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English English language Etymology Expression Usage Word origin

Hairsplitting: blonde vs. brunette

Q:   Why do we say a blonde has blonde hair, but we never say a brunette has brunette hair? It’s always brown. Also, most nouns that describe people by hair color, certainly blonde and brunette, apply to women exclusively.

A: In answer to your first question, each of these words—“blond” (or “blonde”) and “brunet” (or “brunette”)—is both a noun and an adjective, according to standard dictionaries.

So it’s legitimate to say a person has “brunet” (or “brunette”) hair, although the word is used mostly as a noun (“She is a brunette”), and less often as an adjective (“She has brunette hair”).

Why isn’t “brunet” or “brunette” used more often as an adjective? Probably because “brown,” a good old Anglo-Saxon word, does a better job (“She has brown hair”). It’s a simpler, more familiar adjective, so there’s little need for “brunet” or “brunette.”

“Blond” or “blonde,” on the other hand, is an indispensable adjective, since there’s no better substitute.

Besides, it covers a lot of territory, from platinum to light chestnut, unlike some of the wordier alternatives: “yellow-haired,” “golden-haired,” “flaxen-haired,” “sandy-haired,” etc.

Now, about those spellings. The pairs are pronounced alike, but the different endings reflect the masculine and feminine forms in French.

In American English, according to dictionaries and usage guides, the nouns “blond” and “brunet” are used in reference to boys and men, while “blonde” and “brunette” are applied to girls and women.

The adjectives may or may not reflect gender—some guides recommend “blond” and “brunet” for both sexes, while some call for gendered adjectives.

 In modern British usage, the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “the form blonde is now preferred in all senses.”

As we hinted above, these words came into English from French, but their earlier sources were not Gallic.

The French blond (feminine blonde) can be traced to the medieval Latin blondus or blundus (yellow).

The origin of the medieval Latin is uncertain, according to the OED, but other etymological sources suggest convincingly that it’s ultimately Germanic.

The French brunet (feminine brunette) is a diminutive of brun (brown), a word that came into French around 1100 from Germanic sources—“brown” was brun in Old English.

So when modern English borrowed “brunet” and “brunette” from French, it was simply borrowing a form of a word it already had—at least as an adjective.

In English, “blond”/“blonde” was first on the scene, and “brunet”/“brunette” came later.

An adjective spelled “blounde” was recorded a couple of times in the 1480s, but it soon disappeared. The adjective was re-introduced into English from modern French in the 17th century in masculine and feminine forms.

The noun first showed up in the 1820s in the feminine form. The earliest OED citation, from an 1822 issue of the Edinburgh Review, refers to “Brenda, the laughing blue-eyed blonde.”

The dictionary defines the term as “a person with blond hair; one with light or ‘fair’ hair and the corresponding complexion; esp. a woman, in which case spelt blonde.”

The adjective “brunette” was first recorded in English in 1712, the noun in 1713. But the masculine “brunet” wasn’t recorded until the late 19th century, Oxford says, the adjective in 1887 and the noun in 1890.

Those dates should tell you something. Even in olden times, a woman was more likely to be called a “blonde” or “brunette” than a man was to be called a “blond” or a “brunet.”

And today, as you suggest, when we hear those nouns we assume that a woman is being referred to, not a man.

We’ve seen some scholarly studies on hair-color stereotypes, but nothing on this specific subject. However, we assume that sexual stereotyping is responsible for the tendency to characterize women, but generally not men, in terms of hair color.

Seldom do we hear a short man with red hair described as “a petite redhead,” or a tall man with brown hair called “a leggy brunet,” or a buff, light-haired guy characterized as “a shapely blond.” 

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Pedal to the mettle?

Q: A recent mini-review of a film on the New York Times television page used the expression “pedal to the mettle.” I’ve always thought it was “pedal to the metal.” Is the former a proper usage?

A: The recent TV brief that caught your attention quotes the first sentence of an Aug. 23, 2012, review in the Times of the movie Premium Rush, a screwball thriller about a New York City bicycle messenger:

“Pushing pedal to the mettle and its breezily thin, goofy story to the breaking point, ‘Premium Rush’ provides just about all the late summer air-conditioned relief you could hope for.”

You’re right that the correct expression is “pedal to the metal,” but the Times reviewer may have deliberately taken creative liberties here, inspired by the mettle of the biker, who runs “a gantlet of darting cars, buses, trucks and pedestrians” while dodging a crooked cop.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the colloquial expression “pedal to the metal,” which originated in the United States in the 1970s, was used first “in the context of driving, later also in extended use.”

In a literal sense, the “pedal” in the expression is a vehicle’s gas pedal, and the “metal” is the floorboard. (Putting the pedal to the metal is the same as “flooring” it.)

This may have started as a Citizens Band radio term used by truckers. We found the expression in a glossary of CB lingo published in the July 1976 issue of Popular Mechanics: “Pedal to the metal: Accelerator to the floor.” 

It also appears in books on CB radio published that year, and we found one mention from the year before, suggesting that the usage was well established in the CB world by the mid-70s. 

The phrase is used both literally and figuratively as an adjective, an adverb, and a verb.

The OED defines the adjective phrase—usually hyphenated, “pedal-to-the-metal”—as meaning “high-speed, fast-paced; reckless, unrestrained.”

The adverbial phrase—often worded as “with the pedal to the metal”—means “at top speed; headlong, recklessly,” according to Oxford.

And the OED defines the verb phrase (“to put the pedal to the metal”) as meaning “to accelerate, to drive at top speed; (in extended use) to proceed very rapidly or recklessly; to perform to one’s full capacity.”

The OED’s earliest published citation for the phrase is from a 1976 issue of Time magazine: “Up to 3,500 fans will … watch these two ‘pedal-to-the-metal’ drivers bump fenders as they scream around the track.”

Another 1976 citation, this one from the National Lampoon, uses the phrase as a verb: “Once again D.D. puts the pedal to the metal.”

This 1987 quotation, from Jon Franklin’s book Molecules of the Mind, uses the phrase as an adverb: “Our world was an eighteen-wheeler full of dynamite, careening down the highway with the pedal to the metal.”

This more figurative sense of the phrase comes from the Chicago Tribune (1998): “[He] is heading pedal-to-the-metal into matrimony.”

When expressions are used figuratively, people sometimes lose sight of the original meaning of the words, which accounts for phrases like “pedal to the mettle” used mistakenly—not in jest.

Although “mettle” is sometimes misused for “metal,” the opposite is true too, as when we read of someone “on his metal” or “showing his metal.”

The proper phrases are “on his mettle” (prepared to do his best) and “testing his mettle” (showing his best qualities).

The noun “mettle” means a combination of qualities—spirit, determination, courage, strength of character, and so on. As the OED says, it’s “the ‘stuff’ of which one is made, regarded as an indication of one’s character.”

Interestingly, “metal” and “mettle” have separate meanings now, but they began life as different spellings of the same word.

“Mettle” first showed up in the 16th century as a variant spelling of the much older term “metal,” which English borrowed from Old French in the 1200s.

But by the early 18th century “mettle” had become established as the proper spelling for the metaphorical sense of “metal,” meaning “the material from which a person is made,” to quote the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

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Is fun infectious or contagious?

Q: A mentor of mine, an MD, taught me that a contagious disease spreads by contact between people while an infectious one doesn’t need contact. This would suggest that laughter or fun is “contagious,” not “infectious.” Other usage gurus are a bit vague, but I hope to find your usual precision on this one.  

A: Medline Plus, the online medical dictionary from the National Institutes of Health, generally agrees with your mentor. It defines “contagious” as “communicable by contact,” and “infectious” as “capable of causing infection.”

Of course the two terms aren’t mutually exclusive. As William Arthur Hagan explains in The Infectious Diseases of Domestic Animals (1943), “All contagious diseases are also infectious, but it does not follow that all infectious diseases are contagious.”

Although many people use the two terms interchangeably, the definitions for “contagious” and “infectious” in standard dictionaries are similar to those in medical references.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, defines “contagious” as “transmissible by direct or indirect contact,” and “infectious” as “capable of causing infection.”

However, both terms have strayed from those senses when used figuratively, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.).

The lexicographer R. W. Burchfield, writing in Fowler’s, discusses the figurative evolution of “contagious” and “infectious”:

“In figurative uses, contagious tends to be used of both pleasant and unpleasant things (in the OED and OED files of corruption, folly, guilt, panic, and suffering, but also laughter, shyness, and vigour), whereas infectious is mainly restricted to pleasant things (enthusiasm, good humour, laughter, sense of fun, simple delight, virtue, and zeal).”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage agrees that in recent figurative usage “contagious can be used of pleasant and unpleasant things, but infectious is almost always used of pleasant things.”

So, “laughter” and “fun” can be described as either “contagious” or “infectious,” though they’re more likely to be called “infectious.”

Now, let’s look at the history of these two adjectives.

English adapted the word “contagious” from the Old French contagieus in the 1300s, but the ultimate source is the Latin noun contagion, which refers to touching and contact as well as contagion.

In the OED’s earliest example, from Chaucer’s 1374 translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiæ, “contagious” is used to describe the corruption of the soul by being in contact with the body:

“Whan I lost my memorie by the contagious coniunccioun of the body with the soule.” (We’ve replaced the runic letter thorn with “th” throughout.) 

By the early 1400s, the adjective was being used in its medical sense. in Lanfranc’s Science of Cirurgie (circa 1400), leprosy is referred to as “oon of the syknessis that ben contagious.” (We’ve replaced a thorn here with “th.”)

In the 1600s, according to OED citations, people began using “contagious” figuratively to describe all sorts of things “communicated from one to another or to others.”

The dictionary’s first example is from A Treatise of Seraphic Love (1660), by Robert Boyle: “If our Friends do not allay our Love or Affection by unwelcome Actions, or their contagious Sufferings.”

The next citation is from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Well understood Of Eve, whose Eye darted contagious Fire.”

As for “infectious,” English adapted the term from Anglo-Norman and Middle French in the 1500s, but the ultimate source is inficere, Latin for to dye, stain, infect, imbue, or corrupt.

Originally, according to the OED, the English term referred to “causing or spreading disease, esp. of an epidemic nature.” Later, it came to be used more widely to mean capable of “causing or transmitting infection.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “infectious” is from a 1534 treatise on epidemic disease by Thomas Paynell, an English friar who wrote on literary and medical subjects:

“For from suche infected bodies commethe infectious and venemous fumes and vapours, the whiche do infecte and corrupte the aire.”

Soon, according to OED citations, the term was being used figuratively to mean “tending or liable to infect or contaminate character, morals,” but that sense is now considered rare.

By the early 1600s, the adjective took on its modern figurative sense of “having the quality of spreading from one to another; easily communicable.”

The earliest Oxford example is from The Maid’s Tragedy, a 1619 play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher: “She carries with her an infectious griefe, / That strikes all her beholders.”

The next citation, from John Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), uses the term positively: “Through the bright Quire th’ infectious Vertue ran. All dropp’d their Tears.”

We’ll end with a more recent example from a 1988 issue of Rugby News: He’s very infectious and the sort of guy people want to follow.”

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Are you in our wheelhouse?

Q: I’ve noticed the term “wheelhouse” used (or misused) in strange ways. For example, a boxer is said to be within his opponent’s “wheelhouse” or reach. And a politician’s sphere of influence is his “wheelhouse.” Thanks for any information you can render.

A: The noun “wheelhouse” has had quite a few meanings over the last 200 years. You’ve noticed a couple of recent, figurative usages that emerged in the 20th century.

Are they misuses? No, just idioms, or peculiarities of language, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.).

The Oxford English Dictionary says “wheel-house” (spelled “wheelhouse” in most American dictionaries) was first recorded in the early 19th century when it meant a building for storing cart wheels.

The dictionary’s only citation for this sense of the word appeared in an 1808 book about agriculture in the English county of Devon: “The wheel-house under the barn, 25 feet square.”

The word’s principal sense emerged in the mid-19th century, when it meant “a structure enclosing a large wheel,” like a steering wheel, water wheel, or paddle wheel.

Thus, a “wheelhouse” could be a pilothouse on a boat or ship, a part of a mill, or “the paddle-box of a steam-boat,” the OED says.

Oxford has several citations for these uses of the word. The earliest is from the American writer Joseph Holt Ingraham’s travel memoir The South-west (1835):

“The pilot (as the helms-man is here termed) stands in his lonely wheel-house.”

In his book When Charles I Was King (1896), Joseph Smith Fletcher uses the term in reference to a structure for a water wheel: “The mill at Wentbridge, where the stream was pouring through the wheel-house like a cataract.”

The OED’s most recent example is this 1976 citation from a newspaper in Southampton, England, the Southern Evening Echo: “On the roof of the main building is a full size replica of a ship’s wheelhouse which is used for training.”

But “wheelhouse” didn’t stop there. December 2013 draft additions to the OED record a pair of 20th-century meanings.  

The first originated in baseball, where “wheelhouse” means “the area of the strike zone where a particular batter is able to hit the ball most forcefully or successfully.” The dictionary describes this usage as North American.

 The OED’s earliest citation is from a 1959 sports story in the San Francisco Chronicle: “He had a couple that came right into the wheelhouse—the kind he used to knock out of sight—and he fouled ’em off.”

Another newspaper, the Portland (Maine) Press-Herald, provided this 1998 example: “It was a great play. … I just gave him a yell and he put it in my wheelhouse and I got a good shot off.”

And H. G. (Buzz) Bissinger used the word in his baseball book Three Nights in August (2006): “He’ll pound any pitch that ventures into his wheelhouse.”

The term leapt from sportswriting to everyday language in the 1980s. In this new, figurative sense, “wheelhouse” means “the field in which a person excels; one’s strongest interest or ability,” the OED says.

Oxford has several colorful examples of this new sense of the word:

1987:  “He told me he … couldn’t play reggae. Of course he could, but it wasn’t his wheelhouse, and he wanted to keep his playing honest” (from the magazine Musician).

1998: “Here was Brooklyn congressman Chuck Schumer speaking at NYU about gun control, his wheelhouse issue” (from New York Magazine).

