Month: July 2024

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

We thank you kindly

Q: In “The Dig,” a movie set in England in the 1930s, the characters express gratitude by saying, “Thank you kindly,” and concern for the lady of the manor by asking, “Is she doing poorly?” Are these usages dated?

A: These expressions sound old-fashioned to us too, but they’re still in use and have had somewhat of a revival lately.

“Thank you kindly” first appeared in Middle English in the 16th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines “to thank kindly and variants” as “to thank (someone) very much; (also) to thank politely.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from an anonymous interlude, or light theatrical work: “Now I thanke you both full kindly” (An Enterlude of Welth, and Helth, Very Mery and Full of Pastyme, first performed in the mid-1550s).

The most recent OED citation is from the Daily Mail (London, Oct. 14, 2002):  “Bernstein … offered me a job as a documentary producer. I thanked him kindly but indicated that my ambitions lay in other directions.”

A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books, shows that the expression began falling out of favor in the late 19th century but had a comeback in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

When the verb “thank” first appeared in Old English as þancian or ðoncian, it meant “to give thanks.” The runic letters þ, or thorn, and ð, or eth, were pronounced as “th.”

In this early OED example, ðoncade is the past tense of þancian: “genimmende calic ðoncunco dyde vel ðoncade & sealde him” (“taking the cup, he gave thanks and gave it to them”). From Matthew 26:27 in the Lindisfarne Gospels.

As for “poorly,” it first appeared in Middle English as povreliche, an adverb meaning “inadequately, imperfectly, unsatisfactorily.” The earliest Oxford citation is from Ancrene Riwle (also known as Ancrene Wisse), an anonymous guide for monastic women, written sometime before 1200:

“Ant tah min entente beo to beten ham her-inne, ich hit do se povreliche, ant sunegi in othre dei-hwamliche seoththen ich wes nest i-schriven” (“And though my intent is to atone for them [sins] in this, I do it so poorly and sin in other [matters] daily since I was last confessed”).

We’ve expanded the example above and used a more recently edited version of the manuscript. The OED’s passage is from The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (1962), edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and Neil Ripley Ker. Ours is from Ancrene Wisse (2000), edited by Robert Hasenfratz.

The form of the word you’re asking about, the adjective “poorly,” meant “unwell, in ill health” when it first showed up in the 16th century, the OED says. The dictionary describes the usage as “chiefly British,” but all four standard American dictionaries we regularly consult recognize it.

The first Oxford citation, which we’ve expanded, is from a farming guide, written in verse, that refers to the health of cattle:

“From Christmas, till May be wel entered in, / Al cattel wax faint, and looke poorely and thin” (from A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry, 1570, by the English poet-farmer Thomas Tusser).

The earliest OED example for “poorly” used to describe human health is from The Witch, a tragicomedy written in the early 17th century by the English playwright Thomas Middleton: “Why shak’st thy head soe? and look’st so pale, and poorely?”

The dictionary’s most recent citation is from Paper Faces (1991), a children’s novel by the English author Rachel Anderson: “Children couldn’t go into the children’s ward unless they themselves were poorly.”

A search for “feel poorly” in Ngram Viewer indicates that this use of “poorly” fell out of favor in the 20th century, but has come back somewhat in the 21st.

A final note: Thomas Tusser, the author of the farming guide mentioned above, coined an early version of the proverb “a fool and his money are soon parted.”

In an expanded version of his guide, Fiue Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie (1573), Tusser has these lines: “A foole and his monie be soone at debate, / which after with sorrow repents him too late.”

A version closer to the usual wording soon appeared in A Defence of the Gouernment Established in the Church of Englande (1587), by John Bridges: “a foole and his money is soone parted.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

The stylish origin of ‘tag along’

Q: I’m curious about when the word “tag” became used in “tag along.” Is this an American usage or did it originate earlier than that?

A: Early versions of “tag along” were first recorded in England in the 17th century. But the usage ultimately comes from medieval times, when “tags” referred to the ribbon-like strips of cloth in the decoratively slashed hem of a skirt.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the original “tag” was “one of the narrow, often pointed, laciniæ or pendent pieces made by slashing the skirt of a garment.”

