Month: May 2024

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

Beholden to a schedule?

Q: I keep hearing “beholden” used in terms of having to go by a schedule, and even caught myself doing it once. Is this usage becoming more common and considered correct?

A: Traditionally, “beholden” has meant obligated or indebted to someone or something, especially for a gift or favor.

Although “beholden” has also been used for figurative debts or obligations, standard dictionaries don’t recognize its use in the sense of restricted to or bound by something, such as a schedule.

You’re right, however, that the sense of bound by is out there and has appeared in some major publications. This use of “beholden” may very well make its way into standard dictionaries, but it’s not there yet. Here’s the story.

When the verb “behold” appeared in Old English writing as bihaldan, it meant “to hold by, keep, observe, regard, look,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s an expanded OED example from the Blickling Homilies, believed written in the late 10th century, of “behold” used in the sense of to look upon someone or something, the usual modern sense:

englas hie georne beheoldan of þæm dæge þe hie wiston þæt heo seo eadige maria geeacnod wæs of þæm halgan gasten.

(The angels earnestly beheld her from the day they knew that the blessed Mary had been conceived by the Holy Spirit.)

Note that in Old English, the past tense of “behold” was beheoldan (“beholden”), a verb form that was later replaced by “beheld.”

In Middle English, “beholden” became a past participle, and later a predicate adjective.

In this adjectival use, which first appeared in the late 14th century, “beholden” was used with a form of the verb “be” (as in “I am beholden,” “he was beholden,” etc.) and came to mean obligated or indebted.

The two earliest OED citations are from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a chivalric romance written around 1390:

“I am derely to yow biholde” (“I am dearly beholden to you”) … “I am hyȝly bihalden, & euer-more wylle Be seruaunt to your-seluen” (“I am highly beholden and evermore will be servant to yourself”).

As for the modern use of “beholden,” Merriam-Webster online says it describes “people who are obligated to others (often for a favor or gift), as well as people or things that are in figurative debt due to aid or inspiration, as in ‘many contemporary books and films are beholden to old Arthurian legends.’ ”

The OED has this 19th-century figurative example, which we’ve expanded, from Modern English (1873), by the American philologist Fitzedward Hall:

 “As to ourselves, a student must be exceedingly inobservant, not to have perceived how deeply we are beholden to the happy daring of translators for the amplitude and variety of our diction, and for the flexibility of our constructions.”

Finally, here are a few examples we’ve found for the as yet unrecognized sense of “beholden” that you’ve asked about—the use of the adjective to mean restricted to or bound by a schedule:

“He maintains the same workout routine he had in his prime, and he still rises at 4 a.m., restless and beholden to a schedule he no longer has to keep” (a comment about the boxer Joe Frazier from a review of Thrilla in Manila, a documentary about his third match with Muhammad Ali, Sports Illustrated, April 22, 2009).

“Motown mitigated some of the risk by making Broadway the final stop. It wasn’t beholden to a schedule that would keep it there if things went south, and producer Kevin McCollum made the right (if tough) call to cut losses and wrap up the show early” (Forbes, July 31, 2016).

“But anytime they left the city—which they frequently did—traveling was a challenge, as they usually took the train and were beholden to a schedule” (from an article about a carless Manhattan couple, New York Times, Feb. 1, 2018).

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Writing

Like hell, like mad, like stink

Q: What is the origin of the phrase “like stink” (as in “run like stink”)? I know what it means, but not why it means that.

A: “Like stink” has been used colloquially in British English since the early 20th century to mean furiously or intensely. It’s similar to “like hell,” “like mad,” and “like crazy,” intensifiers of a type that dates back to the early 16th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest “like stink” example, which we’ve expanded, is from a play set in the trenches of a British Army infantry company during World War I:

“If you see a Minnie coming—that’s a big trench mortar shell, you know—short for Minnywerfe—you see ’em come right out of the Boche trenches, right up in the air, then down, down, down; and you have to judge it and run like stink sometimes.”

(From Journey’s End, by the English playwright R. C. Sherriff. Laurence Olivier starred in the play when it first opened at the Apollo Theatre in London on Dec. 9, 1928.)

The word “like” is used similarly in American as well as British English in many other colloquial expressions that indicate doing something intensely: “run like blazes,” “fight like the dickens,” “write like a house on fire,” and so on.

