Year: 2009

Q: Not exactly a grammar question, but I’m curious about the verb “backfire.” I’m guessing that one of its meanings – an action that unexpectedly turns out negative – didn’t exist before cars were invented. (I’m presuming “backfire” originated with the invention of the automobile tailpipe.)

A: The verb “backfire” has two literal meanings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

(1) “To light a fire ahead of an advancing prairie-fire in order to deprive it of fuel.”

(2) “To ignite or explode prematurely,” a mishap that can occur with an internal-combustion engine or a firearm.

The first citation for the verb in the OED, from a Londoner’s 1886 memoir of a visit to Kansas, uses “backfire” in the fire-fighting sense:

“We all … set to work to ‘back fire’ from the stables, and were only just in time to save the whole place from destruction, by burning a sufficiently wide piece of grass off, and thus stopping the rush of fire.”

The earliest published reference in the OED for the second sense is from a 1902 story by Kipling: “That car … back-fired superbly.”

The first citation for this usage in reference to a weapon is in The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s 1938 novel: “Penny pulled the trigger. The explosion that followed had a sizzling sound, and Penny fell backward. The gun had back-fired.”

The figurative meaning you’re interested in did indeed come from the second sense of the word, the premature firing of an internal-combustion engine.

This sense first appeared in print in Pitching in a Pinch: Or, Baseball From the Inside, a 1912 memoir by the great Giants and Reds pitcher Christy Mathewson: “One of McGraw’s schemes back-fired on him.”

The schemer, of course, was John “Muggsy” McGraw, who managed the Orioles and Giants.

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Q: I’m perplexed by the use of the phrase “pony up” to describe laying out money for something. What does the concept it describes have to do with ponies?

A: Since the early 19th century, “pony” has been a slang word for money in general, according to Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang.

Why “pony”? The dictionary notes that the word has usually referred to “relatively small sums, as a pony is a small horse.” And to come up with the pony, or “pony up” (circa 1824), meant to pay one’s debts or dues.

Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English generally agrees. It describes “pony” as a term, circa 1810, for money, and goes along with the “small horse = small sum” explanation.

Partridge says “pony up” (“to pay a sum of money”) is a variant of an earlier expression, recorded in 1823, “post the pony.” (As far back as 1780 or so, to “post” meant to pay.)

The first published use of “pony up” cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an 1824 issue of the Atlantic Magazine: “Every man … vociferously swore that he had ponied up his ‘quarter.’ “

What happens if you don’t pony up? I suppose you “come a cropper,” another horsy expression. I had a blog item on it last November.

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Q: I was wondering about the usage of the suffix “ish” to mean a little bit like something, as in “He’s angryish” or “She’s friendlyish.” Most words with “ish” endings seem to mean fully something, like “British,” “snobbish,” or “Jewish,” not sort of something, like “busyish” or “prettyish.” Do you know the origin of this seemingly modernish usage?

A: You ask a very interesting question!

There are actually two “ish” suffixes in English. One comes from ancient Proto-Germanic and helps to form adjectives. The other comes to us from Latin by way of Old French and helps to form verbs.

First the verbs. Many end in “ish,” including “abolish,” “banish,” “finish,” “nourish,” “establish,” “tarnish,” and a lot of others. We adopted these verbs from Middle and Old French, where they ended in ir (abolir, banir, finir, and so on).

In French, the ir ending changes to iss to form extended verbs. (For example, “perish” is périr in French, and the ir changes to iss to form the extended verbs périssons, périssez, périssent, etc.) The French iss originated in Latin as isc, and in Middle English these adopted iss verbs were given endings of “isshe,” later to become “ish.”

Now for the adjectival “ish,” which is more to your point. We get this much older “ish” from a proto-Germanic suffix that’s been reconstructed as iskaz. Versions of it are common to many Germanic languages. In Old English, it’s recorded as isc.

In modern English, according to The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, “ish” is added to nouns and to other adjectives to form adjectives with these meanings:

1. somewhat (as in “oldish”);

2. like a … (as in “childish”);

3. like that of a … (as in “girlish”);

4. of or having to do with … (as in “English”);

5. tending to … (as in “bookish”) or inclined to be a … (as in “thievish”);

6. near, but usually somewhat past (as in “fortyish”).

These “ish” adjectives are much more common now than they were in Old English. Writers have taken advantage of their versatility!

In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “in recent colloquial and journalistic use, -ish has become the favourite ending for forming adjs. for the nonce (esp. of a slighting or depreciatory nature) on proper names of persons, places, or things, and even on phrases.”