2004: “When you’re doing a romantic comedy, you’re in Meg Ryan’s wheelhouse” (from Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures).

2010: “ ‘This is right in our wheelhouse,’ said … Apache’s chairman and chief executive, in an interview. ‘This is what we do for a living’ ” (from the Wall Street Journal).

This seems like a logical progression for “wheelhouse”—from a captain’s domain to a hitter’s sweet spot to anyone’s strong suit or chief interest.

As for your examples, the reference to a boxer’s “wheelhouse” seems to be an expansion of baseball’s sweet-spot sense while the use of the term for a politician’s sphere of influence seems to fall under the strong-suit sense.

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English English language Etymology Expression Usage Word origin

Why is a blond kid a towhead?

Q: I just caught the tail end of Pat’s comments on WNYC about the term “towhead.” I was at a colonial mill in Tarrytown, NY, when the docent explained that the term comes from the light color of flax, which was used to make “towrope” for canal barges.

A: The “tow” in “towhead,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “the fibre of flax, hemp, or jute prepared for spinning.”

Since flax is light in color, blond people (especially children) are sometimes referred to as “towheads” or “towheaded,” expressions first recorded in the 19th century.

The “tow” in the “towrope” (or “towline”) used to pull a canal barge is a horse of another color. The OED says it’s derived from togian, an Old English word meaning to pull or drag.

As for “towhead” (also spelled “tow head” or “tow-head”) and “towheaded” (also “tow-headed”), Oxford has several citations, including an 1884 reference in Harper’s Magazine to “tow-headed children rolling about in the orchards.”

If you remember, Pat mentioned on the air that mistaken spellings (or hearings) of these “tow” terms can be humorous. She once read of “a cute little two-headed boy.”

A caller to the program said she used to think the expression was “toe headed,” and couldn’t imagine what such a phrase meant. 

The noun “tow” used in the fiber sense came into English in the 14th century, but its earlier sources remain uncertain.

The word is “perhaps related” to the Old Norse noun , which meant “uncleansed wool or flax, unworked fibre of thread,” the OED says.

“The original sense may have been ‘textile fibre’ generally,” Oxford adds.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins ventures another suggestion—that “tow” was borrowed from a word in Middle Low German, touw.

Ayto says the term “probably went back to the pre-historic Germanic base tow-, taw-,” meaning to make or prepare “in the specialized sense ‘make yarn from wool, spin.’ ”

The “towrope” mentioned by the docent at the mill may once have been made of tow fiber, but its name comes from the verb “tow” (to pull), which dates back to about the year 1000.

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An Aramaean at the bar

Q: I’m curious if anybody has discovered a link between the English word “barring” and the Aramaic bar. I believe the Aramaic term, which means outside, is the source of the English word. The “bar” in “bar mitzvah” technically means “son of,” which refers to the son being outside the father (bar is the Aramaic form of the Hebrew ben).

A: We’ve discussed the word “barring” on our blog in connection with phrases like “barring fire or flood” and “barring unforeseen circumstances.”

But we didn’t consider the etymology of “barring,” which in the phrases above is a preposition meaning “excluding from consideration, leaving out of account, omitting, excepting, except,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The usage was first recorded in the late 15th century. Three centuries later, people began using the shorter form “bar” in a similar way, as in the common phrase “bar none.”

The OED suggests that this shortening of “barring” to “bar” was influenced by two other prepositions— “save” and “except,” which are shortened versions of “saving” and “excepting.”

The prepositions “bar” and “barring” developed from a similar sense of the verb “bar,” meaning “to exclude from consideration, set aside,” according to the OED.

This sense of the word, dating from the late 15th century, is descended from the original, 13th-century meaning of the verb—to make fast with bars.

The verb “bar” came from the earlier, 12-century noun, which originally meant “a stake or rod of iron or wood used to fasten a gate, door, hatch, etc.,” the OED says.

Today, the noun has three principal meanings: (1) something, like a rod or band, that’s longer than it is thick or wide; (2) something that obstructs or confines, like the related word “barrier”; and (3) a place enclosed by a rail or barrier, which explains the use of “bar” in reference to courts of law.

That third meaning, according to the OED, also led to the use of “bar” for “an inn, or other place of refreshment.” Initially, the dictionary says, the term referred to a “barrier or counter, over which drink (or food) is served out to customers, in an inn, hotel, or tavern.”

The etymology of the English noun “bar” is a bit skimpy.

The OED says the word (first spelled “barre”) came into Middle English in the 1100s from the Old French barre, which acquired it from the Late Latin barra.

The big question here is, where did the Late Latin barra come from? The OED says it’s “of unknown origin.” And with that, unfortunately, the trail goes cold.

It may be true, as you suggest, that the English “bar” comes from Aramaic (a wide family of related Semitic languages and dialects). But we can’t find any evidence of a definitive connection.

The noun pronounced “bar” in Aramaic means “son” or “son of” and is common in names. Though it appears in Hebrew names and in the phrase “bar mitzvah”—“son of the commandment”—the normal Hebrew equivalent of “son” is ben (the Arabic is ibn).

However, it’s interesting to note that there is a preposition in Aramaic, pronounced “bar min,” and meaning “except for,”  “aside from,” or “outside of.”

You can find the Aramaic preposition (transliterated as br mn), along with citations from ancient texts, in the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, which has been a work in progress at the Hebrew Union College since 1986.

Certainly the existence of that Aramaic preposition raises enticing possibilities. But, as we’ve said before, mere similarity is not proof of an etymological connection.

Ancient texts are always being rediscovered, though, and perhaps one of them will someday offer evidence that Aramaic is indeed the source of the Late Latin noun barra. We could then claim an ultimate Aramaic ancestor for the English “bar” and “barring.”

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English English language Expression Grammar Linguistics Usage

A perfect infinitive

Q: I wonder if  Lara Logan’s grammar was correct when she apologized on 60 Minutes for using a questionable source: “It was a mistake to include him in our report.” Should she have said “to have included”? I’ve been studying modern Greek for several years, and deciphering another language makes me question my understanding of my own. Do you answer emails or should I check your blog for an answer?

A: Yes, we do directly answer the emails sent to us by readers like you. Later, we edit these questions plus our responses, and publish them on our blog. (The questioners remain anonymous.)

Now, on to your question about Lara Logan’s apology for her Oct. 27, 2013, report on 60 minutes about the attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, the year before.   

What she said in her Nov. 10, 2013, apology—“it was a mistake to include him in our report”—was grammatically correct. There was no need say “to have included” instead of “to include.”

The phrase “to have included” is a perfect infinitive, a construction that’s used in tandem with the main verb of a sentence. The perfect infinitive generally refers to an action that has happened earlier than the action of the main verb.

But in this case, the two actions were simultaneous: making the mistake and including him in the report. They amounted to the same thing.

Since there was no difference in the timing of the actions, the simple infinitive “to include” is appropriate.

The infinitive is an interesting creature. It’s a form of verb, but it functions like a noun because it refers to an action as a thing in itself.

A simple infinitive (like “to include”) is sometimes called a present infinitive, and a perfect infinitive (like “to have included”) is sometimes called a present-perfect infinitive.

But those labels are misleading because they sound like tenses. And strictly speaking, infinitives have no tense.

Infinitives do, however, take on a sense of time in relation to the main verb in the sentence.

A simple infinitive refers to an action that coincides in time with the action of the main verb. Here are some examples, with the timing indicated in brackets:

● She likes [now] to study [now].

● She liked [then] to study [then].

● She had always liked [then] to study [then].

● She would have liked [then] to study [then].

Note that the simple infinitive (“to study”) is appropriate in each sentence because the  timing of the actions referred to—the studying and the liking—are simultaneous.

A perfect infinitive, on the other hand, is appropriate when the timing of the actions is different, as in these examples:

● She appeared [then] to have studied [earlier].

● She would like [now] to have studied [then].

● She is believed [now] to have studied [then].

● She will want [later] to have studied [earlier].

● She intended [then] to have studied [at some point before now].

So in nearly all cases, the timing of the perfect infinitive and the main verb are dissimilar.

The timing matches, however, when a perfect infinitive is the subject of the sentence and the verb is what linguists call a “past counterfactual conditional”—a “would have” verb referring to an action that never happened. Here’s an example:

● “To have studied would have been wiser for her.”

Patrick J. Duffley describes the peculiar relationship between perfect infinitives and “would have” verbs in his paper “The Gerund and the to-Infinitive as Subject,” published in the Journal of English Linguistics (2003).

Here, he suggests, the perfect infinitive is used to describe “nonreal” actions “in order to situate hypothetical events before the present moment.”

We use the conjunction “if” in a similar way, he says. In effect, a perfect infinitive like “to have studied” signals a meaning similar to “if she had studied.” 

Now let’s return to Logan’s sentence on 60 Minutes: “It was a mistake to include him in our report.”

The two actions—making the mistake and including him in the report—are clearly one and the same.

They not only happened at the same time, but they’re placed in apposition (that is, they’re the equivalent of one another).

We’ve written about apposition before on our blog, including posts in 2011 and 2013.

Since for all practical purposes the two actions coincided, there was no need to use a perfect infinitive (“to have included”).

However, Logan would have been justified in using a perfect infinitive in a sentence like this: “It was wrong [in the past] to include his comments and not to have confirmed [earlier] them beforehand.”

A perfect infinitive would also have been justified if the mistake never happened: “To have included him in our report would have been wrong.”

There are a couple of other points to be made about a sentence like “It was a mistake to include him in our report.” 

Although the nominal subject is the pronoun “it,” the logical subject is the infinitive phrase “to include him in our report.”

Sometimes “it,” as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, is “placed before the verb as anticipatory ‘dummy’ subject, with the logical subject of the sentence as complement.”

Logan’s sentence is a perfect example. The word order places the logical subject—the infinitive phrase—in the position of complement. As a result, the slot of the subject must be filled, and “it” serves the purpose.

One might also write the sentence this way, putting the subject before the verb: “To include him in our report was a mistake.”

Many people don’t realize that an infinitive or infinitive phrase can function as a noun. As such, it can be the subject of a sentence—or, as we’ve written before on the blog, the object of a verb.

The OED notes that a sentence with the dummy subject “it” can have an infinitive phrase as its logical subject. Here are a few of the examples that Oxford cites:

“It was necessary to make a choice.” (From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The History of England From the Accession of James II, 1849.)

“It has been found possible to render voting perfectly secret and to provide for a scrutiny.” (From the Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed., 1875.)   

“It is important to get Wheatsworth Crackers with your bowl of milk or ‘half and half.’ ” (From an ad in the New York Times, 1923.)   

“It’s hard to reconcile the control-freak in his nature with the hyper-adrenalinated kid in front of the camera.” (From a London newspaper, the Independent, 1997.)

Here are a few more examples of our own (without the “dummy” subject). 

Infinitival subjects: “To do the right thing is my ambition” … “To leave was not polite.”

Infinitival objects: “My hope was to do the right thing” … “I never intended to leave.”

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Using “one” for “a” or “an”

Q: At a drugstore here in Hawaii we often hear over a loudspeaker the word “one” used in place of “a” or “an.” For example, “We need ONE manager in the photo department.” Is this pidgin English or does it have a basis in historical English?

A: It’s not surprising that a person living in Hawaii would hear “one” used in place of the indefinite article “a” or “an.”

This regionalism is characteristic of what linguists call Hawaii Creole English, and at least one scholar has attributed it to the influence of Cantonese.

We should mention that the dialect you’re hearing isn’t properly a pidgin—a dialect that has no native speakers, like a trading jargon used for business purposes.

Instead, linguists call it a creole because it has expanded, stabilized over time, and become a native tongue learned by children. So what was once a pidgin developed into a creole about a century ago. 

The roots of Hawaii Creole English extend back into the late 18th century, as Hawaii began to emerge as a trading and plantation center.

We won’t attempt to explain the development of this dialect, a subject much debated by linguists over the past 40 years.

It’s enough to know that many tongues besides native Hawaiian have been spoken on the islands in the last two centuries—the South Seas jargon of early sailors plus many varieties of pidgin English brought by traders and plantation workers from China, Japan, Europe, and other Pacific islands.

The feature you’ve noticed—the use of “one” as the indefinite article—was first recorded in Hawaii in 1838, according to the Australian linguist Jeff Siegel.

In his paper “Substrate Influence in Hawaii Creole English,” published in the journal Language in Society in 2000, Siegel notes that “the use of one as an ‘indefinite article’ was one of the features of Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) brought to Hawaii.”

“Pidgin Hawaiian, spoken by most Chinese in Hawaii in the 19th century, also used the numeral one (akahi) as an indefinite article (in contrast to Standard Hawaiian),” Siegel writes.

He traces this usage to Cantonese, which “optionally uses the word yat ‘one’ ” in indefinite noun phrases.

“It is likely that this feature of Cantonese accounts for the origin of the corresponding use of one in CPE [Chinese Pidgin English],” he writes, “and it could have been responsible for reinforcing its continued use in Hawaii as well.”

Two earlier scholars, John E. Reinecke and Aiko Tokimasa, have also written about “one” in place of “a” or “an” in Hawaii.

“In careless speech, one is used as the indefinite article,” they wrote in “The English Dialect of Hawaii,” published in the journal American Speech in 1934.

You also asked whether the Hawaiian usage has any basis in historical English.

As a matter of fact, there was a time when “one” served a double purpose in our language, too—it was both the number and the indefinite article.

That changed in the Middle Ages when the uses of the word were separated and the article (“a,” “an”) was split off.

You might even say that English is unusual in this respect.

In many languages the word for “one,” as John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins points out, “is used as the indefinite article, but in English the numeral one has become differentiated from the article a, an.”

“An,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, originated as an unstressed form of “one,” and “a” developed in the 1100s as the form used before a consonant.

But the differentiation between “an” and “a” didn’t become universal for quite some time.

“An” was still used before “y” and “w” (as in “an woman”) until the 1400s, Chambers says. In addition, “an” was “used before h in a stressed syllable (an hundred) down to the 1600s and is still affected occasionally before h today,” Chambers adds.

