be considered an ordinary change in meaning.

“There’s a whiff of the eggcorn about all of this; at least, the similarity in spelling and sound is likely to have played a role in encouraging what is otherwise an ordinary process of historical meaning shift,” he writes.

Most standard dictionaries still define “fakir” as an itinerant Muslim or Hindu holy man who lives by begging.

But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) now accepts as standard English the use of “fakir” to mean an impostor or a swindler.

Merriam-Webster’s gives two examples of the usage: “a traveling carnival that was run by fakirs preying on small-town rubes” and “a fakir peddling patent medicines that were mostly liquor and sugar.”

As for the verb “fake,” it “has a rather slippery semantic history,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto says it’s derived from feague, a long-obsolete verb that referred to “any number of nefarious operations, including beating up and killing.” The verb “fake” had a similar sense when it showed up in the 19th century.

But he says the current sense of “fake” (to “do up something spurious to make it seem genuine”) may be traced “back in a straight line to its probably ultimate source”—fegen, a German verb meaning to polish, clean, sweep, or refurbish.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Do we know the ropes?

Q: I’ve heard that “show ’em the ropes” is of theatrical origin, not nautical, as Pat suggested on WNYC. The ropes controlled the stage machinery. Sailors didn’t use the term “ropes.”

A: The Oxford English Dictionary defines “know the ropes,” “learn the ropes,” and “understand the ropes” as to “be experienced in or familiar with some customary action, practice, etc.”

And “show someone the ropes,” the OED adds, means “to teach or explain to someone the customary ways of doing something.”

The dictionary has both nautical and theatrical examples of these expressions dating from the 19th century, but the nautical examples are somewhat older.

That’s not conclusive, of course, and the earliest example of the usage in the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t help—it’s not nautical or theatrical, but merely uses the expression in the sense of being experienced.

In the 1802 entry from James Skene’s diary of a trip to Italy, the author asks a local merchant for advice about how to meet the Pope: “I am a stranger and … I beg you to show me how I ought  to proceed…. You know the ropes and can give me good advice.”

However, the OED’s next two citations for the usage are clearly of nautical origin.

In his 1840 memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana writes, “The captain, who had been on the coast before and ‘knew the ropes,’ took the steering oar, and we went off in the same way as the other boat.” (We’ve expanded the citation.)

And in The Green Hand, a sea story by George Cupples in the December 1848 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the third mate says, “He’s in my watch, and the captain wants him to rough it out; so show him the ropes, and let him taste an end now an’ then.”

The OED’s earliest example for the theatrical usage is an 1850 sketch by John Timon in The Opera Goer (1852), by Ike Marvell: “The belle of two weeks standing, who has ‘learned the ropes.’ ”

In our searches of literary and news databases, we found a somewhat earlier example, from an 1846 issue of the Musical Gazette, that combines the two usages:

“As a ‘land lubber’ must learn the ropes to be a sailor, so must an ‘unmusical lubber’ learn a proper mode of guiding his hand and arm, to be a player.”

And we’ve also found an example in which the usage appears in a punning reference to tightrope walking. A report in the Dec. 3, 1859, issue of Punch discusses a European trip by P. T. Barnum and the French daredevil Charles Blondin, who crossed the Niagara Gorge on a tightrope:

“Barnum has bought up Blondin, ropes and all, and takes him to Europe to show him the ropes there, and to let him wander upon foreign strands (as the poet says) till he gets a good balance at his banker’s, and of course a man who can keep his balance anywhere will have no difficulty in doing that.”

We’ve also come across an interesting paper by Frederic D. Allen in the 1893 issue of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology that notes a similar usage in ancient Greece.

“The smith’s tools are called the ‘ropes of his art’—a figure borrowed from seamen’s parlance. So our figurative expression ‘know the ropes.’ ”

We doubt that the classical usage is the source of our figurative expression. But is ours of nautical origin?

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says flatly that “know the ropes” is derived “from the days of sailing ships, when skill in handling ropes was essential for any sailor.” We’ll merely say perhaps.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Thanks a millions

Q: I would say a house costs 3 million, but my mother-in-law (an ex-teacher of English) insists that it should be 3 millions. Who is right, and why?

A: You’re right. We’ll leave it to you to break this to your mother-in-law.

The term “million” (like “thousand” and “hundred”) is normally singular when preceded by a quantifier like “four” or “several.”

Examples: “Four million homes are affected, but only two million have been evacuated.”

We can understand your mother-in-law’s reasoning here. She regards “million” as a noun in “he paid 3 million,” and reasons that a noun modified by a plural number should be plural: “he paid 3 millions.”

But nouns that stand for numbers don’t act the same as ordinary nouns.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the noun “million” is an “unmarked” plural—it has no plural ending—when “modified by a numeral adjective or (freq.) a quantifier.”

Here are some of the examples given in the OED, along with their dates:

“v mylȝon off fynest gold” (“5 million of finest gold,” c1478);

“a thousand milion, Rejoysing” (c1530);

“between four and five million in the kingdom” (1780);

“a thousand million of pounds sterling” (1856);

“brave nation of forty million” (1915);

”six million of his fellow Jews” (1972);

“several million more” (1975);

and “sold three million of them” (1991).

In this respect, the OED says, “million” can be compared with “dozen” and “hundred.”

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) has a discussion of “million,” and provides a few general rules about the singular and plural uses:

“When modified by a preceding quantitative word (a numeral, many, several, etc.) and followed immediately by a noun, million is unchanged in form (two million people, several million pounds).”

And if no noun follows? Fowler’s says, “Million (not millions) is used in the type Among the eight million are a few hundred to whom this does not apply.”

The usage guide also says that “a million” is “sometimes used elliptically” to mean “a million pounds” or “a million dollars.” All that’s deleted is the currency.

So while Fowler’s doesn’t say so directly, it’s reasonable to assume that “3 million” (not “3 millions”) would be short for “3 million pounds” or “3 million dollars.”

When the currency symbol is used instead, the word is always singular, as in “£3 million” or “$3 million.”

When an “of” phrase follows, Fowler’s says, “the plural is normally used (many millions of votes were lost),” although idiom allows the singular in phrases like “a few million of them.”

As for the word’s history, the OED notes that “million,” meaning “a thousand times a thousand,” first appeared in written English in the 14th century as both noun and adjective.

English borrowed “million” from Old French, but its ultimate source is the classical Latin mille (thousand,) which is also the source of the English “millennium” (a thousand years) and “mile” (etymologically it means a thousand paces).

The OED’s earliest recorded use of the noun is from William Langland’s long poem Piers Plowman, composed some time before 1376): “Manye mylions mo of men & of wommen.”

In older writing, according to Oxford, the term was often seen in the plural when modified by a number: “200 Millions” (c1595);  “near eighty millions Sterling” (1790); “This four millions was taken account of” (1902).

These days, however, the singular is the common idiomatic usage: “he rakes in 20 million a year.”

The earliest adjectival use in the OED is from a manuscript of The Visions of St. Paul that dates from around 1390: “Þen kneled Poul and Mihel And a Milioun Angeles.” (“Then kneeled Paul and Michael and a million angels.”)

Like Fowler’s, the OED notes that the noun “million” is used elliptically to mean “a million coins or units of money of account of some understood value.”

When money is the subject, the plural “millions” is seen more often when there’s no number: “they have millions in the bank” … “she made her millions in the  market.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

A septuagenarian girlfriend?

Q: I am 74, widowed, and “seeing” a former female high school classmate of the same age. Calling her my “girlfriend” sounds ludicrous and I loathe “significant other.” The word “partner” usually means same-sex partner, so that is not applicable in our case. English needs a new word to describe a committed, romantic, sexual relationship between septuagenarians! Where is Shakespeare when we really need him?

A: English has lots of ways for lovers—married or unmarried, young or old—to address one another. The two of us call each other (please don’t cringe) “honey bunny” and “sweetie pie.”

A problem arises, however, when one member of an older unmarried couple has to refer to the other in speaking with outsiders. As you say, “girlfriend,” with its girlish associations, doesn’t quite suit a woman in her seventies.

Maybe Shakespeare could come up with the perfect fit, but none of the words we can think of (“sweetheart,” “friend,” “steady,” “soul mate,” “lady friend,” and so on) seem right.

If we weren’t married, we’d probably refer to ourselves as “companions” when speaking to others. It’s not very felicitous, but we can’t think of anything better.

Technically, there’s nothing wrong with using “girlfriend” for your septuagenarian honey. We’ve checked half a dozen standard dictionaries, and all of them define the term as a woman of any age in a romantic or sexual relationship.

When “girlfriend” showed up in English in the mid-19th century, it simply referred to “a female friend; esp. a woman’s close female friend,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest example in the OED is from the August 1859 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine: “A demure little widow, much more gay and girlish than any of her girl-friends when she chose to forsake her rôle.”

In the late 19th century, “girlfriend” took on the sense you’re asking about: “A female with whom a person has a romantic or sexual relationship; a female partner or lover.”

The dictionary adds that the term refers to “a female member of an unmarried couple, in some contexts esp. a young couple whose relationship is conducted on a relatively casual basis.”

The first Oxford citation for the romantic/sexual sense is from the dedication in a book of medieval poetry edited by Frederick James Furnivall and published in 1892: “To the memory of Teena Rochfort Smith my much-respected and deeply-regretted girl-friend.”

(Furnivall, the second editor of the OED, left his wife for Rochfort Smith, a Shakespearean scholar who died in 1883 at the age of 22.)

The dictionary’s amorous citations for “girlfriend” referred to young women at first, but the usage has widened in recent decades to include older women.

Here’s an example from the Jan. 4, 2001, issue of the Daily Telegraph in London: “A pensioner literally saw red when his 79-year-old girl-friend cancelled their wedding for a third time.”

Interestingly, “girls” wasn’t always a girlie word, as we point out in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions.

In about 1300, when the word made its first known appearance in print, a “girl” was a child of either sex, and “girls” meant children, period.

In the 14th century, for example, the poem Piers Plowman refers to a children’s Latin grammar book as a “gramer for girles.” And in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer refers to small children as “yonge gerles.”

But in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the word began to mean female children, and by the end of the 15th century the androgynous meaning of “girls” was lost.

[Update, April 27, 2015. One of our readers sent a few comments, which we’ve edited: “I’m 83 and my partner is 81.  And yes, we do describe each other as ‘partner.’ Our locality has a procedure for filing as domestic partners. The position I held at the time of our official agreement required such a filing so that my partner could be on my medical plan.  I agree that referring to him as my ‘boyfriend’ would be incomprehensible to anyone who knows me or him; ‘boyfriend’/‘girlfriend’ just doesn’t fit at our age. I really don’t care if we’re thought not to be a heterosexual couple.  I think your correspondent should just relax.  When introducing this lady he should say, ‘Have you met Sally?’  Let the other party make any determination without further comment.”]

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Canada (or Canadian?) geese

Q: Why are they Canada geese, not Canadian geese? After all, we have Canadian bacon and Canadian whisky.

A: Some English speakers do indeed refer to this large waterbird as a “Canadian goose,” but a majority prefer “Canada goose” as the common name for Branta canadensis, according to online searches.

The four standard dictionaries we’ve consulted, reflecting popular usage, list “Canada goose” as the common name for the North American bird, though two of them include “Canadian goose” as a variant usage.

Birders and ornithologists generally accept the popular usage when referring to the goose by its English name. The website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for example, refers to the bird as “Canada goose” and describes it this way:

“A familiar and widespread goose with a black head and neck, white chinstrap, light tan to cream breast and brown back.”

The National Audubon Society also refers to the bird online as “Canada goose,” and notes, “This big ‘Honker’ is among our best-known waterfowl.”

In 1758, the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus included the Canada goose in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, which classified animals, plants, and minerals.

