Category: Expression

Q: In editing a book on tramways in Australia, I came across a puzzling phrase in old correspondence: “in response to yours of even date.” I finally worked out that the response was to a letter sent the same day—that is, “of today’s date.” This reminded me of when we used to have two mail deliveries a day.

A: Yes, the phrase “of even date” means “of the same date” or “of today’s date,” according to the Collins English Dictionary.

Here the sense of “even” is equal in magnitude, number, or quantity—not “even” as in divisible by two.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the phrase as “common in U.S.; in England chiefly in legal language.”

Common in the United States? This is news to us, since we’ve never come across it before. Our guess is that it’s always been confined to legal or business language.

In fact, Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage (3rd ed.) would like to see “even date” less common in legal usage too.

Bryan A. Garner, a lexicographer and lawyer, writes that the usage “originated in commercialese but has affected lawyers’ writing as well. The best practice is to name the date a second time or to write the same date.”

Written examples for the usage date back at least as far as the mid-17th century. The earliest we’ve been able to find is from a legal document entitled “The Commission for Discoveries,” written by Oliver Cromwell and published in 1656:

“We have by Our Letters of Privy Seal, bearing even date with these presents, given full Warrant and Authority in that behalf, to the said Commissioners of, and for Our Treasury to allow and pay the same accordingly.”

The use of the phrase “even date” in the sense of “today’s date” or “the same date” was probably common in commercial writing during Cromwell’s time.

It was familiar enough to be included at least seven times in a clerical manual of the same era, The Clerk’s Tutor for Writing (1667), by Edward Cocker.

The manual is a collection of mock legal documents that illustrate the proper forms clerks should follow. Wherever one document refers to another of the same date, the phrase “bearing even date with these presents” is used—a formula that’s still found in legal writing today.

The OED cites only two examples of the expression “even date.” The earliest is from a document dated March 10, 1681: “Reciting an Indenture of even date therewith.”

Oxford also has this 19th-century example: “By deed of even date he covenanted to pay all calls in respect of the shares.” (From the Weekly Notes, London, 1885.)

In closing, we’ll quote a poem that appears, with many flourishes, in the front of that 17th-century clerks’ manual:

Your book, arme, pen, right forward place.
Your breast from board, yo[ur] head vpright.
Your fingers strait, minde every grace.
Move your pen freely, beare it light.
Full, small, height, depth, & distance mark.
These, with proportions, make a Clerk.

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Q: This question is too late for Thanksgiving, but you may find it useful for Christmas or New Year’s: Is the verb “dress” (to gut a dead deer) related to the noun “dressing” (the stuffing in a turkey)?

A: Yes, to “dress” a deer is etymologically related to the “dressing” that’s stuffed in a holiday turkey. And both senses are related to the verb “dress” (to put on clothes) and the noun “dress” (the garment).

All those senses are ultimately derived from directus, Latin for “straight” and the source of the English word “direct,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

So how did a Latin word for straight, you may ask, twist and turn in English to give us terms for stuffing a turkey and gutting a hunted deer in the field?

When Middle English borrowed the verb “dress” from Old French in the 1300s, the Oxford English Dictionary says, it meant to straighten, erect, prepare, or arrange. (In Old French, dresser meant to arrange.)

The “prepare” sense of “dress” in Middle English included “preparing for use as food, by making ready to cook” as well as seasoning, according to written examples in the OED.

This example is from Richard Cœur de Lyon, a Middle English romance written sometime before 1400: “Or ye come the flesch was dressyd” (“Before your coming, the flesh was dressed”).

And here’s a 1430 citation from a Middle English cookbook: “Put yn þe Oystrys þer-to, and dresse it forth” (“Put the oysters in [the pot of broth] and dress it”).

This example is from Nicholas Lichefield’s 1582 translation of a book by the Portuguese historian Fernão Lopes de Castanheda: “To dresse their meate with salt water.”

The food sense of the verb “dress” gave us the noun “dressing,” which the OED defines as “the seasoning substance used in cooking; stuffing; the sauce, etc., used in preparing a dish, a salad, etc.”

The earliest Oxford example is a 1504 entry in the Records of the Borough of Nottingham: “For floure and peper, and dressing.”

The food sense also gave us the adjective “dressed,” which refers to that which “has been prepared for eating; covered or mixed through with a sauce or dressing.”

The earliest OED example is from Pylgrimage of Perfection, a 1526 religious treatise by William Bonde: “Delycates [delicacies] or denty [dainty, or tasty] dressed meates.”

Getting back to “dress,” all of the Oxford examples for the culinary sense of the verb refer to the kind of preparation that one would do in a kitchen, not out in the field.

However, the OED has an entry for “field-dress,” which it describes as a “chiefly N. Amer.” verb meaning “to remove the internal organs from (hunted game) soon after the kill, primarily to aid the cooling of the carcass.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the usage is from Game in the Desert, a 1939 book by Jack O’Connor about hunting in the American Southwest and northern Mexico:

“For a hunting knife the sportsman should choose a good substantial pocket knife…. With it he can field-dress his game, bore holes in leather, [etc.].”

