Month: September 2018

Q: Many of the recent articles about John McCain have described the late senator as “cantankerous,” which leads me to ask you where this odd-looking word comes from.

A: When the word first appeared in writing in the early 1700s, it was described as a term in the Kentish dialect spoken in southeast England. In the late 1700s, it was said to be a term in the Wiltshire dialect in southwest England.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the dialectal usage may have evolved from the Middle English contak or conteke (quarreling) and contekour or conteckour (a quarrelsome person)—perhaps influenced by a word like “rancorous.”

The OED defines “cantankerous” as “showing an ill-natured disposition; ill-conditioned and quarrelsome, perverse, cross-grained.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from An Alphabet of Kenticisms (1736), by the antiquarian Samuel Pegge: “Contancrous, peevish, perverse, prone to quarrelling.”

The next Oxford example is from She Stoops to Conquer, a 1773 comedy by Oliver Goldsmith: “There’s not a more bitter cantanckerous toad in all Christendom.”

This citation, which we’ve expanded, is from The Rivals, a 1775 comedy by Richard Brinsley Sheridan:

“But I hope, Mr. Faulkland, as there are three of us come on purpose for the game—you won’t be so cantanckerous as to spoil the party by sitting out.”

And in this entry from A Provincial Glossary: With a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (2nd ed., 1790), the lexicographer Francis Grose tracks the usage to Wiltshire: “Contankerous. Quarrelsome. Wilts.”

The first OED example with the modern spelling cites a March 24, 1842 letter by the English author Mary Russell Mitford addressed “To Miss Barrett, Wimpole Street”:

“I rather have a fancy for Mr. Roebuck, who is as cantankerous and humorous (in the old Shakesperian sense) as Cassius himself.” (From an 1870 collection of Mitford’s letters, edited by Alfred Guy Kingan L’Estrange.) John Arthur Roebuck was a British politician.

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Q: I’m writing an article about a European lepidopterist, and I’ve discovered that a butterfly collector in Europe is sometimes called an aurelian. I’ve found several tangential connections to a Roman emperor, but nothing solid. Can you help me explain the usage to my readers?

A:Yes, “aurelian” is a rare old term for “lepidopterist.” It’s still alive, though barely. We’ve checked six standard dictionaries and only one includes the usage. Merriam-Webster Unabridged defines it as “a collector and breeder of moths and butterflies.”

The noun isn’t related to Aurelian, the third-century Roman emperor whose Latin name was Lucius Domitius Aurelianus Augustus. It’s derived from “aurelia,” the chrysalis or pupa of an insect. The chrysalis, as you know, is the hardened outer covering of the pupa, an insect in the immature, non-feeding stage between larva and adult.

The words “aurelia” and “chrysalis” are ultimately derived from the Latin and Greek terms for gold, aurum and χρῡσός (chrisos).

The Latin chrȳsallis comes from the Greek χρυσαλλίς (chrysalis), meaning “the gold-coloured sheath of butterflies,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Although some butterfly chrysalises are gold in color, others are black, brown, green, pink, purple, and so on.

The first of these terms to show up in English was “aurelia,” which the OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, defines as “the chrysalis or pupa of an insect, esp. of a butterfly. (Now scarcely in use, chrysalis being the ordinary term.)”

The earliest example in the dictionary for “aurelia” (as the plural “aureliaes”) is from a 1608 treatise on zoology by the English clergyman and writer Edward Topsell: “All Catterpillers are not conuerted into Aureliaes.”

The term “chrysalis” (in the plural “chrysallides”) appeared in 1658 in an expanded version of Topsell’s treatise that was revised posthumously: “Transmutations … of Catterpillers … into Chrysallides (that shine as if leaves of gold were laid upon them).”

As for the people who study butterflies, moths, and other insects, the terms “entomologist” and “aurelian” appeared in writing in the late 18th century and “lepidopterist” in the 19th century.

The first OED citation for “entomologist” is from an April 18, 1771, report in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: “The entomologists have ranked the bivalve insects under the genus of the monoculi.” (The italics here are in the original, though not in the Oxford citation.)

