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A sod story

Q: I’m puzzled by the word “sod” in Genesis 25:29 of the King James Version of the Bible: “And Jacob sod pottage: and Esau came from the field, and he was faint.” I looked up several definitions of “sod,” but I can’t figure out what it means in this verse.

A: The word “sod” in that passage means “boiled” or “cooked,” and that’s the way it’s translated in most modern versions of the New Testament.

Here’s the passage in  the New International Version: “Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished.” And here it is in the American Standard Version: “And Jacob boiled pottage. And Esau came in from the field, and he was faint.” This is from the New King James Version: “Now Jacob cooked a stew; and Esau came in from the field, and he was weary.”

As it happens, “sod” is an obsolete past tense of the verb “seethe,” which originally meant to boil a liquid or to cook food by boiling or stewing, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest example for “seethe” in the OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, is from Old English Leechdoms (circa 1000), a collection of Anglo-Saxon medical remedies:

“Gif mon syþ garleac on henne broþe” (“If a man seethes [boils] garlic in chicken broth”). The þ at the end of syþ, Old English for “seethes,” is a thorn, a letter pronounced like “th.”

The past tense of “seethe” was seaþ in Old English and originally seþseeth, etc., in Middle English, according to the dictionary. But the Middle English past tense was later “superseded by the form sod taken from the past participle” (soden or sodden).

The OED adds that the sod past tense for “seethe” is now obsolete, and sodden has “ceased to be associated with this verb.” By the 1600s “seethed” had replaced “sod” as the past tense, and by the 1700s it had replaced “sodden” as the past participle of the verb “seethe.”

The various contemporary uses of “sod” as a noun (a piece of turf, a contemptuous person, an annoying experience, etc.) aren’t etymologically related to the archaic Middle English past tense of the verb.

But “sodden” lives on as an adjective with the boiled-down sense of “having the appearance of, or resembling, that which has been soaked or steeped in water; rendered dull, stupid, or expressionless, esp. owing to drunkenness or indulgence in intoxicants; pale and flaccid,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “sodden” used in this sense, which we’ve expanded, is from The Fountaine of Selfe-Loue; or, Cynthias Reuels (1601), a satirical play by Ben Jonson: “By Gods will, I scorne him, as I do the sodden Nimph that was heere euen now; his mistris Arete: And I loue my selfe for nothing else.”

The boiling sense of “seethe” is now archaic, but the verb is often used figuratively today for someone or something boiling with agitation, anger, excitement, rage, turmoil, and so on.

The OED defines this figurative sense as to “be in a state of inward agitation, turmoil, or ‘ferment.’ Said of a person in trouble, fever, etc.; of plans, elements of discontent or change; also of a region filled with excitement, disaffection, etc.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida (1602). Pandarus, Cressida’s uncle, is talking here to a servant: “I come to speak with Paris from the Prince Troylus. I will make a complimentall assault vpon him, for my businesse seethe ’s.”

We’ll end with an example from Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem in blank verse: “She lay and seethed in fever many weeks, / But youth was strong and overcame the test; / Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled / And fetched back to the necessary day / And daylight duties.”

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Nuptial commotions!

Q: I recently corrected yet another person who pronounced “nuptial” as if it were spelled “nuptual,” and continue to lament the fact that I have almost never heard it pronounced correctly. Do any of the standard dictionaries you consult have it as an alternative, or (God forbid!) as the first choice?

A: It’s dangerous to correct someone, especially on pronunciation. Language changes and dictionaries change along with it. That said, you’re in the majority on “nuptial.”

Only one of the ten standard dictionaries we use accepts a three-syllable pronunciation, as if the word were spelled “nuptual.” The other nine accept only two-syllable versions.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary (5th ed.) is the outlier here. In listing acceptable pronunciations of “nuptial,” it first gives the two-syllable versions: NUP-shəl and NUP-chəl. (The ə symbol, called a schwa, represents an “uh” sound, like the “a” in “ago” or “about.”) Those pronunciations, as the dictionary explains in its front matter, may be regarded as “widely used in American speech.”

But following those, it lists these three-syllable variants introduced by “also”: NUP-shə-wəl and NUP-chə-wəl. In Webster’s New World, a variant pronunciation that’s qualified with an italicized “also” or “occas.” does not occur as regularly in American English but shouldn’t be considered nonstandard.

The only other dictionaries that comment at all on the three-syllable pronunciations—Merriam-Webster online and the larger, subscription-only Merriam-Webster Unabridged—do label them nonstandard. The remaining American and British dictionaries that we regard as authoritative list only two-syllable versions.

All ten dictionaries accept NUP-shəl (with “sh” in the last syllable) as the principal pronunciation, many giving it as the only one. Most add NUP-chəl (with “ch”) as well, though in actual speech it can be hard to tell the difference.

