A: You ask a very interesting question. That’s because the words “tax” and “taxes” aren’t your simple, generic examples of a singular and a plural.

Each of them can be interpreted in two different ways. And that complicates their use with the adjectives “less” and “fewer.” This is what we mean:

(1) “Tax” can refer to an individual levy, as in a gasoline tax or an income tax or a sales tax. And two or more of these would be “taxes”—different KINDS of levies.

(2) “Tax” can also be what’s known as a singular “mass” noun for an amount of something—in this case, the amount of money owed to the government. And “taxes,” even though it’s a plural, is ordinarily used in this same sense. You might reasonably say either “I owed no tax this year” or “I owed no taxes this year.” Though you use the plural “taxes,” you’re thinking of a single sum of money.

Now let’s toss the adjective “less” into the mix.

Nobody would argue with a sentence like “I paid less tax this year.” But how about “I paid less taxes this year”? Is that good English usage?

Not to our ears, it isn’t. And we’re not alone.

When we Google the phrase “less taxes,” we come up with several hundred thousand hits. But there are twice as many for “less tax.” In our opinion, the majority has a better ear (or better ears).

Broadly speaking, the rule in modern usage guides is that the adjective “less” is for a smaller amount of one thing (“less milk”), while the adjective “fewer” is for a smaller number of things you can count (“fewer cookies”).

We’ve written before on our blog about the decline of “fewer,” a word that seems to be occurring fewer and fewer times. And we’ve written that the line between “less” and “fewer” wasn’t always as distinct as it is in modern usage guides.

The Oxford English Dictionary has examples from the year 888 to modern times of “less” used to mean “fewer”—that is, a smaller number of things. This isn’t surprising, of course, since “fewer” wasn’t even available until the 14th century.

But getting back to your question, “taxes,” no matter how it’s used, is grammatically plural (like “cookies”). And most people’s ears rebel at the use of “less” with a grammatical plural, as in “less cookies” or “less taxes.”

The appropriate adjective with “taxes” would be “fewer,” but “fewer taxes” would mean a smaller number of individual taxes. And that’s not what we’re trying to say.

The solution? When you want to use the plural “taxes” in a wider sense (meaning the sum), it’s perfectly correct to add “in” and say you paid “less in taxes.” Here’s why.

In the phrase “less in taxes,” the word “less” isn’t an adjective. It’s a noun meaning “a smaller amount.” And “in taxes” (you could just as well use “in tax”) is a prepositional phrase.

This is probably why the phrase “less in taxes” doesn’t offend many ears. It gets more Google hits (2.6 million) than “less taxes” and “less tax” combined.

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A: This use of “bum-rush” as a verbal phrase is fairly recent, and it’s undoubtedly a variation on the earlier noun phrase “the bum’s rush.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says to “bum-rush” is “to charge at or into (a person or place): groupies who bum-rushed the musician’s dressing room.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines it similarly: “to attack or seize with an overpowering rush,” as in “bum-rush the stage.”

M-W dates the expression from 1987, though it doesn’t give the origin. However, 1987 was the year the hip-hop group Public Enemy released its first album, “Yo! Bum Rush the Show.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang (Vol. I) attributes the usage to the title song on the Public Enemy album, but dates it to 1986. We assume that’s because Public Enemy was performing the song that year while it was the opening act for the Beastie Boys.

Since the album came out, “bum-rush” has been used pretty freely as a verbal phrase meaning to deliberately run into someone or something at full tilt.

The intent can be to ambush, push past, beat up, tackle, or shove aside. It can also mean to gatecrash, or push into a club or event without paying.

Though the expression is sometimes used in the sense of to have anal sex (likely a play on the British slang word “bum,” meaning buttocks), the usage we find most often has little to do with sex.

For example, a 2010 news story on the website TMZ reported that Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber had been “bum-rushed” by an overenthusiastic 12-year-old fan.

And in late April the LA Weekly blog reported that a stand-up comic, Randy Kagan, had been assaulted and pushed off the stage at the Hollywood Improv. “I was blindsided, bum rushed,” Kagan is quoted as saying. (He had made remarks about a woman in the audience and her boyfriend took offense.)

As we said, this verbal usage is probably derived from the older phrase “bum’s rush,” defined in Merriam-Webster’s as “forcible eviction or dismissal.” M-W dates this one from 1904.

The “bum” in the phrase is a vagrant or tramp who’s thrown out of a place or forcibly escorted off the premises.

This sense of “bum” as a tramp is of American origin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and apparently so is the phrase “bum’s rush.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang (Vol. I) says the phrase originated “in the saloons of late 19C New York where vagrants and other hungry people attempted to take advantage of the sometimes sumptuous free lunch counters, which were meant for drinkers only.”

Freeloaders, in other words, got the “bum’s rush.”

Here’s a mid-20th-century usage, courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary, from Marten Cumberland’s novel Murmurs in the Rue Morgue (1959):

“Chotin was being given what the vulgar term the ‘bum’s rush.’ He was down the steps … through the gate and flat on his back on the pavement.”

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A: Both “plan on” and “plan to” (as well as the progressive-tense versions you mention) are standard English, though “plan on” is more common in the US than in the UK.

But you’re right that “plan on” sounds more at home in speech or informal writing, while “plan to” seems a better choice for formal writing.

In fact, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “Our evidence suggests that plan on is more often found in spoken than in written use; we have few printed examples.”

The only written example cited in the usage guide is from a December 1977 issue of Cats Magazine: “I will be discharged from the service in 1979 and plan on returning to the States.”

The verbal phrase “plan on” is usually followed by a gerund (“Do you plan on seeing King Lear?”), but it’s sometimes seen with a noun object (“Let’s plan on vichyssoise for lunch”).

The phrase “plan to” is always followed by an infinitive (“So when do you plan to clean your room?”).

By the way, the book Words Into Type (3rd ed.), familiar to journalists, has a handy section called “The Right Preposition,” consisting of a long list of words together with the prepositions they usually take. (It recommends that “plan” be used with “to.”)

As for “plan to” versus “are planning to,” we find the present-progressive version a bit informal, but we don’t think it would be out of place in a casual business letter.

We hope that ex-boss of yours isn’t an ex because of his consternation over your editing. If you’re planning to do that again with your next boss, maybe you should take Paul Simon’s advice and make a new plan.

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A: There isn’t such a word. That’s because “inane” no longer means what it did when it was adopted from Latin. It now means silly or senseless, but it originally meant empty or void.

The Latin adjective inanis (empty) and verb inanere (to empty) do have opposites—plenus (full) and implere (to fill).

You’ll recognize in them the ancestors of our words “plenty,” “plenteous,” “plenum” (a full assembly), and “plenipotentiary” (having full power).

But there’s no English antonym for “inane” that’s based on the same Latin root. Your playful suggestion, “pronane,” doesn’t exist in English, and if it did, it would mean the opposite of empty, not silly.

The Latin-derived words that look a bit like “inane” and come closest to being its opposite in meaning have different classical roots. “Animated,” for example, ultimately comes from anima, Latin for breath or soul.

The adjective “inane,” as you know, means senseless, unimaginative, insubstantial, or unintelligent. It’s used to describe someone or something that lacks sense or substance.

Of course there are lots of English words that mean the opposite. For starters, let’s simply turn around the words in the definition above: “sensible,” “imaginative,” “substantial,” and “intelligent.”

We could add many more: “smart,” “sharp,” “deep,” “profound,” “weighty,” and so on. However, we can’t think of a single word that truly does the job.

It’s interesting that a term derived from the Latin word for empty is so full of senses of one sort or another, though all of them are related to emptiness.

When “inane” showed up in English in the mid-17th century, it simply meant empty and was used to refer to abstract things.

The first citation in the OED is from Joseph Glanvill’s Lux Orientalis (1662), a book about Eastern beliefs in the existence of souls: “To have confined his omnipotence to work only in one little spot of an infinite inane capacity.”

It took a century and a half for the word to come to mean silly, senseless, or empty-headed. The OED’s first citation is from The Cenci (1819), a verse play by Shelley: “Some inane and vacant smile.”

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says “inane” is probably a back formation from the noun “inanity,” which showed up at the beginning of the 17th century.

(A back formation, as regular readers of the blog are aware, is a word formed by subtracting an element from an older one.)

“A similar development is found in vain and vanity,” Chambers notes, “where the noun is recorded earlier than the adjective.”

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A: We assume you passed on to your daughter the traditional view—that “nauseous” means sickening while “nauseated” means sickened.

But the distinction between these two words is becoming less distinct year by year. In fact, it was even less so when they entered English hundreds of years ago.

In a posting we ran on our blog in 2006, we said: “If someone is sick to his stomach, he’s nauseated. If something is sickening, it’s nauseous. Never say, ‘I’m nauseous.’ Even if it’s true, why admit it?”

But in the six years since we wrote that post, the sands of English usage have been shifting. So your daughter might want to pause before correcting anyone.

These are interesting words with a tangled history.

