Month: December 2024

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English English language Etymology Language Linguistics Pronunciation Usage

Uh-oh, it’s the glottal stop

Q: There seems to be a proliferating use of the glottal stop in recent years in America. A word like “important” is pronounced as “impor-unt” To my ear at least, it sounds quite intentional and awkward, as opposed to a natural tendency to elide or soften a hard consonant. Can you shed any light on the history of this trend?

A: English speakers have been glottalizing the letter “t” since at least the mid-19th century. When the “t” is pronounced as a glottal stop, the air flow through the glottis, the area of the larynx that contains the vocal cords, stops, skips over the “t,” and is then released. The sound is often compared to the abrupt halt in the middle of the expression “Uh-oh!”

The pronunciation is common today in both American and British English. As far as we can tell, it was noted first in the UK in the mid-19th century, and in the US in the late 19th century.

The glottalization of “t” has been increasing in American English ever since. However, we haven’t noticed or seen reports of an unusual rise recently.

We suspect that the recent proliferation of “t” glottalization that you’ve sensed may be an example of the “recency illusion,” a term coined by the linguist Arnold Zwicky for “the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent.”

The earliest report of “t” glottalization we’ve found is from Visible Speech (1867), a book on phonetic notation in which the Scottish phonetician Alexander Melville Bell notes the glottal pronunciation of the “t” sound in western Scotland.

Bell, the father of Alexander Graham Bell, includes a chart entitled “Letter-Value of the Principal Consonant and Glide Symbols” that cites the pronunciation of “bu’er for butter (west of Scot.).”

Bell’s report on the use of the glottalized “t” in Scotland is cited in On Early English Pronunciation (Part 4, 1875), by Alexander John Ellis, and A Handbook of Phonetics (1877), by Henry Sweet.

In British English, the use of a glottal stop for the “t” sound in a word like “better” is now “found in many urban accents, notably London (Cockney), Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and others, and is increasingly accepted among educated young people,” according to the Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary (17th edition, 2006).

In American English, the “t” sound in a word like “butter” or “better” is usually pronounced with what linguists call a “flap” or “tap,” not with a glottal stop. This happens when the “t” follows a vowel and precedes an unstressed syllable.

The flap resembles a cross between the “t” and “d” sounds, but very much softened. An exaggerated version can be heard in movies where actors say “alligador” or “phodograph.”

The use of a glottal stop for “t” is most common in American English when the “t” comes just before an unstressed nasal syllable in words like “mitten,” “button,” “mountain,” or “important,” which sound like mi’n, bu’n, moun’n, and impor’nt.

The earliest report we’ve seen of “t” glottalization in American English is from a late 19th-century article referring to the use of the glottal stop for emphasis:

“The glottal stop is used by Americans, in general, only for the sake of extraordinary distinctness or emphasis.” From “English in America,” by the American philologist Charles Hall Grandgent, published in the German periodical Die Neueren Sprachen (The Modern Languages), February-March 1895.

However, glottalization wasn’t a significant factor in American English in the early 20th century, according to the pronunciation guide in Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (1909), edited by William Torrey Harris and F. Sturges Allen:

“The glottal stop is not usually noticed as an element in English speech, but is heard in certain languages and dialects, in North German, Danish, etc.”

The dictionary notes elsewhere that glottal stops “sometimes occur as elements of speech, but are not recognized in standard English.”

A recent study of glottalization in Vermont suggests that “t” glottalization in the US began with people inserting a glottal stop just before the letter “t” to reinforce the “t” sound.

In the study, “What Goes Around: Language Change and Glottalization in Vermont” (American Speech, August 2024), the linguists Julie Roberts and Monica Nesbitt compare two samples of speech, one from the 1930s and one from the 1990s.

In the earlier sample, only the youngest of 17 speakers replaced the “t” sound with a glottal stop. That speaker, as well as older ones, sometimes reinforced the “t” with a glottal stop, a usage the authors describe as “preglottalization.”

In the later sample, the use of a glottal stop to replace or reinforce the “t” sound was more common, but not as common as the standard pronunciation of “t”—that is, a sounded or “released t.”

The authors speculate that the replacement of the “t” with a glottal stop, “present in Vermont speech today, emerged at some point not long before or during the 1930s and may have been led by younger speakers.”

As far as we can tell, Americans began commenting on the use of the glottal stop for “t” in the 1940s, suggesting that the usage was fairly prevalent by then.