So that’s the picture as far as standard dictionaries. As for the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, it gives only the preferred two-syllable pronunciation (with “sh”), though it suggests there’s a hint of a “t” in there: NUPT-shəl.

As you know, “nuptial” is an adjective having to do with matrimony and the marriage ceremony, as well as a noun for a wedding. The noun appears sometimes in the singular but it’s mostly used in the plural, “nuptials.”

The word was borrowed, the OED says, either from French (nuptial) or from Latin, in which nuptialis means “of or relating to marriage or a wedding” and nuptiae means “wedding.” The nupt- element, the dictionary adds, is the past participial stem of the Latin nubere (to marry).

The adjective form entered English first, in the late 15th century, and the noun followed in the mid-16th.

This is the OED’s earliest example of the noun in English writing: “The goddesse Iuno, quene and patronesse of the commocyons [commotions] nupcyalle” (The Boke yf Eneydos [Aeneids], William Caxton’s 1490 translation from a French version of Virgil’s Latin). We like the phrase “nuptial commotions”!

And this is Oxford’s earliest citation for the noun: “Within a while after (he being vanquished with loue) maried her secretly at her house, and solempnized the nuptialles by a Prieste vnknowen” (The Palace of Pleasure Beautified, Adorned and Well Furnished, a book of stories collected and retold by William Painter, 1566).

Finally, since we’re occasionally asked which standard dictionaries we use, here they are in alphabetical order. They’re free online except where noted.

  1. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
  2. Cambridge English Dictionary
  3. Collins English Dictionary
  4. Dictionary.com, based on The Random House Unabridged Dictionary
  5. Lexico, formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online
  6. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
  7. Macmillan Dictionary
  8. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary
  9. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, subscription only
  10. Webster’s New World College Dictionary (5th ed.), print only

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Comparatively speaking

Q: Here in Colorado all the TV stations are following a devastating wildfire in the town of Superior. But like Ogden Nash’s language-obsessed Professor Twist, I’m wondering why we have the comparatives “superior” and “inferior,” but not an in-between one like “medior.”

A: True, there’s no comparative adjective “medior” along the lines of “superior” and “inferior.” The closest adjective we can think of would be “mediocre” (middling, average), but it’s not a comparative like the “-ior” adjectives—and no, we don’t recommend “mediocrer.” (We’ll have something to say later about Professor Twist.)

There are English words formed with “medio-,” a combining element derived from the classical Latin medius (middle), but they’re not comparatives. And they’re used only in botany, zoology, and medicine (as in “mediodorsal,” “mediocarpal,” etc.).

If a comparative “medior” did exist, it would be a blend of “medio-” and the suffix “-ior.” But evidently English, sensible language that it is, doesn’t need a word that would mean “more average.”

When we examine comparative adjectives like “superior,” we’re looking at a very simple kind of word. Sometimes there’s no real stem, just a prefix (“super-”) and a suffix (“-ior”).

Words like this have been simple from the beginning. The English suffix “-ior” represents the “Latin -ior of comparatives,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

So, for example, the classical Latin adjective superior, from which the English word was borrowed, was the comparative form of superus (upper), derived from super (above).

Similar formations are “inferior,” “interior,” “exterior,” “senior,” “junior,” and “ulterior.” That last one, unlike the others, doesn’t have an opposite.

We’ve already given the Latin etymology of “superior,” which was first recorded in English some time before 1393. Here are the sources of the others, along with the earliest dates given in the OED:

  • “inferior” (probably 1387): from the Latin adjective inferior (lower), the comparative form of inferus (low).
  • “interior” (1490): from the Latin adjective interior (inner), comparative of the preposition and adverb inter (among, between, etc.).
  • “exterior” (before 1538): from the Latin adjective exterior (outer), comparative of exter and exterus (outside, outward), derived from ex (out of).  A related English prefix, “extra-”  (situated outside of), is from the Latin preposition and adverb extra (beyond, outside of).
  • “junior” (1606): from the Latin junior (younger), the comparative form of juvenis (young).
  • “senior” (probably 1397): from the Latin senior (older), the comparative form of senex (old).
  • “ulterior” (1646): from the Latin ulterior (more distant), comparative of an unrecorded Latin adjective reconstructed as ulter (distant), a relative of ultra (beyond), which is the source of our English prefix “ultra-.”

The “-ior” suffix in English, the OED says, was formerly spelled “-iour,” equivalent to the French -ieur, seen in supérieur, inférieur, intérieur, extérieur, and ultérieur.

As for the pronunciation of “-ior” comparatives, Oxford says the “primary stress is usually attracted to the syllable immediately preceding this suffix and vowels may be reduced accordingly.”

For instance, the word “super” is stressed on the first syllable, but in the comparative “superior,” the stress is on the second. In addition, the sound of the vowel “e” in “super” changes in “superior.”