The root word here, “nausea,” ultimately comes from ancient Greece, in which nausie (in Ionic Greek) and nautia (in Attic Greek) meant seasickness, sickness, disgust, or loathing. The word passed into Latin, in which nausea means seasickness.

The seasickness angle is significant, since the Greek nausie and nautia were derived from nautes (sailor), which in turn came from naus (ship).

All these words share an ancestor, a prehistoric Indo-European word reconstructed as nau (“boat”), according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

Through Greek and later Latin, that Indo-European root is the distant ancestor of such seafaring English words “nautical,” “nautilus,” “navy,” “naval,” “navigation,” and of course “nausea,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

“Nausea” came into English from Latin in the early to mid-1400s, and while the Latin word meant seasickness, the English word had a more general meaning.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this early meaning as “a feeling of sickness with an inclination to vomit; an occurrence of such a feeling.” (It was later used to mean seasickness too.)

In the 17th century, the OED says, “nausea” came to have figurative meanings like “strong disgust, loathing, or aversion,” or “a feeling of this.”

These are still the meanings the noun “nausea” has today. But the adjectives are another matter.

The earlier of the adjectives, “nauseous,” was first recorded in 1613, according to the OED, and it originally meant “inclined to sickness or nausea; squeamish.”

That, of course, is a somewhat milder version of the meaning that makes you sick: about to throw up.

The original sense of “nauseous” has since become obsolete. But before it died out, it overlapped with another, first recorded in 1618, defined by the OED as “causing nausea,” and “in later use: esp. offensive or unpleasant to taste or smell.”

Later in the 1600s, figurative meanings of “nauseous” came along, and it was used to mean nasty, repellant, loathsome, disgusting, repulsive, or offensive.

In the late 19th century, however, two senses of “nauseous” similar to the early ones showed up in the US: “affected with nausea; having an unsettled stomach,” and “disgusted, affected with distaste or loathing.”

The OED’s earliest citation for this usage is from 1885, and the numerous examples continue into the year 2000.

A representative example is this one from a 1949 issue of the Saturday Review: “After taking dramamine, not only did the woman’s hives clear up, but she discovered that her usual trolley ride back home no longer made her nauseous.”

Meanwhile, “nauseated” was undergoing some changes of its own.

When it was first used, in the 17th century, “nauseated” meant “causing nausea, cloying, rank,” the OED says. In other words, it meant pretty much what sticklers now insist “nauseous” should mean.

The OED’s first citation for the use of the word in writing is from Richard Allestree’s book The Gentlemans Calling (1660): “Forsaking all the unsatisfying nauseated pleasures of Luxury.”

The meaning later shifted to “suffering from or characterized by nausea,” as in this citation from the works of Sir Charles H. Williams, written sometime before 1759: “The nauseated reader, no longer cou’d brook The hoarse cuckow note.”

And that has been the meaning of “nauseated” ever since—or has it?

As you can see, “nauseous” and “nauseated” have had bumpy rides. Where do they stand today?

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says flatly, “Any handbook that tells you that nauseous cannot mean ‘nauseated’ is out of touch with the contemporary language. In current use it seldom means anything else.”

Standard dictionaries agree—though not all of them state the case so strongly.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives “nauseous” two meanings: “1. causing nausea or disgust: nauseating. 2. affected with nausea or disgust.”

And in a usage note M-W adds: “Those who insist that nauseous can properly be used only in sense 1 and that in sense 2 it is an error for nauseated are mistaken. Current evidence shows these facts: nauseous is most frequently used to mean physically affected with nausea, usually after a linking verb such as feel or become; figurative use is quite a bit less frequent. Use of nauseous in sense 1 is much more often figurative than literal, and this use appears to be losing ground to nauseating.”

In case you think the people at Merriam-Webster’s are out on a limb, here’s what the newly revised American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says on the subject (we’ll add paragraph breaks for readability):

“Traditional usage lore has insisted that nauseous should be used only to mean ‘causing nausea’ and that it is incorrect to use it to mean ‘feeling sick to one’s stomach.’ Back in 1965, the Usage Panel was in step with this thinking, with 88 percent rejecting the ‘feeling sick’ meaning of nauseous.

“This attitude persisted for decades but has since begun to give way. In our 1988 survey, 72 percent of the Panel thought that a roller coaster should be said to makes its riders nauseated rather than nauseous. By the 1999 survey, the Panel’s attitude had changed dramatically—61 percent of the Panel approved of the sentence Roller coasters make me nauseous.

“This change might have been inevitable once people began to think that nauseous did not properly mean ‘causing nausea,’ as traditional lore would have it. Even in our 1988 survey, this was the case, as 88 percent preferred nauseating in the sentence The children looked a little green from too many candy apples and nauseating (not nauseous) rides. The 1999 results for this same example were not significantly different.

“Since there is abundant evidence for the ‘feeling sick’ use of nauseous, the word presents a classic example of a word whose traditional, ‘correct’ usage is being supplanted by a newer, ‘incorrect’ one. In other words, what was once considered an error is becoming standard practice.

“Nauseous is now far more common than nauseated in describing the sick feeling. While nauseated remains for some the only ’correct’ word in this use, it is more apt to be interpreted metaphorically. We were left nauseous by the movie suggests that it made us ill. We were left nauseated by the movie implies that we were repulsed by the images.”

We could go on ad nauseam, citing Collins, Macmillan, Cambridge, and other online  dictionaries, but we’ll stop here and answer one more question: what do we think about all this?

We think it’s OK to use “nauseous” for feeling sick, though we don’t do it ourselves and we wouldn’t recommend it for formal writing. However, some holdouts would disagree. If you don’t want to get on their wrong side, use “nauseating” for sickening and “feeling sick” (or “feeling queasy”) when you’re about to throw up.

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A: We can’t figure out why, either. Your daughter was right, and her teacher ought to go stand in the corner with a grammar book. (No, we won’t insist on a dunce cap!)

Before examining that sentence, let’s get rid of some clutter.

The choice between “who” and “whom” becomes obvious when we strip down the first part of the sentence to its basic subject, verb, and object: “Who … will be the most efficient employee….”

Next, let’s move around a few words to make it easier to identify the subject and object in the second part of the sentence. Again, the choice (“she or he” vs. “her or him”) is obvious: “… she or he … will be the most efficient employee….”

We’ve discussed “who” and “whom” many times on the blog (you can search for the terms) and we have a section about them on the Grammar Myths page of our website.

The real question here is whether “whom” matters anymore. We’ll get to that later, but first let’s look at the traditional view about who-ing and whom-ing, with an excerpt from Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I:

“If you want to be absolutely correct, the most important thing to know is that who does something (it’s a subject, like he), and whom has something done to it (it’s an object, like him). You might even try mentally substituting he or him where who or whom should go: if him fits, you want whom (both end in m); if he fits, you want who (both end in a vowel). “Who does something to (at, by, for, from, in, toward, upon, with, etc.) whom. The words in parentheses, by the way, are prepositions, words that ‘position’—that is, locate—other words. A preposition often comes just before whom, but not always. A better way to decide between who and whom is to ask yourself who is doing what to whom.

“This may take a little detective work. Miss Marple herself might have been stumped by the convolutions of some who or whom clauses (a clause, you’ll recall, is a group of words with its own subject and verb). For instance, other words may get in between the subject and the verb. Or the object may end up in front of both the subject and the verb. Here are two pointers to help clear up the mystery, and examples of how they’re used.

“• Simplify, simplify, simplify: strip the clause down to its basic subject, verb, and object.

“• Move the words around mentally to make it easier to identify the subject and the object.

“Nathan invited only guys [who or whom] he thought played for high stakes. If you strip the clause of its false clues—the words separating the subject and verb—you end up with who . . . played for high stakes. Who did something (played for high stakes), so it’s the subject.

“Nathan wouldn’t tell Miss Adelaide [who or whom] he invited to his crap game. First strip the sentence down to the basic clause, [who or whom] he invited. If it’s still unclear, rearrange the words in your mind: he invited whom. You can now see that whom is the object—he did something to (invited) whom—even though whom comes ahead of both the verb and the subject.”

Here’s the $64,000 question: Does this “who”/”whom” business really matter anymore? Our authoritative answer: yes and no. This is what Pat has to say about it in Woe Is I:

“Now for the good news. In almost all cases, you can use who instead of whom in conversation or in informal writing, like personal letters and casual memos.

“Sure, it’s not a hundred percent correct, and I don’t recommend using it on the most formal occasions, but who is certainly less stuffy, especially at the beginning of a sentence or a clause: Who’s the letter from? Did I tell you who I saw at the movies? Who are you waiting to see? No matter who you invite, someone will be left out.

“A note of caution: Who can sound grating if used for whom right after a preposition. You can get around this by putting who in front. From whom? becomes Who from? So when a colleague tells you he’s going on a Caribbean cruise and you ask, ‘Who with?’ he’s more likely to question your discretion than your grammar.”

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A: These words aren’t interchangeable, though they do overlap a bit in their meanings, and they have an etymological relative in common.

