Tag: Word origin

Q: I’m having a discussion with a fellow professor over what it means when a government agency delegates a task to a private organization. Does the verb “delegate” mean to devolve ultimate authority? Or can it be used in the sense of handing over a task that the delegator is ultimately responsible for?

A: We don’t see any evidence that the verb “delegate” has ever meant to transfer ultimate authority for something.

When the verb entered English in the early 1500s, it meant—and it still means—to give a deputy or representative the authority to act on one’s behalf.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from John Palsgrave’s Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (1530), a French grammar for the English: “I delegate myne auctorite, je delegue.”

This is how the OED defines the original sense of the word: “To entrust, commit or deliver (authority, a function, etc.) to another as an agent or deputy.”

There’s no suggestion here that the person doing the delegating is giving up ultimate authority for the task that’s being delegated.

In fact, we’ve found quite a few instances in which officials overruled their delegates or withdrew the authority that they delegated.

William K. Reilly, head of the Environmental Protection Agency in the first Bush administration, discusses the issue in an oral-history interview.

“I believe in delegation—really believe in it,” he says. “I think that people ought to be allowed to make mistakes and if they’re good, they’ll learn from them.”

He adds that he delegated authority to his regional administrators and generally didn’t interfere with their decisions, but he notes:

“There were exceptions to that. I reversed my Regional Administrator on the Two Forks Dam. I also withdrew authority from my Regional Administrator in Chicago to oversee wetlands implementation in the state of Michigan.”

In the early 1600s, according to Oxford, the meaning of the verb “delegate” widened somewhat: “To send or commission (a person) as a deputy or representative, with power to transact business for another; to depute or appoint to act.”

The earliest example of the newer usage is from Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie; or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words (1623): “Delegate, to assigne, to send in commission.”

Again, someone is delegating a subordinate to act in one’s stead, not giving up ultimate authority for the action.

The primary meaning of the verb “delegate” hasn’t changed much over the years. Here’s how The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines it:

“1. To authorize and send (another person) as one’s representative.

“2. To commit or entrust to another: delegate a task to a subordinate.”

In addition to those senses, the OED says, “delegate” took on a specialized legal meaning two hundred years ago: “To assign (one who is debtor to oneself) to a creditor as debtor in one’s place.”

As for its etymology, the English word comes from delegare, Latin for to send, dispatch, assign, or commit, but its ultimate source is leg-, an Indo-European root that’s given us such words as “legal,” “legislator,” “legitimate,” “colleague,” “legate,” and “college.”

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Q: On a visit to a Canadian lake, I saw bord de l’eau signs along the edge of the water. The French looked to me a lot like “bordello.” Is there a connection? Bordellos were frequently near the waterfront since sailors were good customers.

A: No, there’s no connection between bord de l’eau and “bordello”—at least no direct connection—though the two usages may have had an ancestor in common back in ancient times.

English adopted “bordello” in the late 16th century from Italian, in which bordello means a brothel, an uproar, or a mess.

The earliest citation for “bordello” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Every Man in His Humor, a 1598 play by Ben Jonson: “From the Burdello, it might come as well.”

In the early 1300s, however, English borrowed “bordel,” a now obsolete word for a house of prostitution, from Old French, where bordel meant a cabin, hut, or brothel, according to the OED.

Both the Italian and Old French words are derived from borda, the medieval Latin term for a hut. So a bordello was originally a little hut for prostitution.

The OED says the etymology here “is still wanting,” but it speculates that borda may have once meant a “thing of boards.” In Old English, bord meant, among other things, a board or plank.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the Old English word, as well as similar ones in other Germanic languages, may have come from—or been influenced by—two different prehistoric Germanic roots:

“Some evidence suggests that the Germanic word was a fusion of two different but related words: one that had senses related to ‘plank, table, shield’; the other with senses related to ‘border, rim, side of a ship.’ ”

So the “bord-” in “bordello” may come from the “plank” sense in prehistoric German, while the bord in bord de l’eau (like the “board” in “seaboard”) may come from the “edge” sense. (We had a post a while back that discussed “seaboard.”)