Getting back to your question, one can indeed obsess too much about language, like Professor Twist in Ogden Nash’s poem “The Purist.”

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”

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Waste paper

Q: I once read that Cotton Mather wrote something like this: “As a cure for human ills, human excreta is a remedy that is hardly to be paralleled.” I took the “hardly to be paralleled” part to heart and sometimes use it with my wife. We find it droll. I have not been able to find this quotation now, though I do not think I hallucinated it. Can you help?

A: You didn’t hallucinate that passage from the Puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663-1728), who wrote extensively about medical subjects. You’ve had a hard time finding it because the original differs a bit from your memory of it.

The quote comes from The Angel of Bethesda, a medical treatise that was substantially finished in 1724 but not published in Mather’s lifetime. In a section on the use of human excrement in treating disease, he first discusses feces (one use is for treating eye problems!), then turns his attention to urine:

“And yett there is another Excrement of Humane Bodies that is hardly to be parallel’d! Medicinal Springs have been of great Esteem in the World, and much Resorted to. People expect Much from Going to the Waters. But, my Friend, thou hast one within thee, that Exceeds them all. The Uses and Vertues of Humane URINE, St. Barnaby’s Day were scarce Long Enough to enumerate them. The People, who take a Daily Draught of it, (Either their own or some young healthy persons,) have Hundreds of Thousands of them, found a Presærvative of Health (even to Old Age) hardly to be æqualled.”

The treatise was published for the first time in 1972, edited by the historian Gordon W. Jones, though excerpts had appeared in print earlier.

For a time as a young man, Mather studied medicine because a stammer seemed likely to prevent him from becoming a minster, according to the historian Vern Bullough, who reviewed The Angel of Bethesda in the fall 1973 issue of the journal Early American Literature.

In general Mather believed that sin was the cause of sickness, and sickness was the punishment of God. Although many of his ideas sound strange today, the recommended treatments reflected the medical thinking in early 18th-century Colonial America.

However, he was criticized by many doctors for his support of smallpox inoculation. He helped introduce variolation, a precursor of smallpox vaccination, to New England in 1721 and ’22.

He also differed with many doctors in his belief that germs spread disease, though he considered germs to be minuscule insects, tinier than the tiniest grains of sand, that propagated sickness with their eggs.

Thanks for a question that’s hardly to be paralleled. And in case you’re interested, Mather’s ophthalmological remedy involved drying poop, grinding it into powder, and then blowing it into the eye.

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A fortuitous  etymology?

Q: The editor of The Bridge World is more of a stickler than I, but the magazine recently used “fortuitous” in the sense of  “fortunate,” a usage that I consider unfortunate: “Levine’s initial pass had the fortuitous effect of putting him on lead against three notrump.” Do you condone this?

A: The adjective “fortuitous” meant “accidental,” not “fortunate,” when it entered English more than 350 years ago, but it has evolved over the last century to describe a fortunate accident as well as a mere accident.

As Pat explains in Woe Is I (4th ed., 2019), her grammar and usage book, “those notions of good fortune and chance have blended so much that dictionaries also accept a hybrid definition—something fortuitous is  a lucky accident.”

All ten standard dictionaries that we regularly consult—five American and five British—accept that new sense of the word. In fact, three of the dictionaries list it as the only sense. And that’s the meaning of “fortuitous” in that passage from The Bridge World.

We’d add that this serendipitous sense is now so common that we generally avoid using “fortuitous.” If we use it for something that’s just accidental, we’re likely to be misunderstood. And if we use it for a happy accident, we’ll stir up the sticklers. It’s now in what a reader of the blog has described as a never-never land.

As for the etymology, English adopted “fortuitous” in the 17th century from the Latin fortuitus (accidental, casual). The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry, which hasn’t been fully updated since 1897, has only one definition: “That happens or is produced by fortune or chance; accidental, casual.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is found in a treatise opposing atheism: “This Argument against the fortuitous concourse of Atoms.”  From An Antidote Against Atheism, or an Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man, Whether There Be Not a God (1653), by the English philosopher Henry More.

The hybrid sense of “fortuitous” to describe a happy accident began appearing in the early 20th century, according to a usage note in Merriam-Webster online. The dictionary says, “the fact that ‘fortuitous’ sounds like a blend of ‘fortunate’ and ‘felicitous’ (meaning ‘happily suited to an occasion’) may have been what ultimately led to a second meaning.”

“That use has been disparaged by critics, but it is now well established,” M-W adds. “Perhaps the seeds of the newer sense were planted by earlier writers applying overtones of good fortune to something that is a chance occurrence. In fact, today we quite often apply ‘fortuitous’ to something that is a chance occurrence but has a favorable result.”

