Month: April 2024

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Mixed marriage: two ways to wed

Q: Should one officiate a wedding or officiate at a wedding? Or is either fine? Using it as a transitive verb sounds odd to me.

A: The verb “officiate” has been used both transitively (with a direct object, as in “officiate the wedding”) and intransitively (without the object, as in “officiate at the wedding”) since it appeared in the 17th century. But the intransitive usage was long considered the traditional form, and was much more common until the late 20th century.

Today, dictionaries of American English recognize both the transitive and intransitive uses of “officiate” as standard. Dictionaries of British English recognize only the intransitive usage.

The transitive usage is especially popular in the US in reference to officiating in sports and in marriages performed by friends or relatives ordained online.

Merriam-Webster.com, an American dictionary, has nearly identical definitions for “officiate” used intransitively and transitively in senses related to performing a ceremony, serving in an official capacity, or acting as an official at a sporting contest.

M-W has “officiate at a wedding” as an intransitive example, and has these transitive examples: “Two referees officiated the hockey game” … “The bishop officiated the memorial Mass.”

The verb is defined similarly in the Oxford New American Dictionary and Dictionary.com, an updated online dictionary based mainly on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. (American Heritage describes the transitive sense as a usage problem, but bases that view on a 1997 survey of the AH usage panel and may not reflect recent developments in American English.)

A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares words and phrases in digitized books, shows that both senses are now equally popular in American English. The intransitive use doesn’t register at all in a search of British English.

Getting back to your question, the transitive usage also sounds unnatural to us, and we don’t use it. But as language commentators, we accept the view of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage:

“Let us assure you that officiate can be used transitively to mean ‘to carry out (an official duty or function),’ ‘to serve as a leader or celebrant of (a ceremony),’ or ‘to administer the rules of (a game or sport) esp. as a referee or umpire.’ ”

As for the verb’s etymology, English adopted “officiate” in the early 17th century from two post-classical Latin terms: officiat-, the past participial stem of officiari (to perform a function), and officiare (to officiate, say mass, to serve a church, and so on), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When the term first appeared in English, it was transitive and meant “to perform the duties of (an office, position, or place),” the OED says. Its first citation is from The Historie and Lives of the Kings of England (1615), by the English lawyer and historian  William Martyn:

“Because the Emperour intended to giue vnto her for her Dowrie, the Provinces of the Low Countries … his desire was, that forthwith shee might be sent thether to officiate the Protectorship of them in his absence.”

The dictionary says “officiate” soon took on the sense of performing a religious service or rite such as marriage, the use you’re asking about. The first Oxford citation for this sense uses “officiate” transitively, with a direct object preceding the verb:

“Deacons had the charge to … helpe the Priest in diuine Seruice (a place officiated now by our Parish Clerkes).” From Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), by the English poet and antiquary John Weever.

The intransitive use of this particular sense of “officiate” appeared a decade later: “There were many Parish Churches … as doth appeare by Epiphanius … who … tells us also who officiated in the same, as Presbyters.” From The Historie of Episcopacie (1642), by the Anglican clergyman and historian Peter Heylyn.

As we’ve said, the intransitive usage was predominant until the transitive form was revived in the late 20th century. Here’s a recent transitive example from a headline in Entertainment Weekly (Jan. 2, 2024): “Susan will officiate Gerry and Theresa’s ‘Golden Wedding.’ ”

And here’s an example from the website of  the Universal Life Church, which offers “Fast, Free, & Easy” ordinations to people who want to marry friends or relatives: “Get Ordained Online, Officiate A Wedding.”

The OED defines the sports sense of the verb “officiate” as “to act as a referee, umpire, or other official in a match or game.” The dictionary says the sports usage first appeared in the late 19th century.

The earliest Oxford citation is from a London newspaper that uses the term intransitively: “Mr. Walker officiated as referee, and Messrs. Davies and Bryan as umpires” (The Times, Sept. 15, 1884).

The transitive use of “officiate” in sports appeared a century later. The dictionary’s first example is from The Washington Post, May 24, 1978 (we’ve corrected the date):

“There was considerable comment when referee-in-chief Scotty Morrison selected Van Hellmond, Newell and Bob Myers to officiate the finals, passing up more senior referees.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Linguistics Writing

The earliest English writing

Q: You often quote examples of writing from Anglo-Saxon times to illustrate the history of a usage. What is the earliest example of English writing that you know of?

A: You’ve asked what seems to be a simple question, but the answer is complicated. It depends on what you consider writing and how you determine the date.

The earliest version of the language, Old English, developed in England in the fifth century from the dialects spoken by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—migrants from what is now Germany and Scandinavia.

Old English was originally written with runes, characters in futhark, an ancient Germanic alphabet. Latin letters introduced by Christian missionaries began replacing the runes in the eighth century, but some runes were still being used well into Middle English, the language spoken from around 1100 to 1500.