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Q: I’m editing a bunch of fraud-management documents created by colleagues in Europe, and I’ve been changing “fraudster” to “fraud perpetrator” for American audiences. Do you think my instinct is right, or is “fraudster” acceptable in American English?

A: We’ve found “fraudster” in only one standard American dictionary—the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged—and it says the word is chiefly British.

Not surprisingly, “fraudster” is in the four British dictionaries we’ve checked, defined variously as a swindler, someone who gets money by deceiving people, or a person who commits fraud, especially in business dealings.

Is “fraudster” acceptable in US English?

Well, it depends on the audience. It would be perfectly understandable to an American, and the primary goal of writing is communicating. But it sounds somewhat slangy to American ears—at least to our four American ears.

We like the term, however, and we wouldn’t hesitate using it in casual speech or informal writing. In fact, “fraudster” is a lot easier to find in US publications than in US dictionaries.

A Nov. 11, 1995, article in the New York Times, for example, describes “the victims of an opportunistic credit-card fraudster who also happened to be their waiter.”

And a Jan. 5, 2011, article in The Wall Street Journal begins: “Fraudster Bernard Madoff’s sister-in-law Marion, whose husband, Peter, was the former chief compliance officer at his brother’s firm, is asking $6.5 million for her Palm Beach, Fla., home.”

[After this item was posted, the writer Ben Yagoda pointed out that an article in the Aug. 26, 2013, issue of the New Yorker quotes an art historian comparing the art forger Mark A. Landis to “identity fraudsters.” Another reader had this comment: “I would add that the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners regularly uses the word ‘fraudster’ in its publication.  The word is widely accepted in the United States amongst those who seek to prevent, detect and prosecute fraud.”]

If the documents you’re editing are intended for professionals trying to prevent or control fraud, and if you think it might be a familiar term to them, “fraudster” is fine.  It won’t sound slangy or informal to such readers.

In our opinion, a general audience might find “fraud perpetrator” a bit clunky. For alternatives, consider a term that’s in American dictionaries, “defrauder.” And if your readers would accept a bit of informality, you might occasionally stick in a “deceiver” or a “swindler” (even a “fraudster” or two).

The term “fraudster,” by the way, is relatively new. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1975 issue of the Financial Times, though Merriam-Webster Unabridged dates the first known use of the term to 1960.

The OED notes that the word combines the noun “fraud” with the old suffix “-ster,” which dates back to Anglo-Saxon days.

The Old English version of “-ster” was used to form feminine nouns while the Old English version of the suffix “-er” was used to form masculine nouns, according to Oxford.

In the 15th century, the “-ster” suffix gradually began losing its feminine identity, but a new suffix, “-ess,” showed up to replace it.

The old words “seamster” and “songster,” for example, became “seamstress” and “songstress.” An exception to this etymological evolution is “spinster,” which kept its old suffix.

From the 16th century on, the OED says, writers began using “-ess” to create new words, such as “actress,” “authoress,” “priestess,” and so on.

But the dictionary notes “the tendency of mod. usage” to treat nouns “indicating profession or occupation, as of common gender, unless there be some special reason to the contrary.”

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Q: Your recent article about stroking and stoking egos has inspired this question. How did the verb “stroke” come to mean caress while the noun “stroke” came to mean hitting? 

A: The word “stroke” has followed a long, twisted, and (as you’ve noticed) contradictory path since it evolved from its prehistoric Germanic roots.

Language scholars have reconstructed the ultimate source of “stroke” as strik- or straik-, an ancient Germanic base meaning to touch lightly.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says this prehistoric root also gave English the word “strike,” which is a clue to the evolution of “stroke.”

“The verb has stayed very close semantically to its source,” Ayto writes, “whereas the noun has followed the same path as its corresponding verb strike.”

