Month: September 2019

Q: I’m bugged by the use of “job” and “of” in this sentence: “I have the job of delivering the bad news.” The “job” here is a task, not a position, and what is the “of” doing there? There’s no possession involved.

A: You raise two issues—the meaning of the noun “job” and its use with the preposition “of.” We’ll start with the noun.

A “job” doesn’t always mean an occupation or line of work. It can also mean a task, a responsibility, or simply something that needs to be done—senses of the word that have been common for centuries.

So a person can have both “the job of sales assistant” and “the job of delivering the bad news.” And a company that’s lagging in some area can try “to do a better job.” In modern English, “job” has these and many other senses.

However, when the noun “job” came into English in the 16th century it didn’t mean a paid position, as it does today. It originally meant “a piece of work; esp. a small and discrete piece of work done as part of one’s regular occupation or profession,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word first appeared in the phrase “job of work,” recorded in documents (dated 1557-58) relating to the reigns of King Edward VI and Queen Mary : “Doinge certen Iobbes of woorke.” (The letter “i” was used before “j” became established.)

Here’s a later example with the word used alone: “I cannot read, I keep a Clark to do those jobbs for need” (from Thomas Middleton’s play The Mayor of Quinborough, 1615–20, known today under the title Hengist, King of Kent).

The origins of the word “job” are unknown, the OED says, but it’s significant that in the mid-1500s a separate noun “job” meant “a cartload,” or “the amount that a horse and cart can bring at one time.” (This later led to the dialectal nouns “jobble” and “jobbet,” for a small load of hay or whatnot.)

So it’s possible that the two kinds of “job” are etymologically connected. The OED suggests that the original “job” (in “a job of work”) may have conveyed the sense of a “piece” or a “mass”—that is, an amount of something that needed to be carried or moved and hence represented a task.

In fact, the noun “jobber” (1600s), in the sense of a small trader, may also derive from that early sense of “job” as a cartload of something to be hauled.

Apart from its mysterious etymology, “job” later developed many wider meanings than the “piece of work” definition given above. Here are some of them in chronological order, with the OED definitions:

• “An isolated or casual piece of work, undertaken for a one-off payment or on a hire basis” (first recorded in 1660).
• “Criminals’ slang. A crime, esp. one arranged beforehand; spec. a theft, a robbery” (1679).
• “A task, a thing to be done; an operation, a procedure; a function to be fulfilled” (1680).
• “A state of affairs, a situation, a set of circumstances,” frequently used with a modifier (1680), as in the 19th-century phrase “to make the best of a bad job.”
• “Printing. A small piece of miscellaneous work, such as the printing of posters, leaflets, cards, etc.” (1770).
• “A paid position of regular employment, a post, a situation; an occupation, a profession” (1781).
• “A difficult task” (colloquial), as in “That was a job!” (1832).
• “A person’s particular responsibility, duty, or role,” as in “It was my job to pay all the bills” (1841). This is the sense of “job” in the sentence you ask about.
• “A piece of work carried out using the tool or material specified,” used with a modifying noun, as in “needle job” (1846).
• “An operation involving cosmetic surgery … the result of such an operation” (colloquial), used with a  modifying noun, as in “nose job” (1947).

Finally, you ask what “of” is doing in “the job of delivering the bad news.” The expression is a genitive construction, not a possessive. As we’ve noted several times on our blog, the term “genitive” is broader than “possessive.”

In addition to possession (“the lawyer’s office”), the genitive can indicate the source of something (“the girl’s story”), an amount (“two cups of cream”), the date (“yesterday’s storm”), a part (“the cover of the book”), duration (“five years of experience”), type (“the job of cleaning up”), and so on.

In the expression you ask about, “the job of delivering the bad news,” the genitive indicates the type of job.

The “of” in uses like this, the OED explains, serves to connect two nouns, the first denoting the class and the second a particular example of that class.

In “the job of delivering the bad news,” the noun “job” represents the class, and “of” connects it to “delivering the bad news,” a gerund phrase that functions as a noun denoting an example of the class.