The most recent OED example is from the Nov. 6, 2008, issue of the New York Review of Books: “Another one of those cool Harvard Law Review cats who can’t field-dress a chicken, much less a moose.”

Although the verbal phrase “field-dress” may be more popular in the US than in the UK, as the OED asserts, we’ve found examples for the verb “dress” itself used in that sense on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1800s.

In Woodstock, an 1826 novel by Sir Walter Scott, for example, poachers “flayed and dressed the deer, and quartered him, and carried him off, and left the hide and horns.”

And in A Snow Storm in Humboldt, a story in the November 1892 issue of the Overland Monthly in San Francisco, a neighbor gives the narrator one of three deer he’s shot.

“He stayed but a few minutes,” the narrator says, “then I washed my dishes, dressed the deer, chopped wood, brought water from the spring, and prepared supper.”

Interestingly, the most common sense now of the verb “dress” (to put on one’s clothes) didn’t show up until the 1600s, according to citations in the OED.

We’ll skip ahead to this example from Henry Fielding’s 1749  novel Tom Jones: “He had barely Time left to dress himself.”

The use of the verb in the sense of dressing someone else, not oneself, showed up earlier. Here’s an example from the York Mystery Plays (circa 1440), a Middle English cycle of religious pageants: “Dresse vs in riche array.”

The noun “dress,” used to mean a one-piece garment worn by women and girls, showed up in the 1600s. The earliest OED citation is from The Fancies, Chast and Noble, a 1638 comedy by John Ford: “Your Dresses blab your vanities.”

Finally, here are some additional meanings for “dress” and “dressing” that evolved from the original senses of the verb in Middle English: to “dress” a wound (1471), to “dress” a garden with manure (1526), to “dress up” (1674), the “dressings” on a wound (1713), to “dress” for dinner (1741), to “dress” a shop window (1843), and to give someone a “dressing down” (1876).

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Q: Regarding your post about “under way,” please note that as the ship Pequod left port it was “getting under weigh.” This was a nautical metaphor that alluded to the process of pulling up anchor to begin a trip.

A: As we wrote in our 2009 post, the original term for a ship moving through the water was “under way,” not “under weigh.” Strictly speaking, a ship “weighs anchor” before getting “under way.”

The Oxford English Dictionary labels “under weigh” a common variant of “under way” that arose “from erroneous association with the phr. ‘to weigh anchor.’ ”

But a term that lexicographers label a “variant” is merely that. It’s not incorrect, just an alternative spelling.

In most dictionaries, the “variant” label means the spelling is acceptable in standard English, unless a more restrictive label, like “dialect” or “slang” or “offensive,” is also appended.

Both of these nautical expressions date from the 18th century. Oxford’s earliest example of “under way” in English writing is from 1743, and the earliest for “under weigh” is from 1777.

The dictionary describes the earlier “under way” as a nautical term from the Dutch onderweg or onderwegan.

In Dutch, a language from which English adapted many nautical terms, onder means “under, in the course of, etc.,” and weg means “way.” The phrase, the OED says, is “often spelt under weigh.”

What do standard American dictionaries say about “under weigh”?

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) treats “under weigh” as a variant derived “by folk etymology” from “under way.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says that the “weigh” here is a variant of “way” that was “influenced by weigh, as in weigh anchor.”

Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.) says much the same: in the phrase “under weigh,” the dictionary notes, the use of “weigh” for “way” is a variant spelling “modified by the notion of ‘weighing anchor.’ ”

The online Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary makes no mention at all of “under weigh.” It has only “under way,” and uses the example “The ship is under way.” Elsewhere, Random House defines “weigh anchor” as “to heave up a ship’s anchor in preparation for getting under way.”

In short, many dictionaries accept “under weigh” as a variant. And in our opinion it’s so firmly established in nautical usage that it’s no longer remarkable, though “under way” is preferable on etymological grounds.

As for your comment about Herman Melville’s use of “under weigh” in Moby-Dick, he wasn’t the only literary figure to choose the variant.

As Michael Quinion notes on his website World Wide Words, the usage “has the ghostly support of generations of writers.”

In addition to Melville, Quinion cites William Makepeace Thackeray, Captain Frederick Marryat, Washington Irving, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and C. S. Forester.

The mistaken spelling was perhaps inevitable. As Quinion says, “Some over-clever individuals connected with the sea almost immediately linked it erroneously with the phrase to weigh anchor.”

Here are the two earliest examples for each term, courtesy of the OED:

1743: “To prevent which, we do agree, that when Under-way they shall not separate.” (From A Voyage to the South-Seas in the Years 1740-1, by the shipmates John Bulkeley and John Cummins.)

1751: “We drew up the two boats, and set all hands at work to put the ship under way.” (From Robert Paltock’s novel The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins.)