As the OED explains, “like” is “now typically analysed as a preposition” when used “in proverbial similes,” specifically “in phrases describing an action carried out rapidly, with great vigour or energy, or without restraint or limitation.”

In these colloquial phrases, according to the dictionary, “the complement of like is taken as expressive of vigour, energy, etc., rather than being obviously similative.” You might say that they look like similes and act like adverbs.

The usage dates from at least the early 1500s, as in this OED example about somebody who devours food without restraint, leaving little for his companions to eat:

“One doth another tell / Se how he fedeth, lyke the deuyll of hell / Our parte he eteth nought good shall we tast” (from Egloges, a collection of eclogues, or short poems, written around 1530 by the Anglican priest and poet Alexander Barclay).

The dictionary has two older examples in which “as” is used instead of “like.” The oldest is from The Romance of William of Palerne (circa 1350), an anonymous Middle English translation of Guillaume de Palerme, a French tale written around 1200.

In the part of the tale cited, the Holy Roman Emperor wonders where his daughter is. When told that she isn’t in her chamber, he goes to see for himself and “driues in at þat dore as a deuel of helle” (“rushes in through the door as a devil of hell”).

Finally, we should mention that the energetic sense of “stink” may perhaps have been influenced by the use of the word in the early 19th century for a commotion or a fuss. The first Oxford example for the earlier sense is from a glossary of underworld slang:

“When any robbery of moment has been committed, which causes much alarm, or of which much is said in the daily papers, the family people will say, there is a great stink about it” (New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language, 1812, by James Hardy Vaux).

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Linguistics Usage Word origin Writing

Oh, dear! Oh, deer!

Q: I’ve just begun The Age of Deer, a book by Erika Howsare that explores the connections between deer and humans. Are the words “dear” and “deer” also related, or merely two different words with the same pronunciation?

A: The short answer is that “dear” and “deer” may very well be etymologically related, not just homonyms, but the evidence isn’t conclusive.

In Old English, the language spoken from roughly 450 to 1150, the noun “deer” (spelled dior or deor, and occasionally dear) meant something like “beast” and referred to wild animals in general, especially four-legged ones. The usual word for the animals with antlered males was heort or heorot, ancestor of “hart.”

Meanwhile, the adjective “dear” came in two versions: deore (beloved or valuable) and deor (brave, ferocious, savage, or wild, an obsolete sense apparently associated with the noun “deer”).

Linguists have disagreed over whether deore and deor were two separate adjectives or one adjective with two senses. If Old English had just one adjective, then the modern words “dear” and “deer” would probably be related.

The Oxford English Dictionary says both deore and deor come from prehistoric Germanic, an ancient language reconstructed by linguists, but it adds that deor is “of uncertain etymology.”

However, the linguist Anatoly Lieberman argues in a May 19, 2021, post on the blog of Oxford University Press, publisher of the OED, that the two terms come from the same ancient source:

“Some good authorities hesitatingly (very hesitatingly!) admit that Old English dēor(e) and dēor are two senses of the same word. In my opinion, both their hesitation and the common statement ‘origin unknown,’ applied to dēor ‘savage, fierce,’ are groundless.”

Liberman says, “it is probably reasonable to assume that the most ancient meaning of the adjective dear was ‘requiring a strong effort’; hence ‘fierce, wild; hard to obtain; costly; precious,’ and of course ‘dear,’ whether ‘expensive’ or ‘priceless.’ ”

“According to what we know about the Old Germanic ethos,” he adds, “monsters and heroes were believed to be endowed with similar qualities, but what was ‘noble, valorous, praiseworthy’ in the hero was ‘ferocious, deadly’ in his enemy.”

If Lieberman is right—and we hesitantly agree with him—then “dear” and “deer” are related.

In the first OED citation for the noun “deer,” it’s spelled dear and means a large beast: “Se camal þæt micla dear” (“The camel that great deer”). From an interlinear Old English gloss, or translation, of the Latin in the Lindisfarne Gospels, Luke 18:25.

Here’s a full version of the verse, in Early Modern English, from the King James Version: “For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for the noun “deer” used in its modern sense (as the horned animal that’s often hunted) is from Layamon’s Brut, a chronicle of Britain written in Middle English sometime before 1200: “To huntien after deoren.”

The OED notes an earlier Old English passage that mentions hrana (reindeer) among a large group of wild animals: “syx hund. Þa deor” (“those 600 hundred deer”).