In Manual of American Dialects for Radio, Stage, Screen and Television (1947), Lewis Helmar Herman and Marguerite Shalett Herman describe the use of the “glottal stop” in New England, Appalachia, the Midwest, New York City, and in Black English. Here’s an excerpt from the section on New York:

“When the sound of ‘t’ is preceded by a vowel and followed by unstressed ‘le,’ ‘on,’ ‘en,’ ‘ing,’ or ‘ain,’ it is frequently replaced by the glottal stop (/) as in ‘bA:/l’ (battle), ‘kAH/n’ (cotton), ‘mi/n’ (mitten), ‘si/n’ (sitting), or ‘suhEE/n’ (certain).”

(The authors use “/” as a symbol for the glottal stop. The usual symbol now, found in the International Phonetic Alphabet, is “ʔ” and looks like a question mark without the dot at the bottom.)

As for today, the glottalized “t” is common across the US, though some linguistic studies have shown that it’s more common in the West and is used more often by women than men.

In “T-Glottalization in American English,” a paper published in American Speech in 2009, the linguists David Eddington and Michael Taylor address the use of the glottal stop for “t” in the phrase “right ankle.”

The authors found that “younger females use glottal stops much more often than older speakers and males. Women used more glottal stops than men in every age group except one, the youngest group of males.”

Eddington and Taylor note that this finding “is consistent with a large body of sociolinguistic evidence which shows that young women tend to be on the forefront of innovative linguistic change.”

The study also “found that speakers from the western U.S. glottalized more that non-Westerners,” but added that “whether this indicates a west-to-east spread of this phonetic feature is difficult to determine without more data.”

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

To unalive, or not to unalive

Q: I’m seeing “unalive” more and more online. I cannot recall ever hearing or seeing it before. Being a librarian, I searched and found it first in print in 1828 by Leigh Hunt. So apparently it isn’t new. I even rewatched Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch. No joy there. So what’s the story?

A: You’re probably seeing the use of “unalive” as a verb meaning to kill, a usage that first appeared about a dozen years ago.

However, the word “unalive” has been used for more than 200 years as an adjective meaning unmoved or unaffected.

The earliest use we’ve found is from The Caledonian Parnassus; a Museum of Original Scottish Songs (1812), by Willison Glass, who uses “unalive” in the untouched sense.

In his preface, the author doubts that “any reader of taste will rise from the perusal of even these short lucubrations, unalive to the measured melody of their versification, unaffected by the thoughts which they either disclose or suggest, or unprepared to acknowledge the discrimination and taste which appear in the execution.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense as “not fully susceptible or awake to something.” The dictionary’s first citation is the one you found, from Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828), by the poet and literary critic Leigh Hunt.

In that example, Hunt describes a passage in Shelley’s Scenes From the Faust of Goethe, Part 2 (1822) as a criticism of “dry, mechanical theorists, unalive to sentiment and fancy.”

(Those two early uses are the counterparts of “alive to,” meaning “aware or conscious of,” a usage the OED dates back to 1592.)

In the early 20th century, the dictionary says, the adjective “unalive” also took on the sense of “lacking in vitality; not living,” used literally at first and figuratively later.

The first literal citation is from a letter dated April 14, 1905, by the Scottish biblical scholar Marcus Dods: “How you can think yourself empty and unalive I don’t know” (from Later Letters of Marcus Dods, 1911).

The earliest figurative example is from Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The House in Paris (1935): “The street reflected the blind windows and a strip of unalive wet sky.”

In recent years, “unalive” has come to be used as a verb meaning to kill someone or oneself. But the OED, an etymological dictionary, doesn’t yet include that sense, and only one standard dictionary has recognized it so far.

Dictionary.com describes the verb as slang meaning “to kill (oneself or another person)” and has these two examples:

“The point of the game is to unalive all enemies before losing your last life token” … “Is it a cry for help when people on social media talk about unaliving themselves?”

The dictionary explains that the recent senses “are euphemisms to avoid censorship on the internet.” In its slang section, the dictionary adds that the term “is typically used as a way of circumventing social media platform rules that prohibit, remove, censor, or demonetize content that explicitly mentions killing or suicide.”

However, the earliest example we’ve seen for “unalive” used in the sense of to kill someone or oneself appeared first on cable television, and thus wasn’t originally an attempt to outwit the rules on social media.