1777: “I can assure you on the authority of Mr. Sullivan, that he saw him underweigh in the Bessborough and for the East Indies several Weeks ago.” (From a letter written by E. Draper, and later published in the journal Notes and Queries in 1944.)

1785: “This perverse wind has at last … come about to the east, so that we are all in high spirits getting under weigh.” (From a piece by Richard Cumberland, published in the Observer, London.)

As you can see, it didn’t take the variant long to catch on.

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Q: I’m accustomed to the use of “thing” with a modifier to mean a fad (“X is the next big thing” or “I’m sick of this X thing”), but now I’m seeing it used by itself in that sense (“X is now a thing”). Your thoughts?

A: We discussed the history of the word “thing” in a post a few years ago, but we didn’t mention the usage you’re asking about.

As far as we can tell, the use of “thing” by itself to mean a fad or trend cropped up in print in the mid-1980s. But before getting into all the trendy senses of “thing,” let’s look at the origins of this very adaptable word.

The noun “thing,” as we said in our earlier post, has roots that go back into pre-history, before written language, when a Germanic root reconstructed as thingam is believed to have referred to time.

In the Germanic languages, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, this ancient  term came to mean “appointed time” and then evolved into a “judicial or legislative assembly.”

That was the meaning of the word when it showed up in Old English, a sense that’s still seen in other Germanic languages. The Icelandic parliament, Ayto notes, “is known as the Althing (literally ‘general assembly’).”

“In English, however, it moved on through ‘subject for discussion at such an assembly’ to ‘subject in general, affair, matter’ and finally ‘entity, object,’ ” Ayto says.

All those senses—and many more—developed back in Anglo-Saxon times, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED has Old English examples for “thing” as subject, business, concern, matter, affair, deed, circumstance, fact, event, experience, incident, statement, idea, object, and so on.

In short, “thing” can mean almost anything. And some of its trendy contemporary meanings sound similar to senses that were around in the days of Ælfred the Great, the scholar-king who used the word quite a few times himself.

We don’t have the time or the stamina to discuss all the meanings of “thing” (it takes us more than 60 screenfuls to scroll through the OED’s online entry).

So let’s begin with the first usage you mentioned, “the next big thing,” which the OED defines as “the latest popular sensation; the newest trend in a particular field.”

The earliest Oxford example for the expression used this way is from a July 9, 1977, issue of Sounds weekly: “Chelsea mainman Gene October sez that the next big thing will be up and coming band New Hearts.”

However, we’ve found examples for “the next big thing” dating back to the late 1800s, when it originally referred to an important theatrical production.

The earliest example in our searches of online databases is from the June 2, 1883, issue of Punch: “I promised to put him into my next big thing.”

The modern sense of “the next big thing” as a fad or trend first showed up, we’ve found, in an 1894 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“The next ‘big thing’ to which I call attention, is the nostrum vendor. This dare-devil worries me; every mail brings some of his diabolical literature or some of his infernal stuff, ‘all free gratis and for nothing.’ ”

A 1912 article in the International Socialist Review, entitled “The Next Big Thing,” uses it to mean “big and important” campaigns that “chase each other off the stage of life” with “the speed of a quick change artist.”

And an April 24, 1922, article in the American Dyestuff Reporter describes radiotelephony as “beyond a doubt, ‘the next big thing.’ ”

In this phrase, the meaning of “thing” clearly has a lot in common with those Old English examples in the OED that we mentioned above.

And it brings to mind a sense of the word that appeared in the early 1700s—the use of the phrase “the thing” to mean “the embodiment or epitome of stylishness.”

The OED’s first citation for “the thing” is from a 1734 essay by Alexander Pope, but we prefer this example from Distress Upon Distress, a 1752 play by George Alexander Stevens:

“Cæsar had certainly something smart about him: Mark Anthony was a very jemmy Fellow, and Cleopatra quite the Thing to be sure.”

The OED also has citations dating back to the early 1900s for the colloquial use of “thing” after a noun, noun phrase, or adjective to mean “the matter or business which pertains to or is associated with the specified place, phenomenon, etc.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Skidoo! (1906), a collection of comic sketches by Hugh McHugh, the pen name of George V. Hobart, a director, producer, and writer on Broadway:

“When it comes to that poetry thing he thinks he can make Hank Longfellow beat it up a tree.”

The OED’s most recent citation is from the March 2003 issue of the gadget magazine T3: “There’s an FM/MW tuner inside to pick up any slowcoaches who haven’t cottoned on to the digital thing yet.”

Contributors to the Language Log website pointed out in 2011 that “thing” here is sometimes used to dismiss the subject as unimportant. One example cited is a quote, attributed to former President George H. W. Bush: “Oh, the vision thing.”

However, this OED citation, from a May 18, 1955, letter by Flannery O’Connor, is a more clear-cut example of the term used dismissively: “I will be real glad when this television thing is over with.”

Finally we come to the use of “thing” by itself to mean a fad or a trend. The earliest example we’ve found is from an article in the November 1984 issue of Musician magazine.