To “retain” is to keep in one’s possession; to hire; to remember or keep in mind; or keep in one’s service or pay.

To “maintain” is to preserve or keep in an existing state; support or provide for; uphold or defend; affirm or assert; or adhere or conform to.

These definitions are derived from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

The clue to what these words have in common is the word element “-tain.” This element doesn’t exist as a separate word in English, but if it did it would mean “hold” or “keep.”

The “-tain” in words like “maintain” and “retain” developed from the Latin tenere (to hold), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It came into English words that were adopted from French, in which tenir means to hold.

English has many such words besides the two you ask about, including “contain,” “detain,” “pertain,” and “sustain.”

Sometimes this word element (spelled “ten-”) appears at the beginning of a word having to do with holding, as in “tenant,” “tenacious,” and “tenable.”

As for the two verbs you asked about, English adapted “maintain” from the Anglo-Norman maintenir in the early 1300s, when it meant  to support or assist. And English got “retain” from the Anglo-Norman retener in the early 1400s, when it meant to restrain, prevent, or hinder.

Note: After reading this post, a reader comments, “Perhaps it is just the teacher in me, but I view retain with more negative connotations than maintain. Retain is holding back, while maintain is holding up. (I know this isn’t always the case.) Example: If a student cannot maintain her grades, I will be forced to retain her.”

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A: When we use the expression “elephant in the room” today, the elephant we’re usually talking about is something that’s too obvious to go unnoticed but uncomfortable to mention.

For example, all the relatives attending the wake for filthy-rich Great Aunt Beatrice wonder what’s in her unopened will, but none of them bring it up. It’s the elephant in the room.

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition for this sense of “elephant in the room” and variants thereof:

“A significant problem or controversial issue which is obviously present but ignored or avoided as a subject for discussion, usually because it is more comfortable to do so.”

The OED’s first published reference for this usage is the title of a 1984 book, An Elephant in the Living Room: A Leader’s Guide for Helping Children of Alcoholics, by Marion H. Typpo and Jill M. Hastings.

Here’s a more illustrative citation, from a 2004 issue of the New York Times: “When it comes to the rising price of oil, the elephant in the room is the ever-weakening United States dollar.”

In short, the OED’s citations for this use of the phrase go back only about 30 years. And we haven’t found any evidence of a connection to an earlier “body in the room,” in either a theatrical or a real crime scene.

However, there’s an older “elephant in the room” with a different meaning—roughly, something huge yet irrelevant, or perhaps unprovable. Here’s the OED’s definition of this one:

“The type of something obvious and incongruous, esp. (in Logic and Philos.) in discussions of statements which may or may not correspond to observable facts.”

The OED credits the philosopher Harry Todd Costello with the first recorded use of this sense of the phrase.

In an essay published in 1935, Costello wrote: “It is going beyond observation to assert there is not an elephant in the room, for I cannot observe what is not.” (The essay was published that year in American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, by Horace Meyer Kallen and Sidney Hook.)

Did the philosophical use of the phrase lead to the more familiar usage that’s common today? Perhaps, but before committing ourselves we did a bit more searching. And we came across yet other kinds of elephants.

For example, here’s a quotation in which the elephant is too big to ignore, but not necessarily off-limits in conversation. It comes from a 1961 issue of the Appraisal Journal, a real-estate industry publication:

“To continue to pretend that the American economy is thriving in an isolated vacuum would be like trying to ignore the presence of an elephant in the living room.”

And in a 1969 essay entitled “Elephants in the Living Room,” David Aspy used the term “elephant experience” to mean one that’s just too much to cope with—like coming home to find a you-know-what standing you-know-where.

We’ve also found the phrase “pink elephant in the room,” an apparent reference to hallucinating or waking up with a hangover.

This example is from a collection of anecdotes called Gridiron Nights (1915), by Arthur Wallace Dunn: “ ‘It reminds me of the fellow who woke up in the night and found a pink elephant in the room.’ ‘How did he get rid of it?’ ‘Oh, it backed slowly out through the keyhole.’ ”

Even before that, Mark Twain wrote a very funny story, “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882), about something too big to miss yet impossible to find.

In the story, which caricatures detective fiction, a large white elephant, freshly imported from Siam, disappears while quarantined in Jersey City.

But if the Twain story inspired the phrase “elephant in the room,” why did it take so long?

As you can see, in searching for the roots of the expression that’s popular today, it’s hard to determine which of these elephants might have suggested it.

But we suspect that white elephants and pink elephants are mere red herrings in this case. The clue to the origin of our particular “elephant in the room” probably lies with Harry Costello, the philosopher mentioned a few paragraphs ago.

Elephants are familiar presences in philosophy and logic. For instance, many philosophers have commented on the Indian parable of the blind men who attempt to describe an elephant by touch, each “seeing” and hence defining it differently. The fable is often used to make a point about language, experience, and deniability.

The fable would have been familiar to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. The two had an argument at Cambridge University in the early 20th century about the certainty of the proposition “There are no elephants in the room.”

Their argument was much discussed and long influential in philosophical circles. It was probably what Costello had in mind in his 1935 comment on the assertion that “there is not an elephant in the room.”

So can we trace the popular sense of the phrase back to Wittgenstein in the days before World War I? That’s our guess. But, as Wittgenstein would caution, we can’t know it with empirical certainty.

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A: First of all, this mistering of a President is nothing new.

Here’s an example from an April 18, 1861, article in the New York Times from New Orleans: “Mr. LINCOLN’s war proclamation was received with no astonishment.”

There’s nothing wrong or disrespectful about this usage, but it’s by no means universal.

The media—that is, the world of mass communications—is a big place that includes TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, news websites, and the blogosphere.

The news organizations populating this world follow many different style guides, but they generally refer to the occupant of the Oval Office as “President So-and-So” when first mentioned.

They differ, however, over how to refer to the president on second or third or whatever reference.

The Associated Press, for example, uses only his last name while the New York Times mixes things up and uses “the president,” “Mr. So-and-So,” or “President So-and-So.”

As for the courtesy title “mister,” it began life in the 1500s as a variant of “master,” a much older term that first showed up in the early days of Old English, when it was written as mægster.

The ultimate source of “mister” and “master,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is magister, Latin for master, chief, teacher, and a few other things.

When “master” first showed up in English in the writings of King Alfred, the ninth-century ruler of the West Saxons and Anglo-Saxons, it meant a man who had authority over others.

Over the years, it has taken on many other meanings, including an employer (early Old English), a teacher (early Old English), a courtesy title (Old English), a skilled workman (circa 1300), a manager of a shop (c. 1400), a male head of a household (1536), a captain of a merchant vessel (mid-1900s), and so on.

The abbreviated title “Mr.” showed up in the 1400s, according to OED citations, initially a shortened form of “Master” and later short for “Mister.”

“Until the latter half of the 17th cent.,” the OED says, “the title was often written in the full form master, but there is reason for believing that from the 16th cent. it was, at least in rapid or careless speech, treated proclitically, with consequent alteration of the vowel of the first syllable.”

In other words, as “master” began being treated proclitically (that is, as a prefix-like term connected to a name following it), this sense of the word evolved into “mister.”

“Eventually the word came to have the weakened pronunciation whenever it was used as a prefixed title,” the OED adds, “and it became customary always to employ the abbreviated spelling for this use, and only for this.”

As for Dr. Phil, enough said.

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A: No, we hadn’t noticed, at least not until we got your question.

A bit of googling, though, suggests that quite a few other people are using (or, rather, misusing) the adjective “apocryphal” to describe a sudden insight or inspiration or perception.

We came across a book on cancer research, for example, that describes an inspired technological breakthrough in treatment as “truly an apocryphal moment.”

You’re not the only person to raise an eyebrow at that BBC Radio 4 broadcast on April 22, 2012, of The Reunion. In the broadcast, the host Sue MacGregor reunited five people involved in the reconstruction of the theater.

We noticed several comments online by BBC listeners who wondered whether Claire van Kampen, the woman speaking, might have meant “apocalyptic,” not “apocryphal.” But we find that unlikely after listening to the comments by van Kampen, the new Globe’s first music director.

In the broadcast, she describes the moment that inspired her to join the project. She was visiting the site with her husband, the actor Mark Rylance, and felt disappointed at how little progress had been made:

“And then suddenly it—it was one of those apocryphal moments. The moon came out from behind the clouds. And it shone directly on this—this place. And then we heard St. Paul’s chime and we thought, ‘No, no, this—this is going to be magical. And we—we really want to be involved.’ ”

Our guess is that she (like others who misuse the term) was under the mistaken impression that “apocryphal,” which means inauthentic, erroneous, or fictitious, could be used to describe an epiphany.

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, defines epiphany as “a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something”  or “an intuitive grasp of reality through something usually simple and striking.”

We couldn’t find a single standard dictionary that includes insightful, inspirational, or perceptive as a sense of “apocryphal.”

When the adjective showed up in English in the late 16th century, it referred to a statement or story or other piece of writing.