“One,” meanwhile, has three general senses in modern English:

(1) It’s an adjective meaning either the number or undivided (“one apple” … “with one voice” … “we are one”). 

(2) It’s a pronoun meaning a single person or thing (“one never knows” … “I’ll take that one” … “one of us”).

 3) It’s a noun for the number (“odds of four to one” … “one o’clock” … “chapter one”).

However, the adjective “one” is also sometimes used colloquially, the OED says, “as a more emphatic substitute for the indefinite article.”

Examples of this emphatic usage include “He’s one tough customer” and “It’s one hell of a blizzard.”

But nowadays “one” isn’t used in the ordinary sense of “a” or “an,” except in regional pockets.

The OED says it’s chiefly found in the English spoken in India, the Caribbean, and parts of the United States—namely South Carolina, Georgia, and, as you already know, Hawaii.

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Is the cheese blue or bleu?

Q: I was always a snob and looked down on the poor souls who referred to “bleu cheese” as “blue cheese.”  Now “blue” seems to be the preferred spelling. Did this misspelling become acceptable because “bleu” seemed like a mistake to most Americans?

A: You’ll be dismayed to hear this, but the phrase “blue cheese” showed up in English a century and a half before the Frenchified “bleu cheese” version.

In fact, the phrase “blue cheese” may have appeared in English before fromage bleu made its appearance in French. Here’s the story.

The earliest example of the phrase “blue cheese” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an Aug. 3, 1787, entry in The Torrington Diaries, an account of John Byng Torrington’s travels in England and Wales:

“I eat to day at dinner, and at supper, some excellent blue cheese … which … resembles, both in color and taste, the blue mold of Cheshire cheese.”

It wasn’t until the 20th century that “bleu cheese” showed up. The earliest examples that we could find were from the 1940s.

A 1941 issue of the journal Dairy Industries, for example, notes that “Frenchmen are no longer particularly interested in Argentine bleu cheese.” (Argentine bleu cheese? Who knew?)

Interestingly, the only citation for “bleu cheese” in the OED is from this quip by Ogden Nash in You Can’t Get There From Here (1957): “Every time the menu lists bleu cheese I want to order fromage blue, / Don’t you?”

The earliest example of fromage bleu that we could find in a search of French works in the Google Books database was in Huit Jours d’Absence, an 1821 book by H. Saint-Thomas.

In gushing over a cheesemonger’s creations, the author writes that nous mangeon avec délices (“we eat with delight”) the delicacies from the marchand de fromage bleu (“the blue-cheese merchant”).

But even if it turns out that there are earlier examples of fromage bleu out there, we see no reason why an English speaker should refer to all blue cheeses as “bleu cheeses.”

The three best-known blue cheeses are probably Roquefort (French), Gorgonzola (Italian), and Stilton (English).

It would be just as silly to refer to Gorgonzola as a “bleu cheese” or un fromage bleu as it would be to use either term for Stilton.

As for Roquefort, why shouldn’t an American (good speller or bad) call it a “blue cheese”? After all, the cheese is French, not the speaker.

Update: A French reader of the blog points out that “we rarely say fromage bleu. Instead, we say bleu, du bleu, or bleu de [place where it was made].”

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The nowness of “right now”

Q: Whence cometh “right now”?  Our newscasters in Detroit use it all the time and this drives me batty. What’s wrong with just plain old “now”? Any light you can shed would be appreciated.

A: Just about any usage can get on one’s nerves if used too much, but we don’t believe “right” is redundant in the adverbial phrase “right now.”

Here the adverb “right” is an intensifier that emphasizes the nowness—the sense of being in the present—of the adverb “now.”

In fact, the word “right” has been used for emphasis since the earliest days of Old English, the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons.

It’s used in the sense of “exactly” or “precisely” to modify such words as “now,” “then,” “here,” and “there,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the early days, the OED says, the adverb “right” was used as both a “premodifier” (as in “right anon,” “right now,” or “right then”) and a “postmodifier” (as in “anon-right,” “now right,” or “here-right”).   

As it turns out, the word “right” follows “now” in the dictionary’s earliest example of the usage you’re asking about.

In The Lindisfarne Gospels, an illuminated manuscript that may date from as early as the year 700, the phrase is written as nu reht in Old English.

In case you’re interested, the ultimate source of the word “right” is the Indo-European base reg- (to move in a straight line), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

That same prehistoric Indo-European root has given English, via Latin, such words as “regal,” “royal,” “rectangle,” “rectify,” “rectitude,” and “rectum.”

Yes, “rectum.” As Ayto explains, “rectum” is short for rectum intestinum or “straight intestine”—a term “contrasting the rectum with the convolutions of the remainder of the intestines.”

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Pungent Grains of Titillating Dust

Q: Does the expression “up to snuff” come from the stuff people used to stick up their noses? I don’t see the connection.

A: Yes, the expression almost certainly comes from the pinches of powdered tobacco that people used to inhale (or snuff) through their nostrils.

Although we haven’t found a smoking gun that definitely proves tobacco is the source of the expression, the available evidence is pretty conclusive. Here’s the story.

When the word “snuff” entered English in the late 1300s, it was a noun that referred to the burnt part of the wick on a candle, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The first citation in the OED is from the Wycliffe Bible of around 1382: “Candelquenchers, and … where the snoffes ben quenchid.”

In the mid-1400s, a verb “snuff” showed up and meant to cut off the burnt part of the wick with a special tool.

The earliest example in the OED is from a 1465 reference in Manners and Household Expenses of England in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1841): “Item, the same day my master bowt a snoffer to snoffe wyth candeles.”

In the 17th century, the verb “snuff” came to mean to extinguish, as in this citation from a 1687 French-English dictionary by Guy Miege: “To snuff out the Candle.”

And in the 20th century, the verb took on its gangland sense of to kill, as in this cite from When the Gangs Came to London, a 1932 crime novel by Edgar Wallace: “Eddie would have snuffed out Cora.”

The verb “snuff” took on its nasal meaning (“to draw up or in through the nostrils by the action of inhalation”) in the 1500s, according to the OED.

In the late 1600s, the dictionary says, the noun “snuff”  came to mean “a preparation of powdered tobacco for inhaling through the nostrils.”

“The practice of taking snuff appears to have become fashionable about 1680, but prevailed earlier in Ireland and Scotland,” the dictionary notes.

The OED traces the English word to the Dutch and Flemish terms for snuffing tobacco, snuf or snuif, apparently an abbreviation of snuiftabak.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a 1683 issue of the London Gazette: James Norcock, Snuffmaker and Perfumer … sells all sorts of Snuffs, Spanish and Italian.” 

Getting back to your question, when the expression “up to snuff” showed up in English in the early 1800s, it meant “knowing, sharp, not easily deceived.”

The OED’s first citation is from John Poole’s play Hamlet Travestie (1810), a parody on Shakespeare: “Zooks, he’s up to snuff.”

The dictionary’s next citation, from Pierce Egan’s 1823 revision of Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), offers the best clue to the source of the expression: “Up to snuff, and a pinch above it.”

That pinch is clearly alluding to the use of the powdered tobacco. But why would the use of snuff suggest someone who’s “knowing, sharp, not easily deceived”—the original sense of the expression?

Some wordsmiths have offered the explanation that snuff was expensive and used by rich—and presumably wise—people. But we don’t buy that theory.

We think the original sense of the expression simply referred to the exhilarating feeling one got from a hit of snuff, or, as Alexander Pope referred to it in his poem The Rape of the Lock (1714), the “pungent Grains of titillating Dust.”

It’s not clear from the OED citations when “up to snuff” got its modern sense (“up to the required or usual standard, up to scratch”).

The first clear-cut example in the dictionary is from a Nov. 4, 1931, issue of Punch: “Now Romney painted well enough, / And Reynolds too, they say, / And Gainsborough’s things are up to snuff, / And Lawrence had his day.”

However, we’d suggest that Pierce Egan’s 1823 citation above (“Up to snuff, and a pinch above it”) may have used the expression in its modern sense.

And Charles Dickens may have used it in the modern sense too when he put these words in the mouth of Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers (1836): “Up to snuff and a pinch or two over—eh?”

We’ll let the lexicographer John Ayto have the last word on “snuff.”

In his Dictionary of Word Origins, Ayto says the word “snuff” in all its senses probably goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base “imitative of the sound of drawing air in noisily through the nose.”

How, you may ask, does the word’s candle sense have anything to do with its nasal sense?

It seems that to “snot,” an obsolete verb, once meant to put out a candle as well as to blow one’s nose.

And that, Ayto says, suggests that the candle sense of the word “may ultimately have connections with the inner workings of the nose (possibly a perceived resemblance between an extinguished candlewick and a piece of nasal mucus).”

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“After a while” vs. “in a while”

Q: I recently moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. I have noticed that people out West say, “after a while” in situations where I would say, “in a while.” Which is grammatically correct? This is really bothering me!

A: Bother yourself no longer. There’s very little difference between “in a while” and “after a while,” and for the most part they’re interchangeable.

We’ve never heard of a regional preference for one or the other. English speakers seem to choose one or the other at will. Generally, your ear will choose one for you.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the noun phrase “a while” means “a time, esp. a short or moderate time,” and that it’s used chiefly with the prepositions “after,” “for,” and “in.”

Although the two expressions are generally used the same way, their literal meanings are different.

Here the word “in” means “within limits of space, time, condition, circumstances, etc.,” the OED says. So the literal meaning of “in a while” is within the limits of a short or moderate time.

And “after” in reference to time means “subsequent to, following the interval of, at the conclusion of (a period of time),” the OED says. So “after a while” literally means following a short or moderate time.

But for all practical purposes, the two expressions amount to the same thing, since the time referred to is so nebulous. It’s of little consequence whether something occurs within or following a time that’s general and unspecified.

However, you might prefer one version over the other in certain circumstances—or even for psychological reasons.

For example, agreeing to do a task “in a while” sounds more accommodating than agreeing to do it “after a while.”

And in certain constructions, “in” is more idiomatic—“once in a while” … “see you in a while.” But in others, “after” might seem more natural—“After a while, the pain subsided” …  “After a while, we decided to leave.”

Both “in a while” and “after a while” have been common English phrases for hundreds of years.

“In a while” and the now obsolete “within a while” were first recorded about 1380, the OED says. “After a while” first showed up in 1526.

And after a while, the expressions became almost automatic.

While we’re at it, you might be interested in a post we ran back in 2006 about “a while” versus “awhile,” and a post in 2008 about the use of “while” to mean “although,” “whereas,” or “during the time that.”

In the earlier post, we mention that “while” comes from a prehistoric Indo-European root meaning “rest” or “repose,” and it entered Old English from Germanic sources. It can be a noun, a conjunction, or a verb, as in this sentence:

“For a while, we whiled away our time while answering your question.” 

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A “thank you” note

Q: I’m designing a client brochure that includes thanks from numerous folks. The heading reads: “Season’s Greeting and thank you’s from our scholars.” Is the use of “thank you’s” OK? Doesn’t this make it possessive, not plural? But without the apostrophe, “thank yous” looks typically “Jersey” to me!

A: We see no reason why “thank you” has to be pluralized here. But if you want to use the plural, a phrase like “thank you” is pluralized by simply adding the letter “s.”

We agree, though, that “thank yous” looks a bit odd. It might look less so if you added a hyphen (“thank-yous”) or capital letters (“Thank Yous”) or perhaps both (“Thank-Yous”).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), which hyphenates “thank-you,” gives this plural example: “said their thank-yous and departed.”

Although you may raise a few eyebrows with the use of “thank yous,” you’ll raise a lot more by using “Season’s Greeting” rather than the more idiomatic “Season’s Greetings.”

If we were writing the heading for that brochure, we’d go with this: “Season’s Greetings and Thank You from our scholars.”

As for the Jerseyism you mentioned, we had an item on our blog some time ago about “yous,” “yinz,” “yez,” “y’all,” and other nonstandard plural forms of “you.”

We also had a post around the same time about why some people respond to “thank you” with a “thank you” of their own instead of “you’re welcome.”

And if you’re not thanked-out by now, you might be interested in our views about the expression “thank you kindly.”

Getting back to “thank you” itself, the Oxford English Dictionary says it showed up in Middle English as a short form of the expression “I thank you.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from Why I Can’t Be a Nun, a poem from the 1400s that criticizes religious institutions:

“ ‘Thanke yow, lady,’ quod I than. ‘And thereof hertely I yow pray.’ ” (We’ve expanded the citation.)

The use of “thank you” as a noun phrase referring to an expression of gratitude appeared in the late 1700s, according to OED citations.

The first citation is from a 1792 journal entry by the English novelist Fanny Burney: “He looked even extremely gratified … & Bowed expressively a thank you.”

The earliest example of the noun phrase used in the plural is from the Aug. 21, 1894, issue of the Westminster Gazette:

“The majority of passengers retreated from the tables regardless of their running fire of ‘thankyous,’ which were thankyous for nothing.”

The phrase is hyphenated in this example from the Sept. 1, 1900, issue of the Westminster Gazette:  “We had not said nearly enough ‘thank-yous.’ ”

As for “season’s greetings,” the earliest references we’ve found in Google Books are from the mid-19th century. We’ll end with this example from a Dec. 29, 1860, item in the Medical and Surgical Reporter, a weekly journal in Philadelphia:

“We offer our readers, far and near, the season’s greetings — of a Christmas gone and the New Year dawning. Much of hope and good cheer we want all; for ourselves, for our profession, for our country.”

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Generally speaking

Q: I’m puzzled by the phrase “in general.” I assume “general” is the object of the preposition “in,” but can an adjective be an object? I looked up “general” but found no noun form that references generality.

A: The adverbial phrase “in general” is an idiom, a peculiarity of language that doesn’t necessarily have to make sense grammatically. In this case, though, it does.

As it turns out, there is a noun form of “general” that refers to generality, as in this example: “Politicians prefer to speak about the general, not the particular.”

Hence, we have the adverbial phrases “in general” and “in particular.”

When the word “general” showed up in English around 1200, it was an adjective describing a whole class of things or people. But by the 1300s, it was also a noun meaning a whole class of things or people.

