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English English language Etymology Expression Language Spelling Usage Word origin Writing

Let’s swap

Q: During the pandemic baking craze, people making “adjustments” to a recipe have said things like “I swapped out wheat flour for almond flour.” I find this confusing.

A: “Swap” is a legitimate English verb, and there’s nothing wrong with the more emphatic form “swap out” either, as in “swap out X for Y.”

The “out” isn’t necessary but it’s not incorrect, as we wrote in 2012. The use of “out” makes for a more casual usage, but then “swap” is a rather casual verb to begin with, certainly more informal than “substitute,” a similar verb we’ve written about.

Though “swap” may be described as less than formal, it’s a perfectly respectable verb dating from medieval times. As Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage puts it, “Swap is in use in all but the most formal writing.”

Though there’s nothing wrong with “swap,” we agree with you that the verb is sometimes confusing. Here’s why.

In its exchange sense, “swap” is generally used two ways: (1) to swap one thing for another and (2) to swap things with someone else. Note the two prepositions.

As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, to “swap” means to give or dispose of in exchange “for something else” or to exchange (things) “with another person.” The dictionary uses the italics.

So both of these sentences would be acceptable: “I swapped wheat flour for almond flour” and “I’ll swap recipes with you.”

However, some people use “with” for both usages, and that’s probably what you find confusing: “I swapped wheat flour with almond flour.” Did the swapper end up with wheat flour or almond flour?

The “for” version, in our opinion, is clearer because the preposition unambiguously means “in place of.” So to “swap X for Y” plainly means to put X in place of Y.

As we’ve written before, we feel the same about “substitute.” The use of “with” is accepted there, but we find “substitute X for Y” clearer than “substitute Y with X.

Now for some etymology. You’d never guess it, but “swap” was probably onomatopoeic in origin. That is to say, it means what it sounds like—a clap or a smack.

As the OED explains, when the verb first appeared in writing in the mid-1300s it meant to strike or smite, and it was “probably of echoic origin, signifying a smart resounding blow.”

(The dictionary notes a similar echo effect in dialectal German, where a schwappe is a “resounding box on the ear” and schwappen means “to make a clapping or splashing noise, to strike with a resounding blow.”)

So how did the bargaining or trading  sense of “swap” emerge in English?

As the dictionary explains, by the late 1300s, it was being used with the apparent sense of “to ‘strike hands’ in token of an agreement or bargain.” And to this day, striking is associated with bargaining.

“The development of the sense of concluding a bargain from that of striking is paralleled in various uses of strike,” according to the OED.

For example, people arriving at an agreement have been said to “strike a price” (first recorded in 1526), “strike hands” (1530), “strike truce” (1544), “strike peace” (1624), “strike a league”  (1749), “strike a bargain” (1766), and “strike a compact” (1865). The newcomer, “strike a deal,” isn’t discussed in the OED, but we found an early use from 1882.

Getting back to “swap,” in only a few decades it moved from the sense of striking a blow (circa 1350) to that of striking an agreement.

Oxford’s earliest citation for the bargaining sense, where the meaning is “apparently to ‘strike hands’ in token of an agreement or bargain,” is from an anonymous Arthurian legend, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (circa 1390):

“Sweet friend, swap we so—sware with trawþe / Queþer, leude, so lymp, lere oþer better” (“Dear sir, swap we so—swear with truth / Whether hands, in the end, be empty or not”). We’ve expanded the OED’s citation to include the line about hands.

Two centuries later, the verb was being used to mean “to strike (a bargain),” the dictionary says. Here’s Oxford’s earliest example: “Aliena … swapt a bargaine with his Landslord” (from Thomas Lodge’s prose tale Rosalynde, 1590).

Very soon afterward, “swap” acquired its modern sense and was used alone, without “bargain” as an object. We’ll repeat the OED’s definition: to give or dispose of in exchange “for something else”; to exchange (things) “with another person.”

The dictionary’s earliest example: “Soft, Ile not swap my father for all this” (John Lyly’s play Mother Bombie, 1594).