As far as we can tell the verb first appeared in 2013 in Ultimate Spider-Man, an animated TV series on the cable network Disney XD, based on Marvel’s Spider-Man comics. In season two, episode 13, Deadpool tells Spidey that he wants to “unalive” Taskmaster:

Deadpool: We go into that compound, find Agent MacGuffin, snag the list, then unalive Taskmaster and his acolytes, capeesh?

Spider-Man: Wait, unalive them?

Deadpool: Yeah, yeah. Here’s the thing, I can’t really say the k-word out loud. It’s a weird mental tick. But we’re gonna destroy them, make them disappear, sleep them with the fishes. We’ll k-word them.

The term soon began appearing in online memes referring to the episode and in Marvel’s Deadpool comics. In early 2021, “unalive” began showing up as a verb on TikTok and the usage later spread to Instagram and other social media. Here are a few early TikTok sightings (we’ll omit the usernames):

“this is so embarrassing i just want 2 unalive myself” (Jan. 10, 2021) … “I would just write lol back if he was writing he would unalive” (April 20, 2021) … “someone unalive me” (May 28, 2021) … “What does ‘having a plan to unalive yourself’ mean?” (Oct. 19, 2021).

And here’s an Instagram example: “when shakespeare says ‘to be or not to be’ it’s peak literature but when I say to unalive or not to unalive suddenly I am ‘not well’ and need ‘therapy’ ” (Feb. 15, 2022).

 “Unalive” was so prevalent on social media that the American Dialect Society selected the word as its 2021 Euphemism of the Year. The ADS defined it as a “term used as a substitute for ‘suicide’ or ‘kill’ to avoid social media filters.”

The use of euphemisms to evade censorship on social media is sometimes referred to as “algospeak.” However, “unalive” has evolved and is now also used offline, primarily by young people who are uncomfortable speaking about death, according to the linguist Adam Aleksic.

“The function of ‘unalive’ has superseded its initial algospeak origins,” he told CNN (Aug. 17, 2024). “At this point, the kids using it in middle schools aren’t using it to avoid being banned. It’s really taken on a life of its own as a way for kids to feel comfortable expressing topics about death.”

Aleksic, known online as the Etymology Nerd, told CBC, the Canadian public broadcasting network (Aug. 11, 2024) that he had “talked to middle school teachers, where the kids are submitting essays on Hamlet unaliving himself.”

And the usage isn’t limited to young people. In a 2024 exhibit about the rock band Nirvana at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, a placard said Kurt Cobain, the band’s founder, lead singer and guitarist, had “un-alived himself” rather than “killed himself” or “committed suicide.” (The museum hasn’t responded to a request for a comment.)

Speaking of euphemisms, here’s the script of the “Dead Parrot” sketch in The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words (Vol 1, 1989), by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin:

“It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.”

And finally here’s a video of the sketch, written by Cleese and Chapman, and performed with a few ad libs by Cleese and Palin in 1969.

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Spelling Usage Word origin Writing

A stink over ‘odoriferous’

Q: I used to consider “odoriferous” a barbarous lengthening of “odiferous.” I was in my 30s when I deigned to look it up and discovered that the shortening “odiferous” was the barbarism. Pride goeth …

A: You’ll be surprised to hear this, but “odoriferous” and “odiferous” showed up in English around the same time in the late 15th century, and both adjectives have appeared in writing ever since. The longer form is recognized now by more standard dictionaries, but neither is very common.

Interestingly, both “odoriferous” and “odiferous” originally meant pleasant smelling, but the odor can now either be pleasant or unpleasant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED, an etymological dictionary, says the two terms originally described something “that bears or diffuses a pleasant scent; sweet-smelling; fragrant.” In later use, Oxford adds, they describe something “that has or emits a (pleasant or unpleasant) odour; strong-smelling; odorous.”

Some standard American dictionaries suggest the odor is usually unpleasant. American Heritage, for example, defines “odoriferous” as “having or giving off an odor, especially a strong or unpleasant one,” and gives this example: “an odoriferous bag of garbage.”

A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares words and phrases in digitized books, indicates that “odorous” appears more often than either “odoriferous” or “odiferous,” and specific adjectives like “fragrant” and “smelly” are even more popular.