But Linnaeus, writing in Latin, didn’t use the term “Canada goose” in the 10th edition. He referred to the bird as Anas canadensis, a protonym, or early version, of the now-accepted scientific name, Branta canadensis, or “black goose of Canada.”

(Linnaeus used Anas, classical Latin for duck, as the genus for ducks, geese, and swans. Branta, now the genus for black geese, is of unknown origin but may be related to old Germanic names for similarly colored waterbirds.)

The earliest reference to the bird in the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1772 citation from Hudson’s Bay Birds, by Johann Reinhold Forster: “The Canada geese are very plentiful at Hudson’s Bay.”

The OED has only one other citation for the usage, from the Penny Cyclopaedia (1838): “The Canada Goose generally builds its nest on the ground.”

The dictionary, which has no citation for “Canadian” goose or geese, notes that the noun “Canada” is used attributively—that is, adjectivally—“in the names of various commercial products, animals, and plants.”

In addition to “Canada goose,” the OED cites “Canada jay,” “Canada potato” (Jerusalem artichoke), “Canada rice” (an aquatic grass), “Canada thistle,” “Canada violet,” and others.

In the 19th century, writers used the attributive noun (“Canada”) as well as the adjective (“Canadian”) in referring to the goose.

For example, Meriwether Lewis, in a May 15, 1805, journal entry during his expedition with William Clark, uses the adjective in reporting “a small species of geese which differ considerably from the common canadian goose.”

And The American Universal Geography (1812), in listing birds of the United States, says, “The Canadian goose (Anser canadensis) is a bird of passage, and gregarious.”

In The Birds of America (1827-39), John James Audubon uses the attributive noun: “The Canada Geese are fond of returning regularly to the place which they have chosen for resting in, and this they continue to do until they find themselves greatly molested while there.”

And in Ornithological Biography (1835), Audubon describes a “curious mode of shooting the Canada Goose I have practised with much success.”

Audubon says he sinks a hogshead in the sand, covers himself with brushwood, “and in this concealment I have killed several at a shot; but the stratagem answers for only a few nights in the season.”

We’ve come across several theories about why English speakers generally prefer the term “Canada goose” to “Canadian goose.”

The silliest one is that John Canada—described variously as an ornithologist, a taxonomist, or a taxidermist—named the bird for himself. We haven’t found a shred of evidence to confirm this or that such a person even existed.

Another theory is that English speakers use the attributive noun “Canada” for the goose because canadensis  in the scientific Latin name means “of Canada.”

But the ornithologist and zoologist Richard C. Banks, quoted on snopes.com, has said “the English name of a species is not directly related to the scientific name or its ending.”

Banks says the common names of birds probably develop simply because the people who use them prefer them to the alternatives.

In his book Obsolete English Names of North American Birds and Their Modern Equivalents (1988), Banks notes that the Canada goose has had many other names, including “tundra goose,” “common wild goose,” and “ring-neck goose.”

Pat Schwieterman, a contributor to the Language Log, notes that the adjectival form is typically used when the names of countries modify nouns, while the attributive form is generally used when the names of states or provinces modify nouns.

He cites such avian adjectival examples as the American crow, the Cuban parakeet, and the Jamaican lizard cuckoo, along with attributive examples like the California condor, the Arizona woodpecker, and the Louisiana waterthrush.

We can cite many other examples, notably the American robin, as well as many exceptions, including the subject of today’s post: the Canada goose.

Finally, Laura Erickson, who writes and broadcasts about birds, says on the mailing list of the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union that the Canada goose “gets its name from its breeding range.”

“It is of course perfectly acceptable and correct to call one a ‘Canadian goose’ if you see its passport or some other verification of its citizenship,” she adds.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Comparison shopping

Q: A lot of style guides distinguish between “compare to” and “compare with,” but the Oxford Dictionaries website says this distinction is rarely seen in practice. They’ve always seemed interchangeable to me. What do you think?

A: The usage note that got your attention—in the US edition of Oxford Dictionaries—describes the traditional rule, then adds: “In practice, however, this distinction is rarely maintained.”

The British edition of Oxford Dictionaries goes even further, saying “the distinction is not clear-cut,” and the two phrases can be used interchangeably.

The traditional rule can be summarized this way: “Compare with” is used to examine for similarities and differences (often between things of the same type). “Compare to” is used to show a similarity (often between things that are quite different).

It’s possible that the Oxford editors are overstating the case. Yes, English is losing the distinction between “compare with” and “compare to,” but it’s not quite lost yet.

It may be gone, however, by the time Pat publishes a fourth edition of her grammar book Woe Is I. She included the old dictum in the third edition, but played it down: “Don’t lose sleep over this one. The difference is subtle.”

In fact, the distinction is so subtle that some modern usage guides and standard dictionaries disagree on exactly how “compare with” and “compare to” differ.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), for example, says both “compare with” and “compare to” are normally used to examine for similarities and differences, while Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) says only “compare with” is used this way.

However, the two usage guides agree that “compare to” is generally used to point out similarities.

The Collins English Dictionary, generally following the traditional rule, says “compare” is usually followed by “to” when showing similarities, and by “with” when showing similarities or differences.

The online Merriam Webster’s Unabridged says either preposition can be used for either purpose.

We’ve checked eight standard dictionaries in all, and no two are alike in describing the use of “compare with” and “compare to.”

Confused? You’re not alone. Then is anybody paying attention to the traditional rule? Well, sort of.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage examined modern examples of how “compare with” and “compare to” were actually used by writers.

The usage guide found that the old rule “is more often observed than not” when “compare” is used in the sense of “liken”—that is, to show similarities. Among the examples cited are these:

“The deeds of modern heroes are constantly compared to those of Greek and Roman epic and legend” (Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition, 1949).

“They were blue, but a blue so deep that I can only compare it to the color of the night sky” (Robert Penn Warren, Partisan Review, fall 1944).

“Though to be compared to Homer passed the time pleasantly” (William Butler Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil, 1922).

However, the usage guide did find some literary examples in which “with” was used in the “liken” sense.

In a Feb. 2, 1953, citation from the New Republic, for instance, Stephen Spender discusses a poem in which “images seen are compared with sounds heard.”

The editors of the M-W usage guide found “more variation in practice” when “compare” was used in the sense of “examine so as to discover resemblances and differences.”

“Our citations show that more writers use with (as the basic rule prescribes) than to, but the numerical difference between the majority and the minority is not as great as for the ‘liken’ sense,” they wrote.

The usage guide includes examples of both “compare with” and “compare to” used in the “examine” sense. Here are two of them:

“But he is at least a forerunner of what is now called Humanism, of which I must here say something, if only to contrast it and compare it with the Aestheticism of Pater” (T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1932).

“Of five children two died in infancy and of the other three only Susana could be compared to her ancestors in fiber” (George Santayana, Persons and Places, 1944).

The M-W guide adds that it’s often difficult to tell whether a writer is using “compare” in the “examine” or the “liken” sense. It cites the Santayana quote above as an example of such ambiguity.

Yes, it’s a fine mess, all right. You asked us for our opinion, and here it is.

First of all, it’s not something to hyperventilate over. Although a lot of good writers follow the traditional rule, others don’t.

For the time being, we’d recommend using “to” if “liken” could be substituted for “compare.” Otherwise, let your ear decide—use whichever  preposition sounds better and seems more natural to you: “to” or “with.”

If you’re interested, we discussed the history of “compare” on the blog a few years ago in a post about words of equivalence.

English got the verb from French, but it ultimately comes from Latin, where comparare means “to pair together, couple, match, bring together,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When it was first used in English writing in 1447, the OED says, “compare” was generally followed by “to” and meant “to speak of or represent as similar; to liken.”

Here’s an example from Thomas Starkey, written sometime before 1538: “The one may … be comparyd to the body & the other to the soule.”

The OED says a broader sense emerged in the early 1500s: “to mark or point out the similarities and differences of (two or more things); to bring or place together (actually or mentally) for the purpose of noting the similarities and differences.”

Historically, the OED citations show, “compare” has been accompanied by either “with” or “to” when used in the sense of marking similarities and differences. We’ll end with examples using each preposition.

“Whats … the world it self … if compared to the least visible Star in the Firmament?” (From Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, which first appeared in 1621 though there were later editions.)

“To compare Great things with small.” (From John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1667.)

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Grammar Linguistics Usage Word origin

Editing the Editors

An “Open Book” interview with Patricia T. O’Conner in the New York Times Book Review

By JOHN WILLIAMS

This week, one grammar guru writes about another, as Patricia T. O’Conner reviews Mary Norris’s “Between You & Me.” Norris has been a copy editor for more than 30 years at The New Yorker, the notoriously fastidious magazine, and O’Conner, a former copy editor at the Book Review, has written several books about language usage, including “Woe Is I.”

In an email interview, O’Conner said her favorite book on writing is “The Reader Over Your Shoulder,” by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. “There’s no hand-holding, no coddling, no nonsense about ‘finding a voice,’ ” O’Conner said. It was first published in 1943, and O’Conner cautions readers to find early copies, since “some of the best parts are lost” in revised editions.

For the last word on grammar, she recommends “The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,” by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. “It’s an awesome feat of scholarship, and it’s not for sissies — this book is dense, to say the least,” she said. “But it has all of the answers and none of the superstitions.”

Asked for a favorite obscure title on the subject, O’Conner cited “a little green book called ‘Gobbledygook Has Gotta Go,’ published in 1966 by the U.S. Government Printing Office,” given to her by a friend. “The author was John O’Hayre, an employee of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, and I hope he got a medal.”

Like Norris, O’Conner knows the hazards of writing about writing. (Norris started a recent Q. and A. on Reddit with a disclaimer: “Forgive the typos, it’s my day off.”) O’Conner said: “There are always people who will pounce and say, ‘Gotcha! You just broke your own rule!’ But my real feeling is that the world needs fewer writers and more readers.”

From the April 19, 2015, print edition of the New York Times Book Review.

Categories
English English language Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage Word origin

Consider the Comma

A review of Mary Norris’s Between You & Me, from the New York Times Book Review

By PATRICIA T. O’CONNER

Copy editors are a peculiar species (I’ve been one myself, and at the very publication you are now reading). But those at The New Yorker are something else entirely, a species nova that mutated into existence in 1925 and would hurl itself off a cliff rather than forsake the dieresis in “coöperate.”

For the uninitiated, The New Yorker is a magazine that until 2003 spelled the word “deluxe” with a hyphen: “de-luxe.” It inserts periods into “I.B.M.,” though IBM itself dropped them long ago. It phonetically splits the word “England,” when it breaks at the end of a line, like this: “En-gland.” (One imagines a verb, “england,” meaning to provide with glands.)

A regular reader might be forgiven for wondering, “Are these people nuts?” In Mary Norris’s “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen,” we have our answer: They most certainly are. And their obsessions, typographical and otherwise, make hilarious reading.

Norris, a pillar of the copy department for decades, is not crazy herself, or not entirely. For instance, she knows when to stay her hand and let the writer’s voice come through. She also admits occasionally doubting the sanity of The New Yorker’s storied grammar goddess, Eleanor Gould Packard: “I had the unsettling thought ‘What if Eleanor ever loses it?’ ” But what to do? “No one would enter the copy department and say to Eleanor, ‘Drop the pencil and step away from the desk.’ ”

“Between You & Me” is mostly a memoir, but it’s part usage guide, too. Norris shares her views on spelling, punctuation, dangling participles and troublesome pronouns, providing apt illustrations from an editing life. V. S. Pritchett, we learn, was “a terrible speller,” but “when Pauline Kael typed ‘prevert’ instead of ‘pervert,’ she meant ‘prevert.’ ” James Salter adds control to a word “by smacking it with a comma as one would put English on a cue ball.” And by judiciously placing a colon, “Kelefa Sanneh, writing about Scotch, can sound like Henry James.”