OED citations for “of” used this way date back to Old English. With spellings updated, they include “borough of Lincoln” (1123), “color of scarlet” (1530), “vice of covetousness” (1691), and “month of November” (1749).

We also use “of” after “job” to express things like “a good job of painting his room” or “a better job of marketing the product” or “the worst job of redecorating I’ve ever seen.”

There again, what follows “of” answers the question, “What kind of job?”

We’ll end with a quote from one our favorite fictional detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey: “I think the most joyous thing in life is to loaf around and watch another bloke do a job of work.” (The Five Red Herrings, 1931, by Dorothy L. Sayers.)

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Q: The noun “ablution,” namely the washing of one’s body, suggests a verb “ablute.” Ever hear of that?

A: Yes, there is a verb “ablute.” In fact, people have been “abluting” themselves for more than 300 years, though the verb is used infrequently these days, and mainly in British English.

Merriam-Webster Online defines the verb “ablute” as “to wash one’s body” or “to perform one’s ablutions,” and says it’s synonymous with “bathe.”

The verb is “chiefly British,” M-W says, and provides two contemporary examples: “the minimalist bathroom where he ablutes every day” (Irish Times, Oct. 12, 2009), and “After I finished the paper, I headed to the bathroom to ablute myself, as is my wholesome Canadian habit” (Toronto Globe and Mail, March 13, 2004).

As those examples demonstrate, the verb is both intransitive (used without an object, as in “he ablutes every day”), and transitive (used with an object, as in “to ablute myself”).

This is not a common word, even in dictionaries—at least the ordinary ones. Of course it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, where it’s described as “colloquial.” Most of the contemporary uses we’ve seen are semi-humorous.

As for standard dictionaries, Merriam-Webster Online, Merriam-Webster Unabridged, and Lexico (formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online) are the only ones we’ve found, British or American, that have entries for the verb.

However, several standard dictionaries have entries for the adjective “abluted” (washed clean, thoroughly washed) and for the noun “abluent” (a cleansing substance). And “ablution” (the washing of one’s body, mostly used in the plural) is found nearly everywhere.

One might assume that “ablute” was a humorous back-formation based on “ablutions,” but that’s not how the verb originated.

The OED says “ablute” was first recorded in the early 1700s as a direct borrowing from classical Latin, in which ablūt– is the past participial stem of abluere (to wash off).

The first use was medical: “Let the Wound be well abluted with hot Tinctures de Myrrha” (from The Experienced Chirurgion, 1703, by the naval surgeon John Moyle. “Chirurgion” was an early spelling of “surgeon”).

The verb “ablute” has been found in writing ever since. But as we mentioned above, the more modern sightings are colloquial and often tongue-in-cheek. Here’s a partial selection from the OED:

“We are a private lot, not inclined to communal abluting” (the Sun Herald, Sydney, March 14, 1993; here the derivative “abluting” is a noun).

“I abluted in a staff loo” (Derbyshire Life and Countryside magazine, November 2002).

“Also featured in the catalogue are soap applicators for abluting those hard-to-get-to little places” (the Independent on Sunday, June 10, 2007).

As for those relatives of “ablute,” the first to be recorded in English was “ablution” in the late 14th century. This noun, meaning “the act or process of washing clean,” came partly from French and partly from Latin.

The earliest known example, circa 1395, is in the plural and was spelled “ablucions” in Middle English. But in those days it referred to the purification of substances by emulsifying them in hot water, not to personal cleanliness.

On a more personal level, the word came to mean ritual religious washing in the 1500s, and ordinary bathing in the 1600s.

But even then “ablution” (more often “ablutions”), when used in reference to bathing or washing oneself, was “frequently humorous (with mock formal tone),” Oxford says.

The earliest use for personal bathing is from 1664, but this example better illustrates the mock formality of the word: “Having performed the ceremony of ablution, I shifted” (Tobias Smollett’s novel Roderick Random, 1748).

The adjective “abluted,” defined in the OED as “that has been washed clean,” was first recorded in 1650. Like the verb “ablute,” it comes from classical Latin (ablūtus, past participle of abluere, to wash off or away).

