Category: Grammar

Categories
Etymology Grammar Linguistics

Sufficeth this explanation?

Q: You may be wrong about the origin of “suffice it to say.” I believe it’s a mishearing of the more biblical sounding “it sufficeth to say.”

A: We’re sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no mishearing involved. Here’s the story.

The “eth” in “sufficeth” is, as you suggest, an archaic verb ending.

In the Old English and Middle English periods (which ended at around 1500), it was used as a suffix to form the third-person singular present indicative form of a verb.

For example, one would say that he or she or it “goeth,” “cometh,” “sendeth,” “walketh,” “sufficeth,” and so on. 

Grammatically, the old “eth” form is parallel to the modern verb ending “s,” as in “goes,” “comes,” “sends,” “walks,” “suffices,” etc.

As we wrote in the blog entry you question, the expression “suffice it to say” is in the subjunctive mood. It did not arise from any confusion with the archaic verb ending “eth.”

So “it sufficeth to say” and “it suffices to say” are grammatically parallel (both in the indicative mood); one is archaic, that’s all.

Similarly, “sufficeth it to say” and “suffice it to say” are grammatically parallel (both in the subjunctive mood).

We hope this explanation sufficeth.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

The road less traveled

Q: I’m puzzled by phrases like these: “the door not open,” “the boy not young,” and “the days not hot.” Is this an archaic way of writing? Or is it just incorrect? Your knowledge is greatly appreciated.

A: The words “open,” “young,” and “hot” in the examples you give are adjectives. These particular adjectives generally appear before the nouns they modify: “the open door,” “the young boy,” and “the hot days.”

But in archaic or poetic language, we sometimes see negative adjectival forms (like “not open,” “not young,” “not hot”) following the nouns they modify.

Today writers don’t use such negative constructions as much as they once did, but we still occasionally see them.

A few examples are “a man not generous with his money,” “a patient not sensitive to pain,” “a fabric not impervious to water,” and “a woman no longer young.”

A similar pattern is routinely seen with “not” (or some other term of negation) plus a past participle. This isn’t archaic at all (though perhaps a bit poetic).

Here are a few examples: “the money not paid,” “the letter not written,” “a course uncharted,” and the M. Scott Peck bestseller The Road Less Traveled.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Punctuation Uncategorized

Why is the apostrophe possessive?

Q: A question that has been on my mind for a long time deals with the use of the apostrophe in a possessive like “John’s house.” How and when did this usage come into use?

A: When the apostrophe mark was introduced into English in the 1500s, it was originally used to show where a letter or syllable had been omitted. 

We still use it this way in contractions, but in fact it’s also how the apostrophe came to be a mark of possession.   

In Old English, long before the apostrophe came into use, the possessive ending for most nouns was es.

A house belonging to John, for example, would have been called something like “Johnes house.” (Another way to show possession was by using the word “of,” as in “the house of John.”) 

After the apostrophe came along, a possessive word like “Johnes” was written as “John’s” to show that a letter had been dropped—the e in es.

But the story is not as simple as that.

In Middle English (around 1100-1500) and later, the possessive ending es was often misheard as the possessive pronoun “his.”

This accounts for such erroneous old constructions as “John his house” (meaning “Johnes house”).

Historians have suggested that printers used the apostrophe (“John’s”) as a shortened form of either possessive, the legitimate “Johnes” or the illegitimate “John his.”

In “Axing the Apostrophe,” a 1989 article in English Today, the language writer Adrian Room has called the word for this punctuation mark “a cumbersome name for an awkward object.”

Where does this clunky name come from?

The short answer, John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins tells us, is that we got it via Latin and French from the classical Greek phrase prosoidia apostrophos, literally “accent of turning away.”

But there’s usually a long answer when tracking down the origin of an English word.

In this case, “apostrophe” entered English in the 1500s with two meanings, one in punctuation and the other in rhetoric.

In rhetoric, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an “apostrophe” is a “figure of speech, by which a speaker or writer suddenly stops in his discourse, and turns to address pointedly some person or thing, either present or absent.”

The earliest published use of this sense in the OED comes from Sir Thomas More’s Apology (1533): “With a fygure of apostrophe and turning his tale to God criyng out: O good Lorde.”

The first citation for the word used to mean the punctuation mark is from the Shakespeare comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost (1588): “You finde not the apostraphas, and so misse the accent.”

(The word is spelled “apostraphas” or “apostrophus” in various editions of the play. The latter spelling persisted into the 18th century,  echoing the late Latin apostrophus.)

And that’s the story of how John’s house got its apostrophe.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

Foreign correspondence

Q: I have a question about the words “abroad” and “overseas.” Are they only adjectives and adverbs? Or can they act as nouns too? Example: “The tourists prefer abroad/overseas,” or “The players are from abroad/overseas.”

A: They’re usually seen as either adverbs (“He lives abroad/overseas”) or adjectives (“He’s popular with readers abroad/overseas”).

Can they be nouns too? We’ll get to that later.

Interestingly, these two words are interchangeable as adverbs, but not always as adjectives.

In modern American English, “abroad” is seldom used as an adjective BEFORE a noun.

For example, an American would say, “He’s had overseas experience,” but not “abroad experience.”

We should mention, however, that this pre-noun adjectival use of “abroad” is sometimes heard in British English.

Now, let’s look at the question of whether “abroad” and “overseas” are nouns. We’ll take them one at a time.

Standard dictionaries in the US and the UK disagree about whether “abroad” is a noun.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) says yes, but Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has no entry for the usage.

The two standard British dictionaries we’ve checked, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the British version of the Macmillan Dictionary, don’t have entries for the noun usage either. 

In our experience, however, we’ve noticed that some British speakers (though few Americans) do use “abroad” as a noun.

And the Oxford English Dictionary does have a noun entry for “abroad,” with several citations, all of them apparently from British writers.

Here’s one via the bigoted Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love (1945):

“ ‘Frogs,’ he would say, ‘are slightly better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’ ”

In fact, American Heritage’s example of the noun usage (“Do you like abroad or hate it?”) comes from another British author, John le Carré. 

Now on to “overseas,” which none of the standard dictionaries we’ve named, whether American or British, consider a noun.

The OED, however, does consider it a noun, though all but two of the citations include the word as part of the phrase “from overseas.” Here are the exceptions:

1926, from Arnold Bennett’s novel Lord Raingo: “Britons whose secret conceit, compared to the ingenuous self-complacency of overseas, was as Mount Everest to Snowdon.”

1984, from the Sunday Times of Johannesburg: “Both revolve around how terrible it is to live in South Africa when ‘overseas’ appears to offer a brighter future.”

Although a case can be made for using “abroad” and “overseas” as nouns in the classic sense (“We prefer abroad/overseas to the states”), we find this usage jarring.

As for the phrase “from abroad,” it’s our opinion (and the opinion of the OED) that the word “abroad” is functioning as an adverb in a sentence like “She flew from abroad.”

We also think “overseas” is functioning as an adverb in the phrase “from overseas,” but the OED disagrees with us and considers it a noun in a sentence like “His aunt is visiting from overseas.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage

Being as it’s a George Clooney film?