But the grammar advice is less illuminating. Norris defends a friend of hers who actually said, while looking for her sunglasses, “Are those they?” Mary, drop the pencil and step away from the desk. Yes, one may use “It is I” if one wishes, but “It is me” is faultless English. The old prescription requiring the nominative case after the verb “to be” has long been discredited as a Latin construction mistakenly applied to English.

Despite the extreme grammar, this book charmed my socks off. Norris tracks down the person responsible for the hyphen in the title of “Moby-Dick” (it wasn’t Melville). There’s a chapter about dirty words, suitably salty. And Norris is passionate on the subject of pencils, describing them as seductively as others write about wine. Her current love is the “delicious” Blackwing, with its soft lead and flat eraser. On a pilgrimage to a pencil sharpener museum in Ohio (yes), only a sign warning that patrons were under surveillance, she writes, “kept me from dancing.”

Norris is a master storyteller and serves up plenty of inside stuff. When Mark Singer wrote an article about the cost of going to the movies and buying refreshments, the editors cut his reference to Junior Mints. As one editor intoned, “A New Yorker writer should not be eating Junior Mints.” Norris tells of the night she mopped up after Lillian Ross’s poodle, Goldie. She was even propositioned by Philip Roth! Well, sort of. She made a good catch in one of his pieces, and he replied: “Who is this woman? And will she come live with me?” She’s been smitten ever since: “If he should ever read this I just want to say I’m still available.”

(Patricia T. O’Conner’s books on language include “Woe Is I” and, most recently, “Origins of the Specious,” written with Stewart Kellerman. They blog about language at Grammarphobia.com.)

From the April 19, 2015, print edition of the New York Times Book Review.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

“Fast” times

Q: I may be missing a whole category of similar words, but “fast” is the only verb I can think of that requires NOT doing something in order to be doing it. Do you know of any others? Also, it’s odd that something moving quickly is “fast” while something fixed in place is “fast” too–utterly different etymology, no doubt.

A: Strange as it may seem, those three widely different meanings of “fast” are derived from the same ultimate source, firmuz, a reconstructed ancient Germanic root that meant “firm,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

“That underlying sense persists in various contexts, such as ‘hold fast’ and ‘fast friend,’ ” Ayto writes.

He says the sense of eating no food “originated in the notion of ‘holding fast to a particular observance’—specifically abstinence from food.”

Ayto adds that the use of “fast” to mean quick probably comes from “an underlying connotation of ‘extremity’ or ‘severity’ ” in the early “firm” sense of “fast.”

When “fast” first showed up in Old English, it was both an adverb meaning firmly or securely and an adjective meaning “firmly fixed in its place; not easily moved or shaken; settled, stable,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest examples in the OED are from King Alfred’s translation (circa 888) of a work by Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy). We’ll quote the citations and translate the Old English.

adverb: “Swiþe fæste to somne gelimed” (“Exceedingly fast and joined together”).

adjective: “Se þe wille fæst hus timbrian ne sceall he hit no settan upon þone hehstan cnol” (“He who wants his house to be fast must not build it on the highest hill”).

The verb “fast,” meaning “to abstain from food, or to restrict oneself to a meagre diet, either as a religious observance or as a ceremonial expression of grief,” showed up less than a century later, according to Oxford.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the verb is from The Blickling Homilies (971), a collection of Anglo-Saxon religious commentaries: “Þæt ure Drihten æfter þæm fulwihte fæstte” (“After our Lord was baptized, he fasted”).

Some two centuries later, “fast” showed up in its speedy sense as an adverb meaning “quickly, rapidly, swiftly,” according to the OED.

In the dictionary’s earliest citation, from Layamon’s Brut, a Middle English poem written sometime before 1200, “fast” is spelled “veste”:

“He warnede alle his cnihtes … & fusden an veste” (“He warned all his knights … and set sail fast”).

In the early 14th century, “fast” appeared as an adjective meaning quick or swift. The first Oxford citation is from Cursor Mundi, an anonymous Middle English poem written sometime before 1325:

“Sampson … gaue a-braid sa fers and fast, þat all þe bandes of him brast” (“Samson made a sudden movement, fierce and fast, so that all his bindings burst”).

The Middle English phrase “fers and fast” might have been translated as “fast and furious,” an expression that had lost its Samsonian fierceness when it showed up in Modern English in the 18th century.

The OED’s first citation for the phrase, which is defined as “eager, uproarious, noisy,” is from “Tam o’ Shanter,” a 1790 poem by Robert Burns: “The mirth and fun grew fast and furious.”

Getting back to your question, you’re right that the verb “fast,” meaning to refrain from eating, is an odd bird.

Offhand, we can think of at least one other verb that requires, as you put it, not doing something in order to be doing it: “abstain,” in the sense of refraining from drinking alcohol.

Of course “abstain” can also be used in a more general sense, as well as “avoid,” “cease,” “forgo,” “quit,” “renounce,” “spurn,” “stop,” and similar words. Some linguists refer to such terms as “avoidance words” or “words of rejection.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Inside “outside”

Q: My current grammar bête noir is the American insistence on “of” after “outside.” I realize you are on the other side of the pond, but please be neutral. Which is more elegant—“outside the hotel” or “outside of the hotel”? Surely not two prepositions in tandem?

A: OK, we think “outside the hotel” is more elegant, but we don’t think “outside of” is wrong here, and neither, apparently, do most Americans.

Generally a phrase that looks like two prepositions is actually an adverb accompanied by a preposition, as in “flew out of the nest” … “knelt down on the floor” … “doubled over in pain” … “it’s over with now.” The first underlined word in each example is an adverb.

This is also the case with “outside of,” a phrase that the Oxford English Dictionary describes as a compound preposition consisting of the adverb “outside” plus the preposition “of.”

Like “inside,” the word “outside” has several grammatical functions. It can be (1) a preposition, as in “the grass outside the fence”; (2) a noun, as in “the outside of the house is better than the inside”; (3) an adjective, as in “the outside world”; or (4) an adverb, as in “let’s step outside.”

The two standard American dictionaries we consult the most—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.)—both categorize the compound “outside of” as a preposition meaning either (1) “outside” in the spatial sense, or (2) “aside from.”

More to the point, both American Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s list the phrase without reservation (that is, without usage labels like “slang” or “informal”) when used in either sense.

However, some American usage guides object to using “outside of” in one or more of those senses.

Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.), for example, frowns on using it for either sense, while Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says both uses are OK.

“Outside of,” as Merriam-Webster’s notes, “was in common use by standard 19th-century authors such as Emerson, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Henry James.”

Matters are different in the UK, where Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) says “outside” alone “is overwhelmingly the normal use” for both senses.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Dictionaries online (a different  entity) have contradictory views about the phrase.

The OED says the use of “outside of” to mean “apart from” or “with the exception of” is “colloquial”—more proper to ordinary conversation than to formal English.

But the dictionary recognizes “outside of” as entirely normal when used in the spatial sense, defined as “beyond the walls, limits, or bounds of; to or on the outside of; external to.”

The British version of Oxford Dictionaries, on the other hand, sees the use of “outside of” in the spatial sense as “chiefly North American,” while its use in the “apart from” sense is listed without reservation.

The OED’s earliest example of the “apart from” sense is from J. Jacob Oswandel’s Notes of the Mexican War (1847):

“Those who have any money left can get something outside of government rations to eat, but those who have none have to take what comes, good or not good.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the spatial sense is from 1784, when the phrase appeared in a stage direction—“Outside of Dermot’s House”—in Poor Soldier, a comic opera written by the Irish playwright John O’Keeffe.

What do we think of all this? We agree with the editors of the Merriam-Webster’s usage guide:

“Our evidence suggests that writers and speakers retain the of when it seems right to them, and drop it when it does not. You have the same choice.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

An existential question

Q: What exactly does “existential” mean when used to modify such nouns as “threat” and  “crisis”?

A: On a literal level, the adjective “existential” means “of or pertaining to existence,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

So, for example, an “existential threat” would be a threat to existence—that is, to life. An “existential crisis” would be one in which existence itself is held in the balance.

On a personal level, someone facing an “existential crisis” might feel that existence has no purpose, that life is meaningless and perhaps not worth living.

You might say that Hamlet had an existential crisis when he cried, “To be, or not to be, that is the question.”

But “existential” often isn’t used literally, especially in news reports.

For instance, the term “existential struggle” has been used to describe what’s happening in urban design, art, jazz, shipping, and parenting. And Miley Cyrus reportedly had an “existential crisis” at seeing a photo of her teen-age self as Hannah Montana.

We often hear terrorism called an “existential threat,” one that has the country in an “existential struggle.” And recently an executive for a security firm told CNBC that cyber-hacking was “an existential threat to our society.”

It’s hard to see how some of these uses deserve the label “existential.” But many people now see the term as a handy adjective for conveying a sense of urgency or adding dramatic emphasis, usages that aren’t yet recognized by standard dictionaries.

Oxford Dictionaries online says “existential” has these meanings: (1) of or relating to existence, (2) concerning existence as seen through the philosophy of existentialism (more on this later), (3) of a proposition in logic that affirms or implies existence (ditto).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) adds a couple of other meanings: (4) based on experience and (5) relating to a linguistic construction that indicates existence, such as “there’s” in “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”

The word “existential” came into English by way of two medieval Latin terms, the adjective existentialis and the noun existentia (“existence”).

It was first recorded in writing, according to the OED, in Genuine Remains (1693), the posthumously published papers of Dr. Thomas Barlow, Lord Bishop of Lincoln.

In an essay written when he was a Master’s candidate at Oxford (this would have been in 1632 or ’33), Barlow discussed the question, “Whether it is better not to be, than to be Miserable.” (Perhaps he’d seen Hamlet on the stage.)

In one passage, he contrasts the two states: “the enjoying the good of existence, though accompanied with misery,” versus “annihilation: and consequently the being deprived of that existential good.” (We’ve expanded on the OED citation.)

Barlow wrote his exercise in Latin, so “existential” didn’t appear in English until his works were translated in 1693.

“Existential” had that bare meaning—having to do with existence—for quite a while.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, according to OED citations, used it the same way in a weekly paper he edited, the Friend (1809 or ’10): “The essential cause of fiendish guilt, when it makes itself existential and peripheric.”

But later Coleridge used the term in a new way in the field of logic, according to the OED. He used “existential” to describe a proposition that expresses the fact of existence.

Here’s the earliest known use of this sense of the word, from a lecture Coleridge wrote in 1819:

“This necessarily led men … to doubt whether a logical truth was necessarily an existencial one, i.e. whether because a thing was logically consistent it must be necessarily existent.”

The word also has a specific meaning in philosophy, where it has a doctrine all to itself—existentialism.

As the OED explains, existentialism “concentrates on the existence of the individual, who, being free and responsible, is held to be what he makes himself by the self-development of his essence through acts of the will.”

The existential or existentialist movement began principally with the Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s.

But, as the OED says, “it was developed in the 20th c. chiefly in continental Europe by Jaspers, Sartre, and others, and the English word existentialism answers to German existentialismus, which is first recorded in 1919.”

It would be interesting to hear what Kierkegaard or Sartre would say about the “existential struggle” to be a good parent.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Iffen ya brung a gun

Q: A Vivian Maier image from Chicago in the 1950s shows a sign with this message: ’IFEN YA’ BRUNG A GUN / LEAVE IT OUTSIDE THE DOOR / ’CAUSE SHOOTIN’ OUR FRIENDS / JUST MAKES US SORE! Can you explain ’IFEN? It looks like a contraction but I can’t think what’s missing.

A: The Dictionary of American Regional English speculates that the “iffen” spelling represents the pronunciation of “if and.”