Similarly, the noun “abluent” (a cleansing agent), first recorded in 1726, is from classical Latin (abluent–, present participle of abluere). Oxford adds that the post-classical Latin noun abluentia (1702) meant “cleansing medicines.”

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Q: The terms “ottoman,” “divan,” “settee,” and “sofa” seem to have been used in Victorian England. Were they known earlier? Are they interchangeable? Do they come from Turkish, Persian, or some other Eastern culture? As a writer of historical fiction, I must get this right!

A: The nouns “ottoman,” “divan,” “settee,” and “sofa” overlap here and there, but they’re not interchangeable. What’s more, some meanings have shifted over the years, so writers of historical fiction have to be on their toes in describing period furniture.

What these all have in common is a level base, usually cushioned or upholstered. The differences mostly have to do with the extras—that is, whether they have arms, a back, neither of those features, or both of them.

Etymologically, most of these terms come from Arabic or Persian and entered English in the 17th and 18th centuries. We’ll examine them one at a time, beginning with “ottoman” (since you mentioned it first).

“Ottoman,” derived from Arabic, entered English in the late 18th century in the furniture sense: an armless, backless seat or footrest that may also have hidden storage space inside. This is the definition given in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A low upholstered seat without a back or arms, typically serving also as a box, with the seat hinged to form a lid.”

As a furniture term, “ottoman” comes from the earlier adjective “Ottoman,” meaning Turkish, a word derived from Uṯmān (Othman), the Arabic name for Osman I, founder of the Turkish (or “Ottoman”) empire. The furniture was “probably so called to suggest the Oriental style of the seat,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The furniture term was recorded in French as ottomane in 1729 and was borrowed into English 50 years later, according to OED citations. The French word for the item, Oxford says, was also borrowed by other European languages: German (Ottomane, 1772 or earlier); Italian (ottomana, 1797); Spanish (otomana, 1849); and Catalan (otomana, 1888).

The OED’s earliest use in English is from a memorandum written by Thomas Jefferson on Aug. 19, 1789, when he was in France: “Pd. [paid] for an Ottomane of velours d’Utrecht.”

The dictionary’s most recent example is from the autumn 2001 issue of the Art Room Catalogue: “This hugely versatile and attractive ottoman serves as a seat, a footstool or even an occasional table.”

In Oxford’s 19th-century British quotations, people are described as sitting on ottomans (sometimes two at a time), as well as resting their feet on them.

“Divan,” derived from Persian, entered English in the late 1690s in the furniture sense: a long, raised platform against a wall, or a couch-like affair with no back or arms. Here’s the OED definition: “Originally: a long seat consisting of a continued step, bench, or raised part of the floor, against the wall of a room, which may be furnished with cushions, so as to form a kind of sofa or couch. Now usually: a low bed or couch with no back or ends.”

As John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “The word divan has a long and spectacularly variegated semantic history.”

In Persian, etymologists say, a dēvān was originally a small book or collection of documents. Later this came to mean a register or an account book, and later still the office of an accountant or other government official. Eventually, Ayto says, the Persian word broadened to mean “various chambers and the bodies that occupied them, such as tax offices, customs collectors, courts, and councils of state.”

Typically, the walls of these chambers were lined with long seats, and consequently a dēvān came to mean such a seat—a sense that passed from Persian into both Arabic (dīwān) and Turkish (divān), and from them into the European languages.

In fact, many of the Persian meanings of dēvān filtered into French and then into English, OED citations show. For example, “divan” was first recorded in English as “an Oriental council of state” in 1586, and as a Turkish council hall or chamber of justice sometime before 1597.

The sense of a “divan” as a long seat was first recorded in English in the late 17th century.  Here’s the OED citation: “These Duans are a sort of low stages … elevated about sixteen or eighteen inches or more, above the floar. … Upon these the Turks eat, sleep, smoake, receive visits, say their prayers, &c.” (From Henry Maundrell’s A Journey From Aleppo to Jerusalem, published in 1703. Maundrell, who died in 1701, based the book on a diary he kept during a voyage made in the spring of 1697.)

