Month: October 2023

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Why ‘sightseeing,’ not ‘siteseeing’?

Q: Since both “sight” and “site” can refer to a place, why do we use the first one, not the second, in the term “sightseeing”?

A: The word “sight” in the sense of something worth seeing is derived from a prehistoric Germanic term for “to see.” It appeared in Old English hundreds of years before Middle English borrowed “site” from the Latin term for a location.

With that history in mind, it’s not at all surprising that we now use “sight” for a place of interest to a “sightseer,” and “site” for a place to put up a building, hold an event, read the news online, and so on.

Despite their different meanings, the two terms can sometimes refer to the same place, as in “The site [location] of the Battle of Gettysburg is a sight [something worth seeing] that attracts many sightseers.”

Before giving some early examples, we should mention that spelling varied widely in the Middle Ages. In The Canterbury Tales (circa 1386), for example, Chaucer spells “sight” as “site” in “The Clerk’s Tale” and as “sighte” in “The Knight’s Tale.”

The arrival of the printing press in England in the late 15th century and the spread of printing in the 16th and 17th helped standardize English orthography, including the spellings of “sight” and “site.”

The older of the terms, “sight,” is ultimately derived from a prehistoric Indo-European root reconstructed by linguists as sekw (to perceive or see), according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

This ancient root led to the prehistoric Germanic root sehwan (to see) and the Old English noun sihð (a vision or spectacle), the ancestor of our  modern word “sight.” The Old English noun was pronounced like “sixth” (the final letter in sihð was the runic letter ð, or eth, which sounded like “th”).

The earliest example of “sight” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 10th-century Old English gloss, or translation, of the Latin from Mark 9:8 in the Lindisfarne Gospels, dating from around 700:

“[He] bebead ðæm þætte ne ænigum … ða sihðo gesægdon” (“[He] commanded them that no one … be told of the sight”).

The word “sight” was also spelled “siþe,” “sith,” “syth,” “sythte” “sighð” “sihȝeðe” “ziȝþe,” “zyȝþe,” “syhte,” “sichte,” “seȝt,” “siȝhte, “sygte,” “syghte,” “sighte,” and so on before “sight” was established in Modern English.

As for “site,” it’s ultimately derived from the Indo-European root tkei- (to settle, dwell, be at home), source of the Latin situs (position of a thing). Middle English borrowed it in the late 14th century from the Anglo-Norman site (position, location).

The OED’s first English citation for “site” is from John Trevisa’s translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things), an encyclopedic Latin reference compiled in the mid-1200s by the medieval scholar Bartholomeus Anglicus.

The word “site” is spelled “sight” in this passage: “Þe water addre … infecteþ þe place þat he glydeþ inne and makeþ þe sight smoky” (“the water adder infecteth the place that he glideth in and maketh the site smoky”).

“Site” was spelled variously as “sighte,” “siȝt,” “siȝte,” “siht,” “siyt,” “syȝte,” “syhte,” “syyt,” “site,” “cite,” and so on before “site” was established in Modern English.

As for “sightseeing,” it first appeared in the early 19th century. The OED describes it as a compound of the nouns “sight” and “seeing,” and defines it as “the action or occupation of seeing sights.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from an Oct. 21, 1824, entry in the journal of Reginald Heber, the Anglican Bishop of Calcutta: “Morning rides, evening sight-seeing” (published in Heber’s Narrative of a Journey Through the Upper Provinces of India, 1828).

Many people are led astray by “sight” and “site” because they’re homonyms, words with the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings and origins. In this case, the pronunciation is the same and the spelling similar—a double whammy!

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

When a diet is a journey

Q: Is it my imagination or has “journey” become a ubiquitous term for going mentally or spiritually between points A and B? Is this one more example of making ordinary things seem precious, special, and a bit sanctimonious? I cringe when I hear it but I am a dinosaur way behind the times.

A: Yes, “journey” is used a lot these days in its mental or spiritual sense, and it’s often used to make ordinary things seem special: “my ukulele journey” … “our puppy’s housebreaking journey” … “her scrapbooking journey” … “their weight-loss journey.”