The earliest surviving examples of Old English are very short runic inscriptions on metal, wood, bone, or stone. A runic inscription runs down the right side of this fifth-century gold pendant found by a farmer in 1984 at Undley Common near Lakenheath in Suffolk:

The pendant, now in the British Museum, shows a helmeted head above a wolf. The runic letters ᚷ‍ᚫᚷ‍ᚩᚷ‍ᚫ ᛗᚫᚷᚫ ᛗᛖᛞᚢ (gaegogae mægæ medu) run along the right edge. As the museum explains, the message may be read as “howling she-wolf” (a reference to the wolf image) and “reward to a relative” (a translation of the runic letters).

The pendant—technically a bracteate, or thin coin of precious metal—is believed to have been produced in the late fifth century, but it’s uncertain whether it originated in England or was brought there by the settlers.

The dating of the pendant is somewhat uncertain, according to Daphne Nash Briggs, an authority on ancient coins at the University of Oxford:

“It is thought, on stylistic grounds, to have been made around AD 475, and I accept this dating whilst bearing in mind that bracteates are stubbornly difficult to date precisely, and it could in principle have been made a generation earlier.” (From “An Emphatic Statement: The Undley-A Gold Bracteate and Its Message in Fifth-Century East Anglia,” a paper by Nash Briggs in Wonders Lost and Found, 2020, edited by Nicholas Sekunda.)

The earliest surviving examples of Old English writing on parchment are from Latin-English glossaries, according to a history of Old English in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED cites several examples from the Glossaire d’Épinal, written in England around 700 and now at the Bibliothèque Municipale in Épinal, France: “anser goos (i.e. ‘goose’)” … “lepus, leporis hara (i.e. ‘hare’)” … “nimbus storm (i.e. ‘storm’)” … “olor suan (i.e. ‘swan’).”

The British Library notes that “the earliest substantial example of English is the lawcode of King Æthelberht of Kent (reigned c. 589–616), but that work survives in just one manuscript (the Textus Roffensis), made in the 1120s.”

Here’s how the manuscript begins: “Þis syndon þa domas þe æðelbirht cyning asette on aGVSTinus dæge” (“These are the laws that King Æthelberht established in the days of Augustine”).

“Cædmon’s Hymn,” which is considered the earliest documented poem in Old English, is said to have been composed in the seventh century by an illiterate cow herder, according to the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede.

It first appeared in writing in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), a church history written in Latin around 731.

In the next few years, scribes inserted Old English versions of the poem in two copies of the Latin manuscript, now known as the Moore Bede (734–737) and the St. Petersburg Bede (732-746).

Here’s a lightly edited version of the hymn in the Moore Bede (MS Kk.5.16 at the Cambridge University Library):

“Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard / metudæs maecti end his modgidanc / uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuaes / eci dryctin or astelidæ” (“Now we must praise the heavenly kingdom’s guardian, / the creator’s might and his conception, / the creation of the glorious father, thus each of the wonders / that he ordained at the beginning”).

The epic poem Beowulf, the first great work of English literature, is believed to have been written around 725, but the oldest surviving manuscript (Cotton MS Vitellius A XV at the British Library) dates from around the year 1000.

We’ll end with the last few lines of the poem, a farewell to Beowulf by his subjects after their king is mortally wounded in battle, his body burned on a pyre, the ashes buried in a barrow:

“cwædon þæt he wære wyruldcyning, / manna mildust ⁊ monðwærust / eodum liðost, ⁊ lofgeornost” (“Of all the world’s kings, they said, / he was the kindest and the gentlest of men, / the most gracious to his people and the most worthy of fame”).

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

Left for dead

Q: I’m curious when the phrase “left for dead” became common usage. Why is the phrase not “left to die”? I saw the “for dead” version recently in an article and I began wondering.

A: The expression “leave for dead” first appeared in Anglo-Saxon times and has been used regularly since then to mean abandon someone or something almost dead or certain to die.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, which we’ve expanded here, is from a passage concerning St. Paul in The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, First Series, written around 990 by the Benedictine Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham:

“Æne he wæs gestæned oð deað, swa ðæt þa ehteras hine for deadne leton, ac ðæs on merigen he aras, and ferde ymbe his bodunge” (“Once he was stoned unto death, so much so that the persecutors left him for dead, but on the morrow he arose and went about his preaching”). In Old English, “hine for deadne leton” is literally “him for dead left.”

As the OED explains, the preposition “for” is being used here “with an adjective as complement.” This use of “for,” the dictionary adds, is now found chiefly in “set expressions, as in to give a person up for lost, to leave a person for dead, to take for granted, etc.”

In early Old English, the preposition “for” began being used similarly with a noun to mean “with a view to; with the object or purpose of; as preparatory to,” according to the OED.