In the article, Garry Tallent, the bassist for the E Street Band, comments on a People magazine piece that compared the “clean-living” band to the Hardy Boys.

“It’s true,” Tallent is quoted as saying, “but, especially since People magazine, it’s become a thing.”

Tallent was ahead of the curve, since most of the examples we’ve found for the usage are from the last few years, as in this May 5, 2015, headline from the Huffington Post: “If ‘Dadbod’ Is a Thing, What About Mombod?”

What, you ask, are our thoughts about all this thinginess?

Well, the word “thing” has been doing its own thing since Anglo-Saxon days. And the thing about “thing” is that the newest incarnations often aren’t all that new.

In fact, the modern-sounding expression “do your thing” (or “do your own thing”) first showed up in an 1841 essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“But do your thing and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”

Emerson knew a thing or two.

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Q: What’s the deal with “askance”? It’s invariably used with “look” (or “watch”), as in “They looked askance at her unorthodox proposal.” Would it be correct to say someone “listened askance”?

A: It’s possible to read too much into a word, as you’ve done here. In the case of “askance,” you’re taking a figurative usage a bit too far.

The adverb “askance” literally means sideways or obliquely or askew. So on a strictly literal level, to “look askance” means to look out of the corner of one’s eye.

Of course, we all know that a sidelong glance can express skepticism or mistrust. That’s why for nearly 500 years the expression “to look askance” has had the figurative meaning “to be skeptical or mistrustful.”

Because this figurative usage is so well established, dictionaries (though not the Oxford English Dictionary) now define “askance” as meaning with skepticism, suspicion, or disapproval.

What some standard dictionaries fail to say is that in modern English, “askance” is rarely used except with verbs of seeing—as in “look askance,” “view askance,” or “eye askance.”

Only about half the dictionaries we’ve checked say specifically that “askance” is used in describing a look or a glance.

However, all of them, both British and American, use verbs of seeing to illustrate the use of the word: “tourists are looking askance” … “they eyed the stranger askance” … “the company may view askance your plan for early retirement,” and so on.

So the answer to your question is no—“askance” is not normally used with a verb like “listen.”

Figurative usages generally retain some element of reality, and people generally don’t listen sideways. Modifying such verbs with “askance” would stretch the figurative usage all out of shape.

“Askance” is interesting to etymologists because nobody knows for sure where it came from. Most sources, including the OED, date “askance” from the early 16th century and say its etymology is unknown.

However it developed, etymologists agree that the adverb meant sideways or askew when it first showed up.

The OED’s earliest example (written as “a scanche”) appeared in a French-English dictionary published in 1530. The English “a scanche” was defined in French as “de travers, en lorgnant” (askew, eying).

Another early literal usage cited by Oxford is this one from a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt, written sometime before his death in 1542: “For as she loked ascaunce, vnder a stole she spied two stemyng Ise [glowing eyes] In a rownde hed.”

While the adverb has been used throughout its history with verbs related to looking or viewing, it has occasionally been used with others, mostly in poetry. The OED has these examples, both from long poems:

“He bid his Angels turne ascanse / The Poles of Earth” (from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1667).

“They meet, they dart away, they wheel askance” (from James Beattie’s The Minstrel, 1771).

And the OED has a lone example of the adverb used with “speak” to mean “with a side or indirect meaning.” It comes from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Erechtheus, 1876):  “Journeying to the bright God’s shrine / Who speaks askance and darkling.”

But these days, “askance” is used almost exclusively in figurative expressions that include verbs related to sight. This is how the OED explains the usage:

“In the fig. phrases to look, eye, view askance the idea expressed has varied considerably, different writers using them to indicate disdain, envy, jealousy, and suspicion. The last of these is now the prevalent idea, and to look at, eye, view askance = to look at with mistrust.”

The earliest example for the figurative use of “askance” is from Edmund Spenser’s poem The Shepheardes Calender (1579): “That scornefully lookes askaunce.”

And Ben Jonson used the expression in his comic play Every Man Out of His Humor (1600): “Nay boy, neuer looke askaunce at me for the matter.”

Not all of the figurative examples in Oxford come from literature, though. In his book The Life and Growth of Language (1875), William Dwight Whitney wrote about “words … which come to be looked askance at and avoided.”

We mentioned above that the origin of “askance” has never been pinned down with any certainty.

The OED mentions some suggestions by philologists over the years: that it comes from the Italian a schiancio (“bias, slanting, sloping or slopingly, aslope, across”); or the Old Norse á ská (“askew”); or the Jutlandish ad-skands or West Frisian skân, schean, which could have a connection with the Dutch schuin (“sidewise, oblique”).

As Oxford explains in a note, “there is a whole group of words of more or less obscure origin” beginning with “ask-,” including “askance,” “askant,” “askew” and others that are now long dead: “askie,” “askile,” “askoye,” and “askoyne.”

These “ask-” words are “more or less closely connected in sense,” they appeared “mostly in the 16th or end of the 15th” century, and they “seem to have influenced one another in form,” the OED says.