The OED describes “odiferous” as a shortening of “odoriferous.” The two adjectives ultimately come from the classical Latin odorifer (sweet-smelling, fragrant). The dictionary’s earliest citation for “odoriferous” is from an English translation of an ancient Greek historical work:

“Such affluent abundaunce of so odoriferous spices Dame Nature hath accumylated and enriched theym with all.” From Bibliotheca Historica (circa 1487), John Skelton’s translation of Βιβλιοθήκη Ἱστορική, by the first-century historian known as Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily).

The OED’s first citation for “odiferous,” which the dictionary dates at sometime before 1500, is from “The Churl and the Bird,” John Lydgate’s translation of a French poem: “His smel Þt ben so swete and so odeferus.” The shortening was spelled “odeferus” and “odyferous,” as well as “odiferous,” in the 1500s.

Lydgate’s translation was first published by William Caxton around 1478, but the OED cites a paper that suggests the passage was among eight stanzas added later (“Lydgate’s ‘The Churl and the Bird,’ ” by  R. H. Bowers, Modern Language Notes, February 1934).

In the late 16th century, “odoriferous” took on a figurative sense, which the OED defines as “pleasing; agreeable; good.” The earliest citation uses the term in a legal sense:

“That which was in youre lawe, cleare, nete, precious, and odoriferous.” From The Familiar Epistles of Sir Anthony of Gueuara, Edward Hellowes’s translation, believed written around 1575, of Epístolas Familiares (1539), by Antonio de Guevara, a Spanish bishop and royal chronicler to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

However, the dictionary says the figurative sense is “now (usually): unpleasant, disgusting,” as in this citation from a movie review in Newsday, Feb. 2, 1990: “ ‘The whole operation stank like rotten eggs,’ says the narrator early in ‘Dog Tags.’ The whole movie’s not as odoriferous as that line would suggest, but it sure is an odd one.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Writing

We’ll tell you what

Q: My boss has a catchphrase, “I’ll tell you what,” and it’s driving me nuts. Is this something new? Where does it come from?

A: No, it’s not something new. In fact, the usage dates back to the 1500s and can be seen in the works of many respected writers.

When the expression first appeared, it was “used to introduce (and give some emphasis to) an observation or comment,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says “(I, I’ll, I will) tell you what” here has the sense of “I will tell you something; I will tell you what is relevant or pertinent.” It describes the usage as colloquial.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a British response, from around 1565, to a Roman Catholic appeal for Queen Elizabeth I to accept papal authority:

“As for Diuynitie, I wyll tell you what. it is so handled of .ii. men, in .ii. bookes, within these .ii. yeres, that better it had bene the gospel had neuer peped out.”

(From A Sight of the Portugall Pearle, Abraham Hartwell’s English translation of Britain’s Latin response, by Walter Haddon, to a Latin epistle by Jerónimo Osório, Bishop of Faro, Portugal.)

The next OED citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, a history play believed written in the late 1590s:

“My lord, Ile tell you what, If my yong Lord your sonne, haue not the day, for Vpon mine honor for a silken point, Ile giue my Barony, neuer talke of it.”

And here’s an Oxford example from Tennyson’s Harold (1877), a play about Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England: “I tell thee what, my child; Thou hast misread this merry dream of thine.”

In the 18th century, the dictionary says, the expression also came to be “used to introduce a suggestion or proposal: I will tell you what is to be done, what we might do, etc.”

The earliest OED citation for the new sense is from The Rehearsal: or, Bays in Petticoats, an 1753 comedy by “Mrs. [Catherine] Clive,” the English musical comedy star Kitty Clive:

“Oh, I’ll tell you what; let’s set Odelove upon her to enquire into the Plot of her Play.” The Rehearsal features Mrs. Hazard, a female playwright. (The noun “bay” was an old variant of “boy.”)

And here’s an expanded OED example from Robert Browning’s The Inn Album (1875): “Whereon how artlessly the happy flash / Followed, by inspiration! ‘Tell you what— / Let’s turn their flank, try things on t’other side!’ ”

Finally, here’s a citation from Of Human Bondage, a 1915 novel by W. Somerset Maugham: “I tell you what, I’ll try and come over to Paris again one of these days and I’ll look you up.”

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

‘Tuckered out’ and ‘tucked in’

Q: I often hear the term “tuckered out,” but not in any other tenses. My dictionary says “tucker” is a dress. I’m confused. What does “tuckered out” mean, where did it come from, and what are its other tenses?