As we noted in our earlier post, when the verb “stroke” entered Old English in the ninth century, it meant to run a hand softly over the head, body, or hair of a person or an animal. The verb has generally meant to caress—figuratively or literally—since then.

But when the noun “stroke” showed up (probably sometime before 1300, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology), it referred to the act of striking.

Over, the years, the noun has had many meanings, some that suggest striking and some caressing. Here’s a selection from the Oxford English Dictionary:

a blow with an ax (circa 1400), the striking of a clock (1436), a linear mark (1567), a pull of the oar (1583), a seizure (1599), a caress (1631), a movement of a pen (1683), a calamitous event (1686), the hitting of a ball (1744), a swimming movement (circa 1800), a stroke of luck (1853).

It’s time for us to break for lunch, so we’ll end with this example from one of our favorite novels, Doctor Thorne (1858), by Anthony Trollope: “He dressed himself hurriedly, for the dinner-bell was almost on the stroke as he entered the house.

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Q: I’ve been hearing/seeing “spendy” used to mean costly or expensive in recent months. It’s in some online dictionaries.  Have you seen this? Any thoughts? I think it’s too cutesy to take seriously, which isn’t to say I haven’t used it myself.

A: Believe it or not, “spendy” has been in use for more than a century. We think it’s a pretty cool word and can’t understand why it’s not more popular, considering that “spendy” has been available for so long.

It’s out there, but not as out as we’d expect. A simple Google search for “spendy” gets more than 800,000 hits, but a search for “pricey” gets 24.5 million.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the adjective originated and is chiefly used in the US. It originally meant “extravagant, spendthrift,” but later another sense was added—“expensive” or “overpriced.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from a May 1911 issue of the Indianapolis Star: “ ‘Come, boys,’ he said in a reckless impulse of sordid profligacy, ‘let’s have a candy raffle…’ ‘That’s awfully sporty and spendy of you.’ ” 

In searches of our own, we found another example from that same year. It appeared in an ad that ran in Edward P. Remington’s Annual Newspaper Directory for 1911: “These papers reach a thrifty and ‘spendy’ people in all sections of Utah.”

And we found further examples from the teens and twenties, including this one from a comic poem in the Saturday Evening Post (1913): “All found they were living a trifle too spendy / For the payment attached to their modus vivendi.”

This more contemporary example from the OED uses “spendy” to describe big spenders. It’s from a March 2002 issue of the Wall Street Journal: “It was an Olympic crowd, not a ski crowd. … That’s not a real spendy crowd. They eat fast food.”

We’ve also found a handful of examples, from the last decade or so, in which “spendy” appears in negative political contexts—“spendy politicians,” “spendy Democrats,” “spendy Congress,” “spendy liberal,” “spendy officials,” and so on. 

But oddly, the few standard dictionaries that recognize “spendy” see it as an adjective that applies to things, not people.

We found the word in three standard dictionaries, always defined as “expensive” or “costly.” None of the three define it as “extravagant” or “spendthrift.” 

And while most dictionaries agree that this is an American usage, we’ve had no trouble finding examples in British writing.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) describes “spendy” as an informal adjective meaning expensive or costly. The fourth edition describes the usage as “chiefly Pacific Northwest,” but that characterization has been deleted from the fifth.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says the term is “chiefly Northwest.” (M-W also gives the comparative form, “spendier,” and the superlative, “spendiest.”)

The Collins English Dictionary, published in Britain, describes the word as a “US” adjective, though the example given is from a British newspaper, the Sunday Times (2002):

“Her magazine, O, might as well be called ‘Never mind the spendy moisturisers get rid of your terrible husband.’ ” 

And one of the later examples from the OED is also from a British publication, Snowboard UK (2004):

“So now you’ve got your selection of kit from our six of the blingest, you’re going to need to get out there and use it in anger—preferably in the poshest, spendiest resort out there for maximum bling effect.”

As for the etymology of “spendy,” we’ve found suggestions online that it’s a blending of “expensive” and “trendy.” But obviously that’s impossible, since “trendy” was nonexistent in 1911.