The earliest example we’ve seen for the hybrid sense showed up in a usage manual at the turn of the 20th century. In a list of questionable citations “from New York newspapers for the most part,” the book includes this passage: “The change of system is considered fortuitous [fortunate] at this time.” From Word and Phrase: True and False Use in English (1901), by Joseph Fitzgerald.

But as you know, this sense of “fortuitous” has been used by many respected writers since the mid-20th century. Here are a few from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage:

“We have a great and fortuitous advantage, for if there is nothing the Kremlin wants more than to rule the world, there is nothing the United States wants less than to rule the world” (Call to Greatness, 1954, by Adlai Stevenson).

“The circumstance was a fortuitous one for Abraham Lockwood” (The Lockwood Concern, 1965, by John O’Hara).

“She panted into the underground, snatched a ticket from the machine, belted down the stairs, and there was a fortuitous train” (The Good Terrorist, 1985, by Doris Lessing).

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Cut to the chase

Q: What’s the origin of “cut to the chase”? Keystone Cops? Hounds on a fox scent? Or other?

A: The expression “cut to the chase,” which was first recorded in the early 20th century, is derived from the use of the verb “cut” in filmmaking to mean move rapidly from one scene to another.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense of “cut” as “to make a quick transition from one shot to the next.” The earliest example that we’ve seen for the usage is from an early 20th-century book on motion-picture technique:

“Perhaps we can cut to Sam wondering what effect the marriage will have on his chances” (from Technique of the Photoplay, 2d ed., 1913, by Epes Winthrop Sargent). Oxford cites as its first example a different passage from the 1916 third edition of the book.

The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, says the expression “cut to the chase” was originally a film usage meaning “to cut to a chase scene; (hence) to cut to an interesting or fast-paced part of a film.”

The usage appeared in writing for the first time in J. P. McEvoy’s Hollywood Girl (1929), a novel about a Broadway showgirl who finds success in the Hollywood talkies. These three passages in the novel are from script directions in a fictional screenplay (the OED cites an abbreviated version of the third passage):

(1) “Chaney in plaster cast, chewing orchids. Cut to chase”; (2) “with a custard pie klunk that’s a laugh isn’t that a wow now we cut to the chase”; (3) “Quick flashes, breasts, hips, legs. Jannings escapes―I’ll figure it out later … Cut to chase.” (The ellipsis is in the novel.)

As far as we can tell, the expression didn’t appear in print again until 15 years later. In this example from a Canadian newspaper, it’s one of several slogans that Helen Deutch, an MGM screenwriter, has on a wall of her Hollywood office:

“Miss Deutsch has another motto, which had to do with the writing of cinematic drama. It also is on the wall where she can’t miss seeing it, and it says: ‘When in doubt, cut to the chase’ ” (Winnipeg Free Press, March 10, 1944).

In a few years, the usage took on its usual current sense, which the OED defines as “to get to the point, to get on with it; to concentrate on the essential elements of an issue, etc.” The earliest example we’ve found is from a Massachusetts newspaper:

“Let’s cut to the chase. There will be no tax relief this year. No $300 to $400 tax credit for middle-class families. No $5,000 credit for first-time home buyers” (The Berkshire Evening Eagle, Feb. 24, 1947).

The OED’s earliest citation for this sense is from Cross My Heart (1955), an autobiography by the American writer and humorist Frank Scully: “I am the sort who wants to ‘cut to the chase.’ As far as I’m concerned, we can read the instructions later.”

Interestingly, Scully used the expression in the filmmaking sense in an earlier book: “That I suspect does not conflict with the Hollywood saying, ‘Let’s drop the romancing and cut to the chase’ ” (from Behind the Flying Saucers, 1950).

[Note: A reader of the blog offered this comment later the same day. “As someone who used to inhabit cutting rooms, I think there’s another little element to this one. Why ‘cut’? That’s because in the earlier days of filmmaking, in order to edit a film you literally ‘cut’ the piece you wanted out of the main roll with scissors, and then glued those selected scenes together.

“Later, ‘splicers’ turned up―clever little guillotine devices that made far more accurate and consistent cuts to be made, and joins to be made with clear specialist tape to create the ’cutting copy,’ the first edited version of the film.]

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The twisted history of ‘bent’

Q: Colson Whitehead uses the adjective “bent” in this passage from Harlem Shuffle, his latest novel: “Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked.” One can read many meanings into “bent” and I began wondering about its derivation and use over time. What can you tell us?

A: Yes, the adjective “bent” has a variety of meanings. You might say it bends in all directions, every way but straight. A piece of wire can be bent, an angry person can be bent out of shape, a speculator can be bent on making a killing in options, someone on a bender can be bent, and a crook, as well as his illicit gains, can be bent.

Appropriately, the adjective “bent” has a winding history, dating from the Middle English of the 14th century when it was derived from the verb “bend.” And as we’ve written in a 2012 post, “bend” itself has a romantic origin, evoking the graceful curve of a medieval archer’s bow.