But none of them can be “certainly” traced back to Old English, Oxford says. And “though they can nearly all be paralleled by words in various languages, evidence is wanting as to their actual origin and their relations to one another.”

A dissenting view comes from the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, which suggests that “askance” has a longer history.

Chambers maintains that the adverb developed from a late 14th-century conjunction found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—“ascaunce,” meaning “as if, pretending that.”

This word, Chambers says, “appears to be an alteration of earlier ase quances meaning ‘in such a way that, even as.’ ”

And Chambers traces “ase quances,” which appeared in the early 1300s, through Old French quances (as though) back to the Latin quasi (as if, as it were, almost).

While acknowledging that this explanation is “contrary to most sources,” Chambers says it “follows the semantic and structural evidence of the Middle English Dictionary.”

So “askance” may have originated as a 14th-century Latinate conjunction or it may have appeared as a 16th-century adverb traveling incognito. We’ll say only that etymologists disagree, and leave it at that.

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Q: Have you ever addressed the issue of “wait tables” rather than “wait on tables”? The dropping of the preposition gives me indigestion.

A: There’s no reason to get heartburn over this. The two versions showed up around the same time in the 19th century. And the one you prefer is itself a clipped version of a longer expression that appeared in the 1500s. Here’s the story

When the usage first showed up in English, it was “wait at the table” or “wait on the table,” according to written examples in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest example (with the preposition “at”) is from The Arbor of Amitie (1568), a collection of Thomas Howell’s poetry: “Yee and ich can, if neede be than, waight at the table well.”

The first “on” example is from Glasse of Governement, a 1575 play by George Gascoigne about the Prodigal Son: “Wee should haue beene fayne to wayte on the table, and to bee contented with their leauings after supper.”

By the early 1800s, the shortened version “wait at table” was being used. The first example in the OED is from Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813): “She had not prudence enough to hold her tongue before the servants, while they waited at table.”

An even shorter, preposition-less version, “wait table,” appeared later in the 1800s. The earliest Oxford example is from St. Ives, a novel that Robert Louis Stevenson left unfinished when he died in 1894:

“We had a good many pleasant passages as she waited table or warmed my bed for me.”

However, we’ve found several earlier examples of “wait table,” including this caption on an engraving in The Eccentric Traveler, an anonymous 1826 novel published in London: “James waiting Table at Don Gallina’s.”

Here’s another example, from The Laird of Fife, an 1828 novel by an anonymous author: “By the bye, didn’t you wait table there last Tuesday?”

And this one is from The Adventures of Barney Mahoney (1832), a novel written by Marianne Nicholson Croker and published under her husband’s name, Thomas Crofton Croker:

“Two maids an’ a man it is she keeps, an’ you’re to be the man, Barney,—that’s if yees gets it; an’ to clane plate, an’ knives, an’ shoes, an’ windy’s, an’ run errants, an’ wait table, an’ go out wid de carriage, an’ —”

All the examples we’ve seen so far—the longer as well as the shorter—use the singular “table,” probably because the expression had been used up until this time in reference to a domestic servant waiting at a single table in a home.

The two plural expressions you’ve asked about, “wait on tables” and “wait tables,” didn’t appear until well into the 1800s.

The earliest example we’ve found for “wait on tables” is in the transcript of an 1837 debate in Cincinnati between Alexander Campbell and the Rev. John B. Purcell about the Roman Catholic religion:

“The apostles exercised various functions—I admit it. But they substituted the deacons to wait on tables, and distribute the alms, so do their successors; Christ gave them powers adequate to every emergency.”

And here’s a more worldly example from an 1884 issue of New Peterson magazine, an American periodical intended for women: “How was I to know that gentlemen in white gloves ever wait on tables?”

Finally, this is from an 1894 issue of the Methodist Magazine: “Since you like so well to wait on tables, I’ll set you at that, though I doubt you are swift-footed enough for a waiter.”

The earliest example we’ve seen for the “on”-less “wait tables” is from Memoir of Jane Martin and Her Little Brother (1843), a novel written anonymously by “A Lady”:

“She made no reply, but in answer to my asking what attendance I could have, she said that her daughter had been accustomed to attend her lodgers, and added in an under tone, ‘but perhaps she was too godly now to wait tables or tidy rooms.’ ”

This example comes from a July 3, 1879, advertisement in the New York Herald: “Smart boy—wait tables—make himself useful [in] restaurants, and old man to carry signs.”

And this one appeared in a help-wanted ad from the Feb. 7, 1895, issue of the Omaha World Herald: “Wanted—boys to wait tables for their board. Webster hotel, 16th and Howard.”

Nowadays, when waiters do their table-waiting in restaurants, the plural “tables” is more common.

Here are the results of a few Google searches: “wait tables,” 225,000 hits; “wait at table,” 77,900; “wait on tables,” 72,300; “wait table,” 28,900, and “wait at tables,” 23,100.