The earliest example we’ve seen for the noun “aurelian” is in the title and text of a 1766 book by the English entomologist Moses Harris: The Aurelian: or, Natural History of English Insects; Namely, Moths and Butterflies. The subtitle says the book uses the “standard names, as given and established by the worthy and ingenious Society of Aurelians.” (The OED cites a 1778 edition of the book.)

In his preface, Harris notes that the Society of Aurelians used to meet in the 1740s at the Swan Tavern in London, but disbanded after March 27, 1748, when a fire destroyed the tavern along with the society’s specimens, illustrations, and library. Harris formed a new Aurelian Society in 1762, one of several short-lived societies with that name. We haven’t found any earlier written mention of the first society.

”Lepidopterist,” the latecomer entomologically as well as etymologically, appeared in the early 19th century. The OED’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, is from An Introduction to Entomology; or, Elements of the Natural History of Insects (1826), by William Kirby and William Spence:

“If a Lepidopterist goes into the wood to capture moths in the day-time, he finds them often perched on the lichens that cover the north side of the trunk of a tree, with their wings and antennae folded.”

Oxford says the term comes from Lepidoptera, modern Latin for a “large order of insects, characterized by having four membranous wings covered with scales; it comprises the butterflies and moths.”

Interestingly, this modern Latin term is derived from the old Greek words λεπίς (lepis, scale) and πτερόν (pteron, wing). A modern Latin word made of two old Greek terms? Well, as Oscar Wilde put it, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

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Q: The NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA, recently emailed employees to announce the creation of a new position: Associate Director for Technical. If you are not as disconcerted as I am by this use of “technical” without a noun, please help me to accept it and move on.

A: It takes a lot to disconcert us, but we do feel the need for a noun here. Associate director for technical what? Because “technical” is principally an adjective, we expect it to be followed by the noun it modifies.

In this case, the adjective could be short for “technical support,” “technical services,” “technical management,” “technical operations,” and so on.

In fact, such terms appear in many titles at other NASA centers: “associate director for technical management,” “associate director for technical issues,” “associate director for technical activities,” “associate director for technical efforts,” and “associate director for technical affairs.”

However, the NASA website also has many noun-free titles, including “associate director technical,” “associate director/technical,” “associate director, technical,” and “associate director (technical).”

To be fair, a title like “associate director for technical efforts” may be more idiomatic than “associate director for technical,” but it doesn’t tell us much more about what the job entails. That may explain why NASA apparently doesn’t have a consistent style for using the word “technical” in job titles.

We’ve emailed NASA to ask what “associate director for technical” means in the announcement that disconcerts you. But we’ve gotten no response.

The word “technical” is occasionally used as a noun in itself, but not in any way that would clarify that job description.

We sifted through the definitions in major American and British dictionaries and came up with four principal uses of “technical” as a noun. Here they are, along with the earliest dates recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, where available:

1. In sports lingo, the noun “technical” (1917) means what it’s short for, a “technical foul” (1878).
2. In stock-market terminology, “technicals” are indicators of how markets typically behave. The OED has no entry for this noun, but it has one for “technical analysis” (1902), which tries to forecast market activity based on past trends.
3. In business-speak, a “technical” (or a “tech”) can mean a technology company. This use isn’t recorded in the OED, but it’s found in Longman’s Business Dictionary, which says it originated in journalism.
4. In military language, and usually in the plural, “technicals” (1992) are small, light trucks fitted with machine guns or other weapons, generally used by guerrillas or irregular troops. The fighters who ride in such vehicles are also called “technicals” (1992).

As for the etymology of “technical,” Oxford says it was borrowed either from post-classical Latin (technicus) or from ancient Greek (τεχνικός). The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the Greek word (tekhnikós in our alphabet) is the most likely source.

Chambers makes a good case. The Greek adjective tekhnikós means having to do with art, and is derived from tékhnē, a noun for art, skill, craft, or trade. But the Latin technicus, Chambers says,” was known only as a noun in the sense of a teacher or skilled artisan.”