The OED gives the examples of “Micawberish, Spectator-ish, all-over-ish, at-homeish, devil-may-care-ish, jolly-good-fellowish, out-of-townish,” and others.

The use of “ish” with times of day, to indicate rough (or roughish!) times of arrival is a relatively new thing, originating less than a century ago. The first published example in the OED is from 1916, in this exchange from a collection of World War I fiction: “What time shall I come?” “Elevenish,” Sam replied.

I’m a bit busyish now, so I’ll end this here.

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Q: Do you know if there’s a word for incorrect grammar used in a mistaken attempt to sound erudite? For example: “This esteemed group has earned the most profound gratitude of Mrs. Watson and myself.” Thanks very much for any assistance you can provide.

A: You’re looking for the word “hypercorrection.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) defines it as “A construction or pronunciation produced by mistaken analogy with standard usage out of a desire to be correct, as in the substitution of I for me in on behalf of my parents and I.”

Another example would be “The car is available to whomever wants to use it.” I had a blog item last year about still another example, involving “fewer” and “less.”

In fact, the title of my grammar book Woe Is I is a case in point. As I explain in the preface to the second edition, the book’s title hints that it’s even possible to be too correct:

“While ‘Woe Is I’ may appear technically correct (and that’s a matter of opinion), the expression ‘Woe is me’ has been good English for generations. Only a pompous twit – or an author trying to make a point – would use ‘I’ instead of ‘me’ here.”

As for using “myself” when “I” or “me” would be a better choice, I had a blog item about this two and a half years ago.

The adjective “hypercorrect” is relatively new, apparently less than a century old. The first published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922), by the grammarian and linguist Otto Jespersen.

The nouns “hypercorrection” and “hypercorrectness” made their appearances 12 years later. A 1934 citation in the OED says that “only by unceasing vigilance” can such grammatical sins be avoided by those prone to being too correct.

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Q: I listen to you on WNYC podcasts from Bangkok, Thailand, and appreciate your knowledge and personality. Here’s my question: Is there a rule for using articles with medical conditions? For example, we use an article when we have a stomachache or a cold, but not when we have influenza or pneumonia.

A: When speaking of a specific disease, there’s no need to use an indefinite article (“a” or “an”). Examples: “She has measles and he has mumps. Henry has had both scarlet fever and pneumonia.”

Some people use the definite article (“the”) with certain diseases, which is acceptable, but not necessary: “First she had the measles and then he got the mumps, and now they both have the flu.”

When speaking of symptoms or conditions rather than diseases per se, it’s common to treat them as ordinary nouns and use indefinite articles: “She has a broken leg. We all have a stomachache and a headache. James has an infection.” This is also how we treat a cold: “She’s in bed with a cold.”

Much of the way we treat physical maladies is idiomatic, though. Jaundice is a symptom rather than a disease, yet we say “She has jaundice” (no article) or “She is jaundiced.”

I hope this helps. Thanks for your kind words, and for listening!

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Q: I recently saw the phrase “vociferous reader” (instead of “voracious“) in an obituary. Encountering it for the first time as a 55-year-old, I felt it must be a rare accidental usage, but I discovered from Google that it is far more common than I had imagined. I would like to mention it on my own blog but I do not know the proper name for this particular type of incorrect usage. Can you help?

A: “Vociferous reader” is a very good example of a malapropism! When I googled the phrase, I got 964 hits, some tongue-in-cheek.

Here’s a definition of “malapropism” from the Oxford English Dictionary: “The ludicrous misuse of words, esp. in mistaking a word for another resembling it; an instance of this.”

I’ve written two blog items about malapropisms. If you’d like to read more, check out the entry for Jan 2, 2007, and the one for Oct. 24, 2008.

As for the adjective “voracious,” it ultimately comes from the Latin vorare, meaning to devour. When it first appeared in print in 1635, the English word meant greedy about food. The earliest published reference in the OED is from a poem that condemns “voracious Gluttony abus’d.”

By the early 1700s, though, “voracious” was being used figuratively to describe insatiable desires or interests that had nothing to do with food. A 1712 citation from the English essayist Joseph Addison in the Spectator refers to “a Voracious Appetite” for news.

The first (and only) published reference in the OED to literary voraciousness is from an 1883 article in an evangelical magazine: “Mr. Rowland … was a voracious reader.”

The adjective “vociferous,” which entered English around the same time as “voracious,” is ultimately derived from the Latin vociferari, meaning to shout or yell. In modern English, it refers to a noisy or vehement outcry.