But the story begins even farther into the past, when “bend,” both noun and verb, had menacing meanings. In Old English, a “bend” was originally a fetter or a shackle—anything used to restrain or tie someone up—and to “bend” was to fetter them.

The noun was first recorded (as bęnd) around the year 890, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s the OED’s earliest example, which uses the Anglo-Saxon plural benda:

“Þa benda sumes gehæftes” (“the ties were loosed”). From An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, an Old English translation from Bede’s Latin chronicle of the 700s.

The noun was used in that sense until it was eventually superseded by “band” and “bond,” two competing nouns adopted later from Old Norse in the 12th and 13th centuries. “Band” and “bond” were originally variants of each other and meant the same thing as “bend,” the OED says: “a shackle, chain, fetter, manacle,” and so on.

That sense of “bend” is now obsolete except in nautical usage (it means a knot), but for a time during the Middle English period all three nouns—“bend,” “band,” and “bond”—were used interchangeably in that early sense of something for restraining a person.

Not surprisingly, all those words have been traced to the same prehistoric Indo-European source. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots says a verb stem reconstructed as ‌‌bhendh- (to bind) is the ultimate origin, not only of  “bend,” “band,” and “bond” but also of “bind,” “bandana,” and “ribbon.”

Meanwhile, the verb “bend” had come into the language soon after the noun. In Old English, it meant “to fasten or constrain with a ‘bend’ or bond; to confine, fetter,” the OED says.

When first recorded around 1000 (as bęndan), it specifically meant “to constrain or bring into tension by a string,” as an archer would draw a bow. The dictionary’s earliest use in writing is quoted from an illuminated manuscript, The Paris Psalter: “He bende his bogan, se is nu gearo to sceotanne” (“He bent his bow, that is now ready to shoot”).

Later on, in the first half of the 14th century, the verb began to take on its modern meanings. That early sense, “to constrain a bow with the string,” became associated “with the curved shape into which the bow is brought,” the dictionary says, and the verb acquired a new meaning—to arch or curve.

Oxford’s earliest citation for that sense of the verb is from an anonymous poem that uses a participle. The poet’s beloved is described as having eyebrows that arch: “Heo haþ browes bend an heh” (“She hath brows bent on high”). From “The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale,” written sometime before 1350 and collected in The Harley Lyrics, edited by George Leslie Brook in 1968.

[A historical aside, from The Middle English Ideal of Personal Beauty (1916), by Walter Clyde Curry: “The word which seems to express most forcibly and clearly for Middle English poets their ideal of beautiful eyebrows, is the adjective ‘bent.’ It describes the eyebrows arched or curved in the form of a strung bow.”]

Because of its association with arches and archery, the verb “bend” developed two different groups of meanings in the 14th through 16th centuries, Oxford explains: (1) “to bow or curve, deflect, inflect, bow oneself, stoop, submit, yield”; and (2) “to direct or level a weapon, to aim, bring to bear, bring one’s force or energies to bear.”

And those senses in turn blended into a third set of meanings, recorded from the early 15th century onward: “to direct or turn one’s steps, oneself, one’s mind, eyes, ears, in any specified direction.” All this, from a verb that once meant to tie somebody up!

Meanwhile, as the verb “bend” was taking on all those meanings, its participle “bent” emerged as an adjective with corresponding senses: arched, curved, bowed, stooped, directed, determined, and so on. Here are some of those adjectival meanings, along with dates of the first OED sightings:

Braced for action, ready to spring, leveled or aimed like a weapon (c. 1330); forced into a curve, curved, crooked (c. 1374); arched (1380, when “bent brows” meant sharply curved eyebrows); determined or resolute (1548); furrowed (1647, when a “bent brow” was a frowning or wrinkled forehead); bound for or directed at (1697, as in “homeward bent travelers”).

Now we arrive at the figurative slang uses of “bent” that came along in the 19th century. The most prolific of these have to do with being drunk or stoned, and the OED’s earliest example, from American fiction, describes an inebriated doctor:

“He was seldom downright drunk; but was often … confoundedly bent.” From Asa Greene’s 1833 satire of medical quackery, The Life and Adventures of Dr. Dodimus Duckworth, A.N.Q.

This may have come into American use from Scots dialect, Jonathan E. Lighter suggests in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. In mid-18th-century Scots slang, as recorded in poetry, to “bend” was to drink hard.

Scots dialect may also have influenced the use of the noun “bender” for a drunken binge, which dates back to the early 1840s in American writing. The earliest example we’ve found is in a Vermont newspaper’s account of a man arrested after drunkenly (and violently) defending the memory of Ethan Allen:

“When brought before the Recorder in the morning, he had forgotten all about old Ethan, said he had been on a bit of a bender, and was let off by paying for his lodging at Harper’s Hotel.” (The Spirit of the Age, Woodstock, Dec. 10, 1841.)