A: The story begins back in Anglo-Saxon days, when the verb “tuck” (tucian in Old English) meant to punish, mistreat, or torment.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Old English Boethius, a late ninth- or early tenth-century translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (“The Consolation of Philosophy”), a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius:

“Lustlice hi woldon lætan þa rican hi tucian æfter hiora agnum willan” (“Gladly would they [the unwise] let the powerful torment them at will”).

The “punish” sense of “tuck” is now obsolete, the OED says, but in the Middle English of the late 14th century, the verb came to mean “to pull or gather up and confine” loose garments—a sense we use now when we “tuck in” our shirttails or “tuck in” a child at bedtime.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the new meaning is from the story of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, in Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women (circa 1385).

When Dido meets Aeneas and Achates in the wilderness, she asks if they’ve seen her sisters, out hunting “i-tukkid vp with arwis” (“[their skirts] tucked up with arrows”).

This “gather up” meaning of “tuck” apparently led to the use of “tucked up” to describe a tired horse or dog—a sense the OED defines as “having the flanks drawn in from hunger, malnutrition, or fatigue; hence, tired out, exhausted.”

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded here, describes the wild pariah dog: “They generally are very thin, and of a reddish-brown colour, with sharp-pointed ears, deep chest, and tucked-up flanks” (from The Dog, 1845, by the English veterinary surgeon William Youatt).

Meanwhile, the related verb “tucker” appeared in the US with the sense of “to tire, to weary.” The OED says it’s usually seen in the phrasal verb “tucker out,” especially its past participle “tuckered out,” meaning “worn out, exhausted.”

The earliest example we’ve seen, which uses the present participle (“tuckering”), is from an article in a New York literary journal about a shark hunt:

“There’s no sich thing as tuckering out your raal white shark: he’s all bone and sinners [sinews]” (The Knickerbocker, January 1836).

The earliest example we’ve found for the past participle is from an anonymous short story, “The Book Agent,” in The Rhode-Island Republican (Newport, RI), June 22, 1836:

“ ‘I thank you a thousand times,’ said the stranger, ‘I reckoned to have got to the tavern by sun down, but I havn’t, and as I am prodigiously tuckered out, I’ll stay, and thank ye into the bargain,’ following the clergyman into the house.”

The online Cambridge Dictionary has recent examples of the usage in the present tense (“it tuckers you out”) and in the present perfect (“the puppy has tuckered herself out”).

We haven’t been able to find an example of “tucker” used to mean a dress. However, it’s a now-obsolete term for a strip of gathered or pleated material, like a ruffle or frill, sewn in or around the top of a bodice (the upper part of a dress).

The earliest OED citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from a book about heraldry that defines “tucker” as “a narrow piece of Cloth Plain or Laced, which compasseth the top of a Womans Gown about the Neck part” (The Academy of Armory, 1688, by  Randle Holme).

This sense of “tucker” is seen, especially in British English, in the expression “one’s best bib and tucker,” meaning “one’s smartest clothes.”

In another clothing sense, the noun “tuck” has been used since the 14th century to mean one of several folds stitched into cloth to shorten, decorate, or tighten a garment.

The earliest OED citation is from The Testament of Love (1388), by Thomas Usk: “That no ianglyng may greue the lest tucke of thy hemmes” (“That no jangling [quarreling] may grieve [trouble] the least tuck of thy hems”).

(Usk, an English writer and bureaucrat caught up in the turbulent politics of the late 14th century, wrote the Testament in prison as an appeal for mercy. He was convicted of treason, hanged, and beheaded.)

We’ll end on a more palatable note—the use of “tuck” to mean “eat” or “eat heartily,” a sense that developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, perhaps from the “gather up” sense of the verb or the use of the noun “tuck” for a fishing net, a usage that appeared in the early 17th century.

The OED’s first citation for “tuck” used to mean “consume, swallow (food or drink)” is from Barham Downs (1784), a novel by the English writer Robert Bage: “We will dine together; tuck up a bottle or two of claret.”

The dictionary’s first example for “tuck” in the sense of “feed heartily or greedily; esp. with in, into,” uses the gerund (“tucking”): “Tom Sponge now began cramming unmercifully, exclaiming every three mouthfuls, ‘Rare tucking in, Sir William.’ ”

Finally, the Yorkshire schoolmaster Wackford Squeers uses the phrasal verb “tuck into” in this OED citation from the Dickens novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839): “If you’ll just let little Wackford tuck into something fat, I’ll be obliged to you.”

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