The old hitting and smiting uses of “swap” are mostly obsolete today, but the bargaining and exchanging senses of the verb have survived.

It’s used both with and without direct or indirect objects, as in “They swapped clothing” … “He’s agreed to swap” … “I’ll swap you for it” … “Don’t swap with him” … “They buy, sell, and swap.”

There’s also the mid-19th-century expression “swap horses in midstream,” defined in the OED as “to change one’s ideas, plans, etc., in the middle of a project, progress, etc.”

As for the noun “swap,” it developed in a somewhat parallel fashion. Like the verb, the noun originally had senses in the late 1300s relating to a blow struck, though occasionally it was used to mean a kiss (perhaps a noisy one).

Meanings related to an exchange, however, didn’t appear for hundreds of years. The OED’s earliest example is from the early 17th century:

“They … will either beg them, or make a swap with you in priuate” (from a compendium of travel narratives, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, by Samuel Purchas, 1625).

Finally, a few words about the spelling of “swap.” In its earliest uses it was spelled with an “a.” But over the centuries it’s also been spelled “swop,” particularly in British English, and the “o” spelling is accepted today as a chiefly British variant. In the OED’s opinion, “the spelling swap for both [verb and noun] is recommended.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Writing

I’ll be damned if it wasn’t Jerry!

Q: If I say, “It wasn’t Jerry,” I mean it wasn’t Jerry. But if I say, “Damn if it wasn’t Jerry,” I mean it was Jerry. How does “Damn if” change the meaning to its opposite?

A: The statement “Damn if it wasn’t Jerry” is short for “I’ll be damned if it wasn’t Jerry.” The idiom “I’ll be damned,” often followed by “if,” is used to express surprise or negation. In this case, both senses are expressed.

Merriam-Webster.com, which labels the usage “informal + impolite,” defines the two meanings of “I’ll be damned” this way:

(1) “used to show that one is very surprised about something,” as in “I spent an hour putting the machine together and I’ll be damned if it didn’t fall apart as soon as I tried to use it.”

(2) “used to say that one cannot or will not do something,” as in “I’ll be damned if I can remember where I left my keys.”

Our searches of newspaper, magazine, and book databases indicate that the usage showed up in American English in the early 19th century but soon appeared in British English.

The earliest American example we’ve found is from a report in an Indiana newspaper about a schoolmaster who killed one of his students.

The 17-year-old victim, who had refused to sit down and watch while the teacher punished his 14-year old brother, had said, “I’ll be damned if I will—I will not see Marcus punished” (the Indiana Palladium, Lawrenceburg, Aug. 2, 1828).

The first British example we’ve seen is from a collection of historical whodunnits set in the courts of George II and George III:

“Why, look at the very position of the fellow as he lies on his bed there: I’ll be damned if it isn’t all sham!” From The Mysteries of the Court of London (Vol. I, 1849), by George William MacArthur Reynolds. The reference is to someone presumed to be feigning madness.

Finally, we should mention that we’ve discussed “damn” several times on the blog, including a 2021 post about how “damn” became a swear word, and a 2019 post on the shrinking of the adjective “damned” to “damn.”

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English English language Expression Grammar Language Usage Writing

Categorically speaking: in, into, by

Q: Are these sentences correct? (1) “My articles are organized into categories.” (2) “My articles are organized by category.” I’m sure the first is. I think the second is too, but I don’t know why “category” is singular, since I assume there are multiple categories.

A: We’d use “in” for your first example. We think it’s more idiomatic in a passive construction, though not necessarily more correct: “My articles are organized in categories.”

But we’d prefer “into” with an active construction: “I organized my articles into categories.” Why? Perhaps because “into” expresses movement or action, and has since Anglo-Saxon times.

As for your second example (“My articles are organized by category”), we’d leave it as is. Why “category” when there are likely multiple categories?

When the preposition “by” is used in the sense of traveling, paying, communicating, organizing, and so on, it’s generally followed by a mass (or non-count) noun, one that’s always singular in form and doesn’t have an indefinite article or a number as a modifier.