As for the adjective “dear,” the dictionary says the affectionate sense gradually evolved in Old English from “esteemed” to “beloved,” but “the  passage of the one notion into the other is too gradual to admit of their separation.”

The OED’s first citation (with “dear” describing Jesus) is from Juliana, an Old English poem by Cynewulf about the martyrdom of Saint Juliana of Nicomedia. In this passage, Juliana asks all of humankind to pray for her:

“meotud bidde þæt me heofona helm helpe gefremme, meahta waldend, on þam miclan dæge, fæder, frofre gæst, in þa frecnan tid, dæda demend, ond se deora sunu” (“pray to the creator that the guardian of heaven, the wielder of powers, the father, the holy spirit, the judge of deeds, and his dear son may help me in that time of terror, on that greatest of days”).

Moving on to the costly sense of the adjective, the first OED citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from an entry for the year 1044 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

“On ðisum gere wæs swyðe mycel hunger ofer eall Englaland and corn swa dyre swa nan man ær ne gemunde  swa þæt se sester hwætes eode to LX pen” (“In this year there was very great hunger over all England and corn [grain] so dear as no man remembered before so that a sester [a dry measure] of wheat went for 60 pence”).

Over the years, the adjective has taken on many other uses, including to fondly or respectfully address someone (circa 1250), to mean scarce (before 1330), to address the recipient of a letter (c. 1402), and to describe money that can be borrowed only at a high interest rate (1878).

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

Footing the bill

Q: How did “foot” come to be used in “He’ll foot the bill”? And doesn’t it sound awkward to say “He footed the bill”?

A: The use of the verb “foot” in the expression “foot the bill” ultimately comes from the use of “foot” as a noun for the lower part of something—in this case, the total at the bottom of a bill.

When “foot” first appeared in Old English, it referred (as it does now) to the part of the leg below the ankle. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the epic poem Beowulf, dating back to as early as 725:

“Sona hæfde unlyfigendes eal gefeormod fet ond folma” (“Soon he’d devoured the lifeless body, feet and hands”). The passage describes the monster Grendel eating one of his victims.

The noun “foot” soon took on the additional sense of something resembling a foot. The OED’s first citation for this meaning, which we’ve expanded here, is from an Old English riddle that refers to the base of an inkhorn (an inkwell made from an antler) as a foot, spelled fot:

“nu ic blace swelge wuda ⁊ wætre … befæðme þæt mec on fealleð ufan þær ic stonde eorpes nathwæt hæbbe anne fot” (“now I swallow the black wood and water.  … I embrace within me the unknown darkness that falls on me from above. Where I stand on something unknown, I have one foot”). From the Exeter Book, “Riddle 93.”

In the early 15th century, the OED says, the noun “foot” took on the sense of “the sum or total of a column of numbers in an account, typically recorded directly below the final entry in the column.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from a 1433 financial report in the records of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York, a merchant guild:

“First, the saide maister and constables hafe resayved [have received] in mone tolde [money counted], iiijli. ijs. xd., as it profes be [proves by] the fote [foot] of accounte of the yere past” (from The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers 1356–1917, a 1918 work by the British historian Maud Sellers).

A similar use of “foot” as a verb appeared in the late 15th century, according to the OED, which defines the term as “to add up (a column of numbers, or an account, bill, etc., having this) and enter the sum at the bottom.”

The earliest Oxford citation, with “footed” spelled “futit,” is from a record of judicial proceedings in Scotland: “The tyme that his compt [account] wes futit.” From The Acts of the Lords of Council in Civil Causes, 1478–95 (edited by Thomas Thomson, 1839).

The sense of “foot” you’re asking about showed up in the early 19th century. Oxford defines it as “to pay or settle (a bill, esp. one which is large or unreasonable, or which has been run up by another party).”

The first OED citation, which we’ve expanded, is from A Pedestrious Tour, of Four Thousand Miles, Through the Western States and Territories, During the Winter and Spring of 1818, an 1819 memoir of a walking tour by Estwick Evans, a New England lawyer and writer:

“My dogs, knowing no law but that of nature, and having forgotten my lecture to them upon theft, helped themselves to the first repast presented, leaving their master to foot their bills.” (The dogs were later killed by wolves in the Michigan Territory as Evans was on his way to Detroit.)

As for “footed,” it may sound awkward, but it’s the only past tense and past participle listed in the standard dictionaries we regularly consult.

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