The earliest Oxford citation is from a 1402 entry in Political Poems and Songs Related to English History (1861), edited by Thomas Wright:

“Of suche wide clothing, tateris and tagges, it hirtith myn hert hevyly.”

(Chaucer denounced the fashion as “degise endentynge” [ostentatious notching] and a “wast of clooth in vanitee” in “The Parson’s Tale,” late 1300s.)

The use of “tag” as a verb emerged in the early 16th century. The OED defines “to tag” as “to furnish or mark with or as with a tag.”

The dictionary’s first example, which we’ve expanded here, is from a 1503 entry in the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland (1900), edited by James Balfour Paul:

“For ane curpal and ane tee [one crupper strap and one T attachment] to the harnes sadill, tagging, mending, and stopping [padding] of the samyn.”

In the 17th century, the dictionary says, the verb took on the sense of “to trail or drag behind; to follow closely, follow in one’s train,” and is “frequently const. [constructed with] after, along, (a)round, on.”

The dictionary’s earliest example, which uses “tag on,” is from The Plain-Dealer (1676), a comedy of manners by the English playwright William Wycherley: “I hate a harness, and will not tag on in a faction, kissing my leader behind, that another slave may do the like to me.”

The earliest use of “tag along” that we’ve found is from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884): “Tom thought it would be a first-rate surprise for him to come here to the house first, and for me to by and by tag along and drop in, and let on to be a stranger.”

Oxford’s first citation is from More Fables (1900), a collection of short stories by the American humorist George Ade: “The men Volunteered to help, and two or three wanted to Tag along, but Clara drove them back.”

In the mid-20th century, “tag-along” (later “tagalong”) appeared as an adjective describing “that which is towed or trailed behind something else,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s first example appeared during World War II: “Evidence of trailed, or ‘tag-along,’ bombs still is scanty” (The Baltimore Sun, Jan. 21, 1944).

The adjective was later “applied to an uninvited follower,” as in this Oxford example from a Canadian newspaper: “The small trailer snug beside it like a tagalong pup” (The Islander, Victoria, BC, June 10, 1973).

When the noun “tagalong” first appeared, the OED says, it referred to “an unwelcome, uninvited, or neglected companion.” It cites the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961), which has this example: “felt honored to be a tagalong tolerated by the older boys.”

Standard dictionaries now define the noun as someone who follows the lead of another. In British English, it can also mean something that’s attached to and pulled behind something else, like a child’s bicycle attached to an adult’s.

Here’s an example of the follower sense from Merriam-Webster: “His little sister was sometimes a tagalong on his outings with his friends.” And here’s a bicycle example from Longman: “The tagalong attaches to an adult’s bicycle.”

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

Rhyme and reason in Shakespeare

Q: Did “word” once rhyme with “afford” and “sword,” as it seems to do in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 79 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

A: Yes, the noun “word” rhymes with the verb “afford” and the noun “sword” in those two works. Here are the relevant passages:

He lends thee virtue and he stole that word
From thy behavior; beauty doth he give
And found it in thy cheek; he can afford
No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.
     —Sonnet 79

Where is Demetrius? O, how fit a word
Is that vile name to perish on my sword!
     —A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016), the linguist David Crystal uses the International Phonetic Alphabet for the  pronunciations of the three words: wɔːɹd, əˈfɔːɹd, and sɔːɹd.

The ɔː in Original Pronunciation represents the “aw” sound of “thought” in modern English while the ɹ denotes the “r” sound of “bard” in standard American dictionaries. This “r” isn’t pronounced in standard British dictionaries.

So “afford” and “sword” in the early modern English of Shakespeare sounded much like their pronunciations in contemporary American dictionaries, while “word” sounded like the standard American pronunciation of “ward.”

Crystal writes that “historical phonologists use several types of data to reconstruct the sound system from a period before the advent of audio-recording.”

“For the Elizabethan period,” he says, “chief among them are spellings and rhymes, which—judiciously interpreted, and supplemented by the observations of contemporary writers on language—provide most of the information we need in order to reconstruct OP.”