We’ve found examples for all these usages cited without reservation in the “wait” entries of standard dictionaries, though none of the dictionaries include all of them.

In Divided by a Common Language: A Guide to British and American English (2005), Christopher Davies describes “wait on tables” as American English and “wait at tables” as British. That’s generally true, but not always, especially in the UK.

This is from a Dec. 13, 2003, column in the Telegraph (London): “Ben hasn’t had to babysit for slave wages. Or wait on tables for even less.”

And this is from a June 27, 2014, article in the Times (London): “Waiting on tables may be a more lucrative career for the better looking, with 40 per cent of British diners admitting to tipping attractive waiting staff double what they normally would.”

As for the etymology here, the verb “wait” ultimately comes from old Germanic words meaning to watch or guard. When it first appeared in English writing around 1200 in Vices and Virtues, a Middle English religious treatise, it meant to spy upon or lie in wait for.

It took nearly two centuries for “wait” to take on the usual contemporary sense of to remain in place or delay doing something.

The earliest known example is from “The Knight’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (circa 1390): “Now certes lord, to abiden your persence / Heere in this temple of the goddesse clemence / We haue been waytynge al this fourtenyght.”

And as we’ve noted above it took almost two centuries more for the verb “wait” to mean, in the words of the OED, “To serve as an attendant at table; to hand food and drink to persons at a meal.”

The noun “waiter,” which has had a similar evolution, meant one who watches when it showed up in the Wycliffe Bible around 1382.

It wasn’t until the mid-1600s that it took on the sense of “a man employed, at inns, hotels, eating-houses, or similar places, to wait upon the guests (esp. during meals),” according to the OED.

We’ll end with this modern-sounding example from The Parson’s Wedding, a 1664 comedy by the English dramatist Thomas Killigrew: “The sum is six pounds, and be pleased to remember the Waiters.”

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Q: I’ve often wondered if there’s a connection between the “stool” one sits on and the “stool” one evacuates. So I’m asking.

A: The noun “stool” has referred to a toilet seat for hundreds of years. Hence, the use of “stool” for the fecal matter discharged while sitting on the toilet. Here’s the story.

When the word “stool” showed up in Old English in the late 800s, it could refer to “any kind of seat for one person,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest example is from Pastoral Care (circa 897), King Ælfred’s translation of a treatise by Pope Gregory I. The king uses “stole” (the objective form of the Old English “stool”) in translating cathedra, Latin for “chair.”

In case you’re curious, the English word “cathedral” is a shortening of “cathedral church,” which refers to the church housing a bishop’s throne, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

The OED notes that “stool” was often used for “a chair of authority, state, or office; esp. a royal or episcopal throne,” though this sense is now obsolete.

However, a similar term, the noun “see” (from sedes, Latin for “seat”), is now used in reference to the Papacy. In church Latin, the Holy See is Sancta Sedes.

Getting back to that other throne, in the early 1400s, according to Oxford, the term “stool” took on the sense of “a seat enclosing a chamber utensil; a commode; more explicitly stool of ease”—in other words, a potty chair.

The dictionary cites James E. Thorold Rogers’s A History of Agriculture and Prices in England from 1259 to 1793, which includes two 1410 examples that refer to commodes as “close stoles.”

Although you don’t hear “stool” used much now for a commode, many standard dictionaries still include the usage.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, says it can mean “a toilet seat” or “a commode.”

The OED notes that the “groom of the stole” originally oversaw “the room containing the king’s close-stool.” And the dictionary’s citations indicate that the position  was often referred to as the “groom of the stool.”

Oxford has examples for this royal usage going back to the mid-1400s, but we’ll skip ahead to this 1526 citation from a collection of royal household ordinances and regulations:

“It is the King’s pleasure, that Mr. Norres shall be in the roome of Sir William Compton, not onely giveing his attendance as groome of the King’s stoole, but also in his bed-chamber.”

And here’s a more interesting citation, from John Harington’s A New Discovrse of a Stale Svbiect, Called the Metamorphosis of Aiax (1596):

“A seuenth (whome I woulde guesse by his writing to be groome of the stoole to some Prince of the bloud in France) writes a beastly treatise, only to examin what is the fittest thing to wipe withall, alledging that white paper is too smooth.”

Over the years, the position of “groom of the stole” evolved to become what the OED describes as “a high officer of the king’s household … ranking next below the vice-chamberlain of the household.”

Although the word “stole” here is sometimes said to be a reference to the royal robe or a stole-like ornament, the dictionary pooh-poohs this “unauthenticated sense” and says “there seems to be little doubt” that “the word is properly a variant of stool n.”

Not surprisingly, the use of “stool” in the potty-chair sense led to the “stool” that means “a discharge of fæcal matter” or “the matter discharged,” as the OED puts it.

Oxford’s earliest citation is from a 1598 translation of Jacques Guillemeau’s Frenche Chirurgie [Surgery]: “His vrine bloodye; his stoels like matter.”