In the 20th century, the drinking sense of “bent” was applied more widely (like the term “wasted”) to narcotics use. This is the OED’s earliest example: “He was bent, barely able, it seemed, to keep his head up” (Nathan C. Heard’s novel Howard Street, 1968).

And around that same time, according to Random House, the expression “bent out of shape” could mean drunk, high on drugs (especially on LSD), or angry, while  the phrase “get bent” could mean either “get stoned” or “go to hell!”

Another sense of “bent,” penniless (that is, almost “broke”), came along in the early 20th century. The first known example is from a feature story in The Evening Sun, New York, fall 1909:

“ ‘What’s the matter, old man?’ asked a man near him. ‘Broke?’ ‘Not yet, friend,’ replied the sorrowful one, ‘but I’m—well, bent.’ ” From an article by Quincy Sharpe Mills cited in a book about him, One Who Gave His Life (1923), by James Luby.

The use of “bent” that you spotted in Colson Whitehead’s novel—corrupt or “crooked”—also appeared in the early 20th century. The OED’s first example, which we’ve expanded here, is from a glossary of underworld terms:

“BENT, Adjective. General usage. Crooked; larcenous. See ‘TWISTED.’ Example: ‘His kisser shows that he’s bent.’ ” From A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang (1914), by Louis E. Jackson with C. R. Hellyer, a police detective in Portland, OR.

In an associated usage, the adjective also came to mean illegal or stolen, as in “bent car” or “bent goods” (dating from 1930 in the OED). The dictionary also has these senses of “bent”: ruined or out of order (1930); eccentric or insane (both 1942); homosexual (1959); and altered in pitch or tone (1950, used in music to describe a sliding or “blue” note).

Standard dictionaries describe the criminal sense of “bent” as chiefly British, but slang dictionaries and the OED, an etymological dictionary, don’t make that distinction. Colson Whitehead, an American writer, set Harlem Shuffle in the New York of the early 1960s.

In case you’re interested, we wrote in 2008 about  the expression “hell-bent for leather.” And we wrote a post a few years later about verbs, like “bend,” that have two possible endings for the past tense and past participle: either “-d” or “-t.” Today, the past tense “bended” survives only in the expression “on bended knee.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

Greenwashing and pinkwashing

[Note: This post was updated on Jan. 8, 2022.]

Q: I’m curious about the use of “washing” in terms like “greenwashing” and “pinkwashing.” Has “washing” here lost its original meaning, like the “gate” of “Pizzagate,” “Russiagate,” and “Irangate”?

A: No, the use of “washing” as a terminal element here reflects its original source in Anglo-Saxon times: wæscan, Old English for to wash away dirt with water. The “gate” of “Pizzagate” comes from the Watergate scandal, not its original sense of an opening in a wall.

A: The word “wash” or “washing” began showing up in the 1980s in various compound terms for the use of superficial, insincere, or misleading information about the environment, feminism, race, and so on, intended to improve the image of a business, organization, country, etc.

The two most common of the terms are “greenwashing” and “pinkwashing.” Others include “rainbow washing,” “purplewashing,” “sportswashing,” “redwashing,” “humanewashing,” “straightwashing,” and “hetwashing.”

(These recent formations are brand-new in comparison with the centuries-old “whitewashing.” And later we’ll discuss “brainwashing,” a term inspired by mid-20th-century totalitarianism and traceable to Chinese in the era of Mao Zedong.)

Nine of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult have entries for “greenwashing” or “greenwash” used in this sense.

American Heritage defines “greenwashing” as “the dissemination of misleading information that conceals abuse of the environment in order to present a positive public image.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “expressions of environmentalist concerns especially as a cover for products, policies, or activities.”

Two of the standard dictionaries also have entries for “pinkwashing.” It’s defined in Collins as “a superficial or insincere display of concern for the homosexual community” and in Macmillan as “the use of support for LGBT rights and issues by a state or business to boost its own image.”

The collaborative online dictionary Wiktionary adds that a “breast cancer-related sense refers to the pink ribbon, an international symbol of breast cancer awareness.” Though the standard dictionaries don’t include that sense, our database searches suggest that it may be the more common use of the term.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, has entries for the nouns “greenwash” and “greenwashing” as well as the verb “greenwash.”

The dictionary says the noun “greenwash,” derived from the adjective “green” and the noun “wash,” is modeled after the noun “whitewash,” which dates from the 16th century. The verb “greenwash” is derived from that noun, and the noun “greenwashing” is derived from the verb.

The OED’s definition of “greenwashing” is similar to the ones above from American Heritage and Merriam-Webster. It defines the noun “greenwash” as “misleading publicity or propaganda disseminated by an organization, etc., so as to present an environmentally responsible public image; a public image of environmental responsibility promulgated by or for an organization, etc., regarded as being unfounded or intentionally misleading.”