We won’t comment here on the use of “general” in military and civilian titles. We’ve already had several posts on the subject, including one in 2012 that links to a couple of others.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the word “general” is derived from the Latin generalis, which means all of a whole class, but the ultimate source is a prehistoric Indo-European root that refers to producing—that is, making or creating things.

This Indo European root (gen-, gon-, gn-) was very productive itself, as Ayto points out in his dictionary.

It gave Latin genus, the source of generalis, and English (via Latin or Greek) such words as “gender,” “generate,” “generic,” “genesis,” “genital,” “genocide, and “gonorrhea” (literally, flow of semen).

In its “general” entry, the OED has a section on the use of the noun in various adverbial phrases, including “as to the general” (generally), “for the general” (for the most part), and “in the general” (generally). All those are now considered obsolete.

The adverbial phrase “in general” showed up in the 1300s, when it meant universally as well as generally, but Oxford says the universal sense is now obsolete. (In post-classical Latin, in generale or in generali meant without specific reference.)

Here’s an example of the general sense of “in general” from Thomas More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529): “Somwhat wold I speke of Luther, & his secte ingenerall.”

In the early 1500s, the phrase “in general” took on the meaning of “for the most part; as a general rule; commonly, usually,” according to the OED.

Here’s an example from Pylgrimage of Perfection, a 1526 religious treatise by the monk and author William Bonde:

“I shall in general, gather certayne scrappes & cromes that holy doctors hath left behynde them in writyng.”

In contemporary English, “in general” generally means generally—that is, usually, mainly, or overall.

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Let’s do the mashed potatoes

Q: My husband was riding his bike slower than normal when a friend asked, “Did you have too much mashed potatoes last night?” That got him wondering: too much, too many, too much of? What is the correct methodology of inquiring if someone has overindulged in mashed potatoes?

A: A noun phrase like “mashed potatoes” can be confusing. Does it refer to the individual potatoes that have been mashed? Or to the dish produced by mashing them?

In technical terms, is “mashed potatoes” a countable or an uncountable noun phrase? Are we thinking of individual potatoes that can be counted, or a dish made from an indeterminate number of potatoes?

Well, there’s one thing we’ve learning after writing this blog for seven years. No job is too big or too small for academic linguists. They’ll take on anything.

Stephanie Solt, a researcher at DAS, a linguistics institute in Berlin, discusses the ambiguity of “mashed potatoes” and similar dishes in a paper entitled “Q-Adjectives and the Semantics of Quantity.”

In a footnote, she points out the difficulty in choosing between the adjectives “many” and “much” when modifying “anomalous plurals such as refried beans, mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs.”

She writes that these phrases “syntactically show at least some of the characteristics of plural count nouns, but semantically denote noncountable substances or portions of matter.”

“These items are at least marginally acceptable with both many and much, but with a difference in meaning,” she adds.

She gives two Q-and-A examples concerning “scrambled eggs” to make her point:

“Q: How many scrambled eggs do you want?

“A: Three

“Q: How much scrambled eggs do you want?

 “A: A lot/a little/a scoopful/about half the amount you gave him.”

She also offers this hodgepodge of an example: “These/this mashed potatoes/refried beans/scrambled eggs are/is cold.”

Interestingly, the dishes that Americans call “mashed potatoes” and “scrambled eggs” are often referred to as “mashed potato” and “scrambled egg” by British speakers.

Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex in England, discusses this in a post published a few years ago on her blog Separated by a Common Language.

“These kinds of prepared food are substances more than individuable things,” she writes. “You can’t see the boundaries of the individual eggs or potatoes once they are scrambled or mashed.”

She points out that the British “forms reflect this—they’re singular just as other ‘substance’ food names,” but the American forms “reflect the state of the food before mashing/scrambling.”

“Does this mean that Americans think more about the origins of their food?” she adds. “I can’t think of much other evidence for that.”

We agree. In fact, the American usage seems to be gaining ground in Britain. We’ve checked four standard British dictionaries and half of them list “mashed potatoes” as the primary entry with “mashed potato” as an also-ran.

Another way of looking at “mashed potatoes” is through the lens of notional agreement—that is, agreement based on meaning to the writer or speaker rather than on formal textbook grammar.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage gives this example of notional agreement from Ecclesiastes: “time and chance happeneth to them all.” Here a compound subject (“time and chance”) takes a singular verb (“happeneth”).

And here’s one from a Jan. 20, 1938, letter by James Thurber: “I don’t think the barricades is an answer.”

Merriam-Webster’s has many more, but we’ll stop with this example from the Declaration of Independence:  “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”

In the 18th century, the usage guide says, grammarians “undertook to prune the exuberant growth of English” and began insisting on formal agreement.

“Modern grammarians are not so insistent,” M-W says, noting that George O. Curme and Randolph Quirk have recognized that when compound nouns form a “collective idea” the “singular verb is appropriate—notional agreement prevails.”

Getting back to your question, we think of “mashed potatoes” as a dish, not the components of the dish. So we’d use “too much,” not “too many,” to modify “mashed potatoes.”

However, Google searches indicate that “too much mashed potatoes” is only slightly more popular than “too many mashed potatoes,” and “too much mashed potato” is a distant third. The expression “too much of the mashed potatoes” barely registers.

By the way, the earliest example of the dish in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, a 1747 cookbook by Hannah Glasse:

“Mashed Potatoes. Boil your Potatoes, peel them, and put them into a saucepan, mash them well; To two Pounds of Potatoes put a Pint of Milk, a little salt; stir them well together, take care they do not stick to the bottom; then take a quarter of a pound of butter, stir it in, and serve it up.”

The OED’s entry, which is listed under the singular “mashed potato,” includes both singular and plural citations for the side dish.

Here’s a singular citation from the Guardian’s Oct. 15, 1994, weekend supplement: “My ribeye of beef with mashed potato.”

The entry also includes references to the dance (called the “mashed potato,” “mash potato,” or “mashed potatoes”) that was popular during the early 1960s.

The OED’s earliest citation for the dance is a 1959 reference to the James Brown song “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes,” which became a Top 10 rhythm-and-blues hit in 1960.

This one, from the March 6, 1963, issue of Punch, includes two other dance crazes from the ’60s: “The Mashed Potato … remains as much of a mystery as the Hully-Gully and the Loco-Motion.”

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Was ist das?

Q: I’ve studied German, English, French, and Latin, which may explain my fascination with how languages influence one another. For example, the French word for a transom, vasistas, comes from the German phrase was ist das?  I’ve read that French soldiers picked up the usage during World War I or II. True or false?

A: We don’t usually comment on French or German expressions unless we’re discussing their influence on English usages, but curiosity got the better of us this time.

The French noun vasistas is generally believed to be derived from the German expression was ist das? However, the French usage didn’t originate during either of the two world wars.

And some scholars have questioned the influence of was ist das? (what is that?) on vasistas (a transom, a narrow opening in a door or window, or simply a movable window pane).

In the 19th century, for example, the French lexicographers Auguste Brachet and Émile Littré disagreed about the origin of the French term.

In his Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Française (1868), Brachet, who was an etymologist and a historical grammarian of French as well as a lexicographer, says in the entry for vasistas: “origine inconnue” (origin unknown).

But Littré, in his Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, parts of which began appearing in 1863, says the word comes from the German question was ist das?

And Littré, who helped edit a later edition of Brachet’s etymological dictionary, revised the vasistas entry to read: “Origin uncertain. Littré accepts the Germ. was ist das? (We’re quoting here from an English edition.)

Today, though, French language authorities generally accept the German origin of vasistas.

The online Larousse Dictionnaires de Français, for instance, defines vasistas as an “alteration de l’allemand was ist das?, qu’est-ce que c’est?”

And Le Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé, an updated online version of Littré’s dictionary, describes vasistas similarly: “Déformation de l’all. was ist das?, littéral. «qu’est-ce que c’est?»”

Some language books and websites say the usage originated during World War II, World War I, or even the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.

The American language writer Eugene Ehrlich, for example, offers this explanation in Les Bons Mots: How to Amaze Tout Le Monde With Everyday French (1997):

“A term said to have originated in the nineteenth century, during the Franco-Prussian War, when Paris was occupied by German-speaking soldiers who had never before seen transoms, the windows over doors that afford ventilation without having to leave doors open.”

However, the usage preceded all those wars. It showed up in French in the mid-1700s, more than a century before the Franco-Prussian War.

The earliest example we’ve found of vasistas is from a 1760 entry in a diary of household expenses kept by the Duchesse de Mazarin, who was living at Versailles at the time.

In her household accounts, the Duchess recorded this entry under her expenses for  Nov. 14, 1760: “Plus pour deux vasistas, une pour ma chambre, e l’autre pour M. de Laporte.”  (“Also for two vasistas, one for my room and the other for M. de Laporte.”)

(Her household accounts for 1760-62 were published in Paris in 1892 by the Revue Respective.)

The earliest citation we’ve found linking vasistas and was ist das is in Mémoires sur la Nature, les Effets, Propriétés & Avantages du Feu de Charbon de Terre Apprêté (1770), a book by the French physician Jean François Clément Morand in support of coal-burning fireplaces.

In describing the smoke produced by a wood fire, he says this inconvenience “ne laisse dans certaines maisons d’autre alternative, ou que d’éteindre le feu & d’être alors saisi par le froid de l’appartement, ou, si l’on veut ne pas être fatigué de rougeurs, de maux d’yeux cuisans, de souffrir le vent d’une porte, d’une fenêtre, d’un Wass-ist-dass.”

Translation: “leaves in some abodes no alternative but to either put out the fire and then be suddenly cold, or if one does not want to suffer burning red eyes, to endure the wind from a door, window, Wass-ist-dass.”

In our searches, we’ve found the word vasistas in many French dictionaries, encyclopedias, and technical works of the late 18th to early 19th centuries and beyond.

The word appears in quite ordinary surroundings. We even found it—again printed in italics as if it were a foreign term—in a book on raising chickens.

In his book Ornithotrophie Artificièle (1780), the Abbé Copineau addresses the problem of how to ventilate a chicken coop:

“Tant que la saison le permétra, & même dans les beaux jours de l’hiver, on tiendra une partie des croissées du midi ouvertes; ne fût-ce qu’un simple careau de vitre, en manière de vasistas.” 

Translation: “As long as the season allows, & even on mild winter days, one will keep part of the south facing windows open, even if only a single glass pane, as if it were a vasistas.”

 In 1798, vasistas was officially recognized by the French Academy in the fifth edition of Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise.

The dictionary defines it as a small part of a door or window that can be opened or closed at will. But the word’s derivation isn’t given.

So how did the German expression was ist das? come to mean a vasistas in French?

Le Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé suggests that the usage originated as a “name given in jest to the opening through which you can talk to someone.”

We can imagine two possibilities here. Perhaps the usage evolved from French mockery of the German response to those little Gallic windows.

Or think of a Parisian answering a knock on the door by peeping through the opening and asking “Vasistas?”—in imitation German—instead of “Qu’est-ce que c’est?

Either of those explanations could be the answer. Or perhaps something entirely different. We won’t know for sure until we see a citation from the 18th century that explains exactly was das ist.

Note: We’re indebted to a French friend, Martine Copeland, for translating the 18th-century French in this post.

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“Least” wise

Q: I hate it when people say to me, “It’s the least I can do.” I know what they mean, but the implication is that they’ll do the least they can for me. I always point out that I’m more interested in the most they can do for me. It’s a funny old English-speaking world.

A: We interpret the familiar idiom “It’s the least I can do” more generously than you do.

People who say this are suggesting that they’d be willing to do even more if you were to ask. They don’t mean “I’ll do the least I can and no more.”

But there’s another side to this coin. Someone who responds with “It’s the least you can do” isn’t being magnanimous. He means he has a right to expect more!

Enough about the psychology of “the least I can do.” We’re on firmer ground discussing the history of this expression and ones like it.

The word “least” is Germanic in origin. It was first recorded in writing about the year 950 as an adjective, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

It’s a superlative form of “little,” and is defined in the OED as “little beyond all others in size or degree; smallest; slightest.” Although “least” once meant “fewest” as well, that sense of the word has died out.

This OED citation, from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), nicely illustrates the use of “least” as an adjective: “A fix’d star of the least magnitude.”

Two other good adjectival example are the phrases “line of least resistance” (1746) and “path of least resistance” (1896).

“Least” has also been used as an adverb since around 1300.

This adverbial example is from the philosopher George Berkeley’s Alciphron (1732): “Alciphron has made discoveries where I least expected it.”

But “least” has another important function. Since the 12th century it’s been used as a “quasi-noun,” the OED says.

This is the “least” that we find in expressions like “to say the least,” “at least” (or “at the very least”), “not in the least,” “last but not least,” “that’s the least of it,” “least said, soonest mended,” and the usage you’re concerned with—“the least I can do.”

That last one, and versions that vary with the subject or pronoun used (“the least you/he/she/they can do”), go back to the early 17th century—at least.

The OED has only one example (from the 20th century), but we’ve found many going as far back as the 1600s and we wouldn’t be surprised if there are even older ones.

This one is from a 17th-century volume, The Annals of King James and King Charles the First: 1612-1642 (the quotation is from a speech that James delivered before the House of Lords in 1621):

“And since I cannot yet retribute by a General Pardon (which hath by form been usually reserved to the End of a Parliament) the least I can do (which I can forbear no longer) is to do something in present, for the Ease and Good of my People.”

Here are a few more examples:

1677: “Certainly the least you can do is to wait upon his pleasure for them.” (From John Flavel’s Divine Conduct and Saint Indeed.)

1680: “The least he can do is to be mistrustful of his Judgment, and of the quality of his Understanding.” (From a collection of Jansenist treatises called Moral Essays.)

1694: “And truly this is the least you can do if you would be grateful.” (From Samuel Slater’s An Earnest Call to Family-Religion.)

1695: “You have taken care of Honour, and ’tis the least I can do to take care of Conscience.” (From William Congreve’s comedy Love for Love.)

And that’s not the least of it. The usage became even more ubiquitous in the centuries to come.