Q: Please explain how “being as” came into being in this online comment about George Clooney in The American: “He vows his next hit will be his last, but being as this is a feature length movie that was not very likely to  happen.”

A: We’ve written before on the blog about using “being as” and related phrases in the sense of “because” or “since,” and we’ve noted that it’s generally not considered good English.

But perhaps we were a bit too dismissive of a usage that dates back to Shakespeare and earlier.

Although it’s not considered standard English now, the usage is common in US dialects, especially in the South, the lower Midwest, and New England, says the Dictionary of American Regional English.

And as we’ve mentioned, this use of “being” has a long history, either standing alone or in phrases like “being as,” “being that,” and “being as how.”

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for “being as” in this sense is from George Hellowes’s 1574 translation of Antonio Guevara’s Familiar Epistles, a collection of letters in Spanish:

“Being as we are fallen into the most grievous sinnes, we do live, and go so contented, as though we had received of God a safeconduit to be saved.”

A more familiar example is this comment by Leonato from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1599): “Being that I flow in grief, / The smallest twine may lead me.”

And Jane Austen, in an 1813 letter, has this comment about Robert Southey’s The Life of Nelson:

“I am tired of Lives of Nelson, being that I never read any. I will read this, however, if Frank is mentioned in it.” (Jane’s brother Frank was an admiral.)

DARE, the regional dictionary, has many published references for the usage in modern times, including this one from a 1955 letter by Flannery O’Connor:

“While I was in NC I heard somebody recite a barroom ballad, I don’t remember anything but the end but beinst you all are poets I will give it to you.”

Is the usage legit? Well, we wouldn’t use it, unless we were trying to be folksy (as in the O’Connor letter), but here’s another opinion:

­“It is clear that the conjunction being survives dialectally in current English,” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says. “If it—or its compounds—is part of your dialect, there is no reason you should avoid it.”

Merriam-Webster’s adds this warning: “You should be aware, however, that when you use it in writing it is likely to be noticed by those who do not have it in their dialects.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage

“His” and “hers” pronouns

Q: We say “her apple” and “the apple is hers,” but “his apple” and “the apple is his.” Why does “her” become “hers” while “his” doesn’t change?

A: Your question takes us back many centuries into the history of English pronouns.

As you know, “her” can be an object pronoun, as in “Give the apple to her.”

But “her” can also be used in a possessive sense, either with or without s at the end.

The possessive pronouns “her” and “hers” are used as different parts of speech.

The possessive “her” (as in “her apple”) is an adjective. But “hers” (as in “the apple is hers”) is what’s called an absolute pronoun.

Unlike “her,” the absolute pronoun “hers” doesn’t modify anything. Instead, “hers” stands for something: the thing or things belonging to her.

Is it unusual that the feminine forms of these words (“her”/“hers”) are different? Not really.

What’s odd here, as you’ll see, is that the masculine forms (“his”/“his”) are identical.

In Old English, which was spoken until about 1100, the possessive adjective “her” was written as hyre or hire.

The absolute form (“hers”), which the OED says is “used when no noun follows,” evolved later, in the 1300s. 

During the Middle English period (1100-1500), “hers” was spelled hirs, hires, hyres, and even her’s, with an apostrophe to indicate possession.

The modern spelling “hers” showed up in the 1500s.

Why the final s?

Because “hers,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “in form, a double possessive.” (A double possessive is a phrase that uses both “of” and an apostrophe plus s to show possession.)

The pronoun “hers” apparently came about, the OED says, “by association with the possessive case in such phrases as ‘a friend of John’s.’ ” 

But “hers” isn’t unusual in having a final s that makes it resemble a double possessive.

Several other absolute pronouns evolved in similar fashion and at times have also been spelled with apostrophes (“their’s,” “our’s,” “your’s”).

Since the possessive adjective “his” already ended in s, attempts over the centuries to add another s didn’t stick.

This is why, the OED says, “the absolute his … remains identical in form with the simple or adjective possessive.” 

The same thing happened with the possessive pronoun “its,” which also ends in s.

“The more recent its, also ending in s, has followed the example of his,” says the OED.

Thus we depend on the context of a sentence to determine whether the “his” or “its” we’re reading is an adjective or an absolute pronoun.

That’s generally not much of a problem.

A “his” or an “its” that modifies a noun (as in “his apple” or “its apple”), is a possessive adjective.

Otherwise (as in “the apple is his” or “the apple is its”), you have an absolute pronoun.

If you’d like to read more, we touched on this subject a couple of months ago in a blog posting about the double possessive.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Uncategorized

Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. If you miss a program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar

Is “Red Sox” plural?

Q: I write to inquire if “Red Sox” is singular or plural. It SOUNDS plural but it doesn’t LOOK plural. I guess this confusion is another reason not to like them so much.

A: “Red Sox” is indeed plural.

The noun “sox” is described by the Oxford English Dictionary as a “commercial and informal spelling of socks, pl. of sock.”

More to the point, the OED notes that the word is “also used as the final element in the names of some sports teams, esp. in U.S. Baseball.”

However, the first citation for the word in the dictionary is credited not to a sportswriter but to H. G. Wells, who used it in his novel Kipps (1905):

“He abbreviated every word he could; he would have considered himself the laughing-stock of Wood Street if he had chanced to spell socks in any way but ‘sox.’ ”

Another novelist, Zora Neale Hurston, used the word in a short story published in the American Mercury (1942):  “Dat broad couldn’t make the down payment on a pair of sox.”

Paul Dickson, in The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (3rd ed.), traces the name “Red Sox” to the Cincinnati Red Stockings, baseball’s first professional team. The Red Stockings were formed in 1869 and named for their colorful hosiery.

“When the Red Stockings broke up following the 1870 season,” Dickson writes, “many team members headed to Boston to form a new National Association team in 1871, and they carried with them both the name and the red stockings for which they were famous.”

During the late 19th century, several Boston teams wore red stockings.

“When the rival Boston Beaneaters of the National League abandoned its red stockings following the 1906 season,” Dickson says, “the American League team named itself ‘Red Sox’ in 1907 and donned red stockings in 1908.”

The franchise had entered the American League in 1901 and used several other names before adopting “Red Sox.”

However, Boston wasn’t the first town to cheer for a team named “Sox.”

In Chicago, various teams calling themselves the White Stockings (sometimes National Association, sometimes National League, and sometimes American League) played from around 1870 into the early 20th century.

It was because of a dispute over the use of the name “White Stockings,” according to Dickson, that the American League franchise in Chicago adopted the name “White Sox” in 1904.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar

­­Number, please!

Q: I’m writing a press release and I’m stumped by this sentence: “Smart-phone users can now get television program schedules and information literally in the palm of their hands.” Because the subject is plural, I think “hands” is correct, but it sounds awkward. Please help!

A: As you suspect, this sentence has a number-agreement problem. The number at the front (the plural subject, “users”) doesn’t agree with the one at the back (the singular object “palm”).

To be strictly correct, one would need to pluralize “palm” as well as “hand,” and write “in the palms of their hands.”