By the early 17th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was being used to refer to the “the Jewish and early Christian uncanonical literature”—that is the Apocrypha, the etymological parent of the adjective.

Around the same time, “apocryphal” took on its modern meaning of unreal, counterfeit, or sham. The earliest OED citation for this sense is from Ben Jonson’s 1612 comedy The Alchemist: “A whoresonne, vpstart, Apocryphall Captayne.”

So will the inspirational sense of “apocryphal” that you noticed catch on? We haven’t had an epiphany, but we don’t think so.

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A: Once upon a time, river names in English usually included the word “of.” So instead of “River Jordan” (in modern British usage) or “Jordan River” (in American usage), you would have found “River of Jordan” (written something like “rywere of Iordane”).

Many of the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citations for names of rivers, dating from the late 1300s, include “of.” Chaucer in 1395, for example, wrote of “the ryuer of Gysen.”

This practice of including “of” in river names, the OED says, wasn’t the only way of naming rivers, but it was “the predominant style before the late 17th cent.”

At that point, “of” began to drop out of river names, and British and American practices started to diverge.

In proper names, the word “river” commonly came first in Britain, but last in the American Colonies. In other words, most English speakers simply dropped “of,” but Americans reversed the word order as well.

While “river” has occasionally appeared at the end in British writing, this was “uncommon,” the OED says. Most of Oxford’s citations for “river” in last place are from the mid-1600s and after, and most are from North American sources.

As things now stand, the OED explains, the word “river” appears first “chiefly in British English referring to British rivers and certain other major, historically important rivers, as the Nile, Rhine, Ganges, etc.”

In North American usage, however, “river” comes at the end except sometimes in “certain other major, historically important rivers” like the ones mentioned above.

But we haven’t addressed the question “Why?” Why does usage differ in Britain and America? Why did the Colonists prefer “James River” and “Charles River” to the reverse?

We can’t answer that. But certainly the style adopted by the Colonists wasn’t unknown in the mother country.

The earliest OED citation with “river” following a proper noun is from about 1460, in a poem by John Lydgate mentioning the “Rodamus Ryuer.” And as late as 1612, the historian and cartographer John Speed mentions the “Thames Riuer.”

All we can say is that somehow a usage that was uncommon in England was transported to the New World and took hold.

As for earlier etymology, “river” can be traced to the Latin riparius (of a riverbank), from ripa (bank). It has more distant ancestors in the Greek ereipein (to plunge down) and in an ancient Indo-European root reconstructed as reip.

Interestingly, as John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “A heavily disguised English relative is arrived, which etymologically denotes ‘come to the shore.’ ”

“River” entered the language by way of Anglo-Norman and French, first appearing in written English around 1300, the OED says. But the word was part of people’s names as far back as the 11th century.

The OED says it is “attested earlier in surnames, as Gozelinus Riuere (1086; 1084 as Gozelinus de Lariuera), Walter de la Rivere (c1150), Johannes de la Riviere (1166), Willelmus de la Rivere (1200), etc.”

However, Oxford adds, “the early examples certainly, and the later probably, reflect the Anglo-Norman rather than the Middle English word.”

If you’d like to read more about rivers, we had a posting in 2011 about selling someone down the river, and one in 2010 about the differing US and UK pronunciations of Thames.

Finally, all this river talk may have left you wondering about the name “Riviera,” which we now use for the Mediterranean coasts of southeastern France and northwestern Italy. That name, first recorded in the 18th century, comes from an archaic use of “river” to mean a coast or seaboard.

Time to book a vacation!

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A: When Big Brother is watching you, you’re being surveilled, though we’d prefer saying you’re under surveillance, a much more popular usage. In fact, our spell-checker doesn’t recognize “surveil” or “surveilled.”

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, defines “surveil” as “to subject to surveillance.” It gives “surveilled” as the past tense and the past participle.

The dictionary says the verb is a “back-formation from surveillance.” (A back-formation is a new word formed by dropping parts of an older one.)

The verb “survey” has several similar meanings—to look over, examine, evaluate, supervise, and so on—but none of them are quite the same as “surveil” or the longer verb phrase “subject to surveillance.”

English borrowed the noun “surveillance” from French in the late 18th or early 19th century. It’s derived from the Latin vigilare (to watch).

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1799, appears to be using the French word in an English sentence.

The next example is from an 1802 letter by John Gustavus Lemaistre about a visit to a tapestry factory in Paris:

“The workmen are not locked up within the walls of the manufactory … but they are kept under the constant ‘surveillance of the police.’ ” (We’ve expanded the OED citation.)

The word “surveil” didn’t show up until much later. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) dates it to 1914, but M-W doesn’t mention a source.

The earliest example in the OED is from a 1960 court opinion in the Federal Supplement, which publishes case law: “The plaintiff also stresses that the store as a whole, and the customer exits especially, were closely surveilled.”

Is “surveil” etymologically related to “survey”? Not really, though both are derived from Latin words that have something to do with vision.

The verb “survey,” which entered English in the 15th century via the Anglo-Norman surveier, is derived from videre, the Latin verb for see, while “surveil” (as we’ve said above) comes from vigilare, the Latin verb for watch.

And these two verbs have different reconstructed Indo-European roots: “survey” is ultimately derived from weid (to see) while “surveil” is derived from weg (to awake).

Finally, all this talk about surveillance reminds us of “To Surveil With Love,” an episode on The Simpsons a couple of years ago.

In the episode, Homer accidentally leaves his gym bag at train station after nuclear waste is hidden in it. Fearing terrorism, officials suspend civil liberties and install surveillance cameras all over town.

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A: We hear the single sarcastic “Really?” quite a bit, but we haven’t noticed the repetitive usage. It doesn’t surprise us, though. In modern English, “really” has multiple uses—and some corresponding overuses.

For example, “really” is used nearly to death as an intensifier—that is, to be emphatic: “He’s really angry.” And when a single “really” isn’t intense enough, it’s doubled : “He’s really, really angry.”

(We’ve written before on the blog about the repeating of words for emphasis, a practice that’s been common for centuries.)

Other common uses of “really” express doubt (“I look good in orange? Really?”) or surprise (“I won the raffle? Really?”). And again, when a single “really” isn’t sufficiently doubtful or surprising, it’s doubled: “Really? Really?”

And, of course, there’s the sarcastic usage (“You have a 200 IQ? Really?”). We’re a bit surprised, however, that you’re hearing a doubling here. It seems to us that a second “Really?” would lessen the sarcasm.

The word “really” has other uses as well, of course. It can be used to express protest or dismay: “Really now! Five dollars for coffee?”

And it still retains its original, literal sense, in which it means in reality or in fact. In fact (if you’ll pardon the repetition), the word has had quite a history.

When it was first recorded in English in the 1400s, “really” had a strictly literal meaning—as the adverbial form of the adjective “real”—and it often had religious significance.

Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines the original word: “In reality; in a real manner. Also: in fact, actually.”

The word is still used this way, but in its early days it was frequently used “with reference to the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist,” the OED says.

Here, for example, is an early usage dated about 1450. It’s from a Middle English prose translation of a religious poem by Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode (The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man):

“With inne this bred al the souereyn good is put … bodiliche and rialliche, presentliche and verreyliche.” (“Within this bread all the sovereign good is put … bodily and really, presently and verily.”)

The religious historian John Foxe also used the word in a doctrinal sense in his multi-volume Actes and Monuments (1563), shorter editions of which were popularly known as The Book of Martyrs.

In a passage about the Roman Catholic persecution of a Protestant who was burned at the stake in 1410, Foxe writes: “He held this opinion, that it was not the body of Christe really, the whiche was sacramentally vsed in the churche.”

This literal sense of “really”—both religious and otherwise—was later joined by another.

In the mid-16th century, the OED says, people began using it to mean truly, indeed or positively. And somewhat later it was used in the same sense as an intensifier to mean very or thoroughly.

Among the OED’s citations for this sense of the word is a quotation from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): “This last Bill was really frightful.” (The “bill” was a weekly tally of the dead.)

A less grim, and more modern, example comes from a 2003 issue of the New York Post: “I have a really big scoop for you.”

In the early 17th century another use of “really” came along—the one expressing dismay or protest.

Here’s an early example, from Aphra Behn’s comedy The Roundheads (1682): “Really, Madam, I shou’d be glad to know by what other Title you wou’d be distinguish’d?”

A more recent OED citation is from John Braithwaite’s novel Never Sleep Three in a Bed (1969): “Being hauled out of mud-holes by horses was bad enough. But oxen, really!”

Finally we come to the “really” that’s usually framed as a question, though it’s more like a sideways statement of skepticism, doubt, or surprise. This one cropped up in the mid-18th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for this sense of the word comes from Samuel Richardson’s novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753):

“ ‘The Count of Belvedere. He was more earnest in his favour—’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, really—than I thought he ought to be.’ ”

This is the “really” that’s doubled in the sarcastic usage you ask about: “Really? Really?”