When the adjective “technical” entered English in the early 1600s, the OED says, it was used to describe a person with knowledge, expertise, or skill “in a particular art, science, or other subject.”

The first known use in writing is from a 1617 sermon by the English clergyman and scholar John Hales, who had taught Greek at Eton and Oxford. In the sermon, Hales warns against abuse in the interpretation of obscure and difficult Bible passages:

“Nor to think themselues sufficiently provided vpon their acquaintance with some Notitia, or systeme of some technicall divine.” (Here “divine” is a noun for a theologian.)

Later, as the OED says, the adjective was used to characterize someone “expert in or concerned with applied and industrial sciences.” The dictionary’s most recent example is from the July 19, 1998, issue of the New York Times:

“Microsoft’s technical people think it’s completely obvious that an operating system in 1998 should include Web-browsing services.”

Of course the adjective “technical” is also used more broadly, and these senses are also several hundred years old.

For example, since the 1630s “technical” has referred to “the specialized use or meaning of language in a particular field,” the OED says. The dictionary has citations for “technical sense” (1635), “technical terms” (1666), “technical language” (1808), and “technical classification” (1835).

And since the late 18th century, the dictionary says, a writer or a book that uses specialized terms or requires “specialist knowledge to be understood” has been called “technical.”

Oxford’s earliest citation is from a 1779 issue of the Mirror, a short-lived periodical published in Edinburgh: “I have since been endeavouring to make it a little less technical, in order to fit it more for general perusal.”

Another familiar sense of the adjective means “so called” or “strictly so considered.” The earliest example in the OED is a 1779 reference to “a technical, artificial title,” but this 2008 citation from the Styles section of the New York Times is a better illustration:

“Several weeks later Mr. Byrd and Ms. Kalos went on what she described as ‘our technical first date.’ … Two days later they went out alone on what she considers their first real date.”

We won’t go into the many other senses of the adjective “technical,” as applied to products, equipment, processes, activities, and so on. Needless to say, they shed no light on NASA’s use of the word in that job title.

It’s worth mentioning that many other words are related to the ancient Greek noun tékhnē (art, skill, craft, trade). Some of them—along with the first dates given in the OED—are “text” (circa 1369), “context” (perhaps before 1425), “pretext” (before 1535), “architect” (1563), “technology” (1612), “textile,” (1626), “tectonic” (1656), “technicality” (1764), “technique” (1817), “technician” (1833), “technoculture” (1946), and, inevitably, “technobabble” (1981).

Their ultimate ancestor is a prehistoric Indo-European root that’s been reconstructed as teks-, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. It has been variously translated as meaning to weave, make, build, or fabricate.

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Q: My dictionary says a “factoid” can be a questionable “fact” as well as an actual fact that’s trivial. To me these definitions are almost opposites. Has “factoid” always had two meanings?

A: Like many newish words, “factoid” is a work in progress. When it first showed up in English in the early 1970s, it referred to a dubious assumption presented as fact by the news media.

As we wrote in 2010, the first published reference to the word “factoid” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Norman Mailer’s 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe.

In the book, Mailer describes factoids as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.”

The OED defines this early usage more broadly as “something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often that it is popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact.”

It says the word was formed by adding the “-oid” suffix to the noun “fact.” The suffix is derived in part from the Latin -oīdēs and in part from the Greek -οειδής. In classical times, according to the dictionary, it meant “having the form or likeness of, like.”

Oxford says a new sense of “factoid,” used chiefly by journalists, appeared in the early 1980s: “A brief or trivial piece of information, esp. any of a list of such items presented together.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from the Book World section in the May 16, 1982, issue of the Washington Post: “A great lump of a book that never stirs from its obsessive accumulation of factoids.”

The OED is an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence. We’ve also checked a half-dozen standard dictionaries, and all but one include both senses.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, for example, has the original meaning (“an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print”) as well as the newer one (“a briefly stated and usually trivial fact”).

Oxford Dictionaries Online (a standard dictionary) lists both meanings, but in reverse order: “A brief or trivial item of news or information” and “An assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.”