And the verb, Oxford says, has these two senses: “(a) to mislead (the public) or counter (public or media concerns) by falsely representing a person, company, product, etc., as being environmentally responsible; (b) to misrepresent (a company, its operations, etc.) as environmentally responsible.”

In the earliest recorded example we’ve seen, the noun “greenwash” refers to a plan for an open-space buffer between the cities of Louisville and Lafayette in Colorado:

“It’s a great game, this open space whitewash which should be renamed the ‘political greenwash’ or, better yet, ‘open space hogwash’ because that’s all it is—a salve for all the guilty consciences who now have awakened to see the two cities grown together” (an Aug. 10, 1983, editorial in The Louisville Times).

(We’ve seen earlier examples of “greenwash” or “greenwashing” used in the sense of money laundering or applying a thin wash of color.)

The OED’s first citation for the noun “greenwash” appeared four years later: “They create a lot of environmental ‘greenwash,’ and thank god for it, because they create some very good nature reserves. But they’re also commissioning uneconomic nuclear power stations.” (From the September 1987 issue of Sanity, journal of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, London.)

Oxford’s earliest example of the verb “greenwash” is from another London periodical: “Continuing to ‘greenwash the public’ would be foolish” (Daily Telegraph, Oct. 14, 1989).

And its earliest citation for “greenwashing” appeared in a California newspaper: “The activists will keep a booth outside the fair and continue to fight what the group calls ‘greenwashing’ by large corporations who tell the public they are working for the environment while continuing to pollute” (The Orange County Register, April 5, 1990).

(The environmental activist Jay Westerveld has been credited by some sources with coining the term “greenwashing” in a 1986 essay about the hotel industry’s practice of promoting the reuse of towels to save the environment. However, we haven’t been able to find the essay in a search of book, newspaper, and scholarly databases.)

As for “pinkwashing,” the earliest example we’ve found uses the term in its breast-cancer sense: “Jeanne Rizzo, executive director of the Breast Cancer Fund in San Francisco, which is co-sponsoring the hearing, says companies have co-opted breast cancer awareness and are engaged in a ‘pinkwashing’ of the problem.” (From a report of the California legislature on a joint Senate-Assembly hearing on breast cancer and the environment held on Oct. 23, 2002.) Earlier examples use “pinkwashing” in its literal, coloring sense.

The use of “pinkwashing” for the promotion of gender or sexual-identity issues showed up a decade later. The first example we’ve seen uses the term to describe an Israeli campaign comparing its treatment of gays and lesbians with their treatment in the Arab world: “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’ ” (the headline on an opinion article by Sarah Schulman in The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2011).

“Greenwashing” is a much more common term than “pinkwashing,” according to a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares words and phrases in digitized books. The other terms mentioned earlier didn’t register:

“rainbow washing” (promoting gender issues), “purplewashing” (feminism), “sportswashing” (sports), “redwashing” (rightist promotion of leftist issues), “humanewashing” (claims of humane treatment on meat and dairy labeling), “straightwashing” and “hetwashing” (making gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters in fiction act like heterosexuals).

Now on to the more sinister “brainwashing,” which makes those other compounds seem like mere marketing strategies.

This is defined in the OED as “the systematic and often forcible elimination from a person’s mind of all established ideas, esp. political ones, so that another set of ideas may take their place.” It also means “this process regarded as the kind of coercive conversion practised by certain totalitarian states on political dissidents.”

But in a “weakened sense,” the dictionary adds, it can also mean  “the action of pressurizing or persuading a person into a belief considered undesirable.”

The noun came into English in the early 1950s, the OED says,  and was “probably” modeled after the Chinese term xǐ nǎo, from “ to wash, cleanse + nǎo brain.”

The term has become associated with Edward Hunter, an American journalist who reported from Asia and who’s been identified as a clandestine American intelligence agent. His book Brain-washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds was completed in 1950 and published on Jan. 1, 1951.

On Sept. 24, 1950, The Miami News published an article by Hunter entitled “ ‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party.”

However, the term appeared in print earlier in 1950. The OED has this as the term’s earliest published use: “China under Red flag…. ‘Brain-washing’—a new version of the mental purge” (a heading in The Times of India, Mumbai, Jan. 23, 1950). We haven’t been able to determine whether Hunter wrote this article or not.

The OED also has entries for the noun “brainwash” (1950), the verb “brainwash” (1951), the adjective “brainwashed” (1951), and the noun “brainwasher” (1952), all in reference to China.

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Slang Usage Word origin Writing

Swear like a sailor

[Note: We inadvertently sent this post to some readers last Friday. We’re publishing it today so that all our readers can see it.]