As we said, this repetitive usage is new to us, but we’re not really surprised!

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A: You’re right that a lot of parkways don’t lead to parks, but the first parkway apparently did, according to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

The department’s website describes Eastern Parkway, which runs between eastern Brooklyn and Prospect Park, as “the world’s first parkway.”

The department says Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who designed the parkway as well as the park, coined the term “parkway.”

The parkway, which was built from 1870 to 1874, connects Grand Army Plaza, the main entrance to Prospect Park, and Ralph Avenue to the east.

“Olmsted and Vaux intended Eastern Parkway to be the Brooklyn nucleus of an interconnected park and parkway system for the New York area,” the department says.

Although the plan was never completed, it adds, “their idea of bringing the countryside into the city influenced the construction of major parks and parkways in cities throughout the United States.”

The earliest published reference that we could find for the term “parkway” is in Olmsted and Vaux’s 1868 layout map for the construction of Eastern Parkway:

“City of Brooklyn. Plan of a portion of park way as proposed to be laid out from the eastern part of the City to the Plaza.” (Brooklyn was a city until it was annexed by New York City in 1898.)

So, was Leonard right in saying a parkway leads to a park?

Well, that was what Olmsted and Vaux had in mind when they used the term.

And one of the definitions of “parkway” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, could be interpreted that way: “a roadway in a park : a landscaped thoroughfare connecting parks.”

However, the primary definition in Webster’s Third describes it as “a broad landscaped thoroughfare; especially : one from which trucks and other heavy vehicles are excluded.”

And the Oxford English Dictionary defines “parkway” similarly: “A broad arterial road planted with trees; an open landscaped highway or boulevard. Occas. also: the planted area of such a highway.”

In other words, a road is usually called a “parkway” today because of the parklike appearance of the planted median strip or side strips.

As for the Garden State Parkway, a reader of the blog comments: “Here in sunny New Jersey we have a different definition of parkway. The road is so-named because that’s where you park (we have a lot of traffic on our roads at rush hour).”

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A: We believe in maintaining distinctions too—where distinctions exist. But “inflammable” and “flammable” have identical meanings. We can’t find any dictionary definitions that would support your case.

We’ve written about this on our blog, but that was a while ago. We wrote about it more recently in our book Origins of the Specious.

In Origins, we note that some people insist “inflammable” means not burnable, but is misused to mean burnable. Others say it does indeed mean burnable, but it’s merely a puffed-up, redundant version of “flammable.” Here’s an excerpt from the book:

“For the record, ‘inflammable’ does mean ‘burnable.’ And it’s meant that since at least 1605, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Flammable,’ the new kid on the block, didn’t appear in print until more than three hundred years later.

“The cause of all the confusion is the ‘in’ at the beginning of ‘inflammable.’ It turns out that the prefix in- can make a word negative (as in words like ‘incapable,’ ‘inflexible,’ ‘incompetent’), or it can add emphasis (‘invaluable,’ ‘inflame,’ ‘intense’), or it can mean ‘within’ (‘incoming,’ ‘inbreeding,’ ‘infighting’). The in- of ‘inflammable’ is of the emphatic type—it’s called an intensive or an intensifier. The word ‘inflammable’ comes from the Latin inflammare, meaning to inflame. The upstart ‘flammable’ was coined in the early nineteenth century, but for decades it was rarely used. So how did ‘flammable’ eventually catch fire?

“We can thank the National Fire Protection Association for this one. In the 1920s it called for using ‘flammable’ instead of ‘inflammable,’ which it considered confusing because of that in- at the beginning. Insurers and other fire-safety advocates soon joined the cause. In 1959, the British Standards Institution took up the torch: ‘In order to avoid any possible ambiguity, it is the Institution’s policy to encourage the use of the terms ‘flammable’ and ‘non-flammable’ rather than ‘inflammable’ and ‘noninflammable.’ ”

“Which word should a careful writer use today? Well, history may be on the side of ‘inflammable,’ but common sense wins here. If you want to be sure you’re understood—say, the next time you see a smoker about to light up near a gas pump—go with ‘flammable.’ ”

We’ll grant you this—if “flammable” had been the original word, and if the prefix had been ADDED as in intensifier (yielding a word that meant extra flammable), then the distinction you talk about might make sense.

Unfortunately, the history of the development of these words doesn’t bear out such an interpretation.

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A: The verb “inter” does indeed have earthly roots. It’s ultimately derived from the medieval Latin interrare—the prefix in- plus terra (earth).

But in English, the verb “inter” and the noun “interment” can properly be used in connection with burial in any kind of tomb—mausoleum, crypt, or columbarium niche.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines “inter” this way: “To place in a grave or tomb; bury.” And Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has “to deposit (a dead body) in the earth or in a tomb.”

The Oxford English Dictionary also says the verb “inter,” dating back to the early 1300s, means “to deposit (a corpse) in the earth, or in a grave or tomb; to inhume, bury.”

And a tomb needn’t be under ground. Among the definitions of “tomb” in the OED is this one: “A monument erected to enclose or cover the body and preserve the memory of the dead; a sepulchral structure raised above the earth.”

As long as we’re defining terms, Merriam-Webster’s says “columbarium” can mean either “a structure of vaults lined with recesses for cinerary urns” or an individual recess in such a structure.

The word “columbarium” is more poetic than it sounds. It comes from Latin, in which columbarium means “dovecote” and columba means “dove.”

The point is that it would be quite normal to speak of cremated remains “interred” in a niche at Arlington National Cemetery’s Columbarium.

However, many people who are in the funeral business or operate cemeteries prefer different words for this. They often use the terms “inurn” (to put in an urn), “inurned,” and “inurnment.”

For example, a publication called “Administrative Guide to Information and Burial at Arlington National Cemetery” uses the terms “inurn” and “inurnment” for placement of urns into niches at the Columbarium.

On the other hand, the publication uses “inter” and “interment” for burials in the ground (of either caskets or cinerary urns).

The verb “inurn” may sound like industry jargon, but it’s actually been around for quite a while. In fact, the OED’s earliest written example is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

In the citation, which we’ve expanded upon, Hamlet asks the Ghost why the sepulcher “Wherein we saw thee quietly enurn’d, / Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws.”

The OED says “inurn” means “to put (the ashes of a cremated body) in an urn.” Hence, Oxford says, by transference it means “to entomb, bury, inter.”

The noun form of “inurn” (“inurnment”) didn’t show up until the mid-20th century and has an unpleasantly officious ring, in our opinion.

Here are the OED’s citations for “inurnment”:

1934: “Olivet Memorial Park provides every service for Entombments, Inurnments, Interments” (an ad cited in an article in the journal American Speech).

1948: “Normal disposal is by inhumement, entombment, inurnment or immurement, but many people … prefer insarcophagusment” (from Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel The Loved One).

In summary, the choice is up to you—“inter” or “inurn.” However, Shakespeare or no Shakespeare, we prefer “inter.”

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A: You’re onto something there.

The larvae of frogs and toads—known popularly as “tadpoles” and “pollywogs”—have big round heads. And the old noggin sense of the word “poll” is very likely the key to the etymologies of those common names.

“Poll” probably came into English from the Middle Dutch word pol (top, summit), and there are similar words in other Germanic languages. Beyond this, the word’s etymology is uncertain, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The term has been in English in one form or another since around 1300, and it has various meanings relating to the head.

Among other things, it can mean the crown, the scalp, the area where hair grows, and, in the words of the OED, “the prominent or visible part of a head in a crowd.”

That last sense of “poll” has given us many extended meanings related to counting, voting, taxing (“poll tax”), surveying (“opinion poll”), and so on.

But back at the pond, those wiggly big-headed larvae got the name “tadpole” sometime in the Middle Ages. The word is a compound of the Middle English tade or tadde (toad) and, apparently, the noun “poll” (head or roundhead), Oxford says.

The word was first recorded in writing—as “taddepol”—in the 1400s, and its spelling took several centuries to settle down.

Shakespeare, for example, spelled it “tod pole” in King Lear (1608): “Poore Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the tode, the tod pole.”

The modern spelling had become established by the time Oliver Goldsmith wrote An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature (1774): “The egg, or little black globe, which produces a tadpole.”

(An aside: as we wrote in a blog entry earlier this year, the word “tad” for something small, as in “a tad bit,” may be derived from “tadpole.”)

The word “pollywog” came along at roughly the same time as “tadpole” but it took longer to develop its modern spelling.

Its earliest appearance in writing—spelled “polwygle”—is from 1440, the OED says. That very odd-looking word was originally derived, Oxford says, from “poll” plus “wiggle.” In other words, the creature looked like a wiggly head!

It wasn’t until the late 18th century, the OED explains, that a vowel sound crept in between the first two elements of the word, which became “pollywig.” The modern form, “pollywog” followed in the 19th century.

All this talk about pollywogs and pollywigs reminds us of postings we’ve written that discuss two entirely different words with similar endings: “gollywog” and “earwig.”

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A: We think you heard incorrectly.