But this expression commonly appears in the singular: “in the palm of the hand” (or “his hand” or “her hand” or “your hand”). You’re painting yourself in a corner when you start out with a plural subject.

Here’s how the numbers can be made to agree:

(1) If you stick with the plural “users,” the end of the sentence should read either “in the palms of their hands,” or (avoiding the possessive pronoun) “in the palm of the hand.”

(2) If you switch to a singular subject (“A smart-phone user …”), the end of the sentence should read “in the palm of the hand.” We’d avoid the gender issue (“his hand,” “her hand,” “his or her hand”). What about “their hand”? We had an On Language column in the New York Times last year about the lack of a universal third-person pronoun in English.

(3) If you want to simplify things, use “you” instead: “If you’re a smart-phone user, you can now get television program schedules and information literally in the palm of your hand.”

Our preference is for No. 3. This seems to avoid a lot of awkward problems, but it’s your call.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar

For “better” or for “worse”

Q: I made the mistake of telling my wife she looks worse with makeup than without. She claims this means she looks bad without it, the opposite of what I intended. Who’s right? You may throw caution to the wind: we’ve been married for 48 years and our marriage won’t fail no matter what you reply. 

A: Your wife is right. And Pat is surprised she didn’t throw you out!

“Worse” is a comparative form of “bad.” (The forms are “bad” … “worse” … “worst.”) So you were saying she looks “more bad” with makeup than without.

“Better” is a comparative form of “good.” (The forms are “good” … “better” … “best.”) You should have said she looks “better” without makeup than with it. Or, to be safe, “even better”!

Pat’s advice: Memorize this! If your starting point is “good” (and in describing your wife, it had better be), then use comparative or superlative forms of “good.” 

All the best to you AND to your lovely wife.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

Impact zone

Q: It’s probably technically correct to say “make an impact,” but it sounds more childish to me than saying “have an impact.”  Any thoughts?

A: A check of citations in the Oxford English Dictionary shows that both “make an impact” and “have an impact” are used, but the “make” versions far outnumber the “haves.” To tell you the truth, we don’t see much difference between them.

Here are examples of each, from British newspapers and magazines:

1958, “it is the lighting which makes the great impact”;

1965, “you are not going to make a significant impact on growth, though you may make an impact in the charitable sense”;

1966, “What has had an impact on food distributors”;

1969, “He made such an impact on me that his memory will forever remain fresh in my mind.”

These citations appear under the OED’s entry for the noun “impact” in its usual modern meaning, a sense of the word that dates back to 1817:

“Now commonly the effective action of one thing or person upon another; the effect of such action; influence; impression. Esp. in phr. to make an impact (on).”

Many people complain about the verb “impact,” a usage that grew out of this 19th-century sense of the noun. In case you’re interested, we recently wrote a blog entry about the “verbing” of nouns like “impact.”

The original verb “impact,” the OED says, actually goes back more than 400 years. It was modeled after the past participle “impacted,” meaning packed in (as in “an impacted wisdom tooth”).

But two more recent senses of the verb came along only in the 20th century, and these verbs were modeled after uses of the noun that showed up in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In 1916, according to OED citations, writers first used the verb to mean “to come forcibly into contact with a (larger) body or surface,” as when an asteroid “impacts” on or against a planet.

And in 1935, the OED citations show, people began using the verb in the figurative sense of “to have a (pronounced) effect on.”

We don’t care for this figurative usage, but we suspect that it’s here to stay.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar

Should you turn off your grammar checker?

Q: Pat has said on WNYC that she disables her grammar checker because it gives so much bad advice. I wonder if you could expand on this. I generally find my grammar checker to be more of a help than a hindrance.

A: In the new third edition of Pat’s grammar guide Woe Is I, she says her spell checker has been a helpful (though erratic) friend, but grammar check “ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

To make her point about the grammar software, she writes of testing it with this sentence: “After peeing on the rug, Paris scolded her Chihuahua.”

No, grammar check didn’t raise an eyebrow!

Puzzled? In the sentence as written, Paris, not the Chihuahua, is the guilty party. This is an example of a dangler, a common problem involving syntax, or word order.

After getting your question, we turned on the grammar-checking function in Microsoft Word and took it for another test drive. The news isn’t good.

Here’s a selection of some screwed-up sentences that got passing grades:

Those gorgeous Niagara Falls is beautiful. (It should be “that,” not “those.”)

That dress makes you look as an elephant. (It’s “like,” not “as.”)

John looked at me and runs away. (No, “ran away.”)

Effective marketing of brands are difficult. (It should be “is difficult.”)

Gates are at war with Jobs. (Make it “is at war.”)

This is the friend whom I said wanted to meet you. (It’s “who,” not “whom.”)

However you operate it, the things works. (No, “the thing works.”)

None of them is here. (It’s “are here.”)

They don’t admit that, they’re wrong. (No comma, please.)

Everybody has their own seat. (No, “their” isn’t ready for prime time yet.)

In a nutshell, it’s not very good at detecting problems with sequential tenses, subject-verb agreement, punctuation, and so on.

Need we say more?

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
English English language Expression Grammar Language Usage Writing

Collective bargaining

Q: Please tell me which verb is correct in this sentence: “Ninety percent of the team is/are men.” The plural “are” sounds correct, but “team” is singular.

A: Our choice is “Ninety percent of the team are men.” Here’s why.

“Percent” is used with both singular and plural verbs. It usually takes a plural verb when followed by “of” plus a plural noun, and takes a singular verb when followed by “of” plus a singular noun.

Example: “Sixty percent of the cookies were eaten, but only twenty percent of the milk was drunk.”

With your sentence, the question is whether the noun “team” should be treated as singular or plural. This isn’t a black-and-white question!

“Team” is a collective noun: a singular noun that stands for a number of people or things that form a group.

A collective noun takes either a singular or a plural verb, depending on whether you’re talking about the group as a unit (singular) or the individuals (plural).

In this case, the tip-off that we’re talking about individuals is the word “men,” a plural noun.

So we’re talking here about the players who make up the team, not the group as a single unit. This calls for a plural verb: “Ninety percent of the team are men.”

A similar case can be made for the noun “band.” Like “team,” it’s a singular collective noun. But we would say, “Fifty percent of the band are vocalists.”

The singular verb “is” would be dissonant here because the plural “vocalists” indicates that we’re talking about the members of the band, not the group as a whole.

On the other hand, if we’re talking about the group as a single unit, we use a singular verb: “The team [or band] is playing in Pittsburgh.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has a good explanation of all this. It says in part that collective nouns “have had the characteristics of being used with both singular and plural verbs since Middle English.”

Most of the time, nouns and their verbs agree in number: singular nouns with singular verbs, and plurals with plurals. This is what grammarians mean when they talk about “agreement.” But with collective nouns, what’s at work is “notional agreement.”

As Merriam-Webster’s says, the principle of notional agreement “is simple: when the group is considered as a unit, the singular verb is used; when it is thought of as a collection of individuals, the plural verb is used.”

