Month: November 2024

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English language Etymology Language Religion Usage Word origin Writing

‘Generally’ speaking

Q: I hope you can help me in my research. I am trying to find out what “generally” meant when this sentence was added to the Book of Common Prayer in 1604: “Two only, as generally necessary to salvation; that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.” Is this saying the two sacraments are usually necessary, or universally necessary?

A: Here’s how that passage appeared in 1604, when John Overall, Dean of St. Paul’s, added it to the children’s catechism in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer:

“Queſtion. How many Sacraments hath Chriſt ordained in his Church?

“Anſwere. Two onely as generally neceſſary to ſaluation, that is to ſay, Baptiſme, and the Supper of the Lord [Communion].”

(The letter “ſ,” or long “s,” an obsolete form of the lowercase “s,” appears throughout the passage, and “u” is pronounced as “v”—as in “ſaluation,” an old spelling of “salvation.”)

The adverb “generally” had three meanings in the early 1600s: (1) broadly speaking, (2) usually, and (3) universally. In fact, it had had those meanings since the 1300s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but the third sense is now considered archaic.

As for your question, we haven’t been able to find any record of an explanation by Overall or a contemporary as to which sense of “generally” was intended in the catechism.

Later Anglican writers have said “generally” is used in its “universal” sense in the catechism. Arthur W. Robinson, for example, has this explanation of the usage in The Church Catechism Explained (1895):

“ ‘Generally necessary’: i.e. universally necessary, necessary for all alike: obligatory in a way in which, for example, Holy Orders or Matrimony could not be said to be.”

The OED says the adverb “generally” was formed within English by adding the “-ly” suffix to the adjective “general.” The adjective, in turn, was ultimately derived from the Latin adjective generalis, which the OED defines as “common to the whole of a class or kind, generic, forming a group or class, of universal application.”

(In a Dec. 10, 2013 post about the phrase “in general,” we discuss the etymology of the word “general” in more detail.)

Getting back to your question, we think Overall, who delivered lectures in Latin as a professor of divinity at Cambridge, is likely to have intended “generally” in its “universal” sense, derived from the Latin adjective generalis. (The Latin adverb is generaliter.)

In fact, Overall, a High Church traditionalist, “had spoken Latin so long it was troublesome to him to speak English in a continued Oration” when he preached before Queen Elizabeth I, Thomas Fuller writes in The History of the Worthies of England (1662).

As for the three original senses of “generally” in English, all of them first appeared in Ayenbite of Inwyt (1340), a Middle English translation by Michel of Northgate of a French devotional guide, La Somme des Vices et des Vertus (1279), by Laurent du Bois. Here are the meanings, and their earliest citations:

1) broadly speaking: “Nou ich þe habbe aboue yssewed generalliche þe dingneté and þe worþ and þe guodnesse of uirtu and of charité” (“Now I have above generally shown the dignity and the worth and the goodness of virtue and of charity”).

(2) usually: “ ‘Zel al þet þou hest and yef hit þe poure,’ þet is þe uirtue þet þe holy writinge ret more generalliche” (“ ‘Sell all that you have and give it to the poor,’ that is the virtue that holy scripture teaches more generally”).

(3) universally: “Voulhede generalliche is ine eche zenne, vor no zenne ne is wyþoute uoulhede” (“Wickedness generally is in each sin, for no sin is indeed without wickedness”).

Interestingly, the Middle English title of the devotional manual mentioned above, Ayenbite of Inwyt, appears five times, altered a bit, in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).

The title literally means the “again-biting of inner wit,” but it’s usually translated as “Remorse of Conscience.” Joyce uses it in the sense of “conscience,” as in this example: “They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

A new angle on an old word

Q: When I encountered “orthogonal” years ago in geometry class, it meant perpendicular. In recent years, I hear it used in everyday English to mean “irrelevant.” How did this happen?

A: Yes, the old mathematical meaning of “orthogonal” has evolved over the years, but the sense you describe as “everyday” is not all that common, and certainly not heard every day.

The English adjective comes from Middle French, where orthogonal meant “having a right angle,” but the term ultimately comes ancient Greek, where ὀρθογώνιος (orthogonios) was “right-angled.”

The word first appeared in English in a 16th-century mathematical treatise, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. At the time, it also meant “right-angled.”

The earliest OED citation is from A Geometrical Practise, Named Pantometria, begun by the mathematician Leonard Digges sometime before his death about 1559 and finished in 1571 by his son, Thomas, also a mathematician:

“Of straight lined angles there are three kindes, the Orthogonall, the Obtuse and the Acute Angle.” The word “pantometria” (or “pantometry”) in the title of the treatise is an old term for “metrology,” the scientific study of measurement.

In the late 1600s, the OED says, “orthogonal” took on a somewhat wider sense of “relating to or involving right angles; at right angles (to something else).”

In the 19th and 20th centuries, it developed several other mathematical senses that aren’t relevant here. But one sense that appeared in the early 20th century—“statistically independent”—may be pertinent.

We think this sense could have led to a more general, but relatively uncommon meaning that we’ve found in only two standard dictionaries.

American Heritage online defines it as “very different or unrelated; sharply divergent.” The dictionary has this example: “Radical Islamists are ultimately seeking to create something orthogonal to our model of democracy” (from an article by the American national security expert Richard A. Clarke in The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2005).

Dictionary.com defines it as “having no bearing on the matter at hand; independent of or irrelevant to another thing or each other,” and has this example: “It’s an interesting question, but orthogonal to our exploration of the right to privacy.”

The OED, an etymological dictionary, doesn’t include this newer sense. As far as we can tell, it first appeared in the late 20th century.

