Month: September 2024

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage

People who look like me

Q: I often hear Blacks speak of “people who look like me” in referring to opportunities or possibilities. When I hear the expression, I think of doppelgangers or lookalikes. Any thoughts about this?

A: As far as we can tell, the expression “people who look like me” first appeared in the late 19th century and did indeed refer to a doppelgänger—in this case, an imagined rather than a ghostly counterpart of a living person.

The earliest example we’ve found is from “The Chain of Destiny,” a short story by Edith Robinson in the August 1894 issue of Outing, an illustrated monthly magazine in Boston.

A man claims to have seen a woman at a boarding house, but when she denies being there he backs down and says “the figure was merely the result of my own imagination.”

“Then how could you have conjured up a face and figure the counterpart of mine?” the woman asks  “Do you often see people who look like me?”

A similar expression, “someone who looks like me,” showed up in the early 20th century and also referred to a person who looked like another. The earliest example we’ve seen is from A Tax on Bachelors, a 1905 comedy by the playwright Harold Hale.

When a man tells a woman that he’s seen her meeting with a criminal suspect, she replies: “Oh, no, sir. You may have seen someone who looks like me, but I am a stranger in this part of the country.”

In the usage you’re asking about, the two expressions are used figuratively for a racial, ethnic, sexual, or other group, not an individual who looks like someone else.

The usage is an illustration of synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, as in “the American woman” standing for all American women.

In the figurative use of “people who look like me,” the speaker represents an entire group. The usage appears to date from the late 1960s, and the earliest example we’ve seen uses it in a racial sense:

“Most of the islands of the West Indies have a majority of whatever the term is now—I hear Negro and I hear black, but people who look like me.” From remarks by Dr. Karl A. Smith at a conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund, New York, Oct. 28-30, 1969, published the following year in Demographic Aspects of the Black Community, edited by Clyde V. Kiser.

The figurative usage became increasingly more common in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, according a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books. Here are a few examples:

  • “I will be sexist, ageist, and ethnocentric as I decide to accept a ride from a white middle-class woman with two little children. I will overgeneralize that all mothers are trustworthy and that someone who looks like me will indeed behave as I would in a similar situation.” From “ ‘Vive la Difference!’ and Communication Processes,” a paper by Alleen Pace Nilsen in The English Journal (March 1985).
  • “It’s sad to me that the new books of the Nancy Drew series still consist of an all-white world where other people who look like me are still on the fringes of society.” From “Fixing Nancy Drew: African American Strategies for Reading,” a chapter by Njeri Fuller in Rediscovering Nancy Drew (1995), edited by Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tilman Romalov.
  • “It is when the land [Antigua] is completely empty that I and the people who look like me begin to make an appearance.” From My Garden (Book), 1999, by Jamaica Kincaid.
  • “The people who look like me at the conferences I attend are often the ones serving the dinner or the ones cleaning up the room.” From an interview with Pat Mora in A Poet’s Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets (2003), by Bruce Allen Dick.

The writer and educator Ben Yagoda notes that the figurative usage “picked up speed with the election of Barack Obama in 2008.”

In a Jan. 21, 2021, post on his blog, he says Obama “inspired two similarly titled books: The President Looks Like Me & Other Poems, by Tony Medina, and Somebody in the White House Looks Like Me, by Rosetta L. Hopkins.”

“But as with much else,” Yagoda adds, “it was probably Michelle Obama who cemented the phrase in the national consciousness,” with her remarks at the opening of the Whitney Museum’s new building in New York on April 30, 2015:

“You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood.”

We’ll end with the opening lines of “Brown Girl, Brown Girl,” a 2017 poem that Leslé Honoré updated in 2020 after Kamala Harris was elected Vice President:

Brown girl Brown girl
what do you see?
i see a Vice President
that looks like me

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English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Usage Word origin Writing

Can ‘difficult’ be a verb?

Q: I found this unusual use of “difficult” in an old account of a Scottish broadsword match: “both gentlemen displayed such equality of proficiency, that the Judges were difficulted to decide betwixt them.”

A: Unusual indeed, but not when The Sun, a now-defunct evening newspaper in London, published that report on the broadsword match in Edinburgh on Dec. 5, 1828.