Here are a few examples: “Did you get there by train?” … “She paid by check” … “I’ll send them by email” … “He lined up the class by size.”

Of course nouns like those (“train,” “email,” “check,” and “size”) can be used in other situations as count nouns—nouns that can be singular or plural: “I sent you an email explaining that the two checks were in the mail.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Putting English on the ball

Q: During a baseball game on TV the other night, the announcer referred to putting a little extra “English” on the ball. Is this an Americanism? How do the English speak of putting spin on a ball?

A: We’ve seen several theories, most of them pretty far-fetched, for why Americans use the word “English” to describe the spin on a ball. The least unlikely in our opinion is that the usage may have been influenced by the spin, or “side,” favored by English players of billiards, pool, or snooker in the 19th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which is similarly cautious about the etymology, has this to say about the origin of the American usage: “Perhaps so named because English players introduced the technique to the U.S.”

The OED defines the usage as “U.S. Sport (originally Billiards). Spin imparted to a ball by striking it on one side rather than centrally so as to affect its course, esp. after an impact or bounce.” The dictionary says the word “English” here is a synonym for the British term “side.”

The earliest Oxford example for the American usage is from a humorous description of a billiards player who makes various gestures with his cue and body in useless attempts to put spin on the ball or move it in the right direction:

“Tricks at Billiards. … Immediately after shooting using his cue as a magic wand and flourishing it in the air above the table to give an increased ‘English’ to his ball” (Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, Oct. 14, 1861). The quotation marks around “English” suggest that the usage was relatively new in writing, but perhaps heard in speech.

The next OED citation also uses the term humorously, but refers to putting actual spin on a ball. The passage, which we’ve expanded, describes a game of billiards in Paris:

“The cues were so crooked that in making a shot you had to allow for the curve or you would infallibly put the ‘English’ on the wrong side of the ball” (Innocents Abroad, 1869, by Mark Twain).

The British use of “side” in that sense appeared a few years before Americans used “English” for spin. This is Oxford’s earliest citation:

“I do not feel satisfied of any writer being able to convey in diagrams the amount of side to put on a ball for canons when the side stroke is required” (from Billiards, 1858, by Walter White).

Finally, we should mention that we wrote a post in 2012 about the British use of “side” as a slang term meaning insolence, arrogance, pride, pretentiousness, and so on.

Oxford’s earliest example for this sense of the word is from the Nov. 26, 1870, issue of Punch: “Swagger a bit, and put on ‘side’ in the streets of the gay Versailles.”

The dictionary describes the slang usage as “of uncertain origin,” but it notes a possible connection to the use of the term in billiards.

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English English language Expression Grammar Language Punctuation Usage Writing

An ‘or’ … or more?

Q: I find the use of “or” confusing before the last item in a complicated list. For instance, “when shareholders have different consumption preferences, information, tax bases, or investment horizons.” Readers expect “and,” but have to stop and rethink the passage when they get to “or.” Why not put another “or” earlier in the series to help them?

A: We don’t find that passage confusing, but if we did we wouldn’t add an “or” to the series. An extra “or” would make the writing bumpy and might in fact confuse readers.

If you feel that series or another is hard to read, it would be better to add “or” before each item and delete the commas: “when shareholders have different consumption preferences or information or tax bases or investment horizons.”

If a writer (or speaker) believes that clarity requires repetition of the conjunction before each item in a series, then it should be repeated. The writer’s ear should indicate whether that would be helpful.

But otherwise the repetition isn’t required. Commas can be used instead. The only requirement is that a conjunction (“and” or “or”) be used before the final item.

Finally, as we’ve written many times on the blog, we believe a final comma before the conjunction is helpful.

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage

Black Lives Matter

Q: Who coined the phrase “Black lives matter”? Does it date back to the civil rights movement of the ’60s or maybe even earlier?

A: No, it’s more recent than that. The earliest known use of the slogan was in a Facebook posting by the activist and writer Alicia Garza in July 2013, according to The New Yale Book of Quotations (2021).

The book’s editor, Fred R. Shapiro, says Garza’s post “appears to be the introduction of the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter.’ ”

Shapiro cites this portion of the posting: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Black Lives Matter.”