If you’d like to read more, we’ve written blog items on other collective words, including “couple,” “majority,” and “none.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Categories
Etymology Grammar Linguistics

The one and only you

Q: This one’s been bugging me FOREVER! Why do we have subject and object versions of “he” and “she,” but not of lonely “you”?

A: English did in fact once have subject and object versions of the second-person pronoun that we now know as “you.”

In Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, the subject pronouns were “thou” and “ye,” and the objects were “thee” and “you.” The singulars were “thou” and “thee,” and the plurals “ye” and “you.”

Over the centuries, these four pronouns were squished together into the all-purpose “you.”

By the end of the 16th century the all-purpose “you” was firmly established as standard English, though some “thee”-ing and “thou”-ing survived, notably among the Quakers and in rural dialects.

We’ve discussed the history of all this in Origins of the Specious, our book about English language myths. We also touched on it in a blog entry about “y’all.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar Usage

Title characters

Q: I’m confused about when to capitalize the definite article in titles. I see it all sorts of ways in all sorts of publications. Help!

A: No matter where “the” appears in a sentence, it should be capitalized at the beginning of the title of a work (book, play, movie, opera, and so on) if it’s part of the title.

Examples: “I lent him my copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” … “His favorite painting is The Last Supper” … “She consulted The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.”

But if “the” is not part of the title, it’s lowercase: “We get much of our  information from the Oxford English Dictionary.”

Names of newspapers and periodicals often have “the” as part of their titles, but capitalization styles vary. 

The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.) recommends lowercasing “the” before the name of a newspaper or magazine, even if that publication has “The” as an official part of its name.

Example: “I read both the New York Times and the New Yorker.”  (The Chicago Manual also uses italics for the names of newspapers and periodicals, though we don’t on our blog.)

Some book publishers do uppercase “the” if the periodical itself does so. Example: “He reads neither The New York Times nor The New Yorker.”

We wouldn’t capitalize “the” in mid-sentence when it’s part of the name of a school or department at a university, even though academics like to do so (as in, “He’s chairman of The English Department”).

The capital “t” is unnecessary in the example above and, if you ask us, it’s sheer puffery. We’d also like to see “department” lowercased, but that’s probably too much to ask!

We’ve written before about the tendency of academics and bureaucrats to overuse capital letters (as in “the Company” or even “The Company”).

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

A deceptively tricky word

Q: I have a question about this sentence: “The pool of water is deceptively shallow.” Is the pool shallow or deep? It seems to me as if it could be either.

A: The word “deceptively” means “in a deceptive manner, so as to deceive,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And as it turns out, it’s a very deceptive adverb when used to modify an adjective.

Some people feel, for instance, that a man described as “deceptively tall” is actually shorter than he seems. Others think just the opposite – that he’s taller than he seems.

This makes “deceptively” an unreliable word. Is the man tall in appearance but actually short, or short in appearance but actually tall?

The OED says the adverb was first used in print by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his book Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character  (1825):

“If he use the words, Right and Obligation, he does it deceptively, and means only Compulsion, and Power.” (We’ve expanded the quotation somewhat by going to the original.)

Coleridge’s meaning is clear enough. But here’s the only other OED citation for “deceptively,” from Henry W. Bates’s The Naturalist on the River Amazons: A Record of Adventures (1863):

“Two smaller kinds, which are deceptively like the little Nemeobius Lucina.” 

Bates was talking about two Amazon butterflies that were “deceptively like” an English species. But what did he mean?

If two butterflies are “deceptively like” a third, does that mean they’re more or less like it than they seem? Bates probably meant they were so alike as to deceive an onlooker.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) has an interesting usage note about “deceptively”:

“When deceptively is used to modify an adjective, the meaning is often unclear. Does the sentence The pool is deceptively shallow mean that the pool is shallower or deeper than it appears?”

When American Heritage’s Usage Panel was asked to decide, “50 percent thought the pool shallower than it appears, 32 percent thought it deeper than it appears, and 18 percent said it was impossible to judge.”

“Thus a warning notice worded in such a way would be misinterpreted by many of the people who read it, and others would be uncertain as to which sense was intended,” the dictionary adds.

So what should a writer do when faced with this deceptive adverb?

“Where the context does not make the meaning of deceptively clear,” the AH usage note says, “the sentence should be rewritten, as in The pool is shallower than it looks or The pool is shallow, despite its appearance.”

Our advice? Unless you intend to be deceptive, it’s best to avoid “deceptively” before an adjective.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

A work in progress

Q: Does a language student “work with” or “work on” causative form? I prefer “on,” but some colleagues insist on “with.” It seems to me that one works “with” a person and “on” a subject of study.

A: We think “work on” or “work with” would be OK here, but surprisingly we can’t find either usage in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

The two dictionaries do mention “work on” in their entries for “work,” but not in the sense you’re asking about. The only meaning given is to try to influence or persuade somebody, as in “She worked on my sympathies.”

However, the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for the verb “work” lists the verbal phrase “work on” in the sense you’re interested in: to make something a subject of study, occupation, literary treatment, and so on.

But (again surprisingly) we can’t find any mention in the OED’s “work” entry for “work with” used in this sense. We see examples for working with one’s head or with another person, but not with a subject.

Nevertheless, this meaning of “work with” is quite common now. We googled “work with English,” for example, and got more than 2.2 million hits. We got more than 1.2 million for the “work on” version.

This suggests that both of these usages will probably show up before long in the OED as well as in standard dictionaries like American Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Linguistics

Verbal reasoning

Q: My pet peeve is the verbalization of nouns, but I’m always driving when Pat is on the Leonard Lopate Show so I haven’t had a chance to call in about it.

A: Many people get annoyed when nouns are newly “verbed.” We do a lot of groaning ourselves. We don’t like the use of “impact” as a verb, for example, and we tend to avoid it. 

But speakers of English have been legitimately turning nouns into verbs for centuries. This is how English got many of its most familiar verbs.

Would you believe that “cook” began life as a noun? We formed the verb from the noun.

By the same process, we also acquired the verbs “thread,” “petition,” “map,” “jail,” “hammer,” “elbow,” “phone,” “hand,” “farm,” and many more. All these verbs were adaptations of the earlier nouns. 

In English, parts of speech change their functions very readily and have since the days of Old English. This process is called “conversion,” and it accounts for much of our present-day vocabulary.

Not only do nouns get verbed, but verbs get nouned, as in these examples: “a winning run,” “a long walk,” “a constant worry,” “take a call,” “a vicious attack.” Those nouns were adapted from the earlier verbs. 

Conversion works every which way. Adverbs like “out” and “through” get converted into nouns (“he pitched three outs”), into verbs (“a gay celebrity was outed”), and into adjectives (“a through street”).  

Adjectives get converted too. You might say, for instance, that sun causes paper “to yellow” or that a process is beginning “to slow.” Both of those verbs were converted from adjectives. 

For every irritating formation (like the verbs “impact,” ”dialogue,” and “interface”) there are hundreds more that we depend on and use freely every day.

So don’t knock conversion itself. Even when the words are ugly, the process is legitimate. If you don’t like a new usage, simply avoid it. Words that aren’t used tend to disappear.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar Punctuation Usage

Sui genitive!