As it turns out, the use of “difficult” as a verb first appeared in the mid-15th century and is still seen occasionally, though it’s now considered rare or obsolete.

The usage is derived from three sources: the adjective “difficult,” the Middle French verb difficulter (to make difficult), and the post-classical Latin difficultare (to make difficult or obstruct), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When the verb first appeared in late Middle English, it meant “to obscure the sense of; to make difficult to understand,” a meaning that’s now obsolete, the OED says. The present participle “difficultyng” is used in the dictionary’s earliest citation:

“Suche teching is forgid, feynyd and veyn curiosite, difficultyng, harding and derking goddis lawe” (“Such teaching is a forged, fiendish, and vain cleverness, difficulting, hardening and darkening God’s law”). From The Donet, a religious treatise written around 1445 by Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester.

[The word “donet” in the title of Bishop Pecock’s tract comes from the name of Ælius Donatus, author of Ars Grammatica, a fourth-century introduction to Latin grammar. The now-obsolete term was used for a while to mean an introduction to any subject—in Pecock’s case, theology.]

In the early 17th century, the verb “difficult” took on the sense or “to make (an action or process) difficult; to hinder, impede,” a usage that the OED labels “now rare.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a letter written Dec. 29, 1608, in which Sir Charles Cornwallis, the British ambassador in Spain, complains to the Lords of the Privy Council about his lack of access in Madrid compared to the openness shown to the Spanish ambassador in London:

“Your Lordships will not hold so great an inequallity sufferrable; that the King’s Ambassador there should not only have a free Correspondencye with his Master’s Subjects, but a contynuall Resort and Conference with those of his Majesties; then to me here, that one should be restrayned and the other difficulted.”

In the mid-17th century, the verb came to mean “to cause problems or difficulties for (a person, organization, etc.); to hamper, obstruct; (also) to perplex. Usually in passive.” The OED says the usage was frequently seen in Scottish English, but is “now rare.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from An History of the Civill Warres of England, Betweene the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke (1641), a translation by Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth, of a work by the Italian historian Giovanni Francesco Biondi:

“Being thus difficulted [Italian in tai difficultà], the defendants demanded a truce untill Saint Iohn Baptists-day.”

Finally, here are two 21st-century examples cited by the OED:

“The appearance of the optic disc varies widely among healthy individuals, difficulting the recognition of pathological changes.” From The Optic Nerve in Glaucoma (2006), by Remo Susanna Jr. and Felipe A. Medeiros. (We’ve expanded the citation.)

“It difficulted me greatly that I could think of no way to get Theo into the house.” From Florence and Giles (2010), a Gothic tale by the British novelist John Harding.

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English language Etymology Expression Grammar Linguistics Usage Word origin Writing

Do let’s have another drink!

Q: I was stopped by this sentence in an Angela Thirkell novel: “Do let’s do this again.” What is the first “do” doing there?

A: That “do” in The Old Bank House (1949) is an auxiliary verb used to give polite encouragement to a command. It’s a very old usage that dates back to Anglo-Saxon days.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the “do” here is used “with an affirmative imperative: adding emphasis or urgency to an entreaty, exhortation, or command.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from the Gospel of John, 8:11, in the West Saxon Gospels, also known as the Wessex Gospels, dating from the late 900s:

“Do ga & ne synga þu næfre ma” (“Do go and not sin thou never more”).

As for the second “do” in your sentence, the one that means to perform an action, the first OED citation is from the Metres of Boethius, an Old English verse translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (“The Consolation of Philosophy”), a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius:

“Hio sceal eft don þæt hio ær dyde” (“It shall do again what it ere did”). Boethius is saying that any living creature will eventually return to the nature it was born with.

In case you’re curious about the imperative “let’s” in the sentence you questioned (“Do let’s do this again”), we wrote a post in 2012 that discusses the history of the contraction “let’s.”

We’ll end now with a recent example from the title of a book by the Northern Irish historian, author, and broadcaster Gareth Russell:

Do Let’s Have Another Drink! The Dry Wit and Fizzy Life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (2022).

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