Interestingly, the term was used figuratively when it first appeared in Middle English in the 12th century. It originally referred to a pilgrimage through life, a more weighty version of the examples above.

The word “journey” has been used for both literal and figurative travels since English borrowed it from journee, an Old French word adopted from diurnum, Latin for day.

In Old French, a journee could be a day’s travel, a day’s work, or simply a day,  according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Modern French, journée has similar senses: journée de repos (day off), dans la journée (during the day), etc.

When “journey” showed up in Middle English writing, the OED says, the meaning was “figurative, esp. the ‘pilgrimage’ or passage through life.” The dictionary’s earliest example is from Ancrene Riwle (also known as Ancrene Wisse), an anonymous guide for monastic women, written sometime before 1200.

The OED cites The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (1972), edited by Eric John Dobson. But to make clear that the passage refers to a spiritual journey, not a geographic one, we’re using an expanded version of the passage from Ancrene Wisse (2005), edited by Bella Millett and based on Dobson’s work:

“þe pilegrim i þe wor[l]des wei, þah he ga forðward toward te ham of heouene, he sið ant hereð unnet, ant spekeð umbe hwile; wreaðeð him for wohes, ant moni þing mei letten him of his iurnee” (“The pilgrim on his way in the world, though he goes forward toward his home in heaven, he sees and hears and speaks unworthily once in a while, and becomes angry over injustice, and many things may hinder his journey”).

In the late 13th century, a “journey” came to mean a day’s travel, which the OED notes was “usually estimated in the Middle Ages at 20 miles.”

The first Oxford citation is from The South English Legendary (circa 1290), a Middle English collection of lives, or stories, of saints and other church figures. This passage is from the life of St. James:

“Þis holie Man ladde þene dede forth … fyftene Iorneies grete are day … to þe mount of Ioie” (“This holy man led the dead man forth … fifteen great journeys are the distance … to the Mount of Joy”).

The usual modern sense of “journey” as a “course of going or travelling, having its beginning and end in place or time, and thus viewed as a distinct whole,” appeared in the late 14th century, according to OED citations.

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Legends of the Holy Rood, a collection of medieval tales loosely based on the Bible: “When he was þus cumen hame ogayn, / Of his iorne he was ful fayne” (“When he was thus come home again, Of his journey he was very glad”).

Like you, we often see “journey” used to make ordinary things (gardening, sewing, banjo playing, etc.) seem special, but this doesn’t particularly bother us.

We’ll end, however, with an example of “journey” in a 14th-century lullaby that does make us cringe. This excerpt is from “Thou Wandrest in This Fals World,” one of the earliest lullabies in the English language:

Child, thou nert a pilgrim bot an vncuthe gist,
Thi dawes beth itold, thi iurneis beth icast;
Whoder thou salt wend north or est,
Deth the sal betide with bitter bale in brest.
Lollai, lollai, litil child, this wo Adam the wroght
Whan he of the appil ete and Eue hit him betacht.

(Child, you are not a pilgrim but an unknown guest,
Your days are counted, your journeys are cast;
Wherever you may go, to the north or east,
Death will come to you with bitter sorrow in your breast
Lullay, lullay, little child, Adam wrought this woe for you,
When he ate the apple and Eve gave it to him.)

[Note, Oct. 24, 2023: A reader of the blog asks whether the words “est” and “brest” at the end of the third and fourth lines of the lullaby above are supposed to rhyme. They no doubt were intended to rhyme. In Middle English, words were generally spelled as they were pronounced: “east” could be spelled “eest” or “est,” plus a few variations, and “breast” could be written “breest” or “brest,” plus variants.]

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English English language Expression Grammar Language Punctuation Usage Writing

A chorus of exclamation points  

Q: I’m seeing a lot of exclamation points in greetings (“Good Morning!” … “Hello!”) and in expressing gratitude (“Thanks!” or “Thanks!!!”). Is there an overuse of exclamation points? I have a feeling it’s generational, the younger you are the more you use them. Sure would love your opinion.