Here’s an example that we’ve found from a lecture by the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna on Oct. 20, 1990, at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, CA:

“Art is this endeavor to leave the animal domain behind, to create another dimension, orthogonal to the concerns of ordinary history.”

And here’s a later example from Why People Believe Weird Things (2002), by the American science writer and historian Michael Shermer: “For the most part intelligence is orthogonal to and independent of belief.”

We especially like this discussion of “orthogonal” at the US Supreme Court on Jan. 11, 2010. Richard Friedman, a University of Michigan law professor, used the term in arguing for the plaintiffs in Briscoe v. Virginia:

Friedman: “I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging …”

Chief Justice John Roberts: “I’m sorry. Entirely what?”

Friedman, “Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.”

Roberts: “Oh.”

Justice Antonin Scalia: “What was that adjective? I liked that.”

Friedman: “Orthogonal.”

Roberts: “Orthogonal.”

Friedman: “Right, right.”

Scalia: “Orthogonal, ooh.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy: “I knew this case presented us a problem.”

Friedman: “I should have … I probably should have said …”

Scalia: “I think we should use that in the opinion.”

Friedman: “I thought … I thought I had seen it before.”

Roberts: “Or the dissent.”

(We cobbled this account together from reports in The Washington Post, the ABA Journal, The Volokh Conspiracy, and The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.)

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Cheeseparings from the moon

Q: In Can You Forgive Her (1864-65), one of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, a character complains about the “wretched cheeseparing Whig government.” How did “cheeseparing” come to mean penny-pinching?

A: When the term first appeared in the 16th century, it literally meant a paring, or shaving, from a rind of cheese.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an Anglican religious treatise that compares Roman Catholic relics to cheeseparings from the moon:

“Ye abused those that beleeued you, making them beleeue the Moone was made of a greene cheese, as they say: but were those blessed relikes so good as the cheese paring?” From The Supremacie of Christian Princes (1573), by John Bridges.

(Another treatise by Bridges, Defence of the Gouernment Established in the Church of Englande, 1587, includes an early version of a common proverb: “a foole and his money is soone parted.”)

The OED’s next “cheeseparing” citation is from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, believed written in the late 1590s. In the play, Falstaff says the thin, vain Justice Shallow looks “like a man made after supper of a cheese paring.”

In the 19th century, Oxford says, “cheeseparing” came to mean “saving money by making numerous small cuts or adjustments; rigorous economizing, esp. of a mean or parsimonious kind.”

Merriam-Webster online has this explanation: “Presumably, the practice of paring off the rind so as to waste the minimum of cheese was viewed as an excessive form of frugality.”

The first OED citation for the parsimonious sense is from an article in The Parliamentary Review (July 19, 1834) on the retirement of Charles Grey, second Earl Grey, as Prime Minister.

During his four years in office, the article says, “There has been much cheeseparing concerning poor clerks, and small offices.”

In case you’re curious, the second Earl Grey is apparently the source of the name of the bergamot-flavored tea blend, though the earliest known evidence for the name dates from several decades after his death, according to the OED.

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English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Usage Writing

‘We’-ism in fact and fiction

Q: When did using the “royal we” become popular among writers of fiction and nonfiction?

A: Writers have been using the pronoun “we” to refer to themselves since Anglo-Saxon days. But the usage was primarily seen in nonfiction until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, and others began using it in fiction.

In Old English, the singular “we” was used by writers as well as sovereigns and other leaders. The earliest sovereign example in the Oxford English Dictionary describes the third-century Roman Emperor Decius speaking to Pope Sixtus II:

 “Witodlice we beorgað þinre ylde, gehyrsuma urum bebodum & geoffra þam undeadlicum godum” (“Verily we have regard for thy age: obey our commands, and offer to the immortal gods”). From The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, written around 990 by the Benedictine Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham.

The next example, which we’ve expanded here, is from the Old English epic Beowulf, believed to date from the early 700s, though the earliest surviving manuscript is from around 1000. Beowulf, a battle leader, not a sovereign, speaks here after singlehandedly killing the monster Grendel:

“We þæt ellenweorc estum miclum, feohtan fremedon, frecne geneðdon eafoð uncuþes” (“We have engaged in a noble endeavor and have been greatly favored in this battle we dared to face against the unknown”).

Writers of nonfiction have regularly used the pronoun “we” in reference to themselves since the usage first appeared in Old English. The first OED example is from the Old English Orosius, a late 9th- or early 10th-century translation of  Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Pagano Libri VII (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans):

“Nu hæbbe we scortlice gesæd ymbe Asia londgemæro” (“Now we have briefly spoken about the boundaries of Asia”).

As for fiction, the earliest examples we’ve found are from the 18th century. We especially like this one from The History of Tom Jones (1749), a novel by Henry Fielding:

“As we do not disdain to borrow wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending us either, we have condescended to take a hint from these honest victuallers, and shall prefix not only a general bill of fare to our whole entertainment, but shall likewise give the reader particular bills to every course which is to be served up in this and the ensuing volumes.”

The earliest fiction example cited in the OED is from Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): “We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect, with which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy days.”

And we found this example in The History of Pendennis (1848–50), by William Makepeace Thackeray: “Arthur was about sixteen years old, we have said, when he began to reign.”

The practice of referring to oneself in the plural is called “nosism.” The word comes from the Latin nos (“we”), so it literally means we-ism.

We wrote a post in 2011 about the history of the term as well as its usage, which in various senses is referred to as “the royal we,” “the editorial we,” “the authorial we,” “the corporate we,” and so on.

We also published a post in 2017 on the use of “we” in the sense of “you,” as in a nurse asking a patient, “How are we feeling today?” or a primary-school teacher telling a student, “Now we won’t talk in class, will we?” These practices are known as “the hospital we” and the “kindergarten we.”

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