According to Crystal, Shakespeare spelled the noun “word” variously as “word,” “worde,” “ ’ord,” and “ ’ort.”  In addition to “afford” and “sword,” it rhymed with “board,” “ford,” “Ford,” and “lord” in various Shakespearean works.

In a  2012 post about OP, we note that Ben Jonson, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, said the proper pronunciation of “r” after a vowel, as in “far” or “heart,” sounded “growly.”

Crystal points out that Elizabethan speakers used various regional accents in OP, just as speakers today use various accents in speaking contemporary English.

“OP is a phonology—a sound system—which would have been realized in a variety of accents, all of which were different in certain respects from the variety we find in present-day English,” he says.

So how did Shakespeare sound when he spoke OP? “We know nothing about how Shakespeare himself spoke,” Crystal writes, “though we can conjecture that his accent would have been a mixture of Warwickshire and London.”

When “word” first appeared In Old English, spoken from around 450 to 1150, it had many senses, including an utterance, a statement, a speech, lyrics, news, gossip, fame, a command or request, a promise or pledge, and a maxim or proverb.

In the late 10th or early 11th century, the noun took on its usual modern sense: a meaningful element of speech or writing used by itself or with others to form sentences.

The OED defines this sense more expansively. Here’s the first half of its definition: “Any of the sequences of one or more sounds or morphemes (intuitively recognized by native speakers as) constituting the basic units of meaningful speech used in forming a sentence or utterance in a language (and in most writing systems normally separated by spaces).”

The dictionary’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, is from an Old English and Latin passage in a grammar book written by the Benedictine abbot and scholar Ælfric of Eynsham (circa 950 to 1010):

“Of ðam syndon fif VOCALES, þæt synd clypiendlice: a, e, i, o, u. das fif stafas seteowjad heora naman purh hi sylfe and biitan dam stafum ne maeg nan word beon awriten.”

(“Of these [the letters of the alphabet] are five VOWELS, which are called: a, e, i, o, u. These five letters are named for their sounds, and no word can be written without them.”)

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin

On the truckling arts

Q: After watching the Manhunt TV series about the search for Lincoln’s assassin, I looked for further details online. Some articles used the phrase “truckling arts,” but I wasn’t able to find it in dictionaries. Can you help me understand what those particular “arts” are all about?

A: Someone skilled in the “truckling arts” is a sycophant, like Uriah Heep in the Dickens novel David Copperfield (1850) or Mr. Collins in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813).

The expression comes from the verb “truckle,” meaning to act in a subservient manner. But when the verb first appeared in the early 17th century it had a much different sense. To “truckle” was to sleep in a truckle bed, one rolled or slid under another when not in use.

As Merriam-Webster online explains, “the fact that truckle beds were pushed under larger standard beds had inspired a figurative sense of truckle: ‘to yield to the wishes of another’ or ‘to bend obsequiously.’ ”

The figurative usage is derived from an early 15th-century noun, “truckle,” which meant “a small wheel with a groove in its circumference round which a cord passes,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation is from a 1417 entry in the accounts of King Henry V of England: “j apparaille ix pullifs vj Trokles” (“I furnished 9 pulleys and 6 truckles”).

The term “truckle bed” appeared in the mid-15th century. The OED defines it as “a low bed running on truckles or castors, usually pushed beneath a high or ‘standing’ bed when not in use; a trundle-bed.”

The dictionary’s first citation, in Latin and Middle English, is from the Statutes of Magdalen College, University of Oxford (1459):

“Sint duo lecti principales, et duo lecti rotales, Trookyll beddys vulgariter nuncupati” (“There shall be two main beds and two wheeled beds, commonly called ‘truckle beds’ ”).

When the verb “truckle” appeared a century and a half later, it meant “to sleep in a truckle-bed,” the OED says, and was construed as being “under (beneath) the person occupying the high bed.”

The first Oxford example is from The Coxcomb, a comedy by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, believed written in the early 1600s: “I’le truckle heere Boy, give me another pillow.”