We listened to a podcast of Murray Weiss’s March 26 commentary on WNYC, in which he described the 2006 shooting of Sean Bell. What we heard Weiss say was “a fusillade of bullets,” not “a fuselage of bullets.”

So Weiss, who comments on crime at WNYC, quite properly used the word “fusillade” to describe a hail of bullets.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines “fusillade” this way: “1. A discharge from a number of firearms, fired simultaneously or in rapid succession. 2. A rapid outburst or barrage: a fusillade of insults.”

English adapted the word from the French verb fusiller (to shoot). A related English word is “fusilier,” an old term (like “musketeer”) for a soldier carrying a firearm.

But we’re glad you brought this up, because we’re always coming across the incorrect usage you thought you heard.

Either “fusillade” or “barrage” would be appropriate choices to describe heavy gunfire. But not “fuselage,” which means the body of an aircraft.

Yet many people—especially in speech, but sometimes in writing—conflate “fusillade” and “barrage” and come up with “fuselage.”

We even found “a fuselage of bullets” in a 2007 article in the Washington Post about a skirmish involving a Mexican drug smuggler and Border Patrol agents. (It was later corrected after complaints from readers.)

Crime writers, of both fiction and nonfiction, also need to use their dictionaries more often. Here are a few examples (we’re quoting only partial sentences):

“Kate ducked under a heavy fuselage of bullets” (from Lorenzo Carcaterra’s novel Midnight Angels, 2010).

“He was met not only by the cold winds whipping off the Hudson River but by a fuselage of bullets” (from Philip Carlo’s The Butcher: Anatomy of a Mafia Psychopath, 2009).

“A fuselage of bullets killed Donahue instantly” (from The Boston Mob Guide: Hit Men, Hoodlums and Hideouts, by Beverly Ford and Stephanie Schorow, 2011).

We suspect that spell-check programs could be to blame for some of the written usages. One more reminder that spell-checkers can’t read your mind (not as of this writing, anyway), or take context into account.

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A: “Per” is a very versatile preposition—in English as well as in Latin (where its meanings include through, all over, during, by means of, and for the sake of).

In English, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), the word has these meanings:

“1. To, for, or by each; for every: Gasoline once cost 40 cents per gallon. 2. According to; by: Changes were made to the manuscript per the author’s instructions. 3. By means of; through.”

(An example of that rather archaic meaning in the third definition would be “Letters take a week per Pony Express.”)

As for your question, the short answer is yes. It’s not incorrect, as you suggest, to precede “per” with “as.” That second example from American Heritage could just as well read “as per the author’s instructions.”

In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary says that “per” is “usually preceded by as” in English when the meaning is “according to,” or “as stated, indicated, or directed by.”

One of the OED’s early citations is from a 16th-century treatise on accounting methods, James Peele’s The Pathe Way to Perfectnes, in th’ Accomptes of Debitour, and Creditour (1569):

“Readie monie by him paide oute for goodes … and alowed to him self as per his accompte receaued [account received].”

Tobias Smollett used the same construction in his novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771): “This pair of boots, bran new, cost me thirty shillings, as per receipt.”

And Oscar Wilde used “as per” in an 1884 business letter: “There are a few printer’s errors in my article on Dress, which … I would like to have corrected, as per enclosed.”

Finally, here’s an example from Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm’s 1911 satirical novel about undergraduate life at Oxford: “How many of you can be turned out, as per sample, in England?”

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A: This is a peeve that you share with the New York Times. When we were editors there, we were expected to take a close look at every “due to” that came our way.

The Times’s policy was to allow “due to” as an adjectival usage modifying a specific noun (as in, “his bankruptcy was due to a market fluctuation”).

But “due to” wasn’t allowed when modifying a verb and meaning “because of” (as in, “he went bankrupt due to the stock-market collapse”).

This was the position of most usage authorities for quite a while, but the ground is shifting.

(Keep in mind that here we’re talking about “due to” as a modifying phrase, and not about the use of “due” plus an infinitive, as in “The train is due to leave at 4:10.”)

Here’s how Pat wrote about “due to” in the latest (third) edition of her grammar and usage book Woe Is I:

“When you want to be on your very best grammatical behavior, use due to only if you mean ‘caused by’ or ‘resulting from’: The damage was due to moths. In recent years, dictionaries have come to accept a looser usage, meaning ‘because of’ or ‘on account of’: Richie threw the suit away due to the hole. But be warned that some find this grating, especially at the front of a sentence: Due to the hole, Richie threw the suit away.”

In other words, you can defend the use of “due to” in the sense of “because of,” but the usage will raise a few eyebrows.

The advice given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) ends with a somewhat less than enthusiastic acceptance of the looser usage of “due to.” Here’s the dictionary’s usage note (we’ll add paragraph breaks):

“Due to has been widely used for many years as a compound preposition like owing to, but some critics have insisted that due should be used only as an adjective. According to this view, it is incorrect to say The concert was canceled due to the rain, but acceptable to say The cancellation of the concert was due to the rain, where due continues to function as an adjective modifying cancellation.

“Although there is still some support for this notion among members of the Usage Panel, the tide has turned toward accepting due to as a full-fledged preposition. Back in 1966, the ‘adverbial’ use of due to (as in was canceled due to the rain) was rejected by 84 percent of the Panel. In our 2001 survey, however, 60 percent accepted this construction.”

The conclusion: “There is no linguistic reason to avoid using due to as a preposition, but English has a variety of ready substitutes, including because of, on account of, and owing to.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) also notes the objections of critics, but it endorses the usage without reservations.

Although American Heritage, Merriam-Webster’s, and other dictionaries can be cited in defense of the usage, we think “due to” is awkward and ungainly in any case. Since there are more felicitous alternatives, it’s easy enough to avoid.

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A: In Anthropologie’s email, the first line of Ingrid Michaelson’s song “You and I” reads this way: “Oh let’s get rich and buy our parents’ homes in the south of France.”

That possessive apostrophe doesn’t belong there.

Obviously, the indie singer-songwriter means “buy our parents homes”—that is, buy homes for the parents, not from them.

The possessive apostrophe in the email version skews the meaning into “let’s buy from our parents the homes they own in the south of France.”

But the mistake is Anthropologie’s, not Ingrid Michaelson’s. The lyrics as given on her website don’t use the apostrophe.

On the other hand, Michaelson isn’t entirely without blame. In the lyrics on her website, the contraction “let’s” is missing its apostrophe. And everything is lowercase, even “France.”

However, we aren’t usually bothered by lyric writers who take liberties with English. We’ve said before on the blog that lyricists are exempt from the rules of grammar, syntax, usage, spelling, pronunciation, and even logic!

As for the company’s “creatively spelled name,” it’s the French word for “anthropology.” In fact, the English word has occasionally been spelled that way too.

For example, that spelling is used in a 1673 English translation of De Motu Cordis, William Harvey’s 1628 book in Latin about the circulation of blood:

“I call the generall doctrine of man Anthropologie, the parts of which, I do ordain to be, according to this division, Psychologie, Somatologie, and Hœmatologie, into the doctrine of the soul, bodie, and blood.”

In case you’re curious, “anthropology” (spelled with a “y”) entered English in the late 16th century.

In fact, the first published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1593 work by another Harvey, the astrologer and polemicist Richard Harvey:

“Genealogy or issue which they had, Artes which they studied, Actes which they did. This part of History is named Anthropology.”

The word is ultimately derived from the Greek anthropos (man) and -logia (a science or area of study).

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A: Yes, “recombobulate” fills a much needed gap! It implies putting yourself back together after being discombobulated. And what’s more discombobulating than going through airport screening?

We haven’t been through the Milwaukee airport since that sign was mounted, but we recall that it generated some news. Garrison Keillor, for instance, commented on it in an Op-Ed column in the New York Times a couple of years ago. He wrote:

“My heart was gladdened by an official-looking sign in the Milwaukee airport, just beyond the security checkpoint, hanging over where you put your shoes and coat back on and stuff your laptop back in the case: The sign said, ‘Recombobulation Area.’ The English language gains a new word. Recombobulate, America. Pull yourself together, tie your shoelaces, and if your pilot is wearing a button that says ‘To hell with the F.A.A.,’ wait for the next flight.”

(We’ve noticed images online of two different recombobulation signs at the Milwaukee airport, one with all the letters capitalized and one with just the first letter of each word capped.)

The airport put up its sign in 2008, but “recombobulate” and “recombobulation” were in the air (no pun intended) long before that. We’ve found examples going back to 1970, and our guess is that they weren’t the first.

Margaret Bennett used the verb in her book How To Ski Just a Little Bit (1970): “If you find this happening, put your weight on your outside ski and ride that until you’re recombobulated and back on course.”

And Amanda Cross (a k a Carolyn Heilbrun) used the noun in her mystery Poetic Justice (1970): “ ‘To return,’ Reed said, ‘to the conversation of last night, why has misrule and horseplay brought you to such a state of discombobulation? Or, since it has, may I offer my help in recombobulation?’ ”

Even if “recombobulation” isn’t all that new, we’re glad to know that the Transportation Security Administration people at General Mitchell International Airport have a sense of humor.