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Mayday: French to the rescue!

Q: I don’t see any mention of “Mayday,” the danger signal, on your blog. Do you know that it comes from m’aidez in French?

A: Yes, it’s true that the distress signal “Mayday” comes from French. The Oxford English Dictionary says this English interjection is derived from the French m’aidez or m’aider (“help me!”).

The OED notes that the latter form, m’aider, is “either the imperative infinitive or short for venez m’aider  ‘come and help me!’ ”

The term (capitalized in some dictionaries but not in others) was adopted in the early 20th century as an international radio distress signal, principally for use by ships and aircraft.

The National Maritime Museum in Cornwall, England, says on its website that Frederick Stanley Mockford, a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London, originated the usage in 1923:

“He was asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency. Since much of the traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the word ‘mayday’ from the French word m’aidez.”

The OED’s earliest example of the usage, from a February 1923 edition of the Times of London, explains why it was devised as an alternative to “SOS”:

“Owing to the difficulty of distinguishing the letter ‘S’ by telephone, the international distress signal ‘S.O.S.’ will give place to the words ‘May-day,’ the phonetic equivalent of ‘M’aidez,’ the French for ‘Help me.’ ”

This somewhat later example, under the heading “Aircraft and Wireless,” is from the B.B.C. Year-Book for 1930:

“In case of distress, due to engine failure over the sea, the word ‘Mayday’—equivalent to the S.O.S. used by ships—transmitted through the microphone, will summon immediately all possible help.”

 “Mayday” was used later as a noun to mean either “a distress signal consisting of the word ‘Mayday!’ ” or, more generally, “any distress call or call for help,” the OED says.

By the way, the distress signal “SOS” (it’s dotless these days), doesn’t stand for “Save Our Ship” or “Save Our Souls” or anything else. Here’s how we describe it in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths:

“Wireless radio operators adopted it in the early twentieth century because the letters in Morse code (three dots, three dashes, three dots) were easy to send and unlikely to be misunderstood.”

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You’ll find out!

Q: When my advanced English students use “find out,” I tell them it’s a lazy colloquialism that should be replaced with verbs like “learn,” “perceive,” and “discover.” Your blog is required reading for my students, but the search function returns 58 instances where you use the term. Am I too strict, or are you lazy, also?

A: Well, we may be lazy, but you’re much too strict! The phrasal verb “find out” is perfectly respectable.

It’s been used in scholarly English since the mid-16th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) dates it even earlier, from the 13th century.

When first recorded in writing, the OED says, “find out” meant “to come upon by searching or inquiry; to discover (what is hidden).” Oxford’s earliest recorded example comes from a book on logic, Thomas Wilson’s The Rule of Reason (1551).

In a reference to searching for gold, Wilson writes: “They … do searche narrowly … and … at length fynde out the mine.”

(A few years later, in The Arte of Rhetorique, Wilson uses the phrase “to finde out the trueth,” and refers to logic as “that arte, which by reason findeth out the trueth.”)

Around this same time, the OED says, the verb was used to mean “to discover by attention, scrutiny, study, etc.; to devise, invent; to unriddle, solve.” 

The dictionary’s first citation for this use of “find out” is from an English-Latin dictionary, Richard Huloet’s Abcedarium Anglo Latinum (1552): “Finde out by studye, excudo.”

The sense of the verb that’s most familiar today (“to make a discovery; to discover a fact, the truth, etc.”) emerged in the mid-19th century, according to OED citations. In this usage, “find out” is often followed by “about,” Oxford adds.

Here are a few of the OED’s citations for this sense of the phrasal verb:

1862: “ ‘I don’t like the pigs—I don’t know where they are.’ ‘Well, we must find out.’ ” (From George Macdonald’s novel David Elginbrod.)

1881: “ ‘Who might that one be?’ ‘I am thinking ye’ll have to find out for yourself.’ ” (From Charlotte Eliza L. Riddell’s novel The Senior Partner.)

1893: “ ‘He has found out about Mrs. Le Grice’s bill,’ said Lally to herself.” (From Mary Elizabeth Mann’s novel In Summer Shade.)

1894: “Perhaps death brings peace. I shall soon find out about that.” (From “The Umbrella-Mender,” a short story in Beatrice Harraden’s book In Varying Moods.)

So you can see that “find out” has a solid reputation. If a phrase has been used in educated English since before Shakespeare’s (maybe even Chaucer’s) time, you can be sure that it’s a legitimate usage.

And none of the dictionaries or usage guides we’ve checked label “find out” as a colloquialism or as anything other than standard English.

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Speaking words of wisdom

Q: I’m confused about the expression “let it be.” Is it used in a positive or a negative sense?

A: We wouldn’t describe the usage as either positive or negative, though “let it be” is often used in the sense of letting a complicated or troublesome situation resolve itself on its own.

The verbal phrase “let be,” meaning let someone or something alone, first showed up in English in the 12th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED defines the phrase as “to leave undisturbed, not to meddle with; to abstain from doing (an action); to leave off, cease from.”

Here’s an example of the usage from The Legend of Good Women (circa 1385), a poem by Chaucer:

“Lat be thyn arguynge / Ffor loue ne wele nat Countyrpletyd be.” (Modern English: “Let be thine arguing / For love will hear no pleas against itself.”)

And here’s an example of the actual phrase “let it be” from Shelley’s 1822 translation of Goethe’s Scenes From Faust:

“Let it be — pass on — / No good can come of it — it is not well.” (Mephistopheles is speaking here to Faust.)

Of course the best-known use of the expression is from “Let It Be,” the title song of the Beatles’ last studio album, which was released in 1970:

“When I find myself in times of trouble / Mother Mary comes to me / Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.”

Paul McCartney has said the idea for the song came to him in a dream while he “was going through a really difficult time around the autumn of 1968.”

In The Right Words at the Right Time, a book edited by Marlo Thomas, McCartney says he “had the most comforting dream about my mother, who died when I was only fourteen.”

In the dream, McCartney says, “my mother appeared, and there was her face, completely clear, particularly her eyes; and she said to me very gently, very reassuringly: ‘Let it be.’ ”

“So, being a musician, I went right over to the piano and started writing a song: ‘When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me’… Mary was my mother’s name … ‘Speaking words of wisdom, let it be. There will be an answer, let it be.’ ”

McCartney says he wrote “the main body of it in one go, and then the subsequent verses developed from there: ‘When all the broken-hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.’ ”

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Figs and hoots

Q: I’m writing fiction that takes place in 1928 New York City and I wonder if these expressions were used at that time: “She didn’t care a fig” … “She didn’t give a hoot.” Also, could you recommend a good book to consult for speaking styles in the 1920s,’30s,’40s, and ’50s?

A: Those two phrases are well within your fictional time frame. The expression “to care (or give) a fig” dates back to the early 1600s, and “to give (or care) a hoot” has been around since before World War I.

In case you’d like to know how figs and hoots got into these expressions, here’s some etymology.

Both nouns—“fig” and “hoot”—have long been used figuratively for something small and unimportant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

So something that’s “not worth a fig (or a hoot),” or something that you “don’t care a fig (or a hoot) about,” is worthless or contemptible.

The noun “fig”—sometimes “a fig’s end”—was recorded in the sense of something unimportant as early as the mid-1400s.

The OED has this example from The Court of Love, an anonymous poem written about 1450: “A Figge for all her chastite!”

The phrase “not worth a fig” appears in 1600 in a collection of epigrams and satires by Samuel Rowlands: “All Beere in Europe is not worth a figge.”

The OED’s earliest written example of  “care a fig” is from a French-English dictionary published in 1632: “Not to care a figge for one, faire la figue à.”

The “give” version appeared soon afterward, in a Latin-English dictionary of 1634: “Fumi umbra non emerim,  I will not give a fig’s end for it.”

The fact that readers were seeing those “fig” phrases in dictionaries of the 1630s indicates that they were in common use well before that time.  

The “hoot” version came along centuries later, and there are many variations: “give/care/worth a hoot,” even “two hoots,” and “a hoot in hell.”

The noun “hoot” was used in the late 19th century to mean the smallest detail, according to the OED.

Oxford’s earliest example is from John Hanson Beadle’s travel narrative Western Wilds, and the Men Who Redeem Them (1878): “I got onto my reaper and banged down every hoot of it before Monday night.”

“Hoot” started popping up in what are now familiar colloquial expressions shortly after the turn of the century.

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has the earliest example we know of. It’s from a letter Harry Truman wrote to his wife in 1912, collected in the book Dear Bess:

“I really do not care a hoot what you do with my letters so long as you write me.”

Random House also has this example from the novel Three Soldiers (1921), by John Dos Passos: “I didn’t give a hoot in hell what it cost.”

The OED quotes this passage from another novel that appeared a couple of years later, Ralph Delahaye Paine’s Comrades of the Rolling Ocean (1923): “I am glad of that even if he did tell me that as a supercargo I wasn’t worth a hoot in hades.”

Oxford has five subsequent examples that appeared in print before 1928—two from 1925, two from 1926, and one from 1927. So you can safely use both the “fig” and the “hoot” expressions in your fiction.

As for your final question, we recommend that you get yourself a good slang dictionary.

The three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang is pretty pricey, but you can get a used copy of Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English or Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang (both good) online for $10 or $20. Try eBay too. And try to get the most recent edition that you can afford.

Cheaper slang dictionaries aren’t likely to be as authoritative or dependable.

Unfortunately, the really excellent Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang  was never finished. Only the first two volumes appeared, and the company’s dictionary division shut down just before the third volume was to be published.

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Let’s rock-and-roll

Q: On a recent trip to California, a motel desk clerk asked us: “Are we done here?”  When we replied, “Yes,” he said, “Let’s rock ’n’ roll.”  How did this phrase come to mean “Let’s get moving”? I’ve even heard it used as a statement of approval.

A: For more than 30 years, the verb “rock-and-roll” (also spelled “rock ’n’ roll”) has been used in the sense of “get moving” or “get started.”

So that desk clerk meant “Let’s get on with checking you out and preparing your bill” (or words to that effect).

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest published example for this use of the verb “rock-and-roll” (which it hyphenates) is from the April 2, 1980, issue of the Washington Post: “It’s time to rock and roll. The town is ours.”

A few years later, in 1984, this example appeared in the New York Times: “Mittleman looked down at his mended foot, slipped on a pair of shoes borrowed from Record and said, ‘I’m ready to rock and roll.’ ”

Later the phrase started showing up in books, as in these two OED citations:

“Looks like we’re on, lads. Be ready to rock and roll at eleven-thirty!” (From Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, 1997.)

“He uncapped a fountain pen, and took out a yellow legal pad. ‘Okay, Mrs. Chatterjee, let’s rock and roll.’ ” (From Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Desirable Daughters, 2002.)

The OED describes “rock-and-roll” here as a slang usage meaning “to get going, begin, esp. with vigour and energy.” The phrase occurs “chiefly” in the phrases “let’s rock and roll” and “ready to rock and roll,” Oxford adds.

As it happens, a shorter version, “rock”—also defined as “to get going, begin, esp. with vigour and energy”—was  recorded as early as the mid-’60s, the OED says.

This version also appears “chiefly” in the expressions “let’s rock” and “ready to rock,” according to the dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation for this use of “rock” is from a football story in the Oct. 17, 1966, issue of the Los Angeles Times: “All the Bruins, as a matter of fact, should be back and ready to rock with the Bears.”

This more recent example is from Wired magazine in 2000: “The infrastructure is still in place, future-proofed and ready to rock.”

The daddy of these usages, born in the USA in the 1950s, is the verb “rock-and-roll,” defined in the OED as “to dance to or play rock-and-roll music.”

And the granddaddy is the noun phrase “rock ’n’ roll” (as Oxford spells it), whose origins as a musical term aren’t so easy to pin down. In its earliest uses, it can probably be traced to black American music between World Wars I and II.

Here we need to back up a bit to point out that individually, the verbs “rock” and “roll” are extremely old.

The OED says “rock” (meaning “to move to and fro in a gentle and soothing manner”) was recorded in late Old English, and “roll” (“to move with a swaying motion”) in Middle English. So they’re pushing a thousand years old.

The expression “rock ’n’ roll,” the OED says, originated “probably with reference to the motion of the body when dancing.”

But it adds: “It is possible that there may originally also have been some allusion to uses of each verb as euphemisms for sexual intercourse.”

The journalist and rock historian Nick Tosches is more positive on this note, saying the two words have long had sexual connotations. In Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll (1977), Tosches writes:

“An early nineteenth-century sea chanty included the line, ‘Oh do, me Johnny Bowker, come rock ’n’ roll me over.’ A lyric found in the ceremonial Fire Dance of Florida’s obeah worshipers was ‘Bimini gal is a rocker and a roller.’ ”

In African-American blues recordings, “rock” and “roll” began to proliferate in the 1920s. Both Tosches and the OED cite a 1922 recording by the blues singer Trixie Smith of the song “My Daddy Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll).”

Similar usages, especially in African-American music, appeared in the later ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s.

“Rock” in this sense, the OED says, meant both “to have sexual intercourse with” and “to dance with.” 

The OED says the early use of “rock ’n’ roll,” in reference to the hot, rhythmic music of the prewar years, meant “a vigorous and compelling rhythm with a strong beat, as in jazz, swing, or rhythm and blues music; (also) music featuring such a rhythm; lively dance music.”

Its two earliest citations for this early sense of “rock ’n’ roll” are from 1938.

This one is from a song, “Rock It for Me,” written by the twin sisters Kay and Sue Werner, and recorded by Ella Fitzgerald:

“It’s true that once upon a time, / The op’ra was the thing, / But today the rage is rhythm and rhyme, / So won’t you satisfy my soul with a rock an’ roll.”

And this example is from a photo caption that appeared in the New York Times in 1938: “ ‘Rock-and-Roll’ men. Band leaders Benny Goodman (left) and Gene Krupa—Their likes are not to be heard abroad.”

Some time in the early 1950s, the OED says, the meaning of “rock ’n’ roll” shifted and came to mean a new kind of music.

