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

Let’s liven things up

Q: Are “enliven,” “liven,” and “liven up” equally acceptable? Is one preferred? “Liven up” seems a little colloquial for written communication.

A: The verbs “enliven” and “liven” and the phrasal verb “liven up” are all acceptable English and have been for hundreds of years. The two verbs showed up in the early 1600s and the phrasal verb in the early 1800s.

All 10 standard dictionaries that we regularly consult include the three terms as standard English. Not one labels “liven up” as colloquial, informal, casual, or conversational.

Although “liven up” does strike us as somewhat more relaxed than “enliven,” we wouldn’t hesitate to use the phrasal verb in all kinds of writing.

Some of the dictionaries say “liven” is “usually” or “often” used with “up.” In fact, all the examples for “liven” in the 10 dictionaries include “up”—sometimes directly after the verb and sometimes after whatever is livened (as in “liven it up”).

Although “liven up” is more popular now than “liven” by itself, the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, has contemporary examples for both usages.

The OED notes one significant difference in the use of the three terms: “enliven” is used only transitively (with an object) while “liven” and “liven up” can also be used intransitively (without an object).

The first of the terms to appear in writing was “enliven,” which originally was spelled “inliuen” (“inliven”) and meant “to give life to; to bring or restore to life,” according to the dictionary.

The earliest Oxford citation, which we’ve expanded, is from Contemplatio Mortis, et Immortalitatis (“A Contemplation of Death and Immortality”), 1631, by Henry Montagu, Earl of  Manchester:

“Consider Death originally or in his owne nature, and it is but a departed breath from dead earth inliuened first by breath cast vpon it.”

The OED says “enliven” soon came to mean “to give fuller life to; to animate, inspirit, invigorate physically or spiritually.” The dictionary’s first citation for this sense in from a treatise comparing theological and legal righteousness:

“The Divinity derives itself into the souls of men, enlivening and transforming them into its own likeness” (Select Discourses, 1644–52, by the English philosopher and theologian John Smith).

At the beginning of the 18th century, Oxford says, “enliven” took on the sense of “to make ‘lively’ or cheerful, cheer, exhilarate.” The earliest example is from a treatise on theology and science:

“Their eminent Ends and Uses in illuminating and enlivening the Planets” (The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, 1701, by John Ray, an English naturalist, philosopher, and theologian).

When “liven” first appeared in the 17th century, the OED says, it was used transitively in the sense of “to brighten or cheer, to animate; to bring energy and interest into.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from The New Covenant; or, the Saints Portion, a treatise by the Anglican theologian John Preston, written sometime before his death in 1628:

“Things liuened by the expression of the speaker, sometimes take well, which after, vpon a mature review, seeme eyther superfluous, or flat.”

The verb was first used intransitively in the early 18th century. The first OED example, which we’ve expanded, is from a July 24, 1739, letter in which the English poet and landscape gardener William Shenstone describes a conversation with his housekeeper, Mrs. Arnold:

“ ‘Why, Sir, says she, the hen that I set last-sabbath-day-was-three-weeks has just hatched, and has brought all her eggs to good.’ ‘That’s brave indeed,  says I.’ ‘Ay, that it is, says she, so be and’t please G—D and how that they liven, there’ll be a glorious parcel of ’em.’ ”

When “liven up” first appeared in the early 19th century, the OED says, it was used transitively in the figurative sense of “to give life to, put life into.”

The earliest example given is from “The Angel Message,” a poem in Recreations of a Merchant, or the Christian Sketch-Book (1836), by William A. Brewer:

“Hadst thou a thousand lives to live … and garden-sweat to tinct, / Or Calvary’s gore to liven up the sketch … ’twere vain indeed, / To attempt a lively portraiture of man / Freed from the guilt and power of sin.”

A few decades later, the phrasal verb took on the transitive sense of “to brighten, cheer, animate.” The first OED citation is from the novel  Bellehood and Bondage (1873), by Ann Sophia Stephens:

“If she isn’t too knowing, and don’t put on beauty airs, perhaps it might do. … This girl may liven up the establishment a little.”

Finally, the first Oxford citation for the intransitive “liven up” is from the January 1863 issue of The Continental Monthly: “Thus refreshed, although soaked to the skin, Francesco livened up.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Linguistics Phrase origin Punctuation Usage Word origin Writing

Did ‘y’all’ originate in England?

Q: An article in the online magazine Atlas Obscura suggests that “y’all” may have originated in 17th-century England, not the American South of the 19th century. Do you think so too?

A: The regional “y’all” of the American South isn’t quite the same as the earlier contraction used in England, which has roots in Anglo-Saxon times.

The older usage is simply a contracted form of “you all” and means “all of you.” That sense of “you all” has been acceptable English for a thousand years, but has seldom been contracted.

The related regional “y’all” or “you-all,” perhaps the most recognized feature of Southern American speech, is more flexible and may have been influenced by the speech of slaves from Africa or Scotch-Irish immigrants.