In case anyone is wondering, “discombobulate” isn’t a negative version of “combobulate,” as a reader of the blog has suggested. In our earlier posting, we note that “discombobulate” is a joke word formed in 19th-century America.

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A: The use of the phrases “than any” and “of any” can sometimes be illogical when used to make comparisons.

Some usage authorities object to these constructions when not strictly logical, but others consider them acceptable idiomatic English. We’re somewhere in the middle.

The difficulty is more obvious in comparative phrases combining “than any” with words like “better” or “taller” or “bigger.”

The problem is less easy to see in superlative phrases combining “of any” with “best,” “tallest,” “biggest,” and so on.

For example, a comparative phrase like “louder than any singer in the choir” would make more sense as “louder than any other singer in the choir.” (A singer can’t be louder than himself.)

And in our opinion, “of any” can be illogical in superlative phrases as well. For instance, “the prettiest of any of her dresses” isn’t as logical as “the prettiest of all her dresses.”

That’s because the phrase “any of her dresses” implies that the comparison is being made individually—dress by dress by dress—which would call for a comparative phrase: “prettier than any of her other dresses.”

But you can find language commentators who’d consider this nitpicking, and there’s sometimes a fine line between a sensible superlative comparison and one that falls on the ear with a thud.

The phrase you mention—“the hottest of any year since records were kept”—seems reasonable to us.

But is “of any” really necessary here? Why not simply “the hottest year since records were kept” or “the hottest year on record”?

R. W. Burchfield, who edited the revised third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, put the problem this way:

“A fine net of illogicality mars constructions of the types this is the most brutal piece of legislation of any passed by this government (read this is a more brutal piece of legislation than any other passed by this government), and a better book than any written by this author (read than any others).”

We generally agree with Burchfield, though we’d drop the “any” business entirely in his first example: “this is the most brutal piece of legislation passed by this government.”

As we’ve said, some usage authorities disagree with us, and see no problem with using “of any” in superlative comparisons.

For example, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says that in 2009, three-quarters of its Usage Panel accepted the sentence “He is the best known of any living playwright.”

And Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage calls this kind of construction a “long established idiom.”

Still, we have to ask, why not simply “the best known living playwright”? Why make this a comparison at all?

As we’ve said before, reasonable people can disagree. We think that when comparisons are being made, “than any” is problematic in comparative phrases and “of any” is problematic—and can often be dropped—in superlative ones.

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A: It would be great if comment-filtering programs had brains, and could distinguish innocuous usages from loaded ones. But technology has its limits. Don’t expect to see a filter with a high IQ for quite a while.

Your use of “queer” in the old, traditional sense was of course legitimate, as was the usage we wrote about in that blog posting.

An amused reader had told us that her use of the respectable preposition “cum”—as in “a language school cum Eco hotel”—was blocked on Trip Advisor’s website.

Interestingly, the Google search box on OUR website blocks the TripAdvisor posting when tuned to its default SafeSearch setting!

We’ve discussed “queer” before on our blog, within a posting about the history of the word “gay.”

As we said, the origins of “queer” are uncertain, though it may be related to the German quer (oblique or at odds). It’s been in English in the ordinary sense (peculiar or strange) since the 1500s.

Published references in the Oxford English Dictionary indicate that “queer” in the sense of homosexual was first recorded as a noun in 1894 and as an adjective in 1914.

But in the early decades of its usage, that sense of “queer” (as with “gay”) was often an inside joke. A sophisticated writer could get some sly humor by using the word in two ways at once.

In our posting about “gay,” we cited this example from a 1939 song lyric by Noel Coward: “Everyone’s here and frightfully gay, / Nobody cares what people say, / Though the Riviera / Seems really much queerer / Than Rome at its height.”

We came across another double-edged usage recently while rereading Angela Thirkell’s 1934 comic novel Wild Strawberries.

One of the minor characters is an effeminate young BBC commentator whose hobby is embroidery and who’s headed for a “companionate marriage” with a female colleague.

His aunt says of him: “Queer boy, Lionel. I’d let my girls go out with him, but I don’t know that I’d let my boys.”

We’re huge fans of Thirkell, by the way, and we’re pretty sure she knew what she was doing with “queer” in that passage.

Her novels occasionally include gay characters, like Miss Hampton and Miss Bent, a couple who live in a village in Thirkell’s fictional Barsetshire (yes, Anthony Trollope’s county dragged into the 20th century).

Miss Hampton, “the strong and gentlemanly spirit of the pair,” makes a study of “vice” and writes earthy novels (like Temptation at St. Anthony’s, set in a boys’ school) that are selected by the Banned-Book-of-the-Month Club.

And Thirkell enjoys naughty puns. For example, some of her younger characters are prep-school boys who enjoy baiting—or teasing—the schoolmasters. In at least three of her novels, she refers to them as “master baiters.”

Oh, dear. We’ve divagated a bit from our original point—that a perfectly innocent word can be interpreted as something to be filtered out by Big Brother.

Until a program is invented that can handle meanings with the delicacy of a Noel Coward or an Angela Thirkell, comment filters will continue to make asses of themselves.

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A: This is a very interesting question. The short answer is that both versions, with and without “it,” are acceptable. The longer answer—the why—is a bit more complicated.

In the final clauses of both sentences (the part beginning “whose job …”), the subject is “job,” the verb is “was,” and the object is the infinitive phrase “to plow the field.”

But in the second version, “it” has been added after “job.” In effect, the pronoun amounts to an extra subject, a doubling of the real one.

Within its entries for “it,” the Oxford English Dictionary says the pronoun is sometimes “used pleonastically after the noun subject.” (Pleonasm is the use of more words than are required.)

The extra (or pleonastic) “it” is especially common in archaic writings and in poetry—as in Shakespeare’s “For the rain it raineth every day,” sung by both the clown in Twelfth Night and the fool in King Lear.

Here’s where things get complicated. Despite its long history, today this usage is frowned upon in some cases and acceptable in others.

The use of an extra subject pronoun is now considered nonstandard in clauses like “my brother he said” or “her car it broke down.”

But the redundant “it” is still acceptable, even a bit literary sounding, in such constructions as “whose job it was to plow the field.”

In fact, we’ve noticed that this construction is especially common in clauses beginning with “whose,” where the verb is a form of “be” and the object is an infinitive phrase.

For example, “whose task it is to cut the budget,” “whose aim it was to start anew,” “whose duty it is to volunteer,” “whose purpose it was to topple the dictator,” “whose mandate it is to find a cure,” and so on.

No one frowns on usages like that, though “my brother he said” and “her car it broke down” raise a lot of eyebrows.

Why? We don’t know, but the construction with the infinitive phrase somehow managed to survive from older English with its reputation intact while the others lost respectability along the way.

In the acceptable usages we mentioned, the pronoun “it” is certainly not necessary. It seems to be added either for emphasis or for some other rhetorical purpose—for instance, variety or rhythm.

We say this because sometimes good writers will use such phrases both with and without the extra “it” in the same passage. We’ll cite a couple of examples, highlighting the phrases in boldface italics.

From Julie Salamon’s novel White Lies (1987):

“Jamaica at times played the worldly younger sister, whose job was to keep her cloistered, somewhat academic doctor-sister in touch with the goings on in the big world out there. … Geneva would become the wise commentator, whose job it was to press a mirror to her sister’s face and force her to acknowledge the presence of an adult on the glistening surface.”

From the memoir Stolen Lives (2001), by Malika Oufkir and Michéle Fitoussi:

“Then came the housekeepers, whose job was to supervise the running of the Palace and to maintain the traditions that the King valued. Muhammad V had a concubine whose job it was, on feast days, to dress him in his ceremonial costume, a white jellabah and trousers.”

The extra “it” alters the rhythm and avoids the monotony of having “whose job was” appear twice within the same passage.

Notice that in all these cases, the object of the verb “be” is an infinitive phrase: “was to keep her … sister,” “was to press a mirror,” “was to supervise the running,” and so on.

There’s yet another kind of optional “it” construction, one that creates a double object instead of a double subject. This one, too, is considered idiomatic rather than incorrect.

Here the optional “it” immediately follows the verb and precedes clauses beginning with “that.” We’ll invent a couple of examples: “I regret [it] that you took offense at my email” … “Mom resents [it] that you took the car without asking.”

The “it” in such sentences, according to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, “can be omitted without any apparent change in meaning.”

Similarly, “it” can be used or omitted in certain idiomatic phrases. The examples in the Cambridge Grammar include “This brought [it] home to us that we were in great danger” and “He had taken [it] for granted that he would be given a second chance.”

But sometimes the “it” can be omitted only if the clauses are reversed.

The Cambridge Grammar says, for example, that “it” is required here: “We owe it to you that we got off so lightly.” But in reverse, the “it” is dropped: “That we got off so lightly we owe to you.”