The OED’s etymology says the adjective-forming “-y” suffix was added to the word “spend.” As usual, the simpler explanation makes much more sense.

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Q: Am I correct that the word “brief” applies to temporal length, such as a meeting or a vacation, but not to something linear, such as a document? Hence, a “brief nap” but a “short essay”? Speaking of naps …

A: Nope, both meanings of “brief” are well established. In fact, they date back to Middle English.

When the adjective entered the language, around 1400, it meant “of short duration, quickly passing away or ending,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But very soon, around 1430, it was recorded in another sense—“short, concise”—as in a brief speech or essay. This meaning emerged, the OED explains, from the sense of “occupying short time in speaking or reading,” and hence “consisting of few words.”

Shakespeare used the word in both senses.

The first meaning is evident in this familiar quotation from Macbeth (perhaps 1606): “Out, out, breefe Candle, / Life’s but a walking shadow.”

And the second meaning is intended in this passage from Hamlet (1603): “The Chronicles / And Briefe abstracts of the time.”

The adjective came into Middle English from the Old French bref, which in turn came from the Latin brevis (short).

The dual meaning of “brief” should come as no surprise, since the Romans used brevis in several senses—conciseness of expression as well as time, distance, dimension, and so on.

Latin literature has many examples, from Cicero (Brevis a natura nobis vita data est—“The life given to us by nature is short”), Horace (Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio—“In trying to be concise, I become obscure”), and many others. 

It’s interesting to note that the English noun “brief” is older than the adjective. It was first recorded in 1330, when it meant a short piece of writing.

As the OED explains, the noun is descended from the Latin breve (“letter, dispatch, note”), a word that in late classical Latin came to mean a “short catalogue, summary.” 

“From official Latin the word entered at an early period into all the Germanic languages” except for Old English, the OED says. Instead, the noun “brief,” like the adjective, “appears to have entered early Middle English from French.”

This explains why the noun “brief” is used one way in English and another in the other Germanic languages.

Here (as in French), the noun “has remained more distinctly an official or legal word, and has not the general sense ‘letter,’ which it has acquired in continental Germanic,” the OED says.

Those Latin ancestors, by the way, live on in several English words: “abbreviate”; “abridge”; “brevity”; “breve,” a musical term for a short note; and of course “briefs,” a 20th-century word for short underpants—or “shorts,” if you prefer.

Enough. We’re ready for a nap ourselves.

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Q: Is there a word for someone who writes a book that consists only of letters? If there is no such word, how does “epistlographer” strike you?

A: There are quite a few words for letter writers, but none (at least none that we can find) for authors who write epistolary collections. If we were to invent one, though, we might adapt an Italian word for a man of letters, scholar, or author—letterato.

As we’ve said, English does have words for a writer of letters. “Epistolographer,” which is similar to the word you suggest, is already taken.

The Oxford English Dictionary has entries for more of these words, most of them formed on the noun “epistle” (letter).

For instance, there’s “epistler,” meaning “a writer of an epistle.” The OED’s earliest example is from 1610, when the English bishop Joseph Hall wrote, “Let this ignorant epistler teach his censorious answerer.”

Then there’s “epistoler,” defined by the OED as “a letter-writer.” It was first used in 1637 by John Williams, Archbishop of York, in The Holy Table, Name and Thing: “Whether the Epistoler likes it or no.”

A more recent OED citation comes from an 1881 issue of the Saturday Review: “These two great epistolers and speakers” (the reference is to Prime Minister William Gladstone and a Member of Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh).

Another noun, “epistolist,” defined as “one who writes epistles,” dates from the mid-18th century. The word appeared in a letter written in 1743 from an Englishwoman, Elizabeth Carter, to her friend Catherine Talbot:

“I am extremely obliged to you … for your account of the Italian epistolists.” (As it happens, the OED quotes this from a book of letters published in 1808.)