In the mid-1600s, the dictionary says, the adjective “truckling” appeared and meant “subordinate or inferior” or “meanly submissive, servile.”

The OED’s first citation is from a poem, “The Publique Faith,” in a collection of translations and poetry by the English writer Robert Fletcher:

“The elf dares peep abroad, the pretty foole / Can wag [move around] without a truckling standing-stoole [baby walker]” (from Ex Otio Negotium. Or, Martiall His Epigrams Translated: With Sundry Poems and Fancies, 1656, described by Fletcher as “the scattered Papers of my Youth”).

A decade later, Oxford says, the verb took on the figurative sense of  “to take a subordinate or inferior position; to be subservient, to submit, to give precedence.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a Sept. 2, 1667, entry in The Diary of Samuel Pepys: “[Sir Willam Coventry says] he will never, while he lives, truckle under anybody or any faction, but do just as his own reason and judgment directs.”

The OED doesn’t mention the phrase “truckling arts,” but the usage was apparently first recorded in the 19th century. The earliest example we’ve found is from the Secret History of the Court of England (1832), by Lady Anne Hamilton.

In this passage, she criticizes the actions of George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister:

“But, to anyone acquainted with the truckling arts of Mr. Canning, such conduct was no more than might have been expected.”

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Whence the silent ‘c’ in ‘indict’?

Q: Why isn’t the letter “c” pronounced in “indict”?

A: Interestingly, the verb “indict” wasn’t spelled or pronounced with a “c” when it first appeared in Middle English in the early 14th century. In fact it wasn’t even spelled with a “c” in Anglo-Norman or Old French, the sources of the English word.

The “c” crept into the spelling in the early 17th century when scholars apparently decided to make the verb look more like indictare, an Anglo-Latin term for “indict” that developed in medieval legal writing in England.

As it happens, indictare didn’t exist in Classical Latin, where a “t”-less version, indicare, meant “to give evidence against,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The medieval legal term combined the prefix “in-” with the Classical Latin dictare (“to say, declare, dictate”).

As the OED explains, the medieval legal term “seems to be merely the latinized form of the Anglo-Norman and Middle English verb.” In other words, it was apparently a misconceived scholarly attempt to make the Anglo-Norman and Old French look more Latin.

When “indict” first appeared in Middle English in the early 14th century as endyte or endite, Oxford says, it meant “to bring a charge” against someone or “to accuse (a person)” of a crime.

The earliest OED example, which we’ve expanded, is from Handlyng Synne (1303), a devotional work by the English historian and poet Robert Mannyng:

what shul we sey of þys dytours,
Þys fals men, þat beyn sysours,
Þat, for hate, a trewman wyl endyte,
And a þefe for syluer quyte?

(What shall we say of these accusers,
These false men that be jurymen,
But for hate will indict a true man,
And for silver acquit a thief?)

The first OED citation for “indict” spelled with a “c” is from a legal textbook: “If he bee indicted of Felonie, or Treason.” From The Lawyers Light: Or, a Due Direction for the Study of the Law for Methode (1629), by John Doddridge, an English lawyer, judge, and legislator.

In a post we wrote in 2022 about the silent “b” in English, we quote the classicist J. D. Sadler as saying, “There are many words borrowed from Latin through French where we have gone back to the Latin root to replace a letter lost in transit. Most involve the initial consonant in the groups bt, ct, lt, and pt.”

In his article, “Popular Etymology” (The Classical Journal, February-March 1971), Sadler gives “debt,” “doubt,” and “subtle” as examples, along with “arctic,” “perfect,” “subject,” “verdict,” “victuals,” “assault,” “fault,” “somersault,” and “receipt.”

In some of these words, he notes, the initial letter of the consonant cluster is mute, while in others “we have recovered the sound.” He adds that “perhaps words of this sort [those latinized retroactively] should be termed examples of scholarly etymology, rather than of popular etymology.”

We’ve written several other posts on silent letters, including one in 2024 about the final “e” in “dote,” “fate,” “hate,” and “note,” as well as one in 2009 on the “gh” in “caught,” “ought,” “thought,” and “bought.”

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