Sorry we can’t be more enlightening, but we hope this helps.

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A: We touched briefly on the “envelop/envelope” issue in a recent posting about heteronyms, words with identical spellings but different pronunciations and meanings.

As we said in that posting, some identically spelled words can be either verbs or nouns, depending on how they’re pronounced. For example, “record” (accented on the second syllable) is a verb, while “record” (accented on the first) is a noun.

Similarly, “conflict” (accented on the second syllable) is a verb, while “conflict” (accented on the first) is a noun. Some other words that follow this pattern include “permit,” “extract,” “addict,” “combat,” “compound,” “conduct,” “incense,” “insult,” “present,” “produce,” and “subject.”

But occasionally a spelling will change with a move in the stressed syllable, and this is what happened with the verb “envelop” (accented on the second syllable) and the noun “envelope” (accented on the first).

Here’s a little history.

The verb, “envelop” (from the Old French envoluper), came into English first.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” (1386): “For he is most envoliped in synne.”

The noun (from the Modern French French enveloppe) didn’t appear until the early 1700s.

The OED has this early citation from a memoir by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, written sometime before 1715:

“A letter from the King of Spain was given to his daughter by the Spanish Ambassador, and she tore the envelope, and let it fall.”

In modern usage, the verb is always spelled “envelop” and stressed on the second syllable (en-VEH-lup). Rhythmically, it’s similar to the verb “develop.”

And the noun is always spelled “envelope” and stressed on the first syllable (EN-vuh-lope or AWN-vuh-lope). The only variation is in the vowel sound of the first syllable, and both are accepted as standard English.

Why, you ask, do we have one pronunciation for the verb and two for the noun?

Well, the noun entered English in the 18th century, when many educated English speakers favored French pronunciations for words derived from French.

While the French-sounding AWN pronunciation isn’t wrong, it’s hard to justify.

As the OED says, “this pronunciation, or rather some awkward attempt at it … is still very frequently heard, though there is no good reason for giving a foreign sound to a word which no one regards as alien, and which has been anglicized in spelling for nearly 200 years.”

And as Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) notes, the figure is more like 300 years by now, “plenty of time for it to become completely anglicized.”

Finally, if you’d like to read about an “envelope” that’s pushed, not posted, we had a posting a couple of years ago about “pushing the envelope.”

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A: You’re just imagining it. There’s a name for this phenomenon: the “recency illusion.”

The linguist Arnold Zwicky came up with the term, which he has defined as “the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent.”

Some verbs have two possible endings for the past tense and past participle: either “-d” or “-t.” For example, “light” can use either “lighted” or “lit,” and “leap” can use either “leaped” or “leapt.” There’s no irregularity in using one or the other.

This is the case with many other verbs as well. Both forms, “-ed” and “-t,” are standard English and have been part of the language since the Middle Ages.

Here’s how Pat wrote about verbs like these in her grammar and usage book Woe Is I:

“He spilled the milk, or he spilt it? He burned the toast, or he burnt it? Actually, they’re all correct.

“Most English verbs form the past tense the familiar way, by adding d or ed at the end (for example, sneeze becomes sneezed). But some past forms end in t, including bent (except in the phrase on bended knee), crept, dealt, felt, kept, left, lost, meant, slept, spent, swept, and wept.

“Still other verbs, like spill and burn, are in between and can form the past tense with either ed or t. In some cases, ed is more common in the United States, and in other cases t, but they’re both correct, so the choice is yours. In these examples, the spellings I use are given first and the others, many of which are popular in Britain, follow in parentheses: bereaved (bereft), burned (burnt), dreamed (dreamt), dwelt (dwelled ), knelt (kneeled), leaped (leapt), learned (learnt), smelled (smelt), spelled (spelt), spilled (spilt), spoiled (spoilt).”

As for “wake,” we’ve written about it on our blog as well as in our book Origins of the Specious. Here’s an excerpt from Origins about “waked” versus “woken”:

“Both are correct. Since the early 1600s, ‘woken’ has been a bona fide past participle (a verb form that among other things is used with the verb ‘have’ to make compound tenses).

“We’ve always had lots of ways to talk about getting up in the morning, perhaps too many. ‘Wake,’ ‘waken,’ ‘awake,’ and ‘awaken’ are an intimidating bunch. The problem is an embarrassment of riches: There are so many correct ways to use them. Here are the acceptable present, past, and present perfect tenses, according to modern dictionaries.

“• I wake / I woke or I waked / I have woken, I have waked, or I have woke.

“• I waken / I wakened / I have wakened.

“• I awake / I awoke or I awaked / I have awoken, I have awaked, or I have awoke.

“• I awaken / I awakened / I have awakened.”

With so many ways to talk about waking up, you’ll probably be right no matter which one you choose.

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A: Some old familiar idioms lose their literal meaning over the years. This is the case with “back to back.”

In modern usage, this phrase is often used to describe not only physical objects alongside each other, but also events that come one after another.

As we all know, events come in threes and fours as well as twos, while logic would require that only two things can be “back to back.”

Besides, events don’t really have fronts and backs. And even if they did, they’d follow one another “front to back,” not “back to back.”

The point is that the phrase “back to back” has broken the bounds of logic.

There are several literal examples in the Oxford English Dictionary of the phrase used adverbially, including this one from a ballad version of Robin Hood (circa 1500): “And there they turnd them back to back.”

The OED’s earliest examples of the phrase used adjectivally (and hyphenated) are in 19th-century writings about houses. In those days, the phrase was meant literally.

The first quotation is from Dr. Lyon Playfair’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Large Towns in Lancashire (1845): “Back-to-back houses cannot be considered dwellings of proper construction.”

A century later, the phrase was used literally to describe paired fireplaces. This OED citation is from the sociologist Dennis Chapman’s The Home and Social Status (1954):

“The other living-room usually has a ‘back-to-back’ combination fireplace ‘shared’ with the kitchen.”

But when used to describe events, the OED says, the phrase means “following one upon another without a break, consecutive.” And by extension, it also means “full, crowded.”

The use of “back to back” for events is “chiefly” American, the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest example is from a sports story that appeared in the New York Times on August 24, 1952:

“Back to back doubles by Gene Woodling and Joe Collins off Early Wynn in the fourth inning produced the only tally of the day.” (The Yankees beat the Indians, 1-0.)

And here’s an example of the phrase used in the sense of “crowded.” It’s from Lady Bird Johnson’s A White House Diary (1970): “Today was one of those full, back-to-back Washington days.”

Have we, you ask, blessed such constructions? We think the nonliteral use of “back to back” is now firmly established in English.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines the adverbial “back to back” as an idiom meaning “consecutively and without interruption: presented three speeches back to back.”

The dictionary defines the adjectival “back-to-back” as meaning “consecutive; successive: back-to-back performances; back-to-back home runs.”

American Heritage doesn’t even bother with the literal meaning. But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives two definitions: (1) “facing in opposite directions and often touching,” and (2) “coming one after the other: consecutive.”

Apparently the only problem with this usage is what to do about the hyphens. Our advice is to use hyphens only when the phrase is used adjectivally before a noun (“back-to-back doubles”). Otherwise, drop the hyphens.

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A: You’re right in thinking that Shakespeare never suggested gilding a lily. Here’s the quotation, from King John (probably written in the late 1590s):

“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, / To throw a perfume on the violet, / To smooth the ice, or add another hue / Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light / To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, / Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”

That quotation, though, strikes us as a perfect example of gilding the lily. The Oxford English Dictionary has this definition: “to paint (or to gild) the lily: to embellish excessively, to add ornament where none is needed.”

While the original Shakespearean phrase was “paint the lily,” the misquotation “gild the lily” is far and away the more popular version.

In fact, there’s not much of a comparison. A Google search turns up 4.6 million hits for “gild the lily,” but only 108,000 for “paint the lily”—and many of those are attempts to correct the misquotation.

Like it or not, the misquotation has become an English idiom. Why did it become so instilled in the popular imagination?

Possibly because of the assonance of the vowels and the alliteration of the “l” in “gild” and “lily.” That’s just our guess. Or perhaps because the idea of gilding a lily—that is, covering it in gold—is even more outrageous than painting it.

But if it’s any consolation—and it probably won’t be, to an admitted curmudgeon like you—many other Shakespearean phrases have been embellished a bit in the 400 years since they were written.

For example, in King Henry IV, Part I, Shakespeare wrote, “The better part of valour is discretion,” not “Discretion is the better part of valour.”

In Macbeth, he wrote, “Lay on, Macduff,” not “Lead on, Macduff.” Macbeth was encouraging Macduff to fight, not precede him.

In the same play, Shakespeare wrote, “Double, double toil and trouble,” not “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.” The witches’ intent was to multiply the mischief.

In Hamlet, he wrote, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio,” not “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well.”

We’ve written before on our blog about another misquotation from Hamlet. Shakespeare wrote “to the manner born,” not “to the manor born.”

But Shakespeare was a realist who worked hard for a living. He would have though it better to be misquoted than not to be quoted at all.

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