Yet another such noun, “epistolarian,” defined as “a letter writer,” appeared in the early 19th century and promptly vanished.

The OED’s sole example is from Anna Maria Porter’s novel The Hungarian Brothers (1807): “I’ll maintain this sweet, sermonising epistolarian to be a woman.”

Another word that’s seldom seen and has only one OED citation is “epistolean” (“a writer of epistles or letters; a correspondent”).

This example was quoted in an 1881 edition of Joseph Emerson Worcester’s  A Dictionary of the English Language: “He has been a negligent epistolean as well as myself.”

In short, there are quite a few words for letter writers—we won’t even go into “epistolographist” (1822) or the above-mentioned “epistolographer” (1824)—but nary a one for authors of epistolary works.

Which reminds us of  the related words “epistolary” (pertaining to or contained in letters, 1656); “epistolize” (to write a letter, 1650); “epistolographic” (used in writing letters, 1669); and “epistolography” (letter-writing, 1888).

The mother of all these words, “epistle,” is very old, having been recorded in Old English in about 893. Sometimes, from Old English and even into the 1900s, it was shortened to “pistle.” (The “t” is silent, as you probably know.)

As for its etymology, English acquired “epistle” directly from Latin (epistola), but its ultimate source is Greek (epistole).

John Ayto, in his Dictionary of Word Origins, notes the interesting similarity between the Greek epistole (“something sent to someone”) and the word “apostle,” which literally means “someone sent out.”

In English, the OED says, an “epistle” is “a communication made to an absent person in writing; a letter.” But the definition goes a bit further:

“Chiefly (from its use in translations from Latin and Greek) applied to letters written in ancient times, esp. to those which rank as literary productions, or … to those of a public character, or addressed to a body of persons. In application to ordinary (modern) letters now used only rhetorically or with playful or sarcastic implication.”

That explains why “epistle,” as Ayto says, “has never really caught on in English as a general term for a ‘letter’—too high-falutin.”

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Q: I have done some googling, but I am still unsure of the difference, if any, between the words “proportional” and “proportionate.” My gut tells me you will respond that, outside of a mathematics discussion, the words are interchangeable.

A: Your gut is right. Aside from a few specialized meanings, these adjectives are so alike that any differentiation between them would be hair-splitting. They both mean in proportion.

“Proportional” and “proportionate” come from corresponding Latin adjectives, proportionalis and proportionatus. The chief difference is the suffixes, “-al” (-alis) and “-ate” (-atus), which can be used to form adjectives from nouns.

The natural question is, Why do we—and why did the Romans—need two such words?

As it happens, the ancient Romans had only one, the classical Latin proportionalis, which is the source of “proportional,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

English acquired the other word, “proportionate,” from the late Latin adjective proportionatus (proportioned, corresponding), which the OED dates from around 1250.

It seems likely that “proportionate” never would have entered English if medieval Latin scholars hadn’t invented proportionatus. 

Interestingly, the English adjectives first appeared in writing at the same time—around 1397—and in the same work. 

The OED’s earliest citations for both words are from John Trevisa’s Middle English translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum (“On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia  written in Latin in the mid-1200s by a Franciscan monk, Bartholomaeus Anglicus.

Here’s “proportional,” from a section on the grafting of trees: “Among all graffynge of trees, the best is whan the graffe and the stok beth yliche … other of trees that haueth humour proporcional and acordynge either to other.”

And here’s “proportionate,” from a section about fingernails: “The nailes growen in lengthe & brede in quantite proporcionat to the fyngres.” (We’ve replaced the runic letter thorn with “th” throughout.)

The OED defines “proportional” here as meaning “that is in proportion, or in due proportion; related proportionately to something; corresponding, esp. in degree or amount.”

And it defines “proportionate” as meaning “proportioned, adjusted in proportion; that is in (due) proportion, proportional (to); appropriate in respect of quantity, extent, degree, etc.”

Apart from some specialized meanings, the definitions haven’t changed much since the 14th century. The words are as similar today as they were then—in the OED and in standard dictionaries.