Q: I have a grammar question that’s been bothering me. If we say “the Six-Day War” and “the seven-year itch,” why do we also say “the Hundred Years’ War” and “five years’ experience”? Is there a difference I’m unaware of?

A: Normally, nouns used with numbers to form adjectival phrases are singular, as in “two-inch rain,” “three-year-old boy,” “two-dollar word,” “eight-volume biography,” and “four-star restaurant.”

However, where a plural noun is used by tradition to form such a phrase, it’s generally followed by an apostrophe, as in “the Thirty Years’ War” and “the Hundred Years’ War.”

The plural followed by an apostrophe is also used in phrases like “ten dollars’ worth” or “five years’ experience” or “two days’ time.”  

Apostrophe constructions like these aren’t “possessive” in the sense of ownership; strictly speaking, they’re genitive. 

As we’ve written before on the blog, genitives involve relationships much wider than simple possession or ownership. One such relationship is measurement, as in “two weeks’ pay” or “six hours’ time” or “five years’ experience.”

Other common examples of genitives include “a summer’s day,” “for old times’ sake,” “in harm’s way,” and “at wits’ end.” (We’ve discussed “at wits’ end” on our blog as well, in case you’re interested.) None of these apostrophes indicate possession, strictly speaking. 

Where measurements are concerned, we often have a choice of modifying phrases. Let’s say we’re waiting on the tarmac for our plane to take off.

We can use either a plural noun in the genitive case (“a three hours’ wait”), or a singular noun as part of an ordinary compound adjective (“a three-hour wait”).

Either way, it’s a long wait!

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar

Me too? I too?

Q: I know someone who thinks he knows everything about English. This person says the most widely tolerated grammatical error is “Me too.” He insists it should always be “I too.” Is this true?

A: “Me” is a much misunderstood pronoun. Perhaps the most common grammatical error in English is using “I” where “me” would be correct.

For example, in a sentence like “He told John and I a story,” the pronoun should be “me,” not “I.”

In standard English, “me” is an object pronoun. “Me” is technically incorrect only when it’s being used as a nominative (or subject) pronoun – that is, when it’s the subject or implied subject of a sentence.

So “me” is impeccably correct in cases where it’s the implied object of an elliptical (or incomplete) sentence like “Me too.”

For example, if we say, “She invited us to the party,” and you respond, “Me too,” you’re using “me” correctly. “Me too” is an elliptical way of saying “[She invited] me too.” Here, “I too” would be incorrect. You’d never say “She invited I too.”

Or if we say to someone else, “Here’s a gift from us,” and you respond, “Me too,” then you’re using “me” correctly. “Me too” is an elliptical way of saying “[It’s from] me too.” Here, “I too” would be incorrect. You’d never say “It’s from I too.”

On the other hand, if we say, “We’re hungry,” and you respond, “I too,” you’re technically correct though unnaturally formal (more on that later). In this case, “I too” is an elliptical way of saying “I [am hungry] too.”

There are other kinds of constructions in which the choice of “me” and “I” in short elliptical phrases may depend on whether a subject or an object is implied. We wrote a blog item about this last year.

So much for what’s technically correct and incorrect. The truth is that few people say “I too,” and for good reason. Even when it’s correct (and often it isn’t), it’s stiff and formal sounding. 

As we’ve written before on the blog, the use of “Me too” for “I too” is an extremely common idiom and a natural development in English.

The reason is that English speakers generally choose “me” over “I” when a pronoun is the subject of an elliptical, verbless sentence, never mind what’s technically correct.

In a short reply without a verb, “I” seems unnaturally stiff to most people, including us. If it seems stiff to you too, use “Me too.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

When abusage becomes usage

Q: I came across your blog for the first time today. After scanning the entries, I came to this conclusion:  No usage is wrong if your research shows it has been used before. From this brief exposure to your work, it seems your entire focus is to find some way to justify questionable usage.

A: We’re sorry that you interpret our judgments as ways “to justify questionable usage.”

When the two of us make a judgment about a usage, we consult many sources, including these:

The Oxford English Dictionary; current standard dictionaries (and sometime older ones, for historical perspective); old and new usage guides; scholarly studies, and articles in journals like American Speech.

This gives us a feel for whether educated opinion about a usage has changed.

Many times, we’re chagrined at what we learn. But as former journalists (we were once editors at the New York Times) we report what we find, painful though it may be!

English is well over a thousand years old, and it has adapted itself to common usage century by century. Some 19th-century usages are almost unrecognizable today.

The underlying grammar, of course, is much slower to change, though change it does.

Use of the subjunctive, for example, is rapidly slipping away in Britain. We no longer hear “thou sayest” or “she cometh” or “doth,” and English speakers on both sides of the pond seldom use “shall” in place of “will” any more.

Changes in usage – for instance, in spellings, pronunciations, meanings, and choice of vocabulary where no new grammatical function is involved – are more readily observable over time.

And the choice of preposition (as in “wait on line” versus “wait in line,” or “wait on the weather” versus “wait for the weather”) is often idiomatic and does not involve a change in grammatical  function.

Many people ask us, “When does something ‘incorrect’ become ‘correct,’ or at least grammatically acceptable?”

This is the million-dollar question! Any linguist who could definitively answer this question would deserve a Nobel Prize (that is, if the Swedes decided to give one for linguistics).

If you wouldn’t mind reading another blog entry, here’s one we wrote not long ago to a reader who had a similar complaint: 

Even if you never read us again, thanks for letting us hear from you.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

Should we strike out “stricken”?

Q: Please tell me that someday soon the word “absolutely” will be stricken from the language. Oops! Did I commit an egregious error by using “stricken” in lieu of “struck”? If your answer is in the affirmative, please do not respond by saying “absolutely.” I can’t stand hearing it anymore.

A: You’re not the first reader of the blog to complain to us about this. In fact, we wrote an item a few years ago about the annoying overuse of “absolutely” in place of a simple “yes.”

But let’s turn to “stricken.” The past tense of “strike” is “struck,” and that’s usually  the correct past  participle as well.

But, as Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out, the alternative participle “stricken” is used when “strike” has the sense of “to afflict suddenly.”

The usage guide adds that “stricken” is also commonly used (as you used it) in the sense of “to cancel or delete.”

So in the sentence you wrote, either “stricken” or “struck” is absolutely fine!

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

Is “proven” innocent or guilty?

Q: What do you think about “proven” as a past participle? A lot of people insist that it’s an adjective and “proved” is the participle. However, the participial use of “proven” was certainly accepted in the past (“innocent until proven guilty”).

A: Both “proved” and “proven” are standard English, whether as an adjective or as the past participle of “prove.” The choice is a matter of preference rather than right or wrong.

In American English, “proven” is clearly more common as the adjective before a noun: “This is a proven remedy” … “She’s considered a proven talent.”

As for the past participle, until relatively recently “proved” was more common: “It has been proved” … “She had proved unworthy” … “I have proved that my theory works.”

But “proven” has made rapid gains as a past participle and is now about even with “proved” as the American preference.