DARE says this regional conjunction, heard chiefly in the South and South Midland, has also been spelled “effen,” “ef’n,” “if-and,” “if’n,” “ifnd,” and “ifnt.” It says “iffen” is similar in meaning to “if” or “if so be.”

The earliest example of the usage in the regional dictionary is from a 1909 issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly in Durham, NC: “Ef’n yo’ don’ lak de tas’e er yo’ bittle [=victuals], dash um ’way an’ be done!”

(DARE describes the language in this citation as Gullah, a Creole heard among African Americans living on the Sea Islands and along the Southeastern coast.)

However, the Oxford English Dictionary has a much earlier example of the usage from Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel Tom Jones: “If an she be a Rebel.”

(The OED cites the quotation in discussing the substitution of “an” for the conjunction “and,” which it describes as a Scottish or Northern English regionalism.)

Here’s another DARE example of the usage, from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel The Yearling (1938): “Iffen you’ll learn yourself to work, you’ll be your Pa all over.”

The regional dictionary’s most recent example of the usage, from Bobbie Ann Mason’s novel Feather Crowns (1993), supports the idea that the “iffen” spelling simply represents the pronunciation of “if and”:

“Well, I thought it might be, and I thought I’d tell you if-and you didn’t know.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Linguistics Usage Word origin

That’s not us—it’s nature!

Q: My dictionary says nature is the entire physical universe. But for most of us, nature is what’s out there and not human. My question (which I don’t expect answered) is thus: When did we humans look around and say, “That’s not us—it’s nature”?

A: You’re right. We can’t tell you when the first human beings said, in whatever prehistoric language they were speaking, “That’s not us—it’s nature.”

But we can tell you when English speakers began referring to the physical world, as opposed to humans and their creations, as “nature.” It was around 600 years ago. Here’s the story.

English borrowed the noun “nature” in the 13th century from the Anglo-Norman and Old French word nature, but its ultimate source is Latin, where natura meant birth, constitution, character, the physical world, and many other things.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that natura and nature had many earthy meanings in Latin and Anglo-Norman.

In classical Latin, for example, natura could mean the genitals, while in medieval Latin, it could mean the need to urinate or defecate; in Anglo-Norman, nature could mean semen or menstrual discharge.

Those bodily senses carried over into English, where “nature” at one time or another meant excrement, semen, menstrual discharge, the female genitals, sexual desire, and female sexual secretions.

Those senses are now obsolete or rare, but one earthy meaning is still with us: the need to urinate or defecate, as in “the call of nature.”

When “nature” first showed up in English, according to the OED, it referred to the “vital or physical powers of a person; a person’s physical strength or constitution.”

The earliest example in the dictionary is from a Kentish sermon, written around 1275: “Þe nature of Man is of greater strengþe and of greater hete ine þo age” (“The nature of Man is of greater strength and greater promise in early age”).

A little over a century later, “nature” came to mean the “inherent dominating power or impulse in a person by which character or action is determined, directed, or controlled,” according to the OED.

The earliest Oxford citation for this sense is from “The Tale of Melibeus” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (circa 1390): “Nature defendeth and forbedeth by right that no man make hym self riche vn to the harm of another persone.”

Around the same time, “nature” took on the sense of the “innate or characteristic disposition of a particular person, animal, etc.,” the OED says.

In Confessio Amantis, a poem written by John Gower sometime before 1393, Morpheus is described as someone “whos nature Is forto take the figure Of what persone that him liketh.”

Rather than describe all the many meanings of “nature,” we’ll skip ahead to the sense you’ve asked about, which the OED defines as the “phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Cleanness, an anonymous  Middle English poem, written around 1400, about married life. The citation here refers to the infant Jesus:

“Þe ox & þe asse … knewe hym by his clannes for Kyng of nature” (“The ox and the ass knew him by his purity for the King of nature”).

We’ll end with a 20th-century example from The Age of Gods, a 1928 study by the British historian Christopher Dawson about prehistoric culture:

“Man was entirely at the mercy of nature—a mere scavenger who eked out a miserable existence as a food-gatherer and an eater of shell-fish.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Several senses

Q: I recently came across a NY Times article that referred to charges that a man had created fake accounts for his ex-girlfriend “on a several online dating websites.” Why is there an “a” in front of “several”?

A: This appears to be an editing error, though the adjective “several” was sometimes preceded by the indefinite article “a” from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Our guess is that the reporter wrote “a number of” or perhaps “a few,” but a copy editor preferred “several.” In making the change, the article “a” was accidentally left in place.

In case other readers of the blog are interested, the Times article was about “revenge porn,” online harassment that involves the posting of sexually explicit material.

In contemporary English, “several” is usually an adjective (“several books”) or a pronoun (“several of them”) that refers to an indefinite small number greater than two or three.

(Some British dictionaries refer to “several” as a “determiner” when used to modify a noun or noun phrase, but the Oxford English Dictionary and standard American dictionaries use the broader and more common term “adjective,” as we do.)

In addition to its primary sense today, the adjective “several” can also mean different or various (“They split up and went their several ways”) or legally separate (“joint versus several liability”).

The adjective “several” meant separate or apart when English got it from Anglo-Norman in the 1400s, according to the OED. The word is ultimately derived from the Latin verb separare (to separate).

In The Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde to the Holy Land (1511), for example, a reference to “seuerall Cloysters, and seuerall [l]odgynges” means “separate cloisters and separate lodgings.”

The OED has quite a few examples of “several” used in this sense with an indefinite article, including a citation from Speculum Mundi, a 1635 study of nature by John Swan: “Every scale of an onyon is a severall and differing scale.”

And here’s a citation from Milton’s The History of Britain (1690): “But so different a state of things requires a several relation.”

The legal sense of separate, as opposed to joint, showed up in the 1500s, according to Oxford. Here’s a citation from The Interpreter, a 1607 legal dictionary by John Cowell: “Severall taile (tallium separatum) is that whereby land is given and entayled seuerally.”

The use of “several” to mean various or different also showed up in the 1500s, according to Oxford. This example is from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1600): “Draw aside the curtaines and discouer the seuerall caskets to this noble Prince.”

In the 1600s, the adjective took on what Oxford describes as its “chief current sense,”  referring to “an indefinite (but not large) number exceeding two or three,” or “more than two or three but not very many.”

Here’s an example from Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671): “Ninevee, of length within her wall / Several days journey.”

The pronoun use of “several” to mean an indefinite but small number also showed up in the 1600s.

The OED has several examples, including this one from Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705:

“There are still several of these Topicks that are far from being exhausted.”

We could go on, but we’ve exhausted ourselves, if not our topic. If you’d like to read more, we wrote posts in 2010 and 2007 on the use of “few,” “couple,” and “several” for small, indefinite amounts.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

A conspiracy or an intrigue?

Q: In a New Yorker story, Isaac Bashevis Singer writes, “Morris Krakower is clever at conspiracy, but intrigue isn’t necessary here.” I’ve googled and thesaurused, but I’m apparently too dense to get the distinction. I’m hoping you will clarify it for me.

A: The story, “Inventions,” describes a visit by Krakower, a representative of the Communist International, to Warsaw in the 1930s to address a leftist conference on world peace.

In his speech, Krakower defends Stalinism and “proclaims that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can insure peace.”

Although the Polish police have spies in the audience, Krakower isn’t concerned about secrecy. “A few weeks of prison,” he thinks, “can only enhance the prestige of a Party worker.”

So what does Singer mean when he writes that Comrade Krakower “is clever at conspiracy, but intrigue isn’t necessary here”?

We suspect he means that Krakower doesn’t have to resort to convoluted skullduggery to keep his work for the Communist Party secret.

Of course Singer, who died in 1991, was writing in Yiddish, not English. The translator of his story, Aliza Shevrin, is responsible for the English wording.

But is there really a distinction between “conspiracy” and “intrigue”? Not much, as far as we can see, at least not when the two words are used in the cloak-and-dagger sense.

Standard dictionaries generally define “conspiracy” as a secret plan by two or more people to do something illegal or harmful. And the dictionaries define “intrigue” as a secret plot or scheme.

About the only difference we can see is that it takes at least two people to conspire, but only one to intrigue.

When English adapted “conspiracy” from the Latin conspiratio in the 14th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word meant pretty much what it does today—a “combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose.”

The OED’s earliest citation, from “The Monk’s Tale” (circa 1386) by Chaucer, says Brutus and Cassius “Ful privately hath made conspiracie / Agains this Julius in subtil wise.”

When English borrowed “intrigue” from French in the mid-17th century, it referred to “intricacy, complexity; a complicated contrivance; a maze, a labyrinth,” according to Oxford, though that sense is now obsolete.

Before the century was over, the dictionary says, the English term took on the contemporary sense of “underhand plotting or scheming.”

Here’s an early example from The Usurper, a 1668 play by Edward Howard: “Intregue (the true Soul and Genius of the Stage).”

And here’s another, from a 1692 English translation of an essay by the French writer Charles de Saint-Évremond: “He was made Cardinal by Intrigues, Factions, and Tumults.”

Around the same time, “intrigue” took on its sense of “clandestine illicit intimacy between a man and a woman; a liaison,” according to the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for this usage is from The Ephesian and Cimmerian Matrons (1668), by Walter Charleton: “She in like manner falls into an Intrigue (as they nowadays call it).”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

“Accede” vs. “concede”

Q: We have been thinking about the difference between “accede” and “concede.” Can you concede something without acceding to it? Or vice versa? Thanks for any help/guidance you can provide.

A: Both of these verbs express a kind of giving in or acquiescence. The difference is that “concede” has an element of defeat, while “accede” implies a more ready acceptance.

Standard dictionaries define “concede” as to yield, surrender, or admit defeat, or to acknowledge—perhaps grudgingly—that something is true.

And they define “accede” as to give consent or approval, or to agree to a request or demand.

(We’re summarizing the modern definitions in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed., and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.)

So yes, it’s possible to “concede” without “acceding,” because the verbs represent different levels of acquiescence. You might reluctantly agree to something without approving of it.

The truth is that few people use “accede” in ordinary English. “Concede” is much more common. Instead of “accede,” a speaker or writer is more likely to use a common synonym—agree with, approve of, or consent to.

On the surface, it would appear that the two words were derived from “cede,” but in fact neither of them were.

It’s true that at the heart of all three English words is the Latin cedere, a verb that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “to go away, give way, yield.”

But “accede” predated “cede” by a couple of centuries, while “concede” appeared on the scene around the same time as “cede” or a bit earlier.

What’s more, the prefixes (“con-” and “ac-”) are no help in figuring out the different meanings of “accede” and “concede,” so the words are easy to confuse.

“Accede” came into English from the Anglo-Norman and Middle French verb acceder, meaning to approach, accept, or agree to.

That verb’s counterpart in classical Latin, accedere, had several meanings, Oxford explains, including “to go or come (to), draw near, approach, to enter, to resort (to), to attach oneself, join, to agree, assent.”

The Latin suffix ac- (“to” or “toward”) was a variant of ad– that was used before certain letters.

It’s difficult to say just how old “accede” is in English writing. The OED says it could date back to 1425 or even earlier.

But the first definite citation, Oxford says, was recorded in 1465, when the verb meant “to come forward, approach, or arrive (at a place or state).”

Another early meaning of “accede” was to join with or give support. But those early senses of the word are long dead.

The meaning of “accede” that’s still with us, a sense first recorded in 1534, is “to assent, agree, give way,” according to Oxford.

A later meaning, to come into office or assume a position, came along in the mid-1700s and is often used in reference to royalty, as when a monarch “accedes” to the throne. (We also refer to a king or queen’s “accession.”)

Now for the latecomers, “cede” and “concede,” which came into English in the 17th century.

“Cede” first appeared in 1633, the OED says, a borrowing either from French or (more directly) from Latin.