A: We can’t tell you definitively that the increasing use of exclamation points these days can be attributed to young people. Much of what we read now seems to be overexcited, with exclamation points proliferating on almost every front.

Why the overuse of a punctuation mark that’s supposed to be emphatic to begin with?

It may be that a simple “Hello” in a greeting, followed by a comma or a period, no longer feels enthusiastic enough. Or a simple “Thanks” may not seem grateful enough. So the writer punches it up with an exclamation point—or two or three.

The use of a single exclamation point isn’t wrong in these cases, though it can seem overwrought if no real emphasis is needed.

However, using more than one exclamation point at a time—“Thanks!!!”—is going too far. It’s not good English and it’s entirely out of place in formal usage. (Of course, people don’t always use their very best English, especially in casual use with family and friends.)

In her grammar and usage guide Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English (4th ed.), Pat has a few things to say on the subject:

“The exclamation point is like the horn on your car—use it only when you have to. A chorus of exclamation points says two things about your writing: First, you’re not confident that what you’re saying is important, so you need bells and whistles to get attention. Second, you don’t know a really startling idea when you see one.”

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English English language Etymology Language Pronunciation Usage Writing

Caesar’s wife in Shakespeare

Q: I’m researching Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and came upon your 2022 posting on the use of “ph” as “f” in classical imports. I assume the “ph” in “Calphurnia” (Caesar’s wife) was pronounced as “p,” not “f,” in 1599, but I want a scholarly source to cite. Can you help?

A: The “ph” of “Calphurnia” in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar was indeed pronounced as “p,” according to the linguist David Crystal, an authority on the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s plays in Elizabethan times.

In The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016), Crystal has this entry for the noun and its possessive form:

Calphurnia / ~’s n
kalˈpɐ:ɹnɪə / -z
sp Calphurnia / Calphurnia’s

We published a post in 2012 that discusses the movement to reconstruct the original pronunciation of Shakespeare’s works. As Crystal notes there, dozens of rhymes and puns that don’t work in modern English make sense in OP.

The name of Calpurnia, Caesar’s fourth and last wife, is spelled “Calphurnia” in the oldest surviving text of Shakespeare’s play, from the 1623 First Folio, published seven years after his death.

Our guess is that the name may have been spelled “Calpurnia” in Shakespeare’s long-lost original script, believed written around 1599.

In fact it’s “Calpurnia,” as the Romans spelled it, in Plutarch’s Lives (1579), by Sir Thomas North, the source for much of Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare drew on the lives of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony, according to the British Library.

Perhaps the editors of the First Folio mistakenly thought the proper Roman spelling of the name was with a ph digraph rather than the letter p.

Richard Grant White, editor of The Complete Works of Shakespeare: The Plays Edited From the Folio of MDCXXIII (1899), also felt the name “Calpurnia” was misspelled in the First Folio. In his notes for Julius Caesar, White has this explanation for changing “Calphurnia” to “Calpurnia”:

“The folio has, ‘Calphurnia,’ here and wherever the name occurs; yet the needful correction has not hitherto been made, although the name of Cæsar’s wife was Calpurnia, and it is correctly spelled throughout North’s Plutarch, and although no one has hesitated to change the strangely perverse ‘Varrus’ and ‘Claudio’ of the folio to ‘Varro’ and ‘Claudius,’ or its ‘Anthony’ to ‘Antony’ in this play and in Antony and Cleopatra. I am convinced that in both ‘Anthony’ and ‘Calphurnia’ h was silent to Shakespeare and his readers.”

As we say in our 2022 post about the “ph” digraph, the Romans transliterated the Greek letter ϕ (phi) as ph and the letter π (pi) as p. The Latin ph sounded like the aspirated “p” in “pot,” and the Latin p like the unaspirated “p” in “spot.” (An aspirated letter is pronounced with the sound of a breath.)

However, the pronunciations of both the Greek ϕ and the Latin ph evolved during the first few centuries AD and came to sound like the English fricative “f.” (A fricative is a consonant produced by the friction of forcing air through a narrow space.)