So, a library with a “Silence, please!” sign would welcome a voracious, but not a vociferous reader.

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Q: The etymological appendix at the end of my dictionary suggests that “think” and “thank” are related. It has taken me a long time to connect my thinking and my thanking, especially to think before I thank, and thank before I think. If you have anything to share, I’d be thankful. I’m already thinkful in anticipation!

A: “Think” and “thank” are indeed etymologically related, and have as a common ancestor the ancient Indo-European root tong, meaning to feel or think.

This prehistoric root was the source of a proto-Germanic word, reconstructed as thankaz, which gave us the Old English words thencan (to think, to conceive in the mind), thoht (thought), thanc (meaning thought, good will, gratitude), thancian (to thank), and thyncan (to seem or appear).

The last word, thyncan, gave us the now-obscure “methinks” (literally, “it seems to me”). So, methinks, thinking and thanking sprang from the same thoughtful source!

By the way, our modern verb “think” was once two separate Old English verbs: thyncan (to seem or appear) and thencan, whose original meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, may have been “to cause (something) to seem or appear (to oneself).” In Middle English, the two verbs merged into one.

Thanks for your thinkful question.

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Q: I’m an actress who notices new things about accents. Lately, I hear people turning “ing” endings into “een.” So, “running,” “jumping,” and “playing” are pronounced RUN-een, JUMP-een, and PLAY-een. Two famous people who do this are Katie Couric and George Clooney. Have you noticed it?

A: Allan A. Metcalf’s book How We Talk: American Regional English Today has some interesting things to say about this “een” versus “ing” pronunciation. It seems to be a common phenomenon in California, where the pronunciation of second syllables is often different from that in the rest of the country.

For example, Metcalf writes, many Californians pronounce the word “garden” as GAR-den, with the vowel in the second syllable pronounced fully, as if it were the separate word “den.”

Normally, Metcalf says, the vowel in an unstressed syllable is reduced, so that “in most other varieties of English, the pronunciation is GAR-dun or even a vowel-less GARD-‘n.”

The same thing happens with “shouldn’t” and “didn’t,” which some Californians articulate as if the second syllable ended with the fully pronounced word “dent.”

“Another pronunciation even more widely heard among older teens and adults in California and throughout the West is ‘een’ for -ing, as in ‘I’m think-een of go-een camp-een,’ ” Metcalf writes.

This pronunciation, he says, “contrasts with the two usual pronunciations of -ing back East: the formal one that rhymes with sing and the informal one that rhymes with sin and is often spelled as ‘in, as in ‘I’m thinkin’ of goin’ campin’.’ ”

“Like the California pronunciation of garden,” Metcalf adds, “the ‘een’ for -ing gives more prominence to the vowel of an unstressed syllable at the end of a word.”

This doesn’t explain the pronunciation of Katie Couric (born in Arlington, Virginia) or George Clooney (Lexington, Kentucky), but then I have a friend from the Midwest who pronounces “mitten” as MITT-ten, fully pronouncing the “ten” instead of saying MITT-‘n.

Maybe these people are simply California dreamin’.

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Q: I’m stumped. I recently used one of my dad’s expressions: ” barring fire, flood, or civil unrest.” A non-native asked me to explain and I said, “unless something bad happens.” But I want to know more. I’ve found plenty of versions online, but I can’t find anything to indicate the phrase’s origin. Any clues?

A: I’ve spent way too much time on this already, and I still can’t give you a definitive answer. I have a couple of guesses, though, and a few facts to share.

As you’ve already learned, a bit of googling will come up with thousands of variations on the theme, from “barring fire, flood, or acts of God” to “barring flood, fire, or alien abduction.”

Other unfortunate events commonly mentioned include earthquake, nuclear strike, pestilence, and tornado. With stuff like that, why bother to get out of bed in the morning?

Curiously, I couldn’t find a single example of these expressions in a search of published references in the Oxford English Dictionary, though the OED has various references to “barring accidents.”

(A 1797 Coleridge poem is called “Fire, Famine, Slaughter.” And an 1864 Tennyson poem refers to “flood, fire, earthquake, thunder.” But there’s no mention of any “barring” there.)

The earliest example I can find of the kind of phrase you mention appeared in an article in the Columbus (Georgia) Daily Enquirer on Sept. 28, 1892, describing a house that “is as sound as a dollar and is good for a hundred years to come, barring fire and cyclones.”

A financial article in the Boston Journal on Nov. 1, 1895, referred to “dividends of $15 a share, barring fire, flood, and strikes.” And an article in the Oregonian in Portland on March 31, 1910, mentioned the scheduled completion of a new theater “barring fire, strikes or unavoidable delay.”