Originally, “cede” meant “to give way, give place, yield to”—as in “a servant cedes to his master.”

But that early meaning is now obsolete, Oxford says, and since the 1750s to “cede” has meant “to give up, grant; to yield, surrender: esp. to give up a portion of territory.”

The modern sense of the word first appeared in the travel writings of Alexander Drummond in 1754: “That honour was entirely ceded to the Parthian royal race.”

“Concede” was first recorded in 1632, so it and “cede” showed up at virtually the same time.

“Concede” came either from the French conceder or directly from the Latin concedere, which Oxford defines as “to withdraw, give way, yield, grant, etc.”

The essential meaning of “concede” was—and still is—“to grant, yield, or surrender” something like a right or a privilege, Oxford explains. (Here the prefix “con-” means “altogether.”)

In the 1640s, according to the OED, a new sense of “concede” was recorded: “to admit, allow, grant (a proposition), to acknowledge the truth, justice, or propriety of (a statement, claim, etc.).”

For example, in an argument a speaker might “concede” a point or “concede” that a statement is true.

The “concede” that means to admit defeat in an election was first recorded in 1824, when a Kentucky newspaper, the Commentator, reported:  “This state is generally conceded to General Jackson.”

And of course when a candidate  “concedes,” a “concession” speech is not far behind.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Bragging rights

Q: I often use the phrase “brag on” when I speak of praising or boasting about my friends. One of those friends feels “brag on” is too slangy. What are your thoughts?

A: Your use of “brag on” as a verb phrase meaning to praise or to boast about isn’t slang, but it’s considered an American regionalism.

In standard usage, “brag” is paired with a different preposition—“about” or “of”—and it’s usually used in the sense of boasting, not praising.

The Dictionary of American Regional English combines both senses in its definition of “brag on” as “to praise or boast about someone or something.”

Today the usage is chiefly heard in midland America, according to DARE, but in the 19th century it was also heard on the East Coast.

The dictionary has examples ranging as far back as this one from Massachusetts in 1850: “It would have been somethin’ to brag on, I know.” In that citation, “brag on” clearly means the same as “brag about” or “boast about.”

DARE also has examples from other parts of the Eastern United States, including New York, Baltimore, and South Carolina.

But most of the examples recorded since the 1940s are from farther west: Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Louisiana. All these speakers use “brag on” the way you do, meaning either to boast about or to praise.

Here are a few of the examples: “(He) brags on himself” … “He bragged on how big and how pretty my horses were” … “I bragged on all the kids and dogs and he invited me in.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “brag” as “to vaunt, talk boastfully, boast oneself,” a usage first recorded in 1377.

When “brag” is followed by a preposition, the OED says, it’s generally “about” or “of.” In earlier times, though, the prepositions “in” and “on” were occasionally used with “brag,” according to the dictionary.

The OED, which describes the use of “brag in” and “brag on” as obsolete, doesn’t mention the regional American usage.

A sense of “brag” that arose in the 17th century—meaning “to declare or assert boastfully, to boast”—doesn’t need a preposition. It’s often followed by a clause introduced by “that,” according to Oxford citations.

Here’s an early example: “The verie meanest … bragged that they had bathed their hands in the bloud of a Lutheran” (from a 1631 edition of John Foxe’s Actes & Monuments).

Before we close, we can’t resist mentioning an etymological curiosity. No one has ever figured out the origin of “brag,” which dates back to around 1300 in one form or another (it’s been an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a verb).

French has some similar words but they weren’t recorded until the 1500s, so French probably got braguer (to brag) from English rather than vice versa.

However, as the OED notes, a couple of 16th-century English derivatives, “braggart” and “braggery,” may have been borrowed from the French bragard  and braguerie.

In case you’re tempted to suggest that the Italians got there first with braggadocio, that’s a great suggestion but it’s not true. “Braggadocio” is an English word, a mock-Italian invention of the poet Edmund Spenser.

The story, as described in the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, is that in The Faerie Queene (1590), Spenser combined “brag” with the Italian suffix -occhio to form the name of a character who personified boastfulness.

Spenser spelled the name “Braggadocchio,” and no doubt intended the end to be pronounced as in Italian—“kyo.” Today “braggadocio” is spelled, and pronounced, as if  it ended in “sheeo” or “sho.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Linguistics Phrase origin Religion Usage Word origin

Let there be light

Q: After reading your post about the imperative use of “let,” I have a question. What is the function of “let” in the biblical command “Let there be light”? God can’t be addressing the light, since it doesn’t exist yet. So who or what is being addressed? And what purpose does “let” serve here?

A: The English expression “Let there be light” isn’t a literal translation of the Hebrew wording in Genesis: יהי אור. A word for word translation would be “exist light” or “light will be” or some variation.

So a literal translation of the full Hebrew text of Genesis 1:3, ויאמר אלהים יהי אור ויהי־אור, could be “And God said, ‘Light will be,’ and light was.” (We’ve added capitalization and punctuation.)

However, let’s not get too literal. The usual English translation (“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”) accurately and elegantly reflects the sense of the Hebrew.

Although the Hebrew phrase יהי אור may literally mean “light will be,” it’s in the jussive mood, which in Semitic languages expresses a weak or an indirect command.

Biblical translators have generally felt that “Let there be light” is the best wording to represent the jussive mood of יהי אור in Genesis 1:3. And we can’t think of a better one.

The biblical scholar Nahum M. Sarna, in the JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, discusses the use of יהי (“be” or “exist”) in Verse 3: “The directive yehi, found again in Verses 6 and 14, is reserved for the creation of celestial phenomena.”

In our opinion, you’re right that God isn’t addressing the light. He’s not addressing anyone or anything here. He’s simply creating light—that is, ordering that light exist.

In fact, it’s not clear that God is even speaking. The Hebrew verb אמר may mean “intend” as well as “say.” In this case, it may simply be a way to express divine will in human language.

(We won’t get into the old question of where the light came from, since the sun hadn’t been created yet. Biblical scholars have spent a lot of time on this already.)

What purpose, you ask, does “let” serve in the expression “Let there be light”?

When the imperative “let” is used in the sense of “allow” or “permit” or “cause,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can function as an auxiliary to the infinitive that follows—“be,” “bring forth,” and so on.

The OED gives several examples of the usage, including this one from The Mariner’s Magazine, a 1669 book by Samuel Sturmy about nautical navigation: “Let there be an hole about an Inch deep, which shall serve to Prime it with Powder-dust.”

The English scholar and clergyman William Tyndale is credited with introducing the expression “Let there be light” in his 1525 translation of the Bible.

His Bible was the first to appear in print in English, though John Wycliffe and others translated full or partial versions in English before the advent of printing.

Tyndale’s poetic biblical writing has given us such familiar phrases as “flowing with milk and honey,” “the apple of his eye,” “eat, drink, and be merry,” “the salt of the earth,” “the powers that be,” and “my brother’s keeper.”

And his translation heavily influenced the King James Version. In The Social Universe of the English Bible (2010), Naomi Tadmor writes that “about 83 per cent of the New Testament is deemed to be based on Tyndale and 76 per cent of the Old.”

But Tyndale ran afoul of Henry VIII by opposing the king’s plan to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. As a result, Tyndale met a grisly end.

On Oct. 6, 1536, he was convicted of heresy and put to death at Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels by being strangled and burned at the stake.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Is “redouble” to quadruple?

Q: I hear many politicians vow to “redouble” their efforts. When did this become an acceptable term and what does it literally mean—to quadruple one’s efforts?

A: The verb “redouble” has been an acceptable term since the mid-1400s, when it did indeed mean to quadruple.

But today “redouble” generally means to double or increase greatly, or to double an opponent’s double in bridge.

When English borrowed the term from Middle French in the mid-15th century, it meant to double for the second time or to double repeatedly.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Reule of Crysten Religioun (circa 1443), in which the English prelate Reginald Pecock writes that one should “double þis and ȝitt redouble it” (double this and still redouble it).

Although this sense of “redouble” isn’t seen much now, the OED does have a citation for the usage from the January 2003 issue of Wired magazine:

“Even worse are the dupers–counterfeiters who look for software bugs that let them double and redouble their gold on command, turning a single piece into into billions with just a few mouseclicks.” (We’ve expanded the Oxford citation.)

By the late 15th century, “redouble” was being used in the looser sense of “to increase, multiply; to intensify,” according to the OED.

The dictionary has a questionable 1473 citation from the writer-printer William Caxton as well as this definite example from Caxton’s 1490 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Redoublen her sorowes and her trystesses enforce more vpon her.”

The looser sense of “redouble” is similar to the usage in Middle French and Old French, where redoubler could mean “to continue with greater intensity” or “to multiply (something) by two,” according to Oxford.

Although “re-” often has the sense in English of doing something for a second time, the OED notes a “loss of distinct meaning” for the prefix in some English words and even earlier in some Latin terms.

(In a recent post, we discussed a question about a similar subject, the apparently unnecessary  “re-” in the word “reduplicative.”)

In other words, it’s not at all surprising that a politician would now use the verb “redouble” to mean merely to double or to increase greatly.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Pay attention!

Q: Have you done a piece on the blog about why we “pay attention” rather than “give attention” or, as the French say, “do attention”?

A: No, we haven’t explored this yet, so thanks for the suggestion.

You’re right that the verb phrase “pay attention” is more common and idiomatic than “give attention” when the speaker means “be attentive.” However, we can “give” someone our attention as well as “pay” attention to someone.

But getting back to your question, “paying” doesn’t always imply money changing hands.

The verb “pay,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has long meant “to render, bestow, or give,” and what’s bestowed can be attention, a compliment, even one’s allegiance or homage, to mention just a few examples.

For instance, you can “pay your respects,” “pay a compliment,” “pay heed” to advice, and “pay a visit.” In times gone by, a suitor would “pay his addresses” to a young lady. And she might either “pay attention” or “pay him no mind.”

These citations from the OED illustrate how “pay” has been used in this way over the centuries.

1600: “Not paying mee a welcome” (from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

1667: “You deserve wonder, and they pay but praise” (from a poem by the Earl of Orrery).

1711: “After having paid their Respects to Sir Roger” (Joseph Addison in the Spectator).

1711: “Let us pay Visits, but never see one another” (Richard Steele in the Spectator).

1724: “many Honours were paid to the worst of Princes” (from a translation of an epistle by Pliny the Younger).

1766: “Farmer Williams … had paid her his addresses” (Oliver Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield).

1792: “the privileges of friendship, or the momentary homage which the heart pays to virtue.” (Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman).

1796: “The Gentlemen paid her many compliments” (Eliza Parsons’s novel The Mysterious Warning).

1847: “Miss Murray was gone in the carriage with her mamma to pay some morning calls” (Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey).

1866: “Too little attention being paid to the progress of opinion” (The Reign of Law, by the Duke of Argyll).

1882: “They paid little heed to the sermon” (The Revolt of Man, by Walter Besant).

1939: “ ‘Pay her no mind, Moses,’ Jethro said, dropping into the vernacular” (Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Moses, Man of the Mountain).

English acquired the verb “pay” in the early 1200s by way of Anglo-Norman and Old French (it was paiier or paier in Old French), according to the OED.

The Old French verb meant, among other things, “to be reconciled to someone,” Oxford says, reflecting its classical Latin ancestor pacare (to appease or pacify), derived from pax (peace).

As the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology explains, “The meaning in Latin of pacify or satisfy developed through Medieval Latin into that of pay a creditor, and so to pay, generally, in the Romance languages.”

Some of the earliest meanings of “pay” in English are obsolete today—including to pacify, or to be pleasing or satisfactory to someone.

But senses relating to handing over money—or whatever is figuratively owed to someone—are just as old, and of course they’re still with us.