Garza wrote her post after learning that the killer of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, had been acquitted of his murder. But she has said in interviews that the popularization of the slogan was actually a three-woman project. Here’s how she describes it.

On July 13, 2013, Garza was working as an organizer with the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance in the San Francisco Bay Area when she heard news reports that George Zimmerman had been acquitted of second-degree murder in the case.

Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch volunteer in Sanford, FL, had pleaded self-defense after shooting Martin in February 2012. He had admitted following and confronting Martin, saying he looked “suspicious” and wore a “dark hoodie.” He shot Martin as the two scuffled.

As news of Zimmerman’s acquittal spread, Garza went to her Facebook page to write what she called a “a love letter to black people.” Included in her message (preceding the lines cited in The New Yale Book of Quotations) was this sentence: “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter.”

Her friend Patrisse Cullors, who was working with a prisoners’ advocacy organization, repeated Garza’s post on her own social media, echoing the “Black Lives Matter” line and making it a hashtag.

Then a tech-savvy friend of Garza’s, Opal Tometi of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, took to the internet, spreading the hashtag and making it part of a grassroots movement to stop the killing of Black Americans.

The hashtag began appearing immediately on social media in July 2013, though its presence was modest at first. According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, it didn’t take off until the August 2014 killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo. After that, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” became ubiquitous.

Today Garza, Cullors, and Tometi have all gone on to other projects. But history will likely remember them for the movement they started in the summer of 2013.

It’s notable that women have a much larger presence in The New Yale Book of Quotations than in any other general quotation book we’ve seen.

As the introduction notes, the new book supplies “proof of the unrecognized role of women in creating iconic sayings.” It adds that Shapiro, the editor, “has discovered, time and again, that in the realm of famous lines Anonymous was often a woman.”

“Many of the great quotesmiths,” the introduction says, “have been women who are now forgotten or whose wit and wisdom are erroneously credited to more-famous men.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Usage Word origin Writing

Oneself or one’s self?

Q: Dorothy Sayers repeatedly uses “one’s self” in the sense of “oneself” in her 1935 mystery Gaudy Night. Is the two-word version British? Which usage came first?

A: The usual term now in both the US and the UK is “oneself,” though a few standard dictionaries include “one’s self” as a less common variant.

The original form, however, was an early version of “one’s self” that first appeared in English writing in 16th century. In the two earliest citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, “one” is in the genitive case, a form that indicates possession or other close relationships:

“For a suretie, the myschefe of louynge [loving] of ones selfe, is a noyeng or hurtynge pestylence” (from The Comedye of Acolastus, John Palsgrave’s 1540 translation of a Latin play by the Dutch Protestant writer Wilhelm Gnapheus, based on the Parable of the Prodigal Son).

“To exalt ones selfe aboue other men” (from The Sum of Diuinitie Drawn Out of the Holy Scripture, Robert Hutten’s 1548 translation of a treatise by the German theologian Johann Spangenberg).

The earliest OED example with the modern spelling is from the late 18th century: “The earth holds nothing comparable for deadness of weight, with a poor soul really in love—except when it happens to be with oneself!” (Fanny Burney’s novel Camilla, 1796).

And here’s the dictionary’s most recent citation, which we’ve expanded: “In [Marshall] Goldsmith’s opinion, the development of a better reputation was akin to the development of better muscle tone—not conceptually complicated,  just a matter of applying oneself and getting on with it” (The New Yorker, April 22, 2002).

Though “oneself” is the usual form now, the two-word variant still crops up, especially when a writer wants to emphasize the essential being that distinguishes one person from another.

That may be the intention in the title of this 2017 book by Paul Meeham: The Ghost of One’s Self: Doppelgangers in Mystery, Horror and Science Fiction Films.

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English English language Etymology Expression Usage Word origin Writing

How do you copy?

Q: Can you shed some light on how the verb “copy” came to mean receive or understand a message?