Finally, if you’re wondering, the expression “to fall (or sit) between two stools” showed up in the late 1300s, meaning “to incur failure through vacillation between two different courses of action.”

We’ll end with this OED citation about the quandary facing Lily Dale in The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), the final book in Anthony Trollope’s six Barsetshire novels:

“She was like to fall to the ground between two stools—having two lovers, neither of whom could serve her turn.”

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Q: My boss and I have a disagreement about the phrase “at my instance,” which I think should be “at my insistence.” The first time he wrote “at my instance,” I thought it was an auto-corrected version of “at my insistence,” but he insists it’s a common phrase.  I’ve never heard it before, and to me, it grates. Who’s right?

A: Your boss is using “instance” correctly, though it’s not an everyday usage in American or British English.

The phrase “at the instance of” means something like “at the urging of,” “at the suggestion of,” or as you propose, “at the insistence of.”

Today, this sense of “instance” is found chiefly in legal documents, legislative transcripts, and formal business correspondence.

Oxford Dictionaries online includes this example: “In criminal causes, an appeal lies to the House of Lords at the instance of the defendant or prosecutor.”

Although four of the five standard dictionaries we’ve checked include “at the instance of,” the expression is no longer common in ordinary usage in the US or the UK. It still turns up, however, in everyday African and Indian English.

This meaning of “instance” has been in use since the 14th century. Here are a few representative examples of the exact phrase you asked about (“at my instance”) that we found in online searches:

1742: “It was at my instance that he was first made a page, then a querry [equerry], and afterwards groom of the bed-chamber to the Prince” (from a memoir by Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough).

1852: “At my instance he called on me several times, and entered at length into the discussion of subjects on which he proposed to employ his pen” (from a Baltimore editor’s reminiscence of Edgar Allan Poe).

1886: “In 1878, at my instance and largely through my efforts, the present Trades Assembly of Chicago and vicinity was organized” (from Autobiography of Albert R. Parsons).

2006: “At my instance we did a reorganisation that improved matters but unfortunately did not eliminate delays completely” (from The Story of My Life, by the Nigerian novelist T. M. Aluko).

2013: “His vision had become impaired and only the day before, at my instance, he had got his eyes examined by Dr. B. S. Rathke” (from an interview in an Indian daily newspaper, The Hindu.)

So how did an “instance” come to mean an urging or an entreaty? The story begins with the Latin verb instare, which means to be present—literally to stand (stare) upon (in-).

By extension, the notion of being present, at hand, or on the spot came to imply urgency, as John Ayto notes in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

Latin derivatives of instare reflect this complexity—like instantia (presence, urgency, a judicial pleading, an objection) and instantem (present, pressing, urgent).

In medieval times, Old French borrowings from the Latin included instancier (to plead), instant (imminent), and instance (eagerness, anxiety, solicitation, objection).

It was the Old French noun instance, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, that gave us the English “instance,” meaning an entreaty or an “urgency in speech or action.”

This sense of the word is now archaic, the OED says, except in the phrase “at the instance of (a person),” which means “at the solicitation, suit, instigation, or suggestion of.”

The OED’s earliest written example is from Prose Treatise (circa 1340), by the Yorkshire hermit and mystic Richard Rolle of Hampole: “At þe prayere and instaunce of oþer.”

And here’s a 19th-century citation: “The Emperor, at the Pope’s instance summoned Flavianus to Rome” (from Robert Hussey’s The Rise of Papal Power, 1851).

As we said, the noun “instance” has died away except in such phrases. In fact, most senses of the noun are now obsolete.

A notable exception is the use of “instance” to mean an example or illustration, a sense that came into English writing in the late 16th century.

The earliest such usage in the OED is from Angell Day’s The English Secretorie (1592), a letter-writing manual: “I will but giue you an instance of the same.”

This is the noun we use in the phrase “for instance,” which dates from the mid-17th century.

(We wrote a post in 2012 about “for instance” versus “for example,” and a post in 2011 about “instance,” “incident,” “incidence.”)

Oxford’s first written example of “for instance” is from Richard Ligon’s A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657): “The proof of this I found, by looking on the Stars. … For instance; There is a little Star, called Auriga [etc.].”

As a verb, too, “instance” is all but dead. One sense of the verb, to urge or entreat, has died out; another, to cite as an example, is still with us though seldom used today.

Here’s a 19th-century illustration of the latter usage, cited in Oxford: “I may instance olive oil, which is mischievous to all plants” (from Benjamin Jowett’s 1871 translation of Plato’s Dialogues).

Finally, since your boss uses “at my instance” in his official correspondence, you may be interested in a related business usage that has a venerable history, but isn’t seen much these days.

Since the mid-16th century, the word “instant”—in this case meaning “present”—has been used by letter writers to mean “of the current month.” So, as the OED explains, “the 10th instant” means “the tenth day of the current month.”

When the usage is seen, it’s generally abbreviated (“I received your invoice of the 15th inst.”). Similarly, “ult.” (for “ultimo”) means “of last month” and “prox.” (for “proximo”) means “of next month.”