The modern sense of the phrase, according to the OED, was “popularized by disc jockey Alan Freed, who broadcast rhythm and blues music to a multiracial audience from 1951, and later promoted various dances and concerts featuring rhythm and blues performers.”

As the OED explains, Freed’s “1953 ‘Biggest Rhythm and Blues Show’ tour is often regarded as the first major rock ’n’ roll tour, although many of the performers featured would now typically be classified as rhythm and blues vocalists. From this time, the term rock ’n’ roll became popular with white audiences, esp. teenagers.”

Here’s an OED citation from Billboard magazine in 1954: “Freed is now calling his program the ‘Rock and Roll Show.’ ”

Of course, both “rock and roll” and “rock” have taken on whole new meanings in recent generations.

As you mention, the adjective “rock and roll” is now used in the affirmative—it means “cool,” more or less, a usage the OED first records in 1976.

This is an example that Oxford quotes from Esquire magazine in 2008: “Tea is so rock’n’roll these days; according to one rumour, Led Zep’s rider for the O2 gig asked for nothing more than a decent brew of English Breakfast.”

And since the late 1960s, the OED says, to “rock” has meant “to be full of energy, life, and excitement; to be excellent.”

Oxford’s earliest citation is from an advertisement in a 1969 issue of the Times-Bulletin newspaper (Van Wert, Ohio): “Bored? Uptight? In a box? Weekend bowling really rocks!”

[Update, Nov. 11, 2013: A couple of readers pointed out that “let’s roll” is used in the same way as “let’s rock” (let’s get moving), and that the expression took on a special significance for Americans after Sept. 11, 2001. During the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, Todd Beamer and other passengers worked out a plan to overcome the hijackers and regain control of the plane. Beamer’s last words, overheard on an open phone line, were “Are you guys ready? OK, let’s roll.” The OED says the use of “roll” to mean get started, get moving, or take action dates back to 1931.]

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Empire State-ments

Q: Why do we (OK, New Yorkers) pronounce the “Empire State Building” with emphasis on “State,” while we emphasize “Empire” when the words are just “Empire State”?

A: We’ve had this thought ourselves. When people (and not just New Yorkers) say the “Empire State,” they emphasize the first word over the second: “EMPIRE State.”

Similarly, residents of Connecticut refer to the “NUTMEG State,” Californians to the “GOLDEN State,” New Jerseyans to the “GARDEN State,” and so on.

So why does the principal stress shift to the second word when people say “the Empire STATE Building”?

In 2006, on the building’s 75th anniversary, the novelist Benjamin Kunkel wrote a small piece for the New York Times commenting on “our curious pronunciation of those four words.”

“Let’s say you had a building named, as ours would seem to be, after the Empire State, New York,” Kunkel wrote. “In that case, the usual way for a native speaker of American English to pronounce the two middle words of the name would be as a dactyl: ‘EM-pire state,’ you’d say. But we don’t say it like that. Instead we employ what in prosody is called an anapest: ‘em-pire STATE,’ with the accent, that is, on the word ‘state’ rather than on the word ‘empire.’ Say it and see for yourself: it’s ‘em-pire STATE build-ing,’ not ‘EM-pire state build-ing.’ ” 

But Kunkel didn’t offer a good reason why.

Generally, when an identifying adjective modifies “building,” the adjective is emphasized over the noun (“office building,” “apartment building,” etc.).

The same is true when a building has a proper name—the modifier gets the emphasis: “CHRYSLER Building,” “FLATIRON Building,” “WOOLWORTH Building,” “SEAGRAM Building,” and so on.

When “Building” is preceded  by a compound, then the principal emphasis falls on the word that’s normally emphasized in that compound: “Time-LIFE Building,” “LEHMAN Brothers Building,” “New York LIFE Insurance Building,” “Manufacturers Hanover TRUST Building,” “WARNER Brothers Building,” “Universal PICTURES Building,” “New York TIMES Building.”

So if we emphasize the first word in the phrase “EMPIRE State,” why don’t Americans call it the “EMPIRE State Building”? 

We have to admit that we don’t have an answer. And neither, apparently, does anyone else.

We did find a discussion of this subject on a respected language website, but it wasn’t much help.

The linguist Mark Lieberman, writing on the Language Log, noted that when “Building” is modified by a compound,” the main stress generally falls on the expected main stress” of that compound.

“Thus,” he wrote, “what used to be the Field Building in Chicago is now the LaSalle National Bank Building—and I assume (without ever having heard it pronounced) that the main stress ought to be on bank.”

He went on to say that “since New York is the Empire State—with main stress on state—it follows that the Empire State Building ought also to have main stress on state.”

But as we’ve said, and as some readers of the Language Log pointed out, the stress in the two-word phrase “Empire State” is on “Empire,” not on “State.” So that leaves us back where we started.

Of course, “Empire STATE Building” is easier to say than one strong syllable followed by five weak ones: “EM-pire-state-build-ing.” And yet, a string of unaccented syllables doesn’t seem to bother people who say (or used to say) “LEH-man-broth-ers-build-ing.”

Dictionaries aren’t much help here, either. The Collins English Dictionary says the phrase “Empire State Building” is pronounced with accents on the first syllables of “Empire” and “Building.” Well, perhaps by some English speakers, but not by Americans.

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary online gives “Empire STATE Building” for both the British and the American pronunciations.

If we do find an answer to this mystery, you’ll be the first to know!

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Here’s Johnny

Q: What do you call it when you add a name before a country of origin to make a sort of derisive term like “Jack Burma,” “Johnny Turk,” “Johnny Reb,” “Billy Yank,” and so on?

A: Terms like these have been referred to variously as “national personifications,” “collective pseudonyms,” or “collective nicknames.”

They were never the names of real people; they’re just symbols that collectively represent a nation or its citizens.

In military use, some names refer fondly to a country’s own forces, but some represent the enemy. 

During the American Civil War, for example, Northerners referred to Confederate soldiers as “Johnny Reb” (short for “rebel”), while Southerners called Union soldiers “Billy Yank” (for Yankee).

After the war, such terms lost their bitterness. The Oxford English Dictionary cites one such usage that appeared in a trade magazine, Realty & Building, in 1948:

“Colonel John was a Johnny Reb who delighted in telling of the exploits of the boys in gray.”

But the tradition of military or national nicknames goes much further back. 

In Britain, according to the OED, sailors have been familiarly called “Jack” since the 1600s and “Jack Tar” since the 1700s.

More recently, British soldiers have been called “Tommy”—short for “Thomas (or Tommy) Atkins”—since the 19th century. 

As the OED explains, “Thomas Atkins” wasn’t a real person’s name, but “a familiar name for the typical private soldier in the British Army; arising out of the casual use of this name in the specimen forms given in the official regulations from 1815 onward.”

Some of the documents used other names, the OED says, “but ‘Thomas Atkins’ being that used in all the forms for privates in the Cavalry or Infantry, is by far the most frequent, and thus became the most familiar.” The use of “Tommy” for an ordinary soldier first appeared in print in 1881.

We’ve written before on the blog about the use of “Johnny” or “John” as a generic term for a guy or a fellow.

Since the 18th century, the name “John Bull,” according to the OED, has personified “the English nation; Englishmen collectively; the typical Englishman.”

Early in the following century, the name “Johnny (or Jean) Crapaud” was first used to mean a Frenchman, Oxford says. (Crapaud is French for “toad.”)

Similarly, “Johnny Turk” originated in the World War I era as a name for “a Turkish soldier” or “any Turk,” the OED says.  

The Russian equivalent of “John” is “Ivan,” and the use of “Ivan” (or “Ivan Ivanovitch”) to mean a typical Russian soldier, Oxford says, dates from the 1890s.

As for German soldiers, we can trace to World War I the use of “Jerry” or “Fritz” to refer to them, whether individually or collectively. 

We’ll end with “Jack Burma,” a British term for the Burmese. A search of Google Books suggests that it originated in the 19th century during the British occupation of Burma.

In The Burman: His Life and Notions (1882), for example, Sir James George Scott describes how the Burmese travel in bullock carts that “are roomy, and allow ‘Jack Burma’ and his family to loll about as they please.”

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The secret life of sources

Q: On the news, I often hear a source quoted “on condition of anonymity” and several variants thereof. This usage sounds like journalese or legalese. Can you clarify the original and the subtleties of its forms?

A: The expression “on condition of anonymity” is associated with news reporting, but we see it in legal contexts as well. So you’d be justified in calling it both “journalese” and “legalese.”

On the legal front, someone might wish to give information without having it linked to his name. This might happen, for instance, in organized-crime or securities-fraud cases, as well as other kinds of law-enforcement investigations.

But anonymous sources are probably most common in journalism, and have been for quite some time. As a British weekly, the Publishers’ Circular, noted in an editorial in 1893, “Anonymity in the press is not a new subject of discussion.”

Someone who talks to a reporter “on condition of anonymity” is willing to give information—but only if he’s not named. He wants certain information to be made public, but he’s not willing to take responsibility for it.

In both the law and in journalism, such information carries a taint of suspicion, even when it’s perfectly legitimate. The informant could have an ulterior motive, since  anonymity allows him to smear another person’s name while remaining nameless himself.

But sometimes journalists and investigators can’t get certain information in any other way, so they promise to protect their source. And it could be that the informant’s reason for anonymity is simply to protect himself—he might face retaliation if identified.

As we said, the anonymous source—even the anonymous reporter—isn’t new. Periodicals of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries commonly featured articles written anonymously or under pen names.

In the 17th century, a satirical pamphlet entitled Whimsies caricatured the anonymous journalist as a weekly “newes-monger” whose “owne genius is his intelligencer” (in other words, his source is himself).

“No matter though more experienced judgements disprove him; hee is anonymos, and that wil secure him,” the pamphlet said. (Here we’ve expanded on a 1631 quotation that appears in the Oxford English Dictionary.)

In the early 18th century, the Spectator, founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, was notorious for its anonymous columns and for its “letters” (often fictional) from nameless or pseudonymous writers.

The OED quotes one letter-writer in 1712 as begging to be heard “amongst the crowd of other anonymous correspondents.”

And in 1820 Blackwood’s Magazine spoke of “the merit due to us, for being the first to carry on a periodical work, without that vile anonymous disguise, under which such unwarrantable liberties are frequently taken with You, my public.”

Oxford cites this 1882 quotation from the Times of London: “Academical dignitaries, writing … under a disguise of transparent anonymity.” Notice how the writer of that article recognized the evasive nature of the writings he was quoting.

The OED has no citations for the exact expression “on condition of anonymity,” and we can’t say for sure when it first appeared in print.

In 1925 E. M. Forster wrote in the Atlantic that “all literature tends toward a condition of anonymity.” But he used the expression in a different sense than the one we’re discussing here. Forster meant “condition” merely as a state, not as a requirement.

We find the “requirement” sense of the word in this 1925 quotation from the British Medical Journal:

“The Society had since received from the same generous and anonymous source a further munificent gift of something over £28,000, to be applied on the same terms and under the same condition of anonymity.”

And a 1949 article in the Proceedings of the American Association for Public Opinion Research referred to “the condition of anonymity” as “a condition which had for many years been resorted to on the assumption that servicemen would otherwise not give frank reports on the state of their morale.”

The expression as used by journalists quoting unnamed sources wasn’t common, as far as we can tell, until the latter half of the 20th century.

The first such use in the New York Times appears in a 1964 article: “But, though Kennedy himself kept his silence, some of his intimates, on condition of anonymity, did not.”

We’ve found 19th-century examples of the journalistic usage that come close, without using that exact wording.

This one, for example, is from a letter written by Jean Joseph Louis Blanc in 1863 and published in Letters on England (1876):

“Whence comes it that in such a country as England journalism is anonymous? Whence comes it that, generally speaking, anonymity is considered an indispensable condition of journalism? I confess that I am at a loss to explain it.”

And here’s an 1895 example from the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine:

“The first consideration should be, therefore, to create the condition most favorable for the critic to produce an unbiased opinion, and one of the elements of the condition is often anonymity, because it allows him to work impersonally.”

By now, the phrase “on condition of anonymity” is almost a journalistic cliché. 

Walter Shapiro wrote a humorous column on the subject in the Atlantic in 2005, entitled (naturally) “On Condition of Anonymity.”

And Matt Carlson wrote a book on the uses and abuses of anonymity, On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism (2011).

We can’t leave without giving you a little etymology.

The adjective “anonymous,” according to the OED, was first recorded in 1601 (an earlier form, “anonymal,” died out). It literally means “without  name.”

English owes the word “anonymous” to Latin (anonymus) and ultimately Greek (anonymos). But it’s not classical at heart.

Its root is the ancient Indo-European word nomen, the source of the word for “name” in the Germanic languages as well as Latin and Greek.

“Anonymous” is the source of the short-lived noun “anonymousness” (1802) and the more durable “anonymity” (1820).

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Running dogs of rhetoric

Q: In reading some of the old Cold War literature, I frequently come across the term “running dog” in reference to the Chinese disdain for America. What are its origins and implications?

A: The English term “running dog” has been around a lot longer than you might suspect—for hundreds of years before Mao Zedong was a gleam in his father’s eye.

When it first showed up in the early 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase referred to “an animal, esp. a dog: that is raised or kept for pursuing animals in the course of a hunt.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from A Helpe to Discourse (1619), a collection of miscellaneous writings of questionable authorship: Miso, because I hunted in his grounds / Let lose his running dogges, and baukt my hounds.”

The dictionary notes that a similar term, “running hound,” showed up a couple of centuries earlier.

In The Master of Game (1425), a book on hunting, Edward, Duke of York, writes about “rennyng houndis hunten in diuers maners” on the moors.

In fact, the OED says the use of the term “running dog” by the Communists is derived from zougou, a Chinese term for a hunting dog (from zou, to run, and gou, dog).

The dictionary says the Chinese used the term figuratively in the “18th cent. or earlier in political contexts” to refer to a “servile follower, lackey.”

In the 20th century, according to Oxford, the Chinese Communists used the term for “a person who is subservient  to a foreign power, esp. to one that threatens revolutionary interests.” Later, the dictionary notes, the Communists used the term in a “generalized” sense.