Here’s a citation from the Gospel of John, 11:4, in the West Saxon Gospels: “Nys þeos untrumnys na for deaðe, ac for Godes wuldre” (“This sickness is not for death, but for the glory of God”). Jesus is speaking about the ailing Lazarus.

Getting back to your question, one could say “left to die” as well as “left for dead.” Both have been common for centuries. In fact, “left to die” is slightly more popular, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books.

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Linguistics Pronunciation Usage Word origin

Did you warsh behind your ears?

Q:  Can you suss the pronunciation of “wash”?  I’m from central Illinois and I forced myself as an adult to pronounce it “wawsh” instead of the colloquial “warsh.”

A: In American English, the word “wash” is usually pronounced “wawsh” or “wahsh” (wɔʃ or wɑʃ in the International Phonetic Alphabet), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. However, a lot of Americans pronounce it with an “r” before the “sh,” a usage that may be dying out.

The Dictionary of American Regional English describes the dialectal “warsh” or “worsh” pronunciation (wɑrš or wɔrš in DARE’s phonemic system) as widespread in the US but especially frequent in the Midland, a belt that extends roughly from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina across the country to Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska.

The earliest recorded example in the regional dictionary is from the late 19th century, though the pronunciation almost certainly appeared in speech before that. Here’s an expanded version of the citation from “Rubáiyát of Doc Sifers,” a poem about a doctor in Indiana, by James Whitcomb Riley (The Century Magazine, November 1897):

He orders Euby then to split some wood, and take and build
A fire in kitchen-stove, and git a young spring-chicken killed;
And jes whirled in and th’owed his hat and coat there on the bed,
And warshed his hands and sailed in that-air kitchen, Euby said.

DARE has examples from Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. The latest, a 2003 report from Iowa in the dictionary’s own files, uses “wersh” for the pronunciation spelling of the term: “My sister-in-law says ‘I’m going to do the ‘wersh’ (wash as in laundry).”

Pat, who grew up in Iowa, remembers childhood admonitions like “Go warsh your hands” and “Did you warsh behind your ears?”

Interestingly, the dialectal pronunciation of “wash” with an “r” was first recorded in southern England, not in the American Midland. Here’s the earliest example we’ve found:

“I’ve a yeard em zay he don’t make nort of a leg o’ mutton, and half a peck o’ cider to warsh-n down way” (one of two examples in “The Dialect of West Somerset,” a paper by the philologist Frederick Thomas Elworthy, read at a meeting of the Philological Society in London, Jan. 15, 1875).

We’ve seen no evidence that immigrants from southern England brought the usage to the US Midland, but linguists have found indications that  Scotch-Irish immigrants from Ulster may have been the source of the usage.

The authors of the book Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese (2015) maintain that the dialect spoken by the Scotch-Irish, the first Europeans to settle in southwestern Pennsylvania in large numbers, spread from Pennsylvania across the Midland region.

“The English they spoke became the substrate founder dialect for the area (as for much of the U.S. Midland),” write Barbara Johnstone, Daniel Baumgardt, Maeve Eberhardt, and Scott Kiesling. “Although we have very limited evidence about Scotch-Irish phonology, words and morphosyntactic patterns that are indisputably Scotch-Irish are still prevalent in the area.”

The authors refer to the “r” in “warsh” as an “intrusive” or “epenthetic” (inserted) letter before “ʃ” (the IPA symbol for the “sh” digraph, technically a voiceless postalveolar fricative), and say the usage is declining in American English.

“Epenthetic /r/ was once fairly widespread in the U.S. Midwest and the South,” they write, “but it is becoming less common, as it seems to be in southwestern Pennsylvania, as well.”

As for the word “wash,” it first appeared in Old English, the language spoken from around 450 to 1150, as a verb spelled wæscan, wacsan, waxan, wacxan, or waxsan, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Anglo-Saxon versions of “wash,” the dictionary notes, were nearly always used in the sense of cleaning things, not people. A different verb, þwean, was used for washing the human body (the þ, or thorn, at the beginning of þwean was pronounced as “th”).

The OED’s earliest “wash” example, which we’ve expanded here, is from a collection of  Anglo-Saxon charters: “hi sculan waxan sceap and sciran” (“they shall wash and shear the sheep”). From Diplomatarium Anglicum Aevi Saxonici (1865), by Benjamin Thorpe.

The first Oxford citation for the verb “wash” used for people is from a late Old English version of the Gospel of Matthew, 27:24: “þa genam he water, and weosc hys handa beforan þam folce” (“he [Pilate] took water and washed his hands before the people”). From the Hatton Gospels, written around 1160 in the West Saxon dialect.