Where did these phrases come from? I can only guess. Perhaps they were influenced by the Ten Plagues in the Old Testament, though the only biblical plagues that we commonly see in these expressions are pestilence and hail. I’ve never heard of any barring of frogs or locusts or boils.

Another possible inspiration might be the source for that old saying about the steadfastness of mail carriers: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

(No, that’s not the US Postal Service motto, though it’s on the Postal Service’s James A. Farley Building in Manhattan.)

The saying is derived from a nearly 2,500-year-old comment by the Greek historian Herodotus about Persian postal couriers: “These neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night prevents from accomplishing each one the task proposed to him, with the very utmost speed.” (The quote is from G.C. Macaulay’s translation of The History of Herodotus.)

Before I drop the subject, I’d like to mention one of my favorite “barring” expressions. It comes from an Oct. 4, 1921, article in the New York Times that mentioned the reaction of the baseball commissioner of the time, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, to ticket speculation for the 1921 World Series between the Yankees and the Giants:

“The commissioner isn’t worrying, for one of his teams has got to win, barring only fire, famine, pestilence or some one of the like visitations which many people like to describe as coming from on high.”

Sorry I can’t be more definitive, but I hope this helps.

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Q: How did we end up with two adjectives, “ironic” and “ironical,” to describe irony? I assume the shorter version came first.

A: It may make sense that the shorter one came first, but let’s not jump to conclusions here. The suffix “-al” is a tricky little devil when it comes to word history. The longer “historical” (1561), for example, is older than “historic” (1669).

First, some background. The “-al” ending is derived from a similar Latin suffix, –alem, and lets us turn nouns into adjectives and adjectives into other adjectives.

In modern English and modern Romance languages, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “-al” can be added to a Latin-derived noun (like “nation,” “proportion,” “constitution”) to form an adjective (“national,” “proportional,” “constitutional”). Similarly, “-al” can be added to Greek-derived nouns to make adjectives (“baptismal,” “octagonal,” “choral”).

The suffix can also be added to other adjectives to make new adjectives, which is how we got “comical” (circa 1432) from “comic” (1387).

However, this isn’t the case with “ironical,” which came BEFORE “ironic.” The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology describes “ironic” (from 1630) as a shortened form of the earlier “ironical” (1576).

Here’s a little etymological family tree, starting with “irony,” the first of the family to make it into English.

We acquired “irony” from the Latin ironia, and ultimately from the earlier Greek eironeia, which the OED defines as meaning “dissimulation, ignorance purposely affected.”

In it’s original, classical sense, the word referred to a rhetorical method (sometimes called “Socratic irony”) in which a teacher or someone involved in a debate would feign ignorance in order to draw out a student or an opponent.

When the word was adopted into English in the early 1500s, the OED says, it meant “a figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt.”

It was first recorded in English, spelled “yronye,” in a devotional manual (or “ordinary”) called The Ordynarye of Crystyanyte or of Crysten Men (1502). The writer gave “irony” both a religious meaning and a grammatical one.

In the religious sense, the manual says, a man who speaks about his weaknesses just to get a reputation for humility before God commits a sin and “such synne is named yronye.” It compares the religious meaning with one in “grammare, by the whiche a man sayth one & gyueth [giveth] to understande the contrarye.”

“Ironical” and “ironically” came into English at the same time and were first recorded in the same place: Abraham Fleming’s A Panoplie of Epistles (1576), a book on rhetoric. Here are the passages in which the words appear (note that his spellings follow the Greek):

“It may be spoken eironically, for familiar friends use jeasting [jesting] nowe and then, in their letters.” And: “He was (belike) some Pomilio or litle dwarfe, and that made him to use this eironical method.”

Here are the OED‘s definitions: The adverb “ironically” means “in an ironical manner; by way of irony.” The adjective “ironical” means “of the nature of irony or covert sarcasm; meaning the opposite of what is expressed.”

“Ironic,” the latecomer, didn’t appear until 1630. The OED defines it as “pertaining to irony; uttering or given to irony; of the nature of or containing irony.”

It first appeared in print in Ben Jonson’s comic play The New Inne: Or, the Light Heart, in these lines: “Most Socratick Lady! / Or, if you will Ironick! gi’ you joy / O’ your Platonick Love ….” (These are Jonson’s italics.)

It may be that Jonson chose “ironick” simply to rhyme with “Socratick” and “Platonick.” If so, the very existence of “ironic” is ironic!

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