For instance, both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) define “proportionate” as meaning “proportional.” American Heritages adds “being in due proportion.”

The two dictionaries give “proportional” these meanings (we’ll paraphrase): (1) being in proportion; (2) corresponding or properly related in size, degree, etc.; (3) having the same or a constant ratio.

So which is the better one to use? That’s up to you. Use the one that sounds better to you in context. That’s what people have been doing for 600 years.

The same is true for the negative versions—“disproportional” versus “disproportionate,” which mean out of proportion. Although “disproportionate” is vastly more popular than “disproportional,” they’re equally legitimate and virtually interchangeable.

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Q: I believe a garnish on a plate of food is something like a sprig of parsley or a mint leaf.  But Jacques Pépin, on his show Essential Pépin, refers to vegetables (what I would call side dishes) as garnish for a meat dish. What’s up with this?

A: We checked eight standard dictionaries—three American and five British—and all of them define the culinary noun “garnish” the way you do, as a tidbit of food added for decoration or flavor.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, says garnish is an “ornamentation or embellishment, especially one added to a prepared food or drink for decoration or added flavor.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines the verb “garnish” as “to add decorative or savory touches to (food or drink).” M-W defines the noun as “something (as lemon wedges or parsley) used to garnish food or drink.”

We haven’t watched the public-television series Essential Pépin, but if Jacques Pépin is using the word “garnish” to refer to a side dish, he’s using it in a way that’s not customary today.

However, the word “garnish” may have once referred to a side dish, though that usage is now considered obsolete.

The Oxford English Dictionary, in its entry for the noun “garnish,” lists three citations from the mid-1600s under the subheading “? Side-dishes.”

Why the question mark? Well, the sense of “garnish” in all three citations isn’t all that clear. Here’s an example from Ovatio Carolina, an account of the lavish welcome that Charles I received on Nov. 25, 1641, from the Lord Mayor and other officials in London:

“At the South end whereof (two yards distance from the Table), was a Table of Garnish, of three yards square.” (That would be a lot of parsley, but maybe people were big on Petroselinum crispum in those days.)

When the noun “garnish” entered English in the 1400s, it referred to pewter vessels set out on a table, but that meaning is now obsolete.

In the early 1600s, it took on the sense of an embellishment or a decoration, as in this 1615 citation in the OED from The English House-Wife, Gervase Markham’s book about womanly virtues: “Adorn the person altogether without toyish garnishes, or the gloss of light colours.”

By the late 1600s, according to the dictionary, the word “garnish” was being used for “things placed round or added to a dish to improve its appearance at table.”

Here’s an example from Richard Leigh’s The Transproser Rehears’d (1673): “Your Text is all Margent, and not only all your Dishes, but your Garnish too is Pork.” (“Margent” is an obsolete version of “margin.”)

The noun “garnish,” as you may suspect, is derived from the verb “garnish,” which English adapted from Old French in the 1300s.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the earlier word “was originally a fairly utilitarian verb, meaning simply ‘fit out, equip, supply’ or ‘adorn.’ ”

Ayto says the verb is derived from the Old French word garnir (to equip or adorn), but its ultimate source is “presumably” an Indo-European base that also gave English the verb “warn.”

“The notion of ‘warning’ is preserved in the legal term garnishee, applied to someone who is served with a judicial warning not to pay their debt to anyone other than the person who is seeking repayment,” he adds.

Note: We wrote a post a few years ago about “garnishee” and the legal sense of the verb “garnish.”

Update (August 21, 2013): A reader has written to say that the French noun garniture can mean either “garnish” or “side dish,” which may explain Pépin’s usage.

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Q: I’m writing about the use of “disappear” in this Huffington Post headline: “How to Disappear the Unemployed (See North Carolina).” What do you make of this post-Argentina transitive use of an intransitive verb?

A: Yes, that usage does recall a dark time in the history of Argentina. Stewart was a foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires during the early days of the conflict that gave us the usage behind that headline.