The word for the seat is spelled “divan” in the OED’s next citation (dated 1702) and all that follow. But for more than a century it referred only to Eastern interiors as described in travel memoirs, fiction, or foreign political reporting. It wasn’t used to mean a piece of European furniture until the mid-19th century. This is the earliest sighting in Oxford:

“The bed being soft and comfortable, Mr. Quilp determined to use it, both as a sleeping place by night and as a kind of Divan by day” (from Charles Dickens’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841).

We found this earlier American example: “Also a charge of one hundred dollars for one divan and eight cushions” (from the Boston Atlas, May 2, 1840). The article, an anonymous opinion piece, described President Martin Van Buren’s bills for furnishing the White House with “foreign trash” in 1837, the year he took office.

As far as we can tell, “divan” wasn’t common in Western furniture terminology until the early 20th century. Oxford’s next example is from 1919, and according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, the term in its Western sense had its heyday in the 1930s and ’40s.

“Settee,” a native English word from the early 1700s, usually means a bench or modest-sized sofa. The OED definition: “A seat (for indoors) holding two or more persons, with a back and (usually) arms; occasionally also with divisions.”

The dictionary says this word is “perhaps” a variant of the older noun “settle,” which originated in Old English in the late 800s and meant something to sit on, like a chair, bench, or stool. According to OED citations, “settle” survived into Victorian times but in the narrower sense of a long wooden bench.

As for a “settee,” it may be wooden or upholstered. The OED’s first citation is from a 1716 issue of the London Gazette: “All Sorts of Hangings for Rooms and Stair-cases, Chairs, Settees and Screens.” In those days, “hangings” meant wallpapers and decorator fabrics.

In Victorian England, “settee” would have been a common enough term for a bench or smallish sofa. One 1840 example in the OED compares a “settee” to a “double-arm’d chair.”

“Sofa,” derived from Arabic, entered written English in the early 1700s in its modern sense, defined in the OED as “a long, stuffed seat with a back and ends or end, used for reclining; a form of lounge or couch.”

However, it meant something different a century earlier, when it was first borrowed into English from the Arabic ṣoffah. In the early 1600s, it meant a kind of cushioned dais found in Eastern countries. The OED defines “sofa” in the Eastern sense as “a part of the floor raised a foot or two, covered with rich carpets and cushions.”

So in its earliest uses, beginning in 1625, “sofa” appeared in travel memoirs describing the chambers of sultans, viziers, and other potentates.

The word in its modern Western sense, according to the OED, was first recorded in English a century later in a description of an Italian interior: “The Bridegroom sits on a very low sort of seat not unlike an oriental sofa.” (An entry by the philosopher George Berkeley, dated Jan. 20, 1717, in journals kept during a trip to Italy.)

Soon “sofa” became more common, though occasionally its spelling varied, as in these OED examples: “On her Sophee she sits, Vouchsafing audience to contending Wits” (from The Universal Passion, 1727, a satire by Edward Young). “I threw myself on a soffa” (from Samuel Richardson’s 1753 novel Sir Charles Grandison).

As words go, “sofa” has been uncommonly useful. (It was also adopted, as sofa, into French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.) It was very common throughout the 19th century and it still is. It’s held its own against other words used today for the same thing. It’s somewhat less popular than “couch” but far more common than “davenport.”

“Couch,” derived from French in the 1300s, meant a bed for most of its history, though by the 19th century it denoted something like a chaise-longue with a low back and one end-piece. “Davenport,” meaning the same as “sofa,” is a late 19th-century term, probably taken from the name of an American manufacturer.

We’ll end a quotation from the New York Times Magazine, June 21, 1981: “There used to be a split on davenport and sofa; now the split is between sofa and couch.”

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Q: “Inartful” seems to be the word of choice now for excusing comments by public figures that cross the line, especially those by President Trump. However, I can’t find it in my American Heritage and Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Is it a legitimate word?

A: Yes, the adjective “inartful” is a legitimate word that showed up in the early 19th century. But it’s in only one of the 10 standard dictionaries that we regularly consult. Lexico, the former Oxford Dictionaries Online, defines it as “lacking artifice; unsophisticated, unrefined; wanting polish or technical skill. Later also: unsubtle, tactless.”