The earliest OED example for the noun “wash” in the sense of the cleaning of clothes is from an interlinear gloss, or translation, of the Latin vestimentorum ablutio as the Old English reafa wæsc (“garment wash”). From “De Consuetudine Monachorum” (“Concerning the Habit of the Monks”), an article in Anglia, a German journal of English linguistics, Nov. 27, 2009.

However, that sense of the noun doesn’t appear again in the dictionary until the early 18th century: “Wearing Linen from the Wash” (London Gazette, 1704).

When the noun “wash” was first used for people, it referred to the washing away of stains on one’s honor or morality, as in the OED’s first two examples:

  • “The Blemish once received, no Wash is good For stains of Honor, but th’ Offenders blood” (from The Adventures of Five Hours, a 1663 comedy by the English playwright Samuel Tuke).
  • “A Baptism in Reserve, a Wash for all our Sins” (from a 1666 sermon by William Sancroft, dean of St. Paul’s and later Archbishop of Canterbury).

Finally, the first Oxford citation for the noun used in the sense of physically cleaning oneself is from The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1839), by Charles Dickens: “Mind you take care, young man, and get first wash.” (The passage refers to getting to a well first.)

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

‘Dad wouldn’t have a bar of it’

Q: Can you shed any light on the origin of the (mainly) Australian phrase “wouldn’t have a bar of it,” especially what “bar” is doing in there?

A: The expression “not to stand [or “have” or “want”] a bar of something” first appeared in Australian English in the early 20th century, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

The earliest example in the dictionary is from a Sydney newspaper: “He attributes most of his trouble to the fact that he is a married man and father of a grown-up family, but neither wife nor children will stand a bar of him at any price” (Truth, May 21, 1904).

This more recent example, which we’ve expanded, is from Tales of the Honey Badger (2015), a collection of short stories by the Australian rugby star Nick Cummins: “I grabbed a board and paddled straight out, knowing full well Dad wouldn’t have a bar of it.”

Green’s describes the usage as Australian and New Zealand slang meaning “to detest, to reject, to be intolerant of.” However, the dictionary doesn’t explain how “bar” came to be used in the expression.

The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English and The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English also have entries for the usage, but no etymological information.

Three standard English dictionaries—Cambridge, Collins, and Oxford—have entries that label the expression “informal,” but again don’t discuss its history.

The Oxford English Dictionary, our go-to etymological reference, doesn’t have an entry for the expression. However, the OED entries for “bar” used as a verb and as a preposition offer possible clues to its use as a noun in “not to stand a bar of something.”

When “bar” first appeared in Middle English in the 12th century, it was a noun meaning “a stake or rod of iron or wood used to fasten a gate, door, hatch, etc.”

The first OED citation, which we’ve expanded, is from the Lambeth Homilies (circa 1175): “Det is he to-pruste pa stelene gate. and to brec pa irene barren of helle” (“He [Jesus] is the one who will thrust open the steel gate, and break the iron bars of hell”).

When the verb “bar” appeared in the 13th century, it meant “to make fast (a door, etc.) by a bar or bars fixed across it; to fasten up or close (a place) with bars.”

The earliest OED citation is from Cursor Mundi, an anonymous Middle English poem that the dictionary dates at sometime before 1300. In this passage, Lot secures the door of his home in Sodom to keep a mob outside from molesting two angels inside: “faste þe dores gon he bare” (“firmly he did bar the doors”).

In the 15th century, the verb “bar” came to mean “to exclude from consideration.” The earliest Oxford citation, which we’ve edited, uses the gerund form of the verb in referring to one piece of linen set aside from a sale:

“vj.xx yardes, barin one pese, of lynnen cloth” (“six score yards, barring one piece, of linen cloth”). From The Household Books of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, 1462-1471, 1481-1483 (1992), introduction by Anne Crawford.

[Note: Counting in the Middle English of the 15th century was often in scores written in superscript, and the letter “j” often replaced a final “i” in Roman numerals. In the number above, “vj” is six and the superscript xx  is a score, so “vj.xx” is six times 20, or 120.]

And now a numberless example from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, written in the late 16th century. After promising Bassanio to act properly, Gratiano adds, “Nay but I barre [exclude] to night, you shall not gage [judge] me / By what we doe to night.”

In the mid-17th century, “bar” came to be a preposition with the sense of “excluding from consideration” or “leaving out.” The first OED citation is from an epigram in Hesperides (1648), a poetry collection by Robert Herrick. Here’s the epigram in full:

“Last night thou didst invite me home to eate, And shew’st me there much plate, but little meate. Prithee, when next thou do’st invite, barre state [omitting formality], And give me meate, or give me else thy plate.”

Our guess is that the use of the verb to mean “exclude from consideration” and the preposition for “excluding from consideration” may have inspired the use of “bar” in “to not stand a bar of something.” However, we’ve seen no evidence to support this.

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