But before discussing the Huffington Post language, let’s go back a few hundred years to the early days of the verb “disappear,” which was influenced by disparaître, the French verb for disappearing.

When “disappear” entered English back in the early 1500s, it was an intransitive verb, one that doesn’t have a direct object. Here’s an example from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “She disappear’d, and left me dark.”

But the verb has been used transitively (that is, with an object) since the late 19th century in reference to inanimate objects. Until recently, though, this usage has been rare.

The Oxford English Dictionary has only two isolated examples of the transitive usage.

One is from Chemical News in 1897: “We progressively disappear the faces of the dodecahedron.”

The other is from a 1949 article in American Speech about the lingo of magicians: “The magician may speak of disappearing or vanishing a card.”

But this inanimate use of the verb has had a renaissance in recent years, primarily in techie talk: “disappear the data,” “disappear the ‘run script’ dialogue,” “disappear the mouse cursor,” and so on.

Although the techie usage hasn’t made it into standard dictionaries, another transitive sense of “disappear” showed up in the 1970s and has been accepted by lexicographers as standard English.

This sense of the verb—to “disappear” someone—surfaced in news reports about the Argentine military government’s battle against insurgents and its suppression of dissidents in the 1970s.

The earliest example in the OED is from a 1979 article in the New York Times Magazine about people who vanished after being detained by the Argentine military:

“While Miss Iglesias ‘was disappeared,’ her family’s writ of habeas corpus, filed on her behalf, was rejected by the courts.”

The recent incarnation of “disappear” on the Huffington Post website represents a milder, more figurative form of the Argentine-inspired usage.

It appeared above a July 10, 2013, article by George Wentworth about states where unemployment programs are under attack. Wentworth, an attorney for the National Employment Law Project, a labor-advocacy group, wrote:

“Unfortunately, some state lawmakers are not much interested in understanding or solving the continuing unemployment problem; they just want it to go away. So in an increasing number of states, the perceived ‘problem’ is no longer ‘unemployment’—it’s the ‘unemployed.’ And the most convenient and politically facile way to attack the unemployed is to attack unemployment insurance.”

Together, the article and its headline implied that some states are trying to “disappear” jobless people—at least statistically—by reducing the number of people receiving unemployment insurance.

Should this looser transitive use of “disappear” be disappeared? Well, some sticklers are annoyed by it. One reader of the Huffington Post article, for example, posted this tart response: “How to disappear an intransitive verb.”

However, we like this eye-catching use of language. “Disappear” here is an attention-getter, and attention is what headlines are supposed to get.

Although you won’t find the usage in standard dictionaries, it’s an extension of the dark transitive sense from Argentina, which is in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.).

American Heritage says the transitive “disappear” means “to cause (someone) to disappear, especially by kidnapping or murder.” Merriam-Webster’s defines it as “to cause the disappearance of.” Neither dictionary has any lexical reservations about the usage.

The OED defines this sense of the verb as “to abduct or arrest (a person), esp. for political reasons, and subsequently to kill or detain as a prisoner, without making his or her fate known.”

Oxford adds that the word is frequently used “with reference to Latin America,” and that it developed “originally and chiefly after American Spanish desaparecido,” a noun meaning “a disappeared, missing person.”

The Times Magazine article cited above provides some insight into the Argentine usage. The authors write:

“Desaparecido is one of the more familiar terms of a new Argentine argot, a strange, forbidding vocabulary invented by an underworld of military and police personnel in their extralegal duties. The literal translation into English has a curiously passive sense to it: ‘to be disappeared.’ It disguises the ugly reality of clandestine abduction, torture and execution affecting tens of thousands of Argentines in recent years.”

The article continues: “The desaparecidos are persons who, usually after being detained by teams of well-armed men, vanish without a trace into a world beyond all legal and human rights.”