When we see these terms now, they evoke images of ink-stained clerks copying letters by lamp light.

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Q: I was reading an article about Edward Snowden in the New Yorker the other day and stopped at the phrase “blindingly obvious.” My first reaction was that the combination of “blindingly” and “obvious” was an oxymoron. But then I thought that maybe “blindingly” was there to emphasize the obviousness. So, what do you think?

A: In discussing the former government contractor who leaked numerous classified documents, the article in the June 3, 2015, issue of the New Yorker says:

“The President and others have praised the U.S.A. Freedom Act, but haven’t mentioned the blindingly obvious fact that without Edward Snowden the law wouldn’t exist.”

No, the phrase “blindingly obvious” isn’t an oxymoron, a combination of contradictory or incongruous words. The word “blindingly” is being used here, as you suspect, as an intensifier.

The word “blind” has had many uses since it showed up in the West Saxon Gospels in the late 10th century as an adjective meaning sightless.

In addition to indicating sightlessness, it’s meant unguarded (as in “blind side”), reckless (“blind fury”), closed at one end (“blind alley”), flying by means of instruments (“blind flying” or “flying blind”), unquestioning (“blind loyalty”), unrevealed (“blind copy”), and so on.

The adverbs “blind,” “blindly” and “blindingly” have similarly strayed in varying degrees from the original sightless meaning of the adjective, giving us such phrases as “blind drunk,” “blindly accept,” and the one you’re asking about, “blindingly obvious.”

Cambridge Dictionaries Online says “blindingly” means extremely in the expression “blindingly obvious,” and Cambridge gives this example: “It’s blindingly obvious that she’s not happy at school.”

The online Macmillan Dictionary defines “blindingly obvious” as completely obvious, and includes this example: “Isn’t it blindingly obvious he’s in love with you?”

The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for “blindingly,” but it hasn’t been updated since 1887, when the OED was the NED (the New English Dictionary).

The earliest example, from an 1849 sermon by the English theologian Julius Charles Hare, uses the adverb loosely to mean in a blinding manner: “The darkness which lay blindingly on the hearts and souls of mankind.”

Although the OED doesn’t have any citations for “blindingly” used as an intensifier, we’ve found quite a few 19th-century examples in searches of literary databases.

This is from an 1892 article in the New Review, a British literary magazine, about Barrack-Room Ballads, a collection of songs and poems by Rudyard Kipling:

“Only a man of the most blindingly original genius could have written them, and I hope they may win the ear and heart of England, and make England more careful of her gallant children and defenders.”

And here’s an example from Harper’s Chicago and the World’s Fair (1893): “It was frightfully hot in Chicago, it was blindingly hot in the car, and it was hotter still in the country.”

And here’s another, from an 1898 article in the Bookman, a New York literary journal, commenting on the works of the American novelist and short-story writer John Fox Jr.:

“While ‘A Cumberland Vendetta’ is blindingly illiterate, ‘A Mountain Europa,’ truly the best thing he has written, is not.”

The earliest example we’ve found for the exact phrase “blindingly obvious” is from the June 14, 1919, issue of the New Statesman:

“Compared with this terrible and blindingly obvious fact, even the tale of German atrocities sinks into the position of an irrelevancy.”

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Q: I’m Dutch and I recently read (from someone claiming to be a native English speaker) that the use of “happy end” is a common mistake made by those not intimately familiar with the language. Instead “happy ending” should be used. Can you enlighten me?

A: In the phrase “happy ending,” as you know, “ending” is a gerund, an “-ing” word that’s formed from a verb but functions as a noun.

Both the noun “end” and the gerund “ending” mean, among other things, a conclusion. So “happy end” and “happy ending” would seem to mean the same thing.

Although both are technical correct, “happy ending” is the idiomatic phrase (the one used naturally by a native speaker) when referring to the happy conclusion of a novel, play, movie, and so on.

The earliest example of the expression in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Memorable Conceits, a 1602 translation of a book by the French writer and printer Gilles Corrozet:

“A good entrie or beginning is not all, without it haue a happie ending.” (In the original French, “happie ending” is heureuse issue.)

And here’s a citation from a May 10, 1748, letter by Samuel Richardson in which he discusses a scene from his recently published novel Clarissa:

“The greater Vulgar, as well as the less, had rather it had had what they call, an Happy Ending.”

The OED defines “happy ending” as “an ending in a novel, play, etc., in which the plot achieves a happy resolution (esp. by marriage, continued good health, etc.), of a type sometimes regarded as trite or conventional.”

The dictionary adds that in the US the phrase is also used for “an orgasm, esp. one experienced by a man after sexual stimulation given after (or during) a massage.”

The OED doesn’t have an example of this usage, but the comedian Jim Norton uses the phrase in the sexual sense in the title of his 2007 book, Happy Endings: The Tales of a Meaty-Breasted Zilch. The cover shows him lying on a massage table.

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