Wiktionary, an online collaborative dictionary, has only that later sense: “Awkwardly expressed but not necessarily untrue; ill-phrased; inexpedient.” (Merriam-Webster online has an entry for a similarly spelled word, “unartful,” which it defines as “lacking craft” or “lacking skill.”)

“Inartful” is now generally used in that newer sense of being awkwardly expressed, according to our searches of the News on the Web corpus, a database of newspaper and magazine articles from 2010 to the present.

Although the term was relatively popular in the early 19th century, “inartful” fell out of favor for a century and a half until it was revived in the late 20th century, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books.

As you’ve noticed, it’s sometimes used by supporters of President Trump to explain his more controversial comments, though we haven’t seen him use the word himself. Here are a few “inartful” examples from both Democrats and Republicans:

“Do I think some of his verbal formulations are inartful? Yeah” (Ken Blackwell, former mayor of Cincinnati and Trump transition official, on the President’s language, Politico, Aug. 3, 2019).

“I think the president is often inartful, but remarkably effective” (Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House Speaker, Washington Examiner, July 16, 2019).

“He said the truth in an inartful way” (Jesse Jackson on former Vice President Joe Biden’s comment that he worked with segregationists when he was in the Senate, Chicago Tribune, June 27, 2019).

“The expression I used the other day was inartful: Of course America is great and, of course, America has always been great” (Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York on his saying, two days earlier, “We’re not going to make America great again—it was never that great,” Politico, Aug. 15, 2008).

As for its etymology, “inartful” originally meant lacking artifice—that is, natural. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an early 18th-century political tract: “A Man of plain and Inartful Simplicity of Manners” (from The Life of Aristides the Athenian, anonymously published in Dublin in 1714).

But all of the OED’s examples from the 19th century onward use the word in its negative senses (unskilled, badly done, clumsy, tactless): “lace … clotted together in a very inartful manner” (1831); “inartful language” (1957, describing poor writing); “flawed and inartful drafting” (1986); “this inartful reference to his client’s probable future” (2005).

The word’s origins are simple enough. It was formed, the OED says, when the negative prefix “in-” was added to “artful.” So on the surface, at least, “inartful” is comparable to another “artful” opposite—“artless,” a word that appeared slightly earlier than “artful” in the late 16th century.

Both “artless” (first recorded in 1586) and “artful” (1590) were formed with the addition of suffixes to the noun “art,” which since the 1300s had meant not only skill but also artifice. And these new words formed from “art” reflected its two-pronged meanings.

Consequently, for several hundred years “artless” has meant unskilled, ignorant, inexperienced, clumsy; but it has also meant free of artifice—that is, sincere, natural, without guile. Similarly, “artful” has meant skilled or clever, but it has also meant artificial, cunning, deceitful.

These varied meanings of the two adjectives are still found in current usage, according to standard dictionaries. But in the case of “artless,” the OED says, “the usual sense” now is “without guile; sincere, ingenuous.” And in many standard dictionaries, the leading definition of “artful” is sly or cunning.

Meanwhile, as we said earlier, since the 19th century “inartful” has had only negative meanings—clumsy, tactless, and so on. So while “inartful” and “artless” look like they’d mean the same thing, they’re by no means synonymous as used today.

We borrowed the title of this post from the headline of an On Language column by William Safire in the New York Times Magazine (Aug. 4, 1985). In that column, Safire said “inartful” wasn’t a legitimate word. Even years later, in a 2008 column, he said it was “lexicographically unrecognized” (the OED’s entry for “inartful” was not written until 2009).

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[Note: This post was updated on Dec. 23, 2020.]

Q: In an article about the Gilroy, CA, shooting, the NY Times says investigators “also are continuing to scrub various electronic devices and trying to learn if he had any help carrying out the shooting.” Isn’t this an incorrect use of “scrub,” which I’d always understood to mean, in this context, to make data unrecoverable?

A: No, that’s not the only definition of “scrub” in digital technology. When used in technical senses, the verb “scrub” can mean either (1) to clean or erase, or (2) to examine by fast-forwarding or rewinding.