A: The use of “copy” for receive or understand is ultimately derived from its use by American telegraph operators in the 19th century to mean translate and write down Morse code transmissions in English.

In The Telegraph Manual (1859), Taliaferro Preston Shaffner describes the receipt of a message in the late 1840s by an operator at a US telegraph station, where the dots and dashes could be heard on a sounder and read on a printout:

“The operator put the machinery in motion, and he read from the paper the dispatch as it was slowly received. He read aloud, and the copyist, near by, wrote it down with a pencil; and when thus finished, it was handed to the copying clerk, whose duty it was to copy it on the forms as represented by B [an image of a Western Union form]. It was then enveloped and handed to the messenger for delivery.”

This clunky procedure changed dramatically soon after two Northeastern telegraph companies merged on July 1, 1852, as the New York and New England Union Telegraph Company, according to The Telegraph in America (1870), by James D. Reid.

On Oct. 9, 1852, the reorganized company declared its first dividend, Reid writes, and “at this time a stroke of economy was made by Director Thomas M. Clark,” who ordered “that all Morse operators be instructed to copy their own messages as they receive them.”

Thus the telegraph operators took on the work of the copyists and later the copy clerks. To speed up the “drudgery of reading from the paper and then copying,” Reid says, the operators “learned instinctively to catch the sounds by ear” from the sounder and copy them down in English.

As a result, the verb “copy” in telegraph jargon came to mean to receive, translate, and write down. That’s the way J. E. Smith uses it in Manual of Telegraphy Designed for Beginners (1865):

“Students with a clear understanding of the customs and principles set forth in these instructions, and able to copy each other’s telegraphic writing by sound at the rate of thirty-five words per minute, may consider themselves operators.”

In the early 20th century, amateur radio operators in the US began using the verb “copy” in a similar way, as in this example from the August 1917 issue of QST, the monthly magazine of the American Radio Relay League:

“Nightly, we copy KHK, Wahiawa, TH [Territory of Hawaii], distance from San Francisco being 2089 miles, and are not only able to copy him easily, but always on the mill [a typewriter for transcribing Morse code].”

Radio amateurs may also have used “copy” over the next few decades to mean understand or receive a message (the sense you’re asking about), but it’s unclear from many of the written examples we’ve seen whether the verb is being used in the new or the old meaning.

The earliest definite example of the new sense that we’ve found is from a July 1960 exchange of American military radio transmissions. Here’s the conversation, as reported in a December 1960 article in QST (the magazine’s title is code for a broadcast to all radio amateurs):

“W4GGA, this is 9Q5US, are you in Washington?”

“This is W4GGA, and I’m in Washington. The handle here is Ken, and you’re five and nine plus, beautiful signal, how do you copy me? Over.”

“This is 9Q5US. Read you 5 by 9, handle here is Frenchy, can you get hold of the CNO [Chief of Naval Operations] at the Pentagon?”

“Wait one, Frenchy. Go ahead. I have Admiral [Arleigh] Burke on.”

(The author of the QST article, Sgt. Edouard D. Courneyer,  was an Army communications specialist on loan to the Naval attaché at the US embassy in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, Congo. He was using the handle Frenchy and the call sign 9Q5US. The article says the radio exchange took part “during the early part of July when hostilities began in the Congo.” The hostilities broke out after the Belgian Congo was granted independence on July 1, 1960.)

And here’s an example from a 1962 report by NASA on a manned orbital space flight:

“Hello Sigma Seven. Cape Cap Tech. How do you copy?”

“I copy you loud and clear, Murph.”

(From Results of the Third U.S. Manned Orbital Space Flight October 3, 1962, a December 1962 report by NASA’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information.)

Finally, this example is from an article about the Apollo 13 mission, “The Magnificent Apollos,” by Ernest K. Gann, Flying magazine, September 1970:

“Hey, Apollo, I have you now at 1.2 miles. Do you copy?”

“Loud and clear, for a change. And I concur on distance. How can you look so good when you’re so ugly?”

“What pot is calling the kettle black? We figure half a mile now with a closure of 19 feet a second.”

“Keep her coming. Don’t be so shy.”

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