The story begins in Anglo-Saxon days when Old English writers began giving the pronoun “you” a more specific sense by adding “all.”

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the subject or object pronoun “you” was “defined or made precise by a qualifying word or phrase.”

In the dictionary’s earliest citation for this usage, the Old English eow (you) is made more inclusive by adding ealle (all). In the following passage, eow ealle refers to all the people addressed:

“Ic for Cristes lufe forlæt eow ealle, and middaneardlice lustas swa swa meox forseah” (“I for Christ’s love abandoned you all, and despised the lusts of the world as dung”). From Lives of the Saints, believed written in the 990s by the Benedictine abbot Ælfric of Eynsham.

And here’s the dictionary’s first example of “you all” with its modern spelling: “I longe after you all, from the very hart rote [heart rooted] in Iesus Christ.” From a 1549 translation, by Myles Coverdale and others, of Erasmus’s paraphrase, or retelling, of the New Testament.

The contracted form “y’all” showed up a century later with the same inclusive sense of “you all.”

Here’s an expanded version of the passage that was cited in “The Origins of ‘Y’All’ May Not Be in the American South,” a Jan. 9, 2023, article in Atlas Obscura by David B. Parker, a professor of history at Kennesaw State University in Georgia:

The captiue men of strength I gaue to you,
The weaker sold; and this y’all know is true,
The free-borne women ransom’d, or set free
For pittie sake, the seruile sort had yee.

From The Faire Æthiopian, William Lisle’s 1631 translation of Αἰθιοπικά (Aethiopica, Ethiopian Story), an ancient Greek romance by Heliodorus of Emesa.

The article originally appeared on Nov. 29, 2022, on The Conversation, a website that publishes the work of academic researchers, and had a less etymologically startling headline: “ ‘Y’all,’ that most Southern of Southernisms, is going mainstream–and it’s about time.”

It’s clear from our expanded excerpt that Lisle contracted “you all” to maintain the iambic pentameter (a line of five metrical feet, each with one unstressed and one stressed syllable). He also contracted the “-ed” ending of “ransomed,” which was formerly pronounced as a separate syllable.

Here’s a conversational example we’ve found in The Goblin, a comedy by Sir John Suckling, first performed in 1638 and published in 1646:

“A race of criples are y’all, Iffue [if you] of Snailes, he could not else have escaped us?”

We’ve seen other early examples of “y’all” used to mean “all of you,” but the contraction was relatively rare in the past.

As for the colloquial Southern usage, the Dictionary of American Regional English describes “you-all” or “y’all” as “a second person pl pron, often including in its scope others known or assumed to be associated with the person or persons addressed.”

For example, a Southerner might say “How are you-all (or y’all)?” in asking a couple, or even a single person, about themselves as well as their family—a wider usage than the earlier “all of you” sense in speaking to a group of people.

(DARE, the OED, and standard dictionaries use the hyphenated “you-all” for the uncontracted Southern regionalism.)

The earliest example of this colloquial “you-all” in DARE is from an 1816 letter written by a New England clergyman on a trip to Virginia:

“Children learn from the slaves some odd phrases; as … will you all do this? for, will one of you do this?” (Letters From the South and West, 1824, by Henry Cogswell Knight).

The first DARE citation for the contracted “y’all” is from a fictional account of life in the rough-and-tumble days of the Republic of Texas. The speaker here is addressing two people: “Ar y’all alive and kickin’ in thar?” (The Rangers and Regulators of the Tanaha, 1856, by Alfred W. Arrington).

And here’s a DARE citation for the singular usage, from Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science and Education (March 1869):

“The Tennessee lady says … to a friend, as she bids her good-bye … ‘Won’t you all come and see me?’ or, on meeting her, ‘How do you all do?’ meaning only the one addressed.”

DARE notes that “you-all” or “y’all” is also sometimes used attributively, or adjectivally, as in this citation from a letter written during the Civil War:

“I wish this war would end so you all soldiers could get home one more time” (Corpus of American Civil War Letters, 2007, by Michael B. Montgomery and Michael Ellis).

And the regional dictionary says the usage, especially the contraction, is sometimes “used with a preceding qualifier, as all, any, both, some, without of,” as in this example:

“All y’all jes stand back” (from “Ole ’Stracted,” a short story by Thomas Nelson Page, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1886).

Linguists have suggested that the Southern usage may have been influenced by the speech of slaves from Africa or immigrants from Scotland or Ireland.

In “Y’ALL in American English: From Black to White, From Phrase to Pronoun,” John M. Lipski suggests the influence of Black English on the usage (in the journal English World-Wide, January 1993).

And in “The Etymology of Y’all,” Michael Montgomery suggests the influence of the Scotch-Irish phrase “ye aw” (in Old English and New, 1992, edited by Joan H. Hall, Nick Doane, and Dick Ringer).