These uses of “scrub” are well known to people familiar with digital and audio/video technologies. They’re becoming more common as time goes by, though the second one is rather new.

However, in searching the ten standard British and American dictionaries we usually consult, we were surprised to find that only two have caught up to these senses of the word.

For instance, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has definitions having to do with cleaning and erasing; here they are, along with examples:

“a. To maintain the integrity of by finding and correcting errors: software that automatically scrubs stored data.

“b. To erase in such a way as to render unrecoverable: scrubbed the laptop’s hard drive to destroy incriminating evidence.”

And Dictionary.com has this in the audio/video sense: “to fast-forward or rewind in an audio or video file by dragging the progress marker forward or backward across the timeline bar: Scrub forward through the pregame and start playback from the kickoff.”

Some older, specialized reference books have limited definitions too, perhaps because fast-forwarding and rewinding technology was less developed at the time. Here are examples of the verb as used in computer science:

“To examine a large amount of data and eliminate duplicate or unneeded items” (McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 2003). “To wipe information off a disk or remove data from store” (Simon Collin’s Dictionary of Computing, 2009).

In its nontechnical usage, “scrub” has similar senses: (1) to vigorously clean something by rubbing, as in “he scrubbed the kitchen floor,” and (2) to cancel or eliminate, as in “the launch was scrubbed” or “his horse was scrubbed from the race.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, has no entries for computer senses of “scrub,” at least not yet. As for less technical uses, the OED describes the verb as Germanic in origin and “of obscure history.”

The verb was first recorded in Middle English writing in the 1300s, when it meant to curry-comb a horse, a sense that may have come from Middle Low German or Middle Dutch terms for scraping or scrubbing.

In its modern sense—to clean by hard rubbing—“the word may perhaps have been re-imported from Dutch as a nautical term,” the OED suggests.

This current sense of “scrub” was first recorded in the 16th century, at a time when Holland was a major naval power and many Dutch nautical words came into English. In those days, the English word meant “to clean (esp. a floor, wood, etc.) by rubbing with a hard brush and water.”

However, the earliest OED example, from 1595, uses the term figuratively. It’s from a contemporary account of Sir Francis Drake’s final, disastrous expedition against Spain in the West Indies:

“If part of our companie had been sent thither upon our first arrival at Rio de la Hacha, doubtles we had done much goode, but now they [the Spaniards] had scrube it very bare.” (From Sir Francis Drake His Voyage, 1595, a contemporary narrative written by a passenger, Thomas Maynarde. In December 1595, Drake’s men landed at the city only to find that the Spanish had “scrubbed” it bare—that is, removed everything of value.)

The dictionary’s earliest use of “scrub” meaning to cancel or eliminate is from the early 19th century, and is found in the private writings of Sir Walter Scott:

“If I were alone, I could scrub it [a visit to London], but there is no doing that with Anne” (a diary entry written March 22, 1828, and first published in The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1941).

The dictionary defines the word in this sense as “to cancel, scrap, call off; to eliminate, erase; to reject, dismiss.” It adds that this usage was “reinforced by the popularity of the expression amongst servicemen in the war of 1939–45.”

Oxford includes several WWII uses, both British and American, including this enlightening passage from a letter to the editor of the Spectator. The letter, from a British naval officer, ran on May 25, 1945, in response to a review of a book on air force slang:

“The author can possibly justify the inclusion of the term ‘scrub,’ meaning ‘to cancel,’ in a collection of R.A.F. slang. The expression is in common use in the Royal Navy and has been for many generations. It derives from the days when all signals and orders were written on a slate. When the signals were cancelled or orders executed, the words on the slate were ‘scrubbed out’ or, equally correctly ‘washed out.’ ”

[Note: Two readers called our attention to the increasingly common fast-forward and rewind sense of “scrub.” As one commented: “Audio and video scrubbing is moving quickly through a recording (fast-forward or fast-rewind) while the recording plays in order to find a specific spot in the recording. It does not seem like a stretch to me to go from searching an audio or video recording for something specific to searching data recorded on a computer drive for something specific.”]