The new meaning seems to be gaining in popularity over the old one. It’s now accepted by some 64 percent of the usage panel at The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), compared to 59 percent who accept the old meaning. In the dictionary’s fourth edition, only 43 percent accepted the new sense, and the new sense wasn’t even included in the third edition.

In fact, one of the references we’ve consulted, the online Cambridge Dictionary, includes only the new meaning (“an interesting piece of information”) and doesn’t describe the information as trivial.

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Q: I’m curious about why the short form of “market” is “mart” and not “mark.” Was the usage influenced by Kmart?

A: No, “mart” appeared in the Middle Ages, hundreds of years before the S.S. Kresge Company opened its first Kmart store in 1962. And it wasn’t a shortening of “market” either, at least not in English. The two terms came into English separately from different sources, though they’re  etymologically related.

“Mart,” which showed up in the early 1400s, comes from Middle Dutch, where marct and its colloquial form mart were derived from the Old Dutch markat. The Dutch words ultimately come from mercātus, classical Latin for market or fair

“Market,” which first appeared in the early 900s, was borrowed from either medieval Latin, Germanic, or French, but it too ultimately comes from mercātus.

When “market” arrived in Old English, it meant a “meeting or gathering together of people for the purchase and sale of provisions or livestock, publicly displayed, at a fixed time and place,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest OED example is from a document, dated 963, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of Old English writing from the 800s to the 1100s: “Ic wille þæt markete beo in þe selue tun” (“I will be at that market in the same town”).

In, the 1200s, “market” came to mean an “open space or covered building in which vendors gather to display provisions (esp. from stalls or booths), livestock, etc., for sale,” Oxford says.

The dictionary’s first example is from a sermon written around 1275 in the Kentish dialect: “So ha kam into þe Marcatte so he fond werkmen þet were idel” (“So he came into the market and found workmen that were idle”).

Over the years, “market” has taken on many other senses, including a geographical area for commerce, 1615 (as in “the French market for silk”); the state of commercial activity, 1776 (“the market for wool is weak”); short for “stock market,” 1814; in the compound “supermarket,” 1931; and the operation of supply and demand, 1970 (“the market has many virtues”). Dates are from the first Oxford citations; examples are ours.

When “mart” showed up in Middle English, it referred to a “regular gathering of people for the purpose of buying and selling,” according to the OED. The dictionary’s first example is from “The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye,” an anonymous political poem written around 1436:

“And wee to martis of Braban charged bene Wyth Englyssh clothe” (“And we carried a load of good English cloth to the marts of Braban [in the Low Countries]”). From Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History (1861), edited by Thomas Wright.

In the late 16th century, the OED says, “mart” came to mean “any public place for buying and selling, as a marketplace, market hall, etc.” The dictionary’s earliest example, expanded here, is from Churchyards Challenge (1593), a collection of prose and prose by the English author and soldier Thomas Churchyard:

“As nothing could, escape the reach of arts / Schollers in scholes, and merchantes in their marts / Can ply their thrift, so they that maketh gold, / By giftes of grace, haue cunning treble fold.”

Today, “mart” usually refers to “a shop or stall carrying on trade of a specified kind (as shoe mart, etc.),” the OED says, adding, “This latter use is particularly prevalent in the names of retail businesses, esp. in N. Amer.”

It’s hard to tell from the dictionary’s citations when “mart” first referred to a single retail store rather than a place housing various vendors. The first clear example, which we’ve expanded, is from the Dec. 17, 1831, issue of a London weekly, the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction:

“It’s good-bye to Wellingtons and Cossacks, Ladies’ double channels, Gentlemen’s stout calf, and ditto ditto. They’ve all been sold off under prime cost, and the old Shoe Mart is disposed of, goodwill and fixtures, for ever and ever.” (From a fictional account of the sale of a family’s shoe store in London.)

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Q: How did the word “used” come to mean utilized, accustomed, and pre-owned? And why does the second one jangle my sensibilities?