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

Good, best, or well wishes?

Q: I’m mystified by what seems to be the recent use of “well wishes” rather than “good wishes” or “best wishes.” Is “well wishes” really correct? Shouldn’t the modifier be an adjective, not an adverb?

A: The usual expression is “good wishes” or “best wishes,” but “well wishes” has been used for hundreds of years in the same sense.

All three were first recorded in the late 16th century. A search with Google’s Ngram viewer of digitized books indicates that “good wishes” and “best wishes” have alternated in popularity over the years, while “well wishes” has been a distant third.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “well wishes” as “an instance of wishing well to someone or something.” The dictionary says the expression was formed by combining the adverb “well” and the noun “wish.”

Interestingly, “well” has been used adjectivally since Anglo-Saxon times in various constructions indicating good fortune.

In this expanded OED example from the epic poem Beowulf, dating back to as early as 725, the Old English wel is used in the sense of fortunate:

“Wel bið þæm þe mot æfter deaðdæge drihten secean / ond to fæder fæþmum freoðo wilnian” (“Well be he who in death can face the Lord and find friendship in the Father’s embrace”).

The earliest OED citation for “well wishes,” which we’ve also expanded, is from an English translation of a 15th-century Spanish poem about an old man’s reflections on love:

“Thou art that spirit that S. Powle, / Did feele to wrestle with his soule, / And pray’d our Lord to set him free / From such a peeuish enemie of his wel-wishes.” (From Loues Owle, an Idle Conceited Dialogue Betwene Loue, and an Olde Man, 1595, Anthony Copley’s translation of Rodrigo de Cota’s Dialogo Entre el Amor y un Caballero Viejo.)

Oxford adds that the expression is usually plural and “now less common than best or good wishes.” The dictionary also notes the earlier verb “well-wish” (1570), noun “well-wishing” (1562), and adjective “well-wishing” (1548).

As for the more common “best wishes,” the OED defines it as “an expression of hope for a person’s future happiness or welfare, often used formulaically at the end of a letter, card, etc.”

The first citation is from a letter written by the Earl of Essex on Oct. 16, 1595: “This … is … accompanyed with my best wishes, from your lordship’s most affectionate cosin and friend, Essex.”

The OED, an etymological dictionary, doesn’t have an entry for  “good wishes,” and neither do the 10 standard dictionaries we regularly consult.

The earliest example we’ve found is from an analysis of Psalm 129 in a 16th-century treatise on the Book of Psalms:

“Vers. 8. Teacheth vs, that it is a testamonie of Gods great curse vppon vs to want either the prayers or good wishes of the godly, howsoeuer the world make no account of the one or the other” (A Very Godly and Learned Exposition, Upon the Whole Booke of Psalmes, 1591, by Thomas Wilcox).

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I’m a riddle: Am I ridiculous?

Q: Many riddles are ridiculous. Could “riddle” and “ridiculous” be related?

A: No, “riddle” comes from rædels, Old English for the word game, while “ridiculous” is ultimately derived from ridere, classical Latin for to laugh.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “riddle” in this sense as “a question or statement intentionally phrased to require ingenuity in ascertaining its answer or meaning, frequently used as a game or pastime.”

The first OED example is from an Old English translation of the Hexateuch, the first six books of the Hebrew Bible (the Torah plus Joshua). Here’s an expanded version of the citation from Numbers 12:8:

“Ic sprece to him mude to mude 7 openlice næs ðurh rædelsas” (“I speak to him face to face and clearly not through riddles”).

The OED says rædels comes from the Germanic base of rædan, Old English for to read, which originally meant to consider, guess, discover, and foretell as well as to scan writing silently or aloud.

In case you’re wondering, the “s” of the singular rædels was dropped in Middle English on the mistaken impression that it was a plural ending.

As for “ridiculous,” the OED says it entered English through one of two adjectives derived from ridere: the classical Latin ridiculus or the post-classical Latin ridiculosus. Both meant laughable.

The earliest OED citation for “ridiculous,” which we’ve expanded, is from a 16th-century treatise on education. This passage discusses whether the image of God can be in every man if some men are not very godlike:

“If that whiche is in euery mannes bodye were the ymage of godde, Certes thanne [certainly then] the ymage of godde were not onely diuers [diverse], but also horrible, monstruouse, and in some part ridiculouse: that is to say, to be laughed at” (Of the Knowledge Whiche Maketh a Wise Man, 1533, by Sir Thomas Elyot).

Finally, here’s a more recent, expanded example from “Eminent Domain,” a short story by Antonya Nelson, in the Jan. 26, 2004, issue of The New Yorker:

“This same newspaper had announced the arrival of Mary Annie’s first grandchild early the summer before, a little girl, named something fanciful and trendily ridiculous, something that her parents, particularly her mother, Meredith, former dope dealer and hell-raiser, hoped and prayed would suit her as she emerged into the world.”

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