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Q: Can you help me understand what ’Change means in this sentence from a short story I’m reading: “The tears just flowed like thawing snow; as they do in nature, though less often on ’Change.” The apostrophe and capital letter seem to be very confusing here. The author was an Englishman.

A: In Britain, the term “change” or “Change” has referred to a money exchange, a stock exchange, or a commercial exchange for hundreds of years, though the usage isn’t seen much now. In the late 18th century, an apostrophe was added in the mistaken belief that “Change” was short for “Exchange.”

In the sentence you’re asking about, the word apparently refers to a stock exchange. It’s from “The Fetch,” a story by Robert Aickman from his collection Intrusions: Strange Tales (1980).

The narrator, a merchant banker in London, uses it in describing the tears shed by his new wife’s maid, who has discovered that the banker’s ancestral home in Scotland is haunted.

The noun “change” was first used in the Middle Ages to mean a place for bartering or money-changing, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It had this sense for centuries before “exchange” came to mean the same thing and eventually replaced it. Here’s the story.

In the business sense, a “change” was originally “a place for the conversion of money or bullion,” and “a place where merchants or bankers transact business,” the OED says. Those meanings today are obsolete or historical, the dictionary adds.

The word in these senses can be traced to a verb in post-classical Latin, cambiare, which in the 8th century meant “to exchange, to give in exchange, to obtain by exchange” and in the 11th century meant “to change money,” the dictionary says. From medieval Latin, the usage passed into Old French, Anglo-Norman, and finally into English.

Around the year 1200, Oxford explains, chaunge in Anglo-Norman was used “with reference to a money changer’s table,” and toward the end of the 1200s or perhaps earlier, “La Chaunge” was used “as the name of such a place in London.”

Early English uses in the dictionary include “Le Eldechaunge” (1317) and “Le Oldechaunge” (1389), meaning “the Old Change.” (This in fact was the name of a lane in London where such business was conducted in those days. Similarly, in the 18th century, “Change Alley” was a street in the City of London where many stockbrokers did business at coffee houses.)

So “change” long preceded “exchange” as a noun for a place of trade. It wasn’t until the mid-16th century that an “exchange” came to mean a money-changer’s office or “a building in which the merchants of a town assemble for the transaction of business,” the OED says.

The word acquired an official stamp when the capitalized noun “Exchange” came to mean the Royal Exchange, a commercial center in the City of London where merchants traded goods.

The building, modeled on the Antwerp Bourse, was constructed in 1566 and originally called the “Burse,” but in 1571 Queen Elizabeth gave it the title “Royal Exchange.”

The OED’s earliest written use of “Exchange” as short for “Royal Exchange” dates from 1589, but no doubt merchants used it in speech much earlier.

Beginning in the late 17th century, according to OED citations, the phrase “upon Change” (later “on Change”) was used to mean “at the Royal Exchange” or “on the stock exchange.”

In the early 1800s, the apostrophe crept in. As Oxford explains, the shorter word has been “often apprehended since the 19th cent. as a shortening (with elision of the initial syllable) of exchange … and hence frequently spelt ’change.”

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from a Nov. 23, 1821, entry in the English journalist William Cobbett’s diary of his travels through rural England:

“Young wives standing in need of something to keep down the unruly ebullitions which are apt to take place while the ‘dearies’ are gone hobbling to ’Change.” (Cobbett’s travel diary was first published in serial form from 1822 to 1826 in Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, and as a book, Rural Rides, in 1830.)

Henry W. Fowler, in the 1926 first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, notes that “Change” is “not an abbreviation of Exchange, & should have no apostrophe.” Sir Ernest Gowers repeated that in the 1965 second edition. However, the usage was so rare by the late 20th century that R. W. Burchfield dropped the entry in his revised 1998 third edition.

The example you came across in that 1980 short story is unusual. In searches of newspaper databases, we’ve found plenty of examples from the 19th century, but very few from the 20th later than the 1930s. Today the usage is found mainly in historical writing, as is the case with this OED citation:

“He knew he could make money on ’Change—he had demonstrated that over the last few years.” (From Norman B. Ream, a 2013 biography of a 19th-century businessman, by Paul Ryscavage.)

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