Interestingly, the OED’s earliest written example of the term used in the political sense is from an American newspaper in which the Chinese are referred to as “running dogs” of the Russians.

Here’s the citation, from the June 8, 1925, issue of the Los Angeles Times: “The Communists cry ‘overthrow imperialism,’ but they themselves are the running dogs of red Russian imperialists.”

The next Oxford example is from China: A Nation in Evolution (1928), by Paul Monroe: “The intelligent Chinese … may believe that missionaries in general are but the ‘running dogs’ … of the imperialistic business and political interests.”

The earliest example citing a Chinese source is from Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Volume IV (1961):

“Without a revolutionary party … it is impossible to lead the working class and the broad masses of the people in defeating imperialism and its running dogs.”

We’ll end with an example from The Honourable Schoolboy, a 1977 novel by John le Carré:

“Czarist imperialist running dogs drank tasteless coffee with divisive, deviationist, chauvinist Stalinists.”

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Body English

Q: Why do people say “dead body” instead of just “body”? In a news story about a murder, one would assume that the body found in the woods or in the water was dead.

A: Yes, one would assume that a body found floating in the water was dead. And yes, in many cases it’s unnecessary or redundant to add the adjective “dead” to the noun “body.”

But we might want to add “dead” as an intensifier to emphasize the deadness of the body. And of course “body” doesn’t always refer to a corpse. In fact, the word was around for hundreds of years before it came to mean a dead body.

When the word first showed up in early Old English (spelled bodæi or bodeg), it referred to the “complete physical form of a person or animal,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation is from a translation of Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, a church history written in the 8th century by the English monk Bede.

That original sense of “body” is still one of the major meanings of the word. It wasn’t until the 13th century, according to Oxford, that “body” took on the meaning of a corpse.

In fact, the OED says the “corpse” sense of the word “perhaps originally” was “a euphemistic shortening of ‘dead body.’ ” And the dictionary has 115 written examples of the phrase “dead body” used over the last five centuries.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the early etymological history of the word “body” is surprisingly sketchy.

“For a word so central to people’s perception of themselves, body is remarkably isolated linguistically,” Atyo writes.

With the exception of a connection with an Old High German term, “it is without relatives in any other Indo-European language.”

“Attempts have been made, not altogether convincingly, to link it with words for ‘container’ or ‘barrel,’ ” he adds.

All this talk about bodies reminds us of these lines from Robert Burns’s poem “Comin Thro’ the Rye”:

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?

(“Gin” means “if” in Scots and dialectal English.)

And of course there’s J. D. Salinger’s version in Catcher in the Rye, where Phoebe corrects Holden for thinking it’s “catch a body.”

“It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said.

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Einstein? It’s all relative

Q: I used to work in management training, where this saying was cited in arguing for innovation — “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. BrainyQuote attributes it to Einstein, but gives no evidence. Is this one of those “quotes” that float around until someone decides to give a brainy person credit for it?

A: The words are correct—more or less—but the attribution is wrong.

The Yale Book of Quotations says the American novelist Rita Mae Brown, not Albert Einstein, is the source of the earliest known appearance of the quotation in print.

However, a similar quotation appeared around the same time in a book published by Narcotics Anonymous and two years earlier in an unpublished draft of the NA book.

There are also tantalizing suggestions that the quote may have been floating around in the addiction-recovery movement even earlier than that.

The quotation can be found in chapter four of Brown’s novel Sudden Death (1983). We’ll quote a couple of relevant paragraphs to provide some context:

“The trouble with Susan was that she made the same mistakes repeatedly. She’d fall in love with a woman and consume her. Susan thought that her mere presence was enough. What more was there to give? When she tired, usually after a year or so, she’d find another woman.

“Unfortunately, Susan didn’t remember what Jane Fulton once said. ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.’ ” 

(The “Jane Fulton” referred to is another character in the novel.)

A similar quote—“Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results”—appeared on page 11 of an unpublished 1981 draft of a book on recovery prepared by Narcotics Anonymous.

But that was a working draft. The approved version wasn’t published until 1983, when it appeared in the book Narcotics Anonymous. That was the same year Brown’s novel appeared.

Another version of the quotation appeared in a pamphlet, Step 2: Coming to Believe (Rev. ed.), published in 1992 by the Hazelden Foundation, an addiction-treatment organization.

In the pamphlet, a recovering addict is quoted as saying, “When I came into the program, I heard that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

We’ve seen suggestions that a 1980 version of the Step 2 pamphlet might have contained that quotation. But we’ve read the 1980 pamphlet, which is very different, and the quote isn’t there.

We wouldn’t be surprised, though, if an earlier source shows up, perhaps in the addiction-treatment movement, as more published works become digitized.

However, it’s not likely to be Einstein, whose writings are well known. Nor Mark Twain or Benjamin Franklin, as some Internet sites have claimed.

We’ve written before on our blog about “quote magnets,” famous people who get credited for every catchy quote that comes down the pike.

Perhaps the most popular quote magnets of all time are Twain and Winston Churchill. Runners-up include Franklin, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Abraham Lincoln, and Dorothy Parker.

They all said and wrote many quotable things—but not all the quotable things they’re credited with.

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If not, why not?

Q: My question is about a sentence like “Jones is smart, if not brilliant.” Does this mean “Jones is smart, but he isn’t brilliant”? Or does it mean “Jones is smart and maybe even brilliant”? It seems to me I’ve heard this “if not” construction used both ways.

A: We’re not surprised that you’re confused by this use of “if not.” It can be downright confusing, especially in writing when you aren’t able to use intonation and emphasis to get your meaning across.

The usage authority Bryan A. Garner says “if not” can mean either “but not” or “maybe even.”

Writing in Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.), he says it’s “often an ambiguous phrase to be avoided.”

Garner gives several examples of the expression used ambiguously in each sense. In all the examples, he says, it’s possible for a reader to arrive at the unintended meaning.

Here’s a “maybe even” example from the Dec. 8, 1996, issue of the Dallas Morning News: “The greater Phoenix area is one of the fastest—if not the fastest—growth areas for call centers nationwide.” (Aside: We would have written, “The greater Phoenix area is one of the fastest growth areas for call centers nationwide—if not the fastest.”)

And here’s a “but not” example from the April 12, 1996, issue of the Los Angeles Times: “She gave proficient, if not profound, readings.”

Theodore M. Bernstein, another usage authority, says “if not” is “usually perfectly clear in spoken language,” though it becomes “a tantalizing ambiguity” in writing.

In The Careful Writer, Bernstein gives this example of an ambiguous “if not” sentence: “The proposed taxes would be levied primarily, if not exclusively, on New York and Pennsylvania residents.”

He says a speaker would use his voice to emphasize or deemphasize the word “exclusively,” leaving no doubt about his meaning. But a writer can’t “indicate a rise or fall in tonal register.”

His recommendation: “The solution to the present problem should have become evident in its very discussion: if you mean perhaps, say so; if you mean but not, say so.”

We think that makes sense. As we’ve said many times—if not many, many times—the whole point of writing is communicating. And nothing should interfere with that.

One last point. Garner thinks the “perhaps” sense of “if not” is more common than the “but not” sense. Perhaps, but we’re not sure about that.

In fact, there’s only one citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for “if not” in the senses we’ve been talking about, and it’s a “but not” example.

The English author-priest Mark Pattison used the phrase in an essay published posthumously in 1845 in the Anglican periodical Christian Remembrancer: “The style of Bede, if not elegant Latin, is yet correct, sufficiently classical.”

Standard dictionaries generally don’t have entries for “if not.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) doesn’t define “if not,” but it gives this “maybe even” example of the usage: “difficult if not impossible.”  

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The right percent

Q: I’m a journalism student at Mizzou and recently disagreed with an editor about the word “percentage.” I thought it was interchangeable with “percent,” but she wasn’t so sure. We checked the AP stylebook, but it didn’t illuminate anything. What’s the verdict?

A: These words aren’t necessarily interchangeable. A “percent” is a hundredth part of something, but a “percentage” can mean any part of a whole. 

This is why “percent” is generally used with a number: “50 percent of the flour was ruined.”

And this is why “percentage” is not used with a number, just an ordinary adjective: “a large percentage of the flour was ruined.”

Still, “percent” is sometimes used in place of “percentage,” as in “What percent of the flour was ruined?”

This usage has been discouraged by some language authorities, but it’s recognized in most standard dictionaries and seems idiomatic to us.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, by Kenneth G. Wilson, has this to say about the subject:

Percentage is the more widely accepted noun, especially in Edited English, but Informal use of percent (What percent of your time do you spend watching TV?) seems thoroughly established.”

So if that’s what you and the editor disagreed about, you can both relax. If you’re writing formal English, however, you might want to stick with “percentage.”

Now comes the sticky part.

“Percentage” is a noun. (The noun can also be used attributively as a modifier, as in “percentage point.”)

And “percent” is a noun when it means “percentage.” But there’s some disagreement about how to classify “percent” in other cases.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, classifies “per cent” (it’s two words in British English) as an adverb in almost all the other cases.

The dictionary describes “percent” as an adverb when it appears with a number to form a noun phrase that expresses a proportion in hundredths (for example, “10 percent of the students”).

That definition covers a lot of territory. Too much, in our opinion and in the opinion of some standard dictionaries.

Those dictionaries include The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, and the online Macmillan Dictionary in both its US and UK editions. 

All standard dictionaries, including those three, would agree with the OED that “percent” is an adverb when it modifies a verb or an adjective.

In this adverbial Oxford citation, for example, it modifies a verb: “The Funds rose 1 per cent. on the news” (1804).

However,  American Heritage, Webster’s Third, and Macmillan would disagree with the OED that “percent” is an adverb in these Oxford citations:

“The Blank Tickets bear seven per Cent. Interest” (1710); “At the rate of ten per cent. therefore …” (1776); “Ninety per cent of the cooks do their full share” (1904); “cut my social life by about 35 per cent” (1973).

The three standard dictionaries would consider “percent” an adjective or a noun in those citations. We’ll quote some of their own examples of “percent” used as an adjective, a noun, and an adverb.

Adjective : “a 0.75 percent increase in interest rates” … “harvested 50 percent more wheat” … “another 100 percent result” … “a 3½ percent government bond” … “a 2.25 percent checking account.”

Noun: “provided 40 percent of Europe’s requirements” … “42 percent of the alumni contributed” … “owns 20 percent of the business” … “represent 50 percent of the workforce.”

Adverb: “agreed with her suggestions a hundred percent” … “sales increased 30 percent” … “if he is even one percent responsible for the accident.”  

Why does the OED call “percent” an adverb in cases where some standard dictionaries do not? This probably has a lot to do with the fact that “percent” started out as an adverbial phrase. 

The OED says “per cent” (it uses the British form) was modeled on the Italian phrase per cento, which can be translated as “for (every) hundred.”

The dictionary says the phrase appeared in Italian in 1263 or earlier. (In the following century, incidentally, the Italians invented the % sign.)

“Per cent” was first recorded in English in 1568, but a slightly earlier form showed up in 1565—“per centum,” abbreviated as “per cent.” with a period.

As the OED explains, “per centum” was “the usual form in Acts of Parliament and most legal documents.”

This coinage too was modeled after the Italian per cento, though it was fashioned out of Latin elements (per plus centum). In fact, per centum did not exist in Latin.

The facts remain that in Britain the word is still mostly written as a phrase—“per cent”—and is still regarded as adverbial in some standard dictionaries.

The Cambridge Dictionaries Online, for instance, says it’s an adverb in the examples “You got 20 percent of the answers right” and “Only 40 percent of people bothered to vote.”

American dictionaries would generally regard “percent” as a noun in those examples, though perceptions about the linguistic function of “percent” aren’t unanimous even in the United States.

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), for example, sort of agrees with Cambridge and sort of doesn’t.

“Despite changing usage,” the manual says, “Chicago continues to regard percent as an adverb (‘per, or out of, each hundred,’ as in 10 percent of the class)—or, less commonly, an adjective (a 10 percent raise).”

And by the way, the manual, which is widely used in the publishing industry (that means in formal, edited English), also recommends “percentage as the noun form (a significant percentage of her income).”

While we’re on the subject, many people use “percent” and “percentage point” incorrectly—the terms are not interchangeable.

For instance, if a mortgage rate falls to 6 percent from 8 percent, that’s a decline of 2 percentage points, or 25 percent. 

So beware. There’s no percentage in getting things wrong.

By the way, an old friend of ours from the New York Times graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism. Good look with your career!

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“Good-paying” or “well-paying”?

Q: Wish you would address “good-paying job” versus “well-paying job.”

A: We’re taught that “good” is an adjective, not an adverb, so it shouldn’t be used to modify a verb or another adjective.

That, in a nutshell, is why many people regard “good-paying job” as inferior to “well-paying job.”

They think a verb form like the participle “paying” should be modified by “well,” an adverb, not “good,” an adjective.

However, language authorities say “good” has been used as an adverb or a quasi-adverb since the Middle Ages, and this adverbial usage wasn’t criticized until the latter half of the 19th century.

In fact, the phrase “good-paying job” doesn’t strike us as bad English—informal, perhaps, but not incorrect.

It seems more natural and idiomatic than the stiffer, consciously correct “well-paying job,” especially in speech and casual writing.

Although many people consider “good-paying job” an acceptable idiom, “well-paying job” is more popular in edited writing, according to a search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books. [Note: Updated Nov. 16, 2020.]

We believe that in “good-paying job,” the word “good” is being used idiomatically as an adverb to modify the present participle “paying.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage agrees, noting that “good” has been used as an adverb since the 13th century, and that this adverbial use wasn’t criticized until the 19th.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t go that far, but it describes a category of usages in which the adjective “good” is used “in quasi-adverbial combination” with present participles.

Such a combination, the OED says, is “used adjectivally”—that is, the combined phrase modifies a noun (like “job”).

While the OED says that “in none of these instances is good adverbial in origin,” it nevertheless sometimes functions as an adverb.