In modern English, “pay” is also used with adverbs in such phrasal verbs as “pay up,” “pay over,” “pay down,” “pay in,” and “pay out” (in speaking of a line or rope as well as money).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Cultural learnings of America?

Q: The word “learnings” is popular in scientific settings, but to some of us it’s just bad grammar. Your thoughts please?

A: The word “learnings” is popular not only in science, but also in academia, business, finance—in fact, it’s common with all the usual suspects when the subject of unidiomatic English comes up.

Perhaps the most popular use of the term is in the broken English of Sasha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

We’ve found hundreds of other examples of the usage online, including the “Best Practices & Key Learnings” page about diversity on the University of Cincinnati’s website.

Here’s one from the website of the Center for Sustainable Energy: “Learnings from California’s Market Transformation Programs.”

And this example is from Worldreader, a site that encourages literacy around the world: “Learnings From Libraries.”

The word “learnings” is being used here as a synonym for plural nouns such as “findings,” “conclusions,” and “results” as well as singulars like “upshot” and “takeaway.”

We wouldn’t describe this as bad grammar. Rather we’d say it’s an unidiomatic usage, or perhaps a possible new usage in its infancy, or even the revival of an old usage from the 17th century.

In Cymbeline, Shakespeare uses the word “learnings” in the sense of “lessons” or “instructions,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the play, written around 1611, the King takes an orphaned baby into his protection and “Puts to him all the learnings that his time / Could make him the receiver of.” (We’ve expanded on the OED citation.)

Francis Bacon, in The Elements of the Common Lawes of England (1630), uses the term in the sense of teachings or doctrines: “Particular and positive learnings of lawes doe easily decline from a good temper of iustice.”

The OED also has examples from the 1600s of “learnings” used to mean a branch of learning or a science, but the dictionary doesn’t have any citations for the plural word after the 17th century.

Yes, “learnings” has a history, but it sounds to contemporary ears (at least to our contemporary ears) as bureaucratese, academese, or corporatese.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

By Jove, here comes the coroner

Q: In your “by George” article, you fail to mention that the expression “by Jove” was probably a precursor to “by George.” Just thought I’d point that out.

A: Yes, you’re right that “by Jove” was a precursor to “by George”—chronologically speaking, if not etymologically.

We’ve written several times about mild oaths that use euphemistic substitutes for the name of God (“gosh darn it,” “for Pete’s sake,” “by George,” “good golly,” and others), including posts in 2008, 2011, and 2012.

However, we haven’t discussed “by Jove,” which wasn’t a euphemism when it first showed up in English. Here’s the story.

The phrases “by Jove” and “by Jupiter” were originally Latin oaths, pro Iovem and pro Iuppiter. These were used quite literally—not euphemistically—by the Romans to mean something like “my God!” or “good God!”

The supreme deity of the Romans was Jove or Jupiter, wielder of thunderbolts (he was Zeus to the Greeks).

In classical times, the name was written as Iovis or Iuppiter (Iuppiter was a compound of the archaic Latin Iovis and pater). There was no “j” in classical Latin. The letter “i” was both a consonant and a vowel; as a consonant, it sounded like the English letter “y.”

The Roman playwright Terence used the exclamation pro Iuppiter! several times in his plays.

In The Interjections of Terence (1899), Walter Russell Newton writes, “Pro generally indicates pain or grief, but sometimes anger, and less frequently joy.” In English, he says, it should be translated as “O.”

The exclamations “by Jove” and “by Jupiter” eventually filtered into poetic and literary English, but they were not euphemisms at first, since they invoked the name of an actual Roman deity.

The earliest English example for “by Jupiter” in the Oxford English Dictionary (spelled “Iuppiter” in Middle English) clearly uses the term in reference to the Roman god. Here’s the passage, from Chaucer’s poem Troilus & Criseyde (circa 1374):

“By þe goddesse Mynerue And Iuppiter þat maketh þe þonder rynge … ye be the womman … That I best loue.” (“By the goddess Minerva and Jupiter that maketh the thunder ring … you be the woman … that I best love.”)

The OED’s earliest example for “by Jove” also uses the term in reference to the Roman deity. Here’s the citation, from Apius and Virginia, an anonymous 1575 play set in classical times:

“By Ioue master Marchant, by sea or by land / Would get but smale argent if I did not stand, / His very good master, I may say to you.” (We’ve expanded the citation.)

In Elizabethan times, the exclamation “by Jove” was being used both as a mild euphemistic oath and as a reference to the Roman god. Shakespeare used it in eight of his plays, sometimes literally and sometimes euphemistically.

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Lord Berowne, an attendant to the King of Navarre, uses “Jove” euphemistically when he jokes about arithmetic with Costard, a country bumpkin: ”By Ioue, I all wayes tooke three threes for nine.”

And in Antony and Cleopatra (circa 1607), Antony refers to the actual Roman god when he addresses Thyreus, a messenger from Caesar to Cleopatra: “Favours, by Jove that thunders!  / What art thou, fellow?”

As for “by George” (a mild oath with “George” as a euphemism for God), the phrase began life in the late 1500s in a slightly different form. It was originally “for (or fore) George,” and later appeared as “before George,” according to OED citations.

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Ben Jonson’s 1598 play Every Man in His Humor: “I, Well! he knowes what to trust to, for George.”

The next Oxford citation is from John Dryden’s 1680 comedy The Kind Keeper: “Before George, ’tis so!”

The OED’s first “by George” quotation is from a 1694 translation of Rudens, a comedy by Plautus: “By George, you shan’t be a Sowce the better for what’s in it.”

Did the phrase “by Jove” influence “by George”?

Well, the use of “by Jove” as a euphemistic oath showed up about the same time as the euphemistic use of “for George.” But it took almost a century more for the “by George” version to show up.

We’ll skip ahead a bit now and give a couple of OED citations for “by Jove” from 19th-century novels:

“ ‘Venus and the Graces, by Jove!’ exclaimed Sir Sampson.” (From Marriage, 1818, by Susan Edmonstone Ferrier.)

And this one, from Wyllard’s Weird (1885), by Mary Elizabeth Braddon: “By Jove! here comes the Coroner.”

Since we can hardly improve on that, we’ll stop.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Do you party hardy or hearty?

Q: Throughout my life, I have thought that “hardy” meant being able to withstand hard things, while “hearty” referred to doing things heartily. Why do so many people say “party hardy” when I would say “party hearty”?

A: Well, “party hearty” is the older of the two phrases, but both of them have been around for dozens of years, and “party hardy” is slightly more popular on the Web.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the colloquial verb phrases “party hearty” and “party hardy” mean the same thing: “go to parties, celebrate, drink, etc., esp. unrestrainedly.”

The OED’s earliest citation for “party hearty” is from a headline in the Dec. 24, 1955, issue of the Washington Post: “Young set still party hearty.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for “party hardy” is from the July 7, 1977, issue of the same newspaper: “ ‘Party hardy! Yeehaw!’ yelled Brenda Stephens, 14.”

Oxford says the “hardy” form “seems likely to derive from the expression party hard,” with the “-y” suffix added “for reduplicative effect.”

(We’ve written several times on the blog about reduplicatives, terms with recurring sounds. A recent post discusses examples like “goody goody,” “bow-wow,” and “choo-choo.”)

The OED also has citations for “party hearty” and “party hardy” used as adjectival phrases, including these two:

“Those party-hearty people who manage, somehow, to take in four and five debuts a day are complaining,” from the Dec. 24, 1955, issue of the Washington Post.

“The Gang cranks up one of its party-hardy grooves,” from the Jan. 14, 1985, issue of People Weekly.

And the Dictionary of American Slang (4th ed.) has an entry for the noun phrase “party hearty.” The dictionary defines the noun as a “party animal” and gives this example:

“He attracted a Hollywood set of Hawaiian-shirt party hearties who sunned themselves like alligators down in Key West.”

We suspect, as you do, that “party hardy” was initially the result of an eggcorn, the misinterpretation of a word or phrase as another word or phrase. The linguists Geoffrey Pullum and Mark Liberman coined this term for a substitution—like “egg corn” for “acorn.”

The OED suggests that the American accent may have contributed to the substitution of “hardy” for “hearty.”

“The interchangeability of hardy with hearty is likely to have arisen because their U.S. pronunciation is frequently identical,” the dictionary says. It notes that the usage originated in the US and is chiefly seen there.

The Eggcorn Database, a collaborative collection of eggcorns, has a Feb. 20, 2005, entry on “party hardy” submitted by the linguist Ben Zimmer.

Zimmer cites two songs released in 1977: “Party Hardy,” by the funk band Slave, and “We Party Hearty,” by the funk band L.T.D.

Ten years ago, when Zimmer wrote his entry for the Eggcorn Database, he said the usage was running “about 1.3:1 in favor of party hearty.”

Our Internet searches indicate that Web usage is now running slightly in favor of “party hardy,” indicating that the “hardy” version is gaining in popularity. And popularity is what ultimately determines common usage in English.

Which, you ask, makes more sense: “party hardy” or “party hearty”?

Colloquial expressions don’t always make sense, but if we’re talking about people who party hard until they drink themselves under the table (as the OED’s definition suggests), then the partyers had better be hardy.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Is a “nor’easter” full of hot air?

Q: “Nor’easter”: A phony? I await your comment.

A: Yes, “nor’easter” has been exposed. It’s not the charming regionalism that it pretends to be.

We wrote a post to this effect back in 2007, and we’ve also written about it in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

“New England has given us plenty: Boston baked beans, Vermont maple syrup, the Red Sox, Robert Frost, L. L. Bean, and the image of a Maine lobsterman, his yellow slicker flapping in the wind as he braves a menacing nor’easter. The only problem with this stormy picture is that no self-respecting Penobscot Bay lobsterman would use the term ‘nor’easter.’ No, it’s not, as many TV weather people have led us to believe, a quaint New England regionalism.

“The word ‘nor’easter’ is a contraction of ‘northeaster,’ a blustery storm with northeasterly winds. The storm has long been associated with New England, but the term ‘nor’easter’ isn’t native to the land of clam chowdah, according to many linguists and a great many coastal New Englanders. The locals, they say, have always pronounced the word by dropping the two r’s, not the th, making it sound something like ‘nawtheastah.’

“As for where ‘nor’easter’ comes from, it all started in England, not New England. The earliest published reference to ‘nor’easter’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an 1837 translation of an Aristophanes play, The Knights: ‘Slack your sheet! A strong nor’easter’s groaning.’ ”

Hmm. Doesn’t sound very Greek, does it? At any rate, as we go on to say in Origins:

“The OED has even earlier citations for the abbreviations ‘nor’ and ‘nor’east,’ which have been used to refer to compass points since Elizabethan times.

“So how did ‘nor’easter’ cross the Atlantic and end up in the mouth of that mythical Maine lobsterman? The linguist Mark Liberman, who grew up in southern New England, says the term ‘seems faker to me than the lederhosen at the Biergarten in Walt Disney World.’ He attributes the usage to overimaginative journalists who probably embraced ‘nor’easter’ as a ‘literary affectation’ (like ‘e’en’ for ‘even’). ‘However,’ Liberman says, ‘as a linguist I have to admit that a nor’easter is what storms like this have become, in the English language at large, whether we like it or not.’”

We conclude that when a regionalism is just too charming not to exist, then it has to be invented.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Pronunciation Usage Word origin

Is it loo-TEN-ant or lef-TEN-ant?

Q: My daughter wonders why “lieutenant” is pronounced lef-TEN-ant in the UK and loo-TEN-ant in the US. Do you have any clues?

A: The word “lieutenant” came into Middle English in the 1300s from French—lieu for “place” and tenant for “holding.”

(Originally a “lieutenant” was a placeholder, a civil or military officer acting in place of a superior. Think of the phrase “in lieu of” for “in place of.” )

But since the beginning, the British have commonly pronounced the first syllable of “lieutenant” as if it had an “f” or a “v.”