Q: Why do we say someone who cusses a lot “swears (or curses) like a sailor (or trooper, soldier, marine)”? Do people in the military cuss more than others? Is it simply a question of quantity or is something else at work?

A: Yes, many of the “swear like a …” and “curse like a …” usages refer to a sailor, trooper, soldier, or marine, but not all of them. We’ve seen versions of the expression applied to a docker, drunken monk, fishwife, mule-skinner, pirate, porter, preacher’s son, stevedore, termagant, and more.

The two most common versions are “swear like a sailor” and “swear like a trooper,” according to a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares the use of words and phrases in digitized books. (The “soldier” usage barely registers and the “marine” one doesn’t register at all in the books searched, though they appear in old newspaper databases.)

Why are the “trooper” and “sailor” variants so common? Probably because troopers and sailors had reputations for boorish language and behavior when the two phrases showed up (the “trooper” one in the 18th century and the “sailor” in the 19th).

As Christine Ammer explains in The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, “The troopers in this term were the cavalry, who were singled out for their foul language from the early 1700s on.”

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by Elizabeth Knowles, says, “A trooper was originally (mid 17th century) a private soldier in a cavalry unit, and from the mid 18th century was proverbial for coarse behaviour and bad language.”

In fact, many soldiers still speak an expletive-ridden language that the author Tom Wolfe referred to as “Army Creole.” In The Right Stuff, his 1979 book about the test pilots and astronauts of the space program, he cites this conversation as an example of Army Creole:

“I tol’im iffie tried to fuck me over, I was gonna kick’is fuckin’ ass, iddnat right?”

“Fuckin’ A.”

“Soey kep’on fuckin’ me over and I kicked ’is fuckin’ ass in fo’im, iddnat right?”

“Fuckin’ A.”

“An’ so now they tellin’ me they gon’ th’ow my fuckin’ ass inna fuckin’ stoc-kade! You know what? They some kinda fuckin’ me over!”

“Fuckin’ A well tol’, Bubba.”

Sailors on civilian or military vessels have had a similar reputation, according to the historian Paul A. Gilje.

In his 2016 book Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750 to 1850, he cites 18th-century reports of the “wicked conversation,” “carnal songs,” “ill language,” and “profane language” of sailors, especially their rampant use of the expression “damn son of a bitch.”

“Others might curse and swear, but the liberty of the waterfront enjoyed by sailors and their own maritime culture gave the phrase ‘to swear like a sailor’ a resonance that rebounded throughout society,” Gilje writes. “Other members of the working class understood that going to sea offered a special license to resort to bad language.”

The earliest written example of the expression we’ve seen is from a religious treatise that uses the “trooper” version in describing one of the Apostles:

Peter seems to have been the boldest. He cou’d curse and swear like a Trooper. And his denying Jesus thrice, shows that he was capable of any thing” (A Conference Upon the Miracles of Our Blessed Saviour, 1730, by William Stevenson).

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of the “trooper” variant, which we’ve expanded, appeared a decade later: “Bless me! she curses and storms at me like a Trooper, and can hardly keep her Hands off me” (from Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela).

As far as we can tell, the “sailor” variant didn’t appear in writing until a century later. The earliest written example we’ve seen is in a book by a traveler who found surprisingly little swearing aboard a ship sailing from New York to Liverpool:

To swear like a sailor, is a common mode of characterising excessive profanity. And yet I was on board this ship ten days before I heard an oath from one of the crew” (Memoranda of Foreign Travel: Containing Notices of a Pilgrimage Through Some of the Principal States of Western Europe, 1845, by Robert J. Breckinridge). The crew may have watched their language around Breckinridge because he was a Presbyterian minister.

And here’s an example that appeared a dozen years later: “he did swear like a sailor, from mere habit and forgetfulness, for no man not professedly religious had a diviner instinct of reverence and worship than he” (from “Uncle Josh,” a short story by Rose Terry Cooke, Putnam’s Monthly, September 1857).

The only OED citation for the “sailor” variant is from the 20th century: “Della was a pretty little thing. Tough as nails—on the surface. She could—and did—swear like a sailor” (The Rose Petal Murders, 1935, by Charles G. Givens).

We’ll end with a poem, “The Sailor’s Folly,” cited in Swear Like a Sailor. It was written on Feb. 13, 1801, in Charleston, SC, by Simeon Crowell, a reformed seaman who had once prided himself on his cursing and carnal songs.

When first the sailor comes on Board
He dams all hands at every word
He thinks to make himself a man
At Every word he gives a dam

But O how Shameful must it be
To Sin at Such a great Degree
When he is out of Harbour gone
He swears by god from night to morn. 

But when the Heavy gale doth Blow
The Ship is tosled to and froe
He crys for Mercy Mercy Lord
Help me now O help me God

But when the storm is gone and past
He swears again in heavy Blast
And still goes on from Sin to Sin
Now owns the god that Rescued him. 

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