The Spanish term had previously appeared in Time magazine, according to OED citations, in a 1977 article about Argentina:

“Amnesty International  … accused the military of arbitrary detention, torture, summary executions and the ‘disappearance’ of at least 500 suspects…. Amnesty charges that many of the desaparecidos were innocent citizens abducted and murdered by soldiers and police in mufti.”

But in searches of our own we found earlier uses of desaparecidos, in both Spanish (1971) and English (1976). We also found it in Spanish in the mid-’70s in reference to Augusto Pinochet’s suppression of opponents in Chile.

An English phrase that conveys the meaning of desaparecidos, “the disappeared,” predates Argentina’s military dictatorship, which ended with the return to civilian rule and free elections in 1983.

The OED’s first use of this noun phrase comes from a poem in Charles Bukowski’s The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969): “the hearse comes through the room filled with / the beheaded, the disappeared, the living / mad.”

Oxford’s next citation for the phrase is in reference to Argentina and comes from Robert McAfee Brown’s Theology in a New Key (1978):

“People are taken from their homes by masked gangs. They are never heard from again; they become ‘the disappeared,’ who are tortured to extract information about their political activities before they are killed.”

Some of these usages have survived “post-Argentina” (to use your phrase), and are now used more widely.

For example, “the disappeared” has been used in reference to victims of violent crime in Mexico. It’s also been used to refer to those kidnapped and killed by the Irish Republican Army. The OED includes a 1998 citation from the Belfast Telegraph:

“In addition to a firm commitment on decommissioning, he said his party wanted to see a resolution to the dreadful suffering to the relatives of the ‘disappeared’ and the standing down of the IRA active service units.”

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Q: In your language Q&A, you say, “One soldier does not a troop make.” This would have surprised the training cadre of P Company, 2nd Training Regiment, Fort Dix, NJ, in the summer of 1959, when I (a trainee) was repeatedly addressed as “troop.”

A: Yes, it’s true that “troop” is used colloquially in the military to mean an individual soldier.  And quite a few civilians use “troop” that way too.

But this meaning of the word isn’t yet in standard dictionaries, which still define the singular word “troop” in the military sense as a unit of service members.

We wrote a post about “troop” in 2006 and updated it in 2009. We’ve now checked to see whether the standard usage has changed since then, and it hasn’t.

In its military sense, the noun “troop” refers to a unit or a body of soldiers, especially an air or armored cavalry unit corresponding to an infantry company. Used in the plural, though, “troops” means soldiers or military units.

None of the standard dictionaries we checked accept the use of the singular “troop” to mean an individual service member.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for what it labels an “irregular” usage—the singular “troop,” used to mean one person.

The OED defines “troop” in this sense as “a member of a troop of soldiers (or other servicemen); a soldier, a trooper.”

This usage, Oxford says, is an “irregular” one derived from the use of “troop” as a collective plural, or “in some cases perhaps abbrev. of trooper.”  It describes this as a colloquialism used “chiefly” in the military.

Here are the dictionary’s citations, which begin in the 19th century, for this colloquial meaning of “troop”:

“The monkey stowed himself away … till the same marine passed … and laid hold of him by the calf of the leg. … As the wounded ‘troop’ was not much hurt, a sort of truce was proclaimed.” (From an 1832 volume of a travel memoir, Fragments of Voyages and Travels, by the naval officer Basil Hall. The “troop” here is a royal marine bitten by the ship’s monkey.)

“Can you spare a bite for a front-line troop?” (From a 1947 story collection, The Gorse Blooms Pale, by the New Zealand author Dan Davin.)

“ ‘You don’t smoke dope, do you, troop?’ ‘No, no sir!’ ” (From Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, 1973.)

We discussed the etymology of “troop” in our earlier post. We’ll just mention here that the term was borrowed in the 16th century from French, which got it from troppus, late Latin for flock. (Some etymologists believe troppus in turn may have Germanic roots.) 

Getting back to your question, a trainee at Fort Dix may often be addressed as “troop,” but this usage hasn’t made the leap into civilian life as standard English—at least not yet. Stay tuned!

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