In the early days, this tendency was sometimes reflected in spellings:  “leeftenaunt” (1387), “luf-tenend “ (late 1300s), “leyf tenaunt” (early 1400s),” “lyeftenaunt” (circa 1425), “luff tenande” (late 1400s), “leivetenant” (late 1500s), and so on.

But long after the spelling stabilized and “lieutenant” became the dominant form in writing, the “f” sound has survived in British speech, where the usual pronunciation today is lef-TEN-ant. Nobody knows why.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the origin of the “f” and “v” sounds “is difficult to explain,” and the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says it “remains uncertain.” In other words, we can only guess.

The OED says one theory is that English readers misinterpreted the letter “u” as a “v,” since in Middle English the two letters were not distinct.

But Oxford says this can’t account for the “f” and “v” pronunciations since it “does not accord with the facts.”

The dictionary is apparently referring to the fact that in Middle English spelling, the letter “v” was generally used at the beginning of a word and “u” elsewhere, regardless of the sound, which accounts for old spellings like “vpon” (upon) and “loue” (love). However, the “u” is in the middle of “lieutenant,” not the beginning.

The OED suggests two possibilities to explain the appearance of the “f” and “v” sounds in “lieutenant.”

One is that that some of the “f” and “v” pronunciations “may be due to association” with the noun “leave” or the adjective “lief.”

A likelier theory is “that the labial glide at the end of Old French lieu as the first element of a compound was sometimes apprehended by English-speakers as a v or f.” (A labial glide is a transitional sound in which air is forced through the lips.)

Oxford also notes the existence of “the rare Old French form leuf for lieu,” which may have influenced the English pronunciation. (The language researcher Michael Quinion cites a medieval form of the word, leuftenant, in the records of what is now a Swiss canton.)

However it came about, the usual pronunciation in Britain today begins with “lef,” and seems unlikely to change.

As Oxford notes, John Walker in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1793) gives the “actual pronunciation” of the first syllable as “lef” or “liv,” though he “expresses the hope that ‘the regular sound, lewtenant’ will in time become current.” Despite Walker’s advice, that pronunciation “is almost unknown” in Britain, the OED adds.

Noah Webster, in his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), recommends only one pronunciation for the word, which he renders as “lutenant.”

American dictionaries have followed Webster’s lead and give loo-TEN-ant as the pronunciation, though they usually note the lef-TEN-ant pronunciation in Britain.

Finally, an aside. Another of our correspondents once suggested that the British pronunciation arose though squeamishness: “The Brits didn’t want to refer to their officers with the term ‘loo’!”

Intriguing, but untrue. The word “loo” wasn’t recorded in the bathroom sense until the 20th century. Another theory down the drain.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Noseblind spot

Q: A Febreze commercial uses the apparently new word “noseblind” to describe someone who can’t smell. As far as I know, there are only two common adjectives for sensory deficiencies: “blind” and “deaf.” Aside from obscure medical terms, are there common words for the loss of the three other traditional senses?

A: Although the Febreze commercials have helped popularize “noseblind,” the term had been around for a dozen or so years before Procter & Gamble began using it last summer to promote the air freshener.

The earliest example of the usage we could find is from an Oct. 8, 2002, comment on a Mazda discussion group: “I use 89 octane from esso all the time, but haven’t noticed any smell at all. Maybe I am nose blind, but it hasn’t been a problem for me.”

And here’s an example from “The Revisionist,” a short story by Helen Schulman in a 2004 collection from the Paris Review:

“The resultant odor was strong enough to etherize an elephant, but Hershleder the rebel was nose-blind to it.”

Julia LaFeldt, a P&G spokeswoman, told us that “Febreze first started using the term ‘noseblind’ in July 2014 when we launched our current campaign.”

In a July 9, 2014, press release, P&G announced that the actor-comedian Jane Lynch would be promoting Febreze to counter “noseblindness,” a condition that “occurs naturally over time when a person becomes accustomed to surrounding smells.”

In videos featuring Ms. Lynch and others, the adjective “noseblind” is repeatedly used to describe people who are so used to their own odors that they can’t smell what their guests do.

On a web page that features videos promoting Febreze, P&G offers a mock dictionary entry that defines “noseblind” as a noun but treats it as an adjective in the accompanying example:

“noseblind [nohz-blihnd], noun; The gradual acclimation to the smells of one’s home, car, or belongings, in which the affected does not notice them (even though their guests do).

“Example: I can’t attend Book Club this week. Nancy is completely noseblind to the fact that her house smells like a feral cat shelter.”

As for your question, we don’t know of any common words for the loss of the three other traditional senses: taste, smell, and touch (though “numbness” might describe an inability to feel a touch). The usual medical terms are “ageusia” (taste), “anosmia” (smell), and “analgesia” (touch—actually, the inability to feel pain).

A more general term, “sensory processing disorder,” describes a condition in which the nervous system doesn’t properly organize sensory signals into the appropriate responses. It can affect one or more of the senses, according to the SPD Foundation.

The linguist Arnold Zwicky, who discussed “noseblind” recently on his blog, describes it as “a fairly clever coinage for this sensory saturation effect, treating it as similar to being temporarily blinded by bright lights or deafened by loud noises.”

“But it’s not truly similar to being blind or deaf, which are enduring and more global inabilities,” Zwicky adds.

If you’d like to read more, we’ve answered several questions on the blog about “nose” and “blind,” including a post in 2009 as well as posts in October and November of 2012.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

English via Facebook

Q: Does Facebook use “via” incorrectly when your friend A forwards a link to you from his friend B? Facebook describes this as “From A via B,” but surely it should be the other way around, “From B via A.”

A: You’re right—“via” has meant “by way of” since it came into English in the 1700s.  A newer sense of the word, “by means of” or “with the aid of,” came into use in the 1930s and is also accepted as standard English in modern dictionaries.

So Facebook has things turned around. In fact, the message is coming from friend B (the original source) by way of (or “via”) friend A, the intermediary who forwards it.

These two examples from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) illustrate the standard uses of “via”:

  • by way of: “She flew to Los Angeles via Chicago.”
  • by means of: “I’ll let her know via one of our friends.”

The English preposition “via” was taken directly from the Latin noun via, meaning “way” or “road.”

Despite its classical origins, the English word is relatively new as these things go, since it dates back only to the 18th century. This is why it’s sometimes printed in italics in older writing.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from a letter written by James Lovell, a delegate to the Continental Congress, to John Adams on June 13, 1779:

“This night is the fourteenth since we first had the news of his victory, via New Providence.” (The reference is to Gen. Benjamin Lincoln in a battle against the British.)

Here’s another example that clearly displays the original usage: “Lord Weybridge … is on his way to London viâ Paris.” (From Theodore Edward Hook’s novel The Parson’s Daughter, 1833.)

The newer sense of the word (“by means of”) is nicely illustrated by this 1977 citation from the OED:

“It would in theory be possible to provide five more services with national coverage via satellite.” (From a British government report on the future of broadcasting.)

But no matter which usage you subscribe to—and current dictionaries accept both—“via” always refers to whoever or whatever is in between, not to the origin.

Think of the word “viaduct,” a long high bridge that’s an elevated go-between.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

When words change their spots

Q: I see that the online Merriam-Webster has caved to the misuse of “peruse,” which is now apparently an antonym to itself. It means, or so the dictionary says, to examine or read “in a very careful way” (the traditional usage) as well as “in an informal or relaxed way.” Are linguists creating a new type of word?

A: Often a simple question calls for a complicated answer, and this is one of them.

Linguists and lexicographers don’t create new meanings for words. They merely catalog what they perceive as shifts in common usage—shifts that naturally occur as a language develops.

As for the verb “peruse,” it’s been used to mean “both careful and cursory reading” since the 16th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Take a look at a post about “peruse” that we wrote in 2006 and later updated to reflect recent dictionary definitions. As you can see, the usage you object to is well established.

It’s unfortunate that a language commentator in the early 1900s took a dislike to the word’s “cursory” sense, and that other usage guides unthinkingly followed.

But in the end, the general public took no notice and continued to use “peruse” in the old familiar way.

The truth is that common usage determines what’s “correct.” This is why alterations in meaning, spelling, and pronunciation are normal as a language develops.

Even Classical Latin, when it was a living, spoken language, underwent regular shifts and changes. It only became frozen when it died.

And once Latin words were absorbed into English and the Romance languages, those words continued to shape themselves to their new surroundings and came to reflect common usage in those societies.

For example, we’ve written on our blog about the assimilation of Latin words into English and the consequent shifts in pluralization.

Many words derived from Latin plurals have become accepted over the years as singular nouns in English: “ephemera,” “erotica,” “stamina,” “agenda,” “trivia,” “insignia,” “candelabra,” and more recently “data.”

What’s more, the word “media” now has both singular and plural usages in English, as we wrote in a post four years ago.

This naturalization process is normal and expected. Similarly, we should expect words to change their meanings. As this happens, they can even take on meanings that are opposed.

Sometimes these words retain both opposing senses, as with “cleave” and “sanction.” Such words are often called “contronyms,” and the reader has to judge the writer’s intent by the context.

(Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged, for example, feels that “literally” has joined this group and can be taken to mean “in effect.” However, we aren’t yet recommending that our readers adopt this looser usage.)

We’ve written about words with opposing meanings many times on our blog, including posts in 2008, 2010, and 2012.

At times a word’s earlier meaning is discarded and becomes obsolete. This process can move an originally affirmative word (like “pedant”) in a derogatory direction.

But just as often the reverse happens, and a derogatory word (like “terrific”) takes on a positive meaning.

Words change not only in meaning but in grammatical function. This kind of change, as when a noun becomes a verb, often upsets people, but it’s a natural way in which new words are formed.

As we’ve said before, this process is called conversion, and it’s given us a considerable portion of our modern English words.

Thanks for your question, and we hope we’ve shed a little light here.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Usage

The times they are a changin’

Q: I increasingly hear sentences with two nouns competing to be the subject. Some recent examples, all from local newscasts: “Our producer, she is going to New Hampshire” … “My aunt and uncle, they died of diabetes” … “That guy, he can play on Sunday.” I was told years ago by an English professor that this was incorrect. Have the rules changed?

A: In all of those examples, the pronoun duplicates the subject: “our producer, she” … “my aunt and uncle, they” … “that guy, he.”

The pronoun in all these cases isn’t technically necessary. It’s sometimes called a “pleonastic subject pronoun” (pleonastic means redundant or superfluous).

Although such a pleonasm is sometimes used as a literary device in poems and songs, the Oxford English Dictionary says this usage is “now chiefly regional and nonstandard.”

We’d add that speakers of standard English use pleonastic subject pronouns for emphasis in casual conversation, though rarely in prose writing, especially in formal prose.

For centuries, poets and balladeers have used this device to force a pause in the meter of a line and give it a songlike air.

Consider, for example, this line from the 13th-century poem Amis and Amiloun, the Middle English version of an old French legend: “Mine hert, it breketh.” How much duller it would be without that superfluous pronoun!

Modern poets, too, have employed this usage. Here’s a line from A Shropshire Lad (1896), by A. E. Housman: “I tell the tale that I heard told. / Mithridates, he died old.”

The OED has many examples, dating back to Old English. Here’s a sampling: 

“My sister, shee the jewell is” (from an anonymous Elizabethan play, Common Conditions, 1576).

“ ‘Fair and softly,’ John he cried, / But John he cried in vain” (William Cowper, 1782).

“The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out” (the novelist Matthew Gregory Lewis, 1795).

“The skipper he stood beside the helm” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1839).

“My wife she cries on the barrack-gate, my kid in the barrack-yard” (Rudyard Kipling, 1892).

“The times they are a changin’ ” (Bob Dylan, 1964).