In the original Greek version of Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, written in the late first or early second century, Calpurnia is Καλπουρνία (with a π) and pronounced “Calpurnia,” the same as the classical Latin and usual modern English spelling.

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Writing

Upon my word!

Q: In the 1940 movie of Pride and Prejudice, the phrase “upon my word” is used repeatedly to mean “I can’t believe what I just heard.” How did those three words amount to a statement of incredulity?

A: It’s been a while since we saw the 1940 film of Pride and Prejudice, with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier as Elizabeth and Darcy, but as we recall the screenplay took quite a few liberties with Jane Austen’s novel.

With that in mind, we searched for “upon my word” in two online versions of the novel, an 1894 edition from Ruskin House and a 1900 edition from Odhams Press, both published in London.

The expression appears eight times in each version, occasionally used in its original sense of an assurance of truth or good faith, but primarily in its later sense of an exclamation of surprise or strong emotion—the meaning you describe as incredulity.

In this example of the original sense from chapter 16, Elizabeth assures Wickham that she’d express her dislike of Darcy anywhere in Hertfordshire except at the house where he’s staying:

“ ‘Upon my word I say no more here than I might say in any house in the neighbourhood, except Netherfield.’ ”

And in this exclamatory example from chapter 29, Lady Catherine expresses surprise and annoyance at Elizabeth’s outspokenness:

“ ‘Upon my word,’ said her Ladyship, ‘you give your opinion very decidedly for so young a person.’ ”

When the usage appeared in the late 16th century (originally as “upon his word”), it was “an assertion, an affirmation, a declaration, an assurance; esp. as involving the veracity or good faith of the person who makes it,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The first OED citation is from a guide to English language and culture: “Doth not Euripides saie & Phorphyrie vpon his word, that a bodie of presence is best worthie to rule?” (Elementarie, 1583, by Richard Mulcaster). Phorphyrie refers to the third-century philosopher Porphyry of Tyre.

And here’s the first “upon my word” version for this sense: “Madam, upon my word I will not rob you of your Jewel, I freely resign him to you” (from The Humorists: a Comedy, 1671, by the playwright and poet Thomas Shadwell).

The dictionary says the usage came to mean “assuredly, certainly, truly, indeed” in the late 16th century. The expression is “of my word” in the first Oxford example for this sense:

“Of my word, she is both crabbish, lumpish, and carping” (from Endimion, the Man in the Moone, 1591, a comedy by the Elizabethan playwright John Lyly).

The OED’s earliest “upon my word” version for this sense is from a report to the British Parliament in the mid-17th century about a rebellion in Ireland:

“Upon my word your Lordship is little beholding to him” (from A Declaration of the Commons Assembled in Parliament; Concerning the Rise and Progresse of the Grand Rebellion in Ireland, July 25, 1643).

In the early 18th century, the expression came to be “a simple exclamation of surprise or strong emotion,” a usage Oxford describes as “now somewhat archaic.”

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from The Beaux Stratagem (1707), a comedy by the English playwright George Farquhar:

“Lady Bountiful: Let me see your arm, sir — I must have some powder-sugar to stop the blood. — O me! an ugly gash; upon my word, sir, you must go into bed.”

As for now, standard dictionaries define “upon my word” variously as meaning indeed, really, assuredly, and as an exclamation of surprise or annoyance.

Merriam-Webste, for instance, defines it as “with my assurance: indeed, assuredly,” and gives this example: “upon my word, I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

And Cambridge says it’s “used to express surprise or to emphasize something.” The dictionary has an example from chapter 2 of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

In this expanded version, Mr. Dashwood agrees with his wife that he doesn’t have to give his mother and her daughters three thousand pounds, as he originally planned, despite his late father’s request that he take care of them:

“ ‘Upon my word,’ said Mr. Dashwood, ‘I believe you are perfectly right. My father certainly could mean nothing more by his request to me than what you say. I clearly understand it now, and I will strictly fulfill my engagement by such acts of assistance and kindness to them as you have described.’ ”

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