A: Let’s begin with the word “use,” which showed up in English as a verb and a noun in the Middle Ages. The noun ultimately come from the Latin ūsus (a use, custom, skill, habit, or experience), and the verb comes from ūtī (to use) and the past-participle ūsus (used).

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that those Latin ancestors have given English such words as “utensil,” “utility,” “utilize,” “usage,” “usual,” “usury,” “abuse” (etymologically, “misuse”), and “peruse” (“use thoroughly”).

The English verb meant “to utilize or employ for a purpose” when it first appeared in Layamon’s Brut, a Middle English poem written sometime before 1200, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

Chambers doesn’t give a citation, but here’s an example from the poem: “Hii vsede þat craft to lokie in þan lufte; þe craft his ihote astronomie” (“They used that craft to look in the sky; the craft they named astronomy”).

When the noun “use” showed up around the same time in Ancrene Riwle, an anonymous guide for monastic women that’s believed to date from sometime before 1200, it meant the “act of utilizing or employing a thing.”

Again, Chambers doesn’t give a citation, but here’s an example from the monastic guide: “Þis word habbeð muchel on us” (“You have much use of this word”).

We won’t get into all the various senses of the noun and verb “use” here. Instead, we’ll stick to the three meanings of “used” that you’re asking about: (1) utilized, (2) accustomed, and (3) secondhand.

We’ve already discussed #1, the original meaning of the verb in Middle English. This is still the primary sense of the verb.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, lists this sense first: “To put into service or employ for a purpose: I used a whisk to beat the eggs. The song uses only three chords.”

The “accustomed” meaning of the verb first appeared in the Middle Ages, reflecting the “custom,” “habit,” or “experience” sense of the Latin ūsus. The verb was originally accompanied by a preposition, usually “in” or “to,” but occasionally “of” or “till.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has this early “in” example from the South English Legendary (circa 1300), a collection of lives, or stories, of saints and other church figures:

“In penance he was so wel yused” (“He was so well used to penance”). The passage is from the “Life of St. Edmund of Abingdon.”

And here’s an early “to” citation from the same story: “So longe hi hem vsede þerto” (“So long she used them thereto”). The “to” here is part of þerto. The citation refers to Edmund’s mother, who accustomed her children to a life of Christian devotion and austerity.

In the late 1300s, the OED says, writers began using the “used to” construction to describe a past action that “was formerly habitual but has been discontinued.”

The first example given is from John Trevisa’s translation, dated sometime before 1387, of Polychronicon, a history written in Latin in the mid-1300s by the Benedictine monk Ranulf Higden: “Englische men used for to goo into abbayes of Fraunce.”

The latest Oxford citation is from the Nov. 18, 2012, issue of the Daily Telegraph (London): “I used to go to yoga, Pilates and circuit training and have given all those up.”

The “did use to” construction showed up in the early 17th century to describe such a habitual past action.

The dictionary’s first example is from a 1624 religious tract by James Ussher, a Church of Ireland archbishop and later primate: “In whose language … the Church also did use to speake.”

In the late 19th century, writers began using “used to” passively to describe being familiar or comfortable with something—that is, accustomed to it.

The earliest OED example is from an essay by Edward Gibbon, published posthumously in 1796, referring to those “who are used to the laboured happiness of all Horace’s expressions.”

This more recent citation is from “If You See Her, Say Hello,” a 1975 song by Bob Dylan: “And I’ve never gotten used to it, I’ve just learned to turn it off.”

Why, you ask, does this usage jangle your sensibilities? We don’t know. It doesn’t jangle ours. But perhaps, like Dylan, you haven’t gotten used to it.

As for the adjective “used” (technically, a participial adjective), it took on its “secondhand” sense in the late 19th century. The first Oxford example is from an ad in the Sept. 30, 1874, issue of the Chicago Tribune: “New and used furniture.”

And as geezers ourselves, we enjoyed this citation from Pompey, a 1993 novel by Jonathan Meades: “You tell me the name of the geezer who’ll buy a used pacemaker with fifteen thou on the clock.”

If you’d like to read more, we ran a post in 2013 about “used” and “pre-owned.”

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