As you point out, “proven” has a long history as a past participle in certain legal language: “A person is innocent until proven guilty” … “The verdict was not proven.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says “proven” began life as the past participle of preven, the usual Middle English spelling of the word we now spell as “prove.”

“Proven survived in and descends to us from Scottish English,” the usage guide adds. “It apparently first established itself in legal use and has been slowly working its way into literary and general use.”

As for the choice between “proved” or “proven,” Merriam-Webster’s says: “Both forms are standard now.”

The Oxford English Dictionary also notes that the use of “proven” as both a participle and as an adjective originated in Scottish English.

And in Scots Law (the legal system in Scotland), the OED says, “the verdict ‘Not proven’ is admitted, besides ‘Guilty’ and ‘Not guilty,’ in criminal trials.”

A usage note in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says: “Surveys made some 50 or 60 years ago indicated that proved was about four times as frequent as proven. But our evidence from the last 30 or 35 years shows this no longer to be the case.”

“As a past participle proven is now about as frequent as proved in all contexts,” the usage note adds. “As an attributive adjective (‘proved or proven gas reserves’) proven is much more common than proved.”

Case closed!

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar

Why Alice has got to grow up again

[Note: This post was updated on May 23, 2022.)

Q: On your Grammar Myths page, you defend the use of “gotten” and discuss the distinction between “have got” and “have gotten.” Yes, there is a distinction, but there’s a larger issue too. In the spirit of omitting extraneous verbiage, why not simply use “have” instead of “have got”?

A: On the surface, this sounds like a good idea, as if the “got” in “have got” is merely redundant. But the answer is more complicated.

“Get” is an extremely versatile verb and much misunderstood, with many idiomatic usages.

Often, critics of “have got” misunderstand the nature of the verb. The problem is that they confuse “get” and “have,” which are two separate and distinct verbs.

As you know, several forms of the verb “get” legitimately use forms of “have.” We underline that because people sometimes assume “have got” is always incorrect and should be replaced by “have.” Not so.

Here, for example, are two sentences indicating that the speaker owns a car:

(1) “I have a car.”

(2) “I have got a car.”

In the first, the verb is “have,” used in the present tense. And obviously it’s the main verb.

In the second, the verb is “get” is technically in the present perfect tense, with “have” as the auxiliary. But as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, in this idiomatic sense, “have got” is a “specialised use of the perfect” that’s identical in meaning and function to the present tense of “have.” In other words, “I have got a car” = “I have a car.”

Both #1 and #2 are perfectly correct English, and you may choose either. You may prefer one to the other for reasons of style, euphony, or economy of expression. But both are unassailably correct. (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language regards this use of “have got” as an informal idiom.)

We mentioned above that “get” has many idiomatic usages. One that sometimes puzzles people is the construction “have got to” in the sense of “must.” For example, “You have got to read this.”

Some people consider this incorrect English. Again, not so! (The OED also calls this sense of “have not” a “specialized use of the perfect,” one equivalent to “must” or “have to.”

The perfect-tense “have got” plus “to” plus a verb in the infinitive (as in “I have got to go”) is often used in place of present-tense “must.” So “You have got to read this” is equivalent to “You must read this” or “You have to read this” (another idiomatic usage).

By “idiomatic” we don’t mean to suggest that “have got to” isn’t absolutely kosher.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out early literary examples of this usage in the works of Disraeli, Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.

So there’s no reason to avoid using “have got to” in the sense of “must” or “have to.” As M-W says, “Have got to, have to, and the frequently recommended must can all be used in the present tense, but only had to can be used in the past.”

The OED has quite a few citations for the “have got to” usage, including these from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865):

“The first thing I’ve got to do is to grow to my right size again.” And later, “I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again.”

Oxford says that “to have got to” is the equivalent of “to have to” or “to be obliged to.”

The Cambridge Grammar says, “The idiom have got derives historically from a perfect construction,” an origin that’s “reflected in the fact that the have component of it is an auxiliary.”

Cambridge also notes that there is sometimes a difference between “I’ve got to mow the lawn” and “I have to mow the lawn.”

The first sentence expresses the sense of a “single obligation,” Cambridge says, while the second expresses a “single or habitual obligation.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar Linguistics Usage

A black perfect little dress?

Q: Why do we say “a perfect little black dress” instead of “a black perfect little dress”?

A: Guess what, there’s a general formula for the order of adjectives in English. (Isn’t there a general formula for everything?)

This is why we say “a perfect little black dress” instead of “a black perfect little dress.”

As The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language explains, size usually comes before color: “A large black sofa represents the preferred order while a black large sofa is very unnatural” (page 452).

Well, that explains “little black dress.” But why does “perfect” come before “little” and “black”? Read on.

Cambridge distinguishes between two kinds of “pre-head modifiers” (for our purposes, these are adjectives preceding a noun): the “early” ones and the “residual” ones.

As a rule, the “early” ones come first, and they account for things like quantity (as in “two,” or “enough,” or “another”); superlatives (“largest”); order (“second”); and rank or importance (“key”).

After these come the following kinds of adjectives, which Cambridge lists in this order:

(1) Evaluative (these express a speaker’s subjective opinion), as in “good,” “bad” “attractive,” “tasty,” “valuable,” “perfect.”

(2) General property (these represent a quality that can be observed objectively, like size, taste, and smell, as well as human characteristics). Examples include “big,” “fat,” “thin,” “sweet,” “ear-splitting,” “long,” “jealous,” “pompous,” “wise.”

(3) Age, as in “old,” “new,” “young,” “modern,” “ancient,” “up-to-date.”

(4) Color, as in “black, “green,” “crimson,” “powder-blue.”

(5) Provenance, as in “French,” “Chinese,” “Venezuelan.”

(6) Manufacture (these describe what something is made of, or how or by whom it’s made). Examples include “woolen,” “wooden,” “cotton,” “iron,” “carved,” “enameled,” “Sainsbury’s.”

(7) Type, as in “men’s,” “women’s,” “children’s,” and words (often nouns) like those underlined in these phrases: “sports car,” “photograph album,” “dessert spoon,” “passenger aircraft,” “laptop computer,” “winter overcoat,” “digestive biscuit,” “summer’s day.”

Cambridge gives the following as an example using all seven kinds of adjectives: “an attractive tight-fitting brand-new pink Italian lycra women’s swimsuit.”

This explanation isn’t rigid, but it shows how adjectives generally fall into line.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

Stiff upper English

Q: I grew up in Oklahoma and live in Connecticut, but British English often seems more correct to me. For instance, the Times of London uses spellings like “catalogue” and “largesse” (my preferences) while the New York Times uses “catalog” and “largess” (ditto). The London paper also uses “none of them is” and “any of them is” (my choices) while the NYT uses “none of them are” and “any of them are” (ditto).

A: The different spellings and usages you mention aren’t necessarily characteristic of British vs. American practices.

In fact, the divisions aren’t as black and white as many people think. In some cases, for instance, two spellings are used, both in the US and in the UK.

First of all, let’s set the record straight about “none” and “any.”

It’s not true that they are invariably singular. In both the US and the UK, these can be either singular or plural.