We’ve found many nonstandard uses of pleonastic subject pronouns in speech or dialogue from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Here’s an example from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): “The king he spread his arms, and Mary Jane she jumped for them.”

In recent decades, as you’ve noticed, speakers of standard English have been using the device for emphasis in conversation.

Here’s a quote from Bruce Springsteen in the Feb. 5, 1981, issue of Rolling Stone: “My mother and father, they’ve got a very deep love because they know and understand each other in a very realistic way.”

Is the usage legit? Well, the OED doesn’t consider it standard English. But we see nothing wrong with its emphatic use in casual speech.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Usage Word origin

Is “close proximity” redundant?

Q: I would love to hear your perspective on “close proximity.” If “in proximity to” means “close to,” what does “in close proximity to” mean? Including “close” seems redundant to me, but it feels odd to leave it out.

A: Well, the phrase “in close proximity” isn’t very graceful (we’d prefer “near” or “close to”), but we don’t consider it redundant, as we’ll explain.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “proximity” as “nearness” or “the fact, condition, or position of being near or close by in space.”

So theoretically the noun “proximity” should need no help from an adjective like “close.”

But theory is one thing and fact is another. In reality, there are degrees of nearness, so it’s reasonable to indicate how near with the use of an adjective like “close,” “closer,” or “closest.”

Used by itself, “proximity” sometimes seems inadequate, which may be why the naked word feels odd to you.  A statement like “There’s no restaurant in proximity to my apartment” could mean within a city block or a ten-minute drive.

As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “Of course there are degrees of proximity, and close proximity simply emphasizes the closeness.” The usage guide gives many examples, including these:

“Swallow means porch-bird, and for centuries and centuries their nests have been placed in the closest proximity to man” (from Richard Jefferies’s book The Open Air, 1885).

“Mr. Beard and Miss Compton disagreed on the distance of meat from heat, probably because Mr. Beard had in mind a smaller fire-bed to which the steak could  be in closer proximity” (from the New York Times, 1954).

“The herb [tansy] works only on plants in very close proximity” (from the New York Times Magazine, 1980).

This OED has dozens of examples of the usage, dating back to the early 1800s. Here’s one from an 1872 travel guide to the English Lake District: “Owing to the close proximity to the sea.”

Elsewhere in the same guide, we found this example in a description of the city of Carlisle: “It dates back to the time of the Romans, and was in close proximity to the wall of Hadrian.”

The word “proximity” came into English from the French proximité (near relationship), the OED says. It was derived from the Latin noun proximitas (nearness or kinship), which came from the adjective proximus (nearest, next).    

When first recorded in English, in 1480, “proximity” referred to blood relationship or kinship (as in the phrase “proximity of blood,” first recorded in the 16th century and still occasionally used).

The noun was soon being used to refer to other kinds of nearness—time, space, distance, and so on. Today, “proximity” in relation to distance is the dominant usage.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the Latin proximus (nearest) was the superlative form of an “unrecorded” Latin word that’s been reconstructed as proque (near).

This reconstructed word, Ayto adds, was “a variant of prope, from which English gets approach and propinquity.”

Another English relative, Ayto says, is “approximate,” which ultimately comes from the Latin verb proximare (“come near”).

We’ll close with another example from the M-W usage guide. It’s from Iolanthe (1882), by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.

But then the prospect of a lot
 Of dull M.P.’s in close proximity,
 All thinking for themselves, is what
 No man can face with equanimity.

 Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
 And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Why not “one headquarter”?

Q: To my ear, “one headquarter” sounds better than “one headquarters.” Why is the plural “headquarters” used for both the singular and the plural?

A: When the term first showed up in English in the early 1600s, it was “headquarter” (or, rather, “head quarter”), but the “s”-less singular is rarely seen now except in South Asian English.

We’ll have more to say later about the history of “headquarter”/“headquarters,” but first let’s look at how the word is generally used in contemporary English.

Today, “headquarters” is a noun that’s plural in form but can be used with either a singular or a plural verb.

As Pat writes in her grammar and usage book Woe Is I (4th ed., 2019), “headquarters” is one of those words, like “series” and “species,” that ends in “s” but can mean either one thing or more—a base or bases.

She gives this example: “Gizmo’s headquarters was designed by Rube Goldberg. The two rival companies’ headquarters were on opposite sides of town.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has these modern examples of “headquarters” used in each way:

singular: “Hundreds of Home Office staff should be moved out of London because a new headquarters is too small to accommodate them.” (From the Daily Telegraph, 2004.)

plural: “He set up two headquarters, one to control Japan … and the other to command U.S. forces in the Far east.” (From Richard B. Finn’s book Winners in Peace, 1992.)

Now let’s look at the history of “headquarter” and “headquarters.”

Both of these forms showed up in written English in the first half of the 17th century, with “headquarter” used in the singular sense and “headquarters” used initially in the plural sense.

But within a few years, “headquarters” was being used in both singular and plural contexts —or, as the OED puts it, the plural form “headquarters” was being used “with pl. or sing. concord.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of “headquarter” used in the singular sense is from a 1622 issue of the Continental Newes that refers to military forces “about to draw away their Ordnance into their head quarter.”

The OED’s earliest example of “headquarters” used as a plural is in a 1639 issue of a newsletter, Curranto This Weeke From Holland: “This Campe is divided into 2 Head-quarters, on one side commandeth Monsieur de Lambert, and on th’other side Colonell Gassion.”

And the first example of the plural form used in a singular sense is from a 1644 issue of the Weekly Account: “The Hoptonian Forces are as yet at their head quarters at Winchester.”

In the 1500s and 1600s, the dictionary points out, other Germanic languages had singular forms for the singular sense: German Hauptquartier (1588 or earlier), Swedish huvudkvarter (1658), Dutch hoofdkwartier (1688 or earlier).

Why did the plural form “headquarters” come to be used in English for both singular and plural senses?

Perhaps because the plural “quarters” was being used around the same time for a singular place of residence. Here’s an example from Every Man in His Humor, a 1616 play by Ben Jonson: “Turnebull, White-chappell, Shore-ditch, which were then my quarters.”

(Then as now, “quarters” is used to mean a place or places of residence. But unlike “headquarters,” it always has a singular verb.)

As we’ve said earlier, the singular “headquarter” is rarely seen now except in South Asian English. Here are some recent examples from military and corporate writing:

“My headquarter was at Chandhi Mandir which is easily the best laid out military cantonment in the country.” (From S. K. Sinha’s book A Soldier Recalls, 1992.)

“Another network was established by National Informatics Centre … whose headquarter is at Delhi.” (From Computer Technology for Higher Education, 1993, by Sarla Achuthan and others.)

[Note: This post was updated on June 15, 2020.]

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Linguistics Phrase origin Usage Word origin

When the subject is a dummy

Q: I’ve read your recent post on deconstructing “it” and I have one additional question. What does “it” refer to in sentences like “It is raining” and “It is snowing”? I’ve heard various explanations of this usage, but I’d appreciate your take on it.

A: English speakers have been using the pronoun “it” to talk about the weather since Anglo-Saxon days. The “it” that we use to denote weather conditions (“it was drizzling” … “it’s hot”) is often called a “dummy” or “empty” or “artificial” subject.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says the “it” here has no semantic meaning and serves “the purely syntactic function of filling the obligatory subject position.”

The Oxford English Dictionary describes this “it” as “a semantically empty or non-referential subject” that dates back to Old English, where it was frequently used in statements about the weather.

The OED’s earliest recorded usage in reference to weather is from an Old English translation, possibly written around the 10th century, of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, which he probably completed in Latin in 731.

In the relevant passage, “hit rine & sniwe & styrme ute” (“it rain & snow & storm out”), the verbs are in the subjunctive.

We’ll expand the OED citation and give a modern English translation: “as if you at feasting should sit with your lords and subjects in winter-time, and a fire be lit and your hall warmed, and it should rain and snow and storm outside.”

This Middle English example from around 1300 needs no translating: “Hor-frost cometh whan hit is cold.”

The  “it” we use in statements about the weather, according to the OED, is part of a broader category of usages in which the pronoun is “the subject of an impersonal verb or impersonal statement, expressing action or a condition of things simply, without reference to any agent.”

These usages would include statements about the time or the season (“it was about noon” … “it was winter”); about space, distance, or time (“it was long ago” … “it’s too far”); and about other kinds of conditions (“how is it going?” … “it was awkward” … “if it weren’t for the inconvenience”).

The Cambridge Grammar wouldn’t use the term “dummy subject” to describe most of these non-weather usages. In its view, a dummy subject “cannot be replaced by any other NP [noun phrase].”

So Cambridge regards the “it” in a sentence like “It is five o’clock” or “It is July 1” as a predicative complement rather than a dummy subject, because “it” could be replaced by “the time” or “the date.”

Some linguists, however, might argue that none of the “it” usages we’ve discussed are true dummy subjects, but we’ll stop here.

To quote Shakespeare (Macbeth, around 1606), “If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twer well, / It were done quickly.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Pronunciation Spelling Usage Word origin

How “colonel” became KER-nel

Q: How did a “colonel” in the military come to be pronounced like a “kernel” on an ear of corn?

A: The word for the military officer once had competing spellings as well as competing pronunciations. When the dust settled, it ended up being spelled in one way and pronounced in the other.

The word was actually “coronel” when it entered English in the mid-16th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s the messy story of how a word once spelled “coronel” in English came to be spelled “colonel” and pronounced KER-nel.

English acquired the original “coronel” from the Middle French coronnel, which came from colonello, the Italian word for the commander of a regiment, the OED says.

Colonello is derived from colonna, Italian for a column, which in turn comes from columna, Latin for a pillar.

Oxford cites the English philologist Walter William Skeat as saying the colonello got his name because he led “the little column or company at the head of the regiment.”

The first company of the regiment—the colonel’s company—was called la compagnia colonnella in Italian and la compagnie colonelle in French, according to the OED.

The confusion began when the Italian colonello entered Middle French in the 16th century. The two “l” sounds apparently didn’t sit well with French speakers, so the first “l” changed to “r” and the word briefly became coronel.

The process by which two neighboring “l” sounds were “dissimulated” (or rendered dissimilar) was common in the Romance languages, the OED says.

However, the French coronel “was supplanted in literary use, late in 16th cent., by the more etymological colonnel,” according to the dictionary. (The word is now colonel in modern French.)

But meanwhile both English and Spanish had borrowed coronel, the dissimilated version of the word, from Middle French in the mid-1500s.

When it entered English, in 1548, it was spelled “coronel,” with a three-syllable pronunciation (kor-uh-NEL) similar to that of the Middle French word.

Although it’s still spelled coronel in Spanish, English speakers soon followed the French and returned to the more etymologically correct spelling.

As the OED explains, “under this influence [the French spelling change] and that of translations of Italian military treatises colonel also appeared in English c1580.”

By the mid-1600s, the OED says, “colonel” was the accepted English spelling and “coronel” had fallen by the wayside.

But the word’s pronunciation took much longer to get settled.

The two competing pronunciations (kor-uh-NEL, kol-uh-NEL) existed until the early 19th century, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, along with a popular variation, KER-uh-nel.

In the early 1800s, Chambers says, the KER-uh-nel pronunciation was shortened to KER-nel. (The awkward KOL-nel, a shortened version of kol-uh-NEL, was recorded in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755, but it eventually fell out of use.)

Although the KER-nel pronunciation became universally accepted, Chambers says, “the familiar literary form colonel remained firmly established in printing.”

So you might say that the word’s spelling today reflects its Italian heritage while the pronunciation reflects its French side—that is, its brief period of dissimilation in French.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Help support Grammarphobia.com

Search the blog

Subscribe to The Grammarphobia Blog

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

The blog is updated regularly! Read our latest posts …

Blog archives