There are other common usages in which “good” plays an adverbial role, though in most of them the OED stops short of classifying the word as an adverb:

● The adverbial phrase “as good as.” This modifies a verb or an adjective and means the same as an adverb like “practically.” Examples: “He as good as confessed” … “The victim was as good as dead.”

● Phrases like  “a good long time,” “a good sharp knife,” “a good many people,” and so on. Here, “good” acts as an adverb like “very” or “properly.” It modifies the adjective and serves as an intensifier.

● The phrase “good and.” This colloquial expression is an adverbial phrase that intensifies, as in “his hair was good and red” … “until we’re good and ready.”

● The phrases “for good” (as in “he left for good”) and “but good” (“you socked him but good”). These adverbial idioms can be compared to “finally” and “well.”

Merriam-Webster’s, which calls “good” an adverb when it functions as one, says English speakers of all educational levels use “good” adverbially. 

“Our evidence shows that adverbial good is common in the speech of the less educated, but is also known and used by the better educated,” M-W’s editors write.

Ironically, they add, “The schoolmasterly insistence on well for the adverb may have contributed to the thriving condition of adverbial good.”

We can imagine a couple of reasons why “good-paying job,” in particular, seems natural to many.

(1) “Good” has other forms—“better” and “best.” There’s nothing at all wrong with “better-paying job” or “best-paying job.” So why not “good-paying job”?

A critic might argue that “better” and “best” are adverbs—forms of “well”—when used with participles like “paying.” (In fact, the OED does categorize them as adverbs when so used.)

But isn’t this a circular argument?

If one calls “good” a misused adjective in “good-paying job,” then why aren’t “better” and “best” adjectives when used in the same expression?

We could just as easily call all three—“good,” “better,” “best”—adjectives being used informally in an adverbial way to modify the participle “paying.”

(2) We use the adjective “good” in phrases like “good-looking boy” and “good-tasting pie,” so why not in  “good-paying job”?

A critic might answer that “look” and “taste” are grammatically different from most verbs. They’re known as linking verbs, which are modified by adjectives like “good” instead of adverbs like “well.” (We’ve written about linking verbs before, including posts in 2012 and 2010.)

Here we would respond that when “good” modifies the participle of a linking verb (as in “good-looking,” “good-tasting”), it’s clearly an adjective—not an adverb.

But when it modifies the participle of a non-linking verb (“good-paying”), then it’s being used informally as an adverb.

We admit that “good-paying” is informal English. So do the editors at Merriam-Webster’s, who suggest that “adverbial good is still primarily a speech form.”

“Our evidence,” they write, “is mostly from reported or fictional speech, letters, and similar breezy and familiar contexts. It is not likely to be needed in a book review or a doctoral dissertation.”

We’ll end with an example of the usage from a 1936 letter by Archibald MacLeish, the poet and Librarian of Congress: “It pays good and keeps the boys in school.”

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In-laws and other impediments

Q: I wonder why English has only one term, “brother-in-law,” for three different kinds of relatives: your spouse’s brother, your sibling’s husband, and your spouse’s sibling’s husband.

A: You might also ask why something similar can be said of “sister-in-law,” which refers to three different relatives too.

This is probably because “brother-in-law” and “sister-in-law” originally referred not only to the various relatives involved but also to a prohibited relationship shared by them.

When  “brother-in-law” entered English around 1300 and “sister-law” about 1440, the phrase “in-law” meant “in canon law,” as opposed to “in blood” or “by nature,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says the phrase was appended to names of relationship to indicate “the degrees of affinity within which marriage is prohibited; a brother-in-law or sister-in-law being, as regards intermarriage, treated ‘in law’ as a brother or sister.”

The word “affinity” here, Oxford says, refers to “relationship by marriage (as distinguished from relationship by blood).”

We won’t discuss the ins and outs of affinity in canon law, the ecclesiastical rules of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches. Let’s just say that different churches have different rules for which relationships are impediments to marriage.

In an earlier post, we noted that the term “in-law” was once used in English to describe relationships that are now referred to with the term “step.” So, the expression “sister-in-law” once also meant stepsister.

Another old term, “inlaw,” used to mean the opposite of “outlaw” or, as the OED puts it, “one who is within the domain and protection of the law.”

Finally, in case you’re wondering, the use of the term “in-law” as a colloquial noun for any relative showed up first in the late 1800s. The earliest example in the OED is from the Jan. 24, 1894, issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine:

“The position of the ‘in-laws’ (a happy phrase which is attributed with we know not what reason to her Majesty, than whom no one can be better acquainted with the article) is often not very apt to promote happiness.”

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A jitney lunch

[NOTE: This post was updated on July 3, 2016.]

Q: My wife went to a country schoolhouse that was being swallowed up as Omaha grew. Unlike the modern schools in town, hers had no facilities for a hot lunch. But once a month the school system would deliver a hot lunch (usually hot dogs) called a “jitney lunch.” What does “jitney” mean and where does it come from?

A: You’d be surprised at how much time and effort language scholars have spent trying to find out where the word “jitney” comes from.

In Studies in Etymology and Etiology (2009), for example, David L. Gold explores possible French, Russian, Spanish, British, Yiddish, and other sources. His conclusion: origin unknown.

All the other references we’ve checked, including the Oxford English Dictionary and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, agree: origin unknown.

But in 2016, the language scholar Stephen Goranson of the Duke University Libraries managed to confirm what had previously been only conjecture: The source of “jitney” was jetnée, an African-American word, via the French or Creole spoken in Louisiana, for jeton, French for “token.”

Goranson cites a ditty described in a 1915 issue of the Literary Digest as “a little catch popular with the Louisianian French-Speaking Negro”:

Mettons jetnée danz il trou / Et parcourons sur la rue—  Mettons jetnée—si non vous / Vous promenez à pied nou! This may be freely translated: Put a jitney in the slot / And over the street you ride; / Put a jitney—for if not / You’ll foot it on your hide.”

The 1915 article suggests that jetnée/“jitney” was coined by Southern blacks to mean a nickel, and was influenced by French jeton or jetton.

Now for the news. As Goranson says, “The following newly reported discovery appears to confirm such an origin by giving—in an African-American newspaper in 1898—a transitional form.”

Here he cites an article, published in January 1898 in the Illinois Record, headlined “Spingfield South-End Happenings”:

“What little jetney coachman on S. 6th street has such a big head he cant put on the coachman’s hat he only wears the coat with brass buttons?”

Goranson adds: “Note association with coach as well as (presumably) coin (or token), of little worth.”

Once established, the term for a bus or coach token spread quickly. As linguists have previously reported, the word showed up the following year, spelled “jitney,” in the Dec. 16, 1899, issue of the Morning Herald in Lexington, KY:

“ ‘Can’t spare de change. Me granmaw died in Sout’ Afriky an’ I need dis to float me over ter de fun’ral.’  ‘Quit yer kiddin’ an’ let me have a jitney.’ ”

Slang dictionaries say that at the turn of the century, “jitney” (sometimes spelled “gitney”) meant either five cents or a nickel, the fare to ride minibuses at the time. 

But by the early 20th century, the term was being used adjectivally to refer to the minibuses themselves. The OED’s earliest example is in a Nov. 28, 1914, letter from Los Angeles published in the Jan. 14, 1915, issue of the Nation:

“This autumn automobiles, mostly of the Ford variety, have begun in competition with the street cars in this city. The newspapers call them ‘Jitney buses.’ ”

Soon the word was being used by itself as a noun for the minibuses. Here’s an OED example from the April 16, 1915, issue of the New York Evening Post: “The jitney wears out the streets and should contribute to their repair.”

You’ll be especially interested in the next step in the evolution of “jitney”—as a noun used attributively (that is, adjectivally) to mean cheap or shoddy or inferior. Here’s how Oxford explains the new usage:

“So, on account of the low fare or the poor quality of these buses, used attrib. to denote anything cheap, improvised, or ramshackle.”  

The earliest published reference in the OED for this new usage is from Somewhere in Red Gap (1916), Harry Leon Wilson’s sequel to his better-known novel Ruggles of Red Gap (1915):

“It would be an ideal position for him. Instead of which he runs this here music store, sells these jitney pianos and phonographs and truck like that.”

As for those hot dogs served at your wife’s country school once a month, we imagine the meal was referred to as a “jitney lunch” either because it was cheap or uninspiring or because it was delivered by a jitney.

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Title tracking

Q: Is there a term for a song that has the same title as the album it’s on? Is it called the “titular track”?

A: Although the phrase “titular track” is sometimes used for such a tune, the most common terms are “title song” and “title track.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says that when the word “title” is used as an adjective it can mean “having the same title as or providing the title for the collection or production of which it forms a part.” It gives this example: “the title song.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “title song” as “the song or track giving its name to a long-playing record.”

The OED’s earliest example is from the Jan. 6, 1961, issue of the British weekly magazine New Musical Express: “Am I that easy to forget … is the title song of a soft-sung album by Debbie Reynolds.”

Oxford defines “title track” (it hyphenates the term) simply as “title song.” The first citation in the dictionary is from the Feb. 21, 1970, issue of Melody Maker, a British weekly that merged with New Musical Express in 2000:

“It’s hard to believe that the same man who could write and play the extraordinary title track could also be responsible for ‘Spirits’ and ‘Search.’ ”

We’ve written a couple of posts about a related term, “eponymous,” which has traditionally referred to the person something is named for, as in “Hamlet is the eponymous hero of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.”

Modern dictionaries say the term can now refer to the named as well as the namer, as in “Hamlet is the eponymous title of Shakespeare’s play about Hamlet.”

Getting back to your question about a song with the same title as its album, here are the results of a few Google searches: “title song,” 14.1 million hits; “title track,” 10.3 million; “titular track,” 126,000; “titular song,” 22,400.

In case you’re wondering, the word “title” is quite old, dating back to Anglo-Saxon days. The OED says it was spelled titul in Old English and probably pronounced with a short “i” (as in “little”), similar to the short “i” in its Latin source, titulus (an inscription or a title).

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What’s the difference?

[Note: This post was updated on May 27, 2020.]

Q: I’ve always said “A is different from B,” but now I’m hearing television ads and reporters saying that “A is different to B.” (Currently, there is a denture ad that says, “Dentures are very different to real teeth.”) I cringe when I hear “different to,” but am I cringing with righteousness?

A: We’d say “different to” makes you cringe out of unfamiliarity, not righteousness. The usage has a long history, but it’s uncommon in American English despite your recent sightings or, rather, hearings.

In a post a few years ago, we pointed out that both “different from” and “different than” are legitimate constructions. But we didn’t say much about “different to,” except that it’s used in British English.

On one point, British and American speakers agree—“different from” is standard in all varieties of English. 

But the other two combinations—“different than” and “different to”—are controversial, depending on whom you ask and where you live. In very broad, general terms, Americans accept “different than” but not “different to,” while the reverse is true in Britain.  

Much has been written about all of this—probably more than it deserves.

The editors of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage say they have “thousands and thousands of words” in their files, by about 80 commentators, on the subject of “the propriety of different than or different to.”

Despite all the wordage, the M-W editors write, the various “different” phrases can be explained very simply:

● “different from”: This usage “is the most common and is standard in both British and American usage.”

● “different than”: This construction “is standard in American and British usage, especially when a clause follows than, but is more frequent in American.” (A clause contains both a subject and its verb.)

● “different to”: This phrase “is standard in British usage but rare in American.”

We should note here that not all authorities agree with M-W that “different than” is standard in Britain.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says “different than” is “hardly used at all in BrE [British English], but is well established in AmE.”

The authors, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, write: “American manuals accept than, especially with clausal complements, while British ones vary in their attitude to it: some defend it as permitting a simpler construction … but most do not allow it as standard in BrE.”

Another guide, Fowler’s Modern English Usage (3rd ed.), by R. W. Burchfield, has this to say:

“The commonly expressed view that different should only be followed by from and never by to or than is not supportable in the face of past and present evidence or of logic.”

Despite that, Burchfield adds, “different to” is “rarer in AmE,” while “different than” is “widespread in AmE but does not form part of the regular language of Britain.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, in its entry for “different,” says it’s used today with “from,” “to,” and “than” (formerly with “with,” “against,” etc.) in “constructions specifying the two or more things which differ from each other.”

The OED goes on to say: “Different from is the most common and most accepted construction, both in British and North American English. Different than, although often thought of as being used chiefly in North America, has a long history of use in British English.”

Whether or not you regard “different than” as standard in Britain, it’s certainly standard in the US, especially before clauses.  For example, “different than it appeared” is much simpler than “different from the way it appeared” or “different from what it appeared.”

Now on to the question at hand, the use of “different to.”

This construction, the OED says, “is found in writers of all ages, and is frequent colloquially, but is by many considered incorrect.” [Note: The OED‘s third edition, updated in March 2016, no longer includes this notation and in fact does not comment specifically on the use of “different to.”]

As we’ve shown, it’s probable that most of the “many” who consider this incorrect are Americans, since “different to” isn’t considered incorrect in British English.

The British commentators Huddleston and Pullum give this example of the usage in the Cambridge Grammar: “This version is very different to the one we shall hear in the simulcast.”

From a historical perspective, there’s no doubt that “different to” has a respectable pedigree. Evidence in the OED shows that “different from” was first on the scene in the 15th century, followed  by “different to” and “different unto” in the 16th century, and “different than” in the 17th century.

For many years, all three forms lived peacefully together. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 18th century that objections began cropping up. Some grammarians of the day found reasons to quarrel with both “different than” and “different to.”

Henry Fowler, in the first edition of his Modern English Usage (1926), defended both of them. Nevertheless, they still raise the ire of pedants in one English-speaking country or another.

We’ll conclude by saying that neither “different than” nor “different to” is incorrect. All that can be said against them is that in some places they aren’t commonly heard. 

British speakers don’t routinely use “different than.” Some still occasionally object to “different to,” though it’s a standard usage in Britain.

Similarly, some Americans still occasionally object to “different than,” though it’s standard in the US. But Americans rarely use “different to.”

So any American who uses “different to” on home ground can expect to inspire a few cringes.

[We discussed the etymology of “different” on Dec. 20, 2021, in a post about how it differs from “disparate.”]

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