When we mean “any of it” or “none of it” (that is, any or no amount of one thing), the accompanying verb is singular. But when we speak of “any of them” or “none of them” (that is, any people or no people), the verb is plural.

For what it’s worth, we searched the archives at both newspapers for “any of them” and “none of them.” Guess what? We found lots of singular and plural examples – at both papers. No comment.

We’ve written before on the blog about “none.” Though many people are misled by the word’s etymology, it’s not true that “none” invariably means “not one.” Unfortunately, this bit of 19th-century folklore is deeply entrenched.

The Oxford English Dictionary agrees. It says that “none,” in the sense of “not any (one) of a number of people or things” or “no people,” is used “commonly with plural concord.” Examples are given from late Old English up to the present.

Now let’s examine the other words you mention. We’ll begin with “catalog” vs. “catalogue.” 

The word was first adopted into English in the 1400s, when it was spelled “cataloge” or “cathaloge.”

It’s derived from the French catalogue and the late Latin catalogus (which come ultimately from the Greek katalogos). The “gue” ending was introduced in the 1500s, possibly to emphasize the resemblance to French.

In American English, both spellings are used; “catalog” is generally preferred, with “catalogue” listed in dictionaries as an equal variant. In British English, both spellings are also used, but the preferences are reversed.

We consulted Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (published in Britain).

The American preference for “catalog” was underscored early in the 20th century, when the American Library Association endorsed the simpler spelling.

The popularity of the spellings “catalog,” “dialog,” “analog,” and others is evidence of the gradual decline of the “gue” ending.

The New York Times still uses “dialogue,” but prefers the simpler spelling for “catalog.” It uses “analog” for the adjective that means the opposite of digital, but it uses “analogue” for the noun meaning a counterpart or equivalent. (See what we mean about black and white?)

Now, let’s look at “largess” vs. “largesse.” This noun, which means something like “generosity,” was adopted into English from the French largesse in the 1200s, when it was spelled a variety of ways.

The anglicized spelling “largess” was firmly established in the 1500s and for centuries was preferred in both American and British English. That’s still somewhat true in American English, though many Americans as well as Britons have reverted to the French spelling.

As things stand today, according to American Heritage, “largess” is preferred in American English, with “largesse” as a less common variant. Most usage guides agree. But  Merriam-Webster’s gives “largesse” as the more common spelling and “largess” second.

As for the British, Longman gives both spellings equal weight, though “largesse” is listed first. The OED calls its entry for the word “largess, largesse.” (Again, there are more grays than blacks and whites!)

In summary, the variations you speak of are not necessarily examples of American vs. British usage. Or at least, the demarcations are not as cleanly cut as is often supposed. And sometimes different practices are examples of greater or lesser degrees of formality.

We generally prefer the shorter spellings, but feel free to use the longer ones if you like. Be consistent, though. Never mind what Emerson had to say.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
English language Etymology Grammar Linguistics Spelling Style Usage

Honey, I sunk the boat

[Note: A later post on this subject appeared on May 24, 2019. And an updated post about “shrink,” “shrank,” and “shrunk” was published on Jan. 2, 2020.]

Q: I’ve noticed that even the best-edited publications sometimes use “sunk” instead of “sank” for the past tense of “sink.” This leaves me with a sinking feeling. What can we do about the loss of a perfectly good four-letter word that can be spoken in any company?

A: Both “sank” and “sunk” are accepted for the past tense of “sink” in American English. The two are listed, in that order, as equal variants in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.).

So it’s correct to say either “the boat sank” or “the boat sunk.” The past participle is “sunk,” as in “the boat has sunk” or “the boat was sunk.”

In case you’re wondering, the same is true for “shrink.” The same three American dictionaries  allow either “shrank” or “shrunk” in the past tense.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says “shrunk” is “undoubtedly standard” in the past tense, though the preference in written usage seems to be for “shrank.”

In 1995, William Safire drew catcalls from the “Gotcha!” gang for using “shrunk” in the past tense in the New York Times. Why did he do it? Here’s how he explained it:

“Because Walt Disney got to me, I guess: the 1989 movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids did to ‘shrank’ what Winston cigarettes did to ‘as’: pushed usage in the direction of what people were casually saying rather than what they were carefully writing.”

But back to “sunk,” which has bounced back and forth in acceptability over the centuries. Arguments over it are nothing new. For instance, we found a spirited defense of “sunk” in the past tense in an 1895 issue of the journal The Writer.

In the history of English, the use of “sunk” in the past tense has been “extremely common,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In fact, the OED cites Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 as giving the past tense as “I sunk, anciently sank.”

Johnson himself used “sunk” as the past tense, as in this citation from his treatise Taxation No Tyranny (1775): “The constitution sunk at once into a chaos.”

But Johnson was right: “anciently,” to use his word, the accepted past tense was indeed “sank.”

The verb was sincan in Old English, with the past tense sanc and the past participle suncon or suncen.

The old past tense seems to have been preserved into Middle English, the form of the language spoken between 1100 and 1500.

Here’s an example from Arthur and Merlin (circa 1330): “Wawain on the helme him smot, / The ax sank depe, god it wot.”

But in modern English, both “sank” and “sunk” have appeared as past tenses, and “sunk” may even have been preferred in literary usage. Here’s Dickens, for example: “ ‘Cold punch,’ murmured Mr. Pickwick, as he sunk to sleep again” (The Pickwick Papers, 1836).

The usage can be found in the Bible (1611): “The stone sunke into his forehead.” And here it is in Sir William Jones’s poem Seven Fountains (1767): “The light bark, and all the airy crew, / Sunk like a mist beneath the briny dew.”

“Sunk” was used by Addison and Steele in the Spectator in the 18th century, and by Sir Walter Scott in the 19th.

In fact, Scott’s novels are full of “sunk,” as in this passage from The Heart of Midlothian (1818): “Jeanie sunk down on a chair, with clasped hands, and gasped in agony.”

Today, the British prefer to reserve “sunk” for the past participle and use “sank” for the past tense, so the preferred progression in contemporary British English is “sink/sank/sunk.”

The lexicographer Robert Burchfield, writing in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), sums up the state of things in British English. The past tense, he writes, “is now overwhelmingly sank rather than sunk.” And today the preferred past participle is “sunk,” not the old “sunken.”

It seems that in American usage, too, most people prefer “sank” as the past tense, even though dictionaries allow “sunk.” As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “Sank is used more often, but sunk is neither rare nor dialectal as a past tense, though it is usually a past participle.”

Some commentators have suggested that the return of the “sink/sank/sunk” progression (along with a distaste for “sunk” as a past tense) may have been influenced by the similar irregular verbs “drink/drank/drunk,” “swim/swam/swum,” “ring/rang/rung,” and others.

This common pattern, by the way, probably inspired “brang” and “flang” as illegitimate past tenses of “bring” and “fling.”

And it probably also brought about “snuck,” the much-reviled past tense of “sneak,” which dictionaries now accept as standard English and which we’ve written about before on the blog.

To recap, these days it’s no crime (at least in American English) to say “the boat sunk in a storm” or “my  jeans shrunk in the dryer.”

But the grammar police will still fine you for using a past participle when the simple past tense is appropriate, as in “The bell rung” or “I drunk the milk” or “She sung off key.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English language Grammar Usage

Do we need a “pre” fix?

Q: Can we talk about “pre” words, most of which I find redundant? Why do we preheat the oven – aren’t we just heating it? A pre-recorded message is just recorded, a pre-addressed envelope is addressed, a pre-existing condition is existing, etc

A: Yes, many “pre” words are redundant. This is a recurrent complaint, and there’s not much more I can say except that indeed the “pre” is often unnecessary.

I just wrote to someone who wondered why his jeans were called “pre-washed.” Why not just “washed”?

In this case, the prefix might be justified if you argue that it means “washed prior to purchase.” Still, we sometimes can’t see the forest for the “pre”s! (Sorry, bad pun.)

[Note: We don’t consider “preexisting condition” redundant (and we don’t hyphenate it). We wrote a posting about this in 2012. ]

A good friend and former New York Times colleague, Merrill Perlman (another inveterate punner), has written about the subject for the Columbia Journalism Review’s Language Corner and has some interesting things to say.

“There’s no logical reason for some of these ‘pre’ uses,” she writes. “But then, few claim that English is logical.”

Check out Merrill’s column. I think she’s terrific (she inspired the title of this post), but perhaps I’m “pre-judiced.”

And if you’d “pre-fer” to read even more, I wrote a blog item recently about the origins of a “pre” word and a “pro” word.

Buy our books at a local store, Amazon.com, or Barnes&Noble.com.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Linguistics Phrase origin Uncategorized Writing

An inkling of medieval times

Q: I just read an article in an information technology trade magazine wherein the author used the word “inkle” as a verb meaning to imply or to hint. That can’t be right—can it?

A: This is one of those “Eureka!” moments.

The verb “inkle” is extremely old, and dates back to the 1300s. Its original meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was “to utter or communicate in an undertone or whisper, to hint, give a hint of.”

With the addition of “ing,” the verbal noun “inkling” was born around 1400. It meant—and still means—a slight mention, hint, or subtle intimation.

Meanwhile, the parent verb, “inkle” fell into oblivion and pretty much vanished for hundreds of years.

It was essentially reinvented in the 1860s, and again around 1900, apparently as a back-formation from “inkling,” according to the OED. (A back-formation is a new word formed by dropping part of an older one, as “escalate” was formed from “escalator,” and “burgle” from “burglar.”)

R. D. Blackmore, the author of Lorna Doone, used the verb in his lesser-known novel Cradock Nowell (1866): “His marriage settlement and its effects, they could only inkle of.”

And Samuel Butler used it in Erewhon Revisited (1901), a sequel to his better-known utopian novel Erewhon (1872): “People like being deceived, but they also like to have an inkling of their own deception, and you never inkle them.”

In 1904, Thomas Hardy inkled in the first part of his three-part Napoleonic drama The Dynasts: “Thou art young, and dost not heed the Cause of things / Which some of us have inkled to thee here.”

Now, “inkle” seems to have been reinvented again! Technically, it may be a back-formation, but we  secretly like to think of it as a revival of a medieval verb.

Buy our books at a local store, Amazon.com, or Barnes&Noble.com.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Phrase origin Word origin Writing

Among or between?

Q: When describing three people working together, is it a collaboration among, amongst, or between them?

A: There’s no difference between “among” and “amongst,” beyond their spellings. “Among” is preferred in American English and “amongst” is often preferred in British English. We wrote a blog post earlier this year about “among/amongst.”

You also ask about the use of “between” versus “among.” In general, “between” applies to two (“This is between him and me”), and “among” to three or more (“The six members agreed among themselves”).

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage gives this example: “Trade between the United States, Canada and Mexico has grown under Nafta.”

As the style guide explains, “Each country trades with each of the others, rather than with all simultaneously. When more than two things are related in a purely collective and vague way, use among.”

The word “betwixt,” by the way, is an old-fashioned version of “between,” though both words have been around in various forms since Anglo-Saxon times.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “betwixt” as somewhat archaic in literary English and chiefly poetical.

However, the expression “betwixt and between,” meaning neither one thing nor the other, is a relative newcomer.

The earliest citation in the OED is from Frederick Marryat’s maritime novel Newton Forster (1832), which refers to “the lease of a house in a betwixt and between fashionable street.”

Buy our books at a local store, Amazon.com, or Barnes&Noble.com.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Linguistics Phrase origin Pronunciation Slang Usage Word origin

In search of the wild kudo

[NOTE: This post was updated on Aug. 25, 2020.]

Q: What is the source of the word “kudos”? Is there such a thing as a “kudo” in the wild?

A: The word “kudo” arose as a mistake, and the majority opinion is that it’s still a mistake.

The correct word, “kudos,” is a singular noun and takes a singular verb, say most usage guides, including the new fourth edition of Pat’s book Woe Is I. “Show me one kudo and I’ll eat it,” she says.

That’s the short answer, the one to follow when your English should be at its best. But English is a living language, and the singular “kudo” and the plural “kudos” are out there kicking up their heels, never mind the word mavens.

Where did “kudo” come from? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s a back formation resulting from the erroneous belief that “kudos” is plural. (A back formation is a word formed by dropping a real or imagined part from another word.)

Pronunciation may have played a part here. Originally “kudos”—like its singular Greek cousins “chaos,” “pathos,” and “bathos”—was pronounced as if the second syllable were “-oss” (rhymes with “loss”). A later pronunciation, “-oze” (rhymes with “doze”), probably influenced the perception that the word was a plural.

Now for some etymology. “Kudos” comes from the ancient Greek word κῦδος (kydos), a singular noun meaning praise or renown. And it was a relative latecomer to English.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says the Greek term “was dragged into English as British university slang in the 19th century.” The first published reference for “kudos” in the OED dates from 1831, when it meant glory or fame.

Although “kudos” was officially singular, it was often used in a general way without a direct or indirect article, which may have blurred its sense of singularity.

In a typical early citation in the OED, for instance, Charles Darwin writes in an 1859 letter that the geologist Charles Lyell read about half the manuscript of On the Origin of Species “and gives me very great kudos.”

In its earliest uses, according to Merriam-Webster’s, “kudos” referred to the prestige or glory of having done something noteworthy. But by the 1920s, it had developed a second sense, praise for an accomplishment.

And it was during the ’20s, the usage guide says, that “the ‘praise’ sense of kudos came to be understood as a plural count noun, much like awards or honors. Time magazine, according to M-W, may have helped popularize the usage.

Here’s a 1927 example from Time that suggests plurality: “They were the recipients of honorary degrees—kudos conferred because of their wealth, position, or service to humanity.”

And the usage guide also cites a 1941 citation from the magazine that’s clearly plural: “There is no other weekly newspaper which in one short year has achieved so many kudos.”

Once “kudos” was seen in Time and other publications as a plural, M-W’s usage guide says, “it was inevitable that somebody would prune the s from the end and create a singular.”

The OED’s earliest sighting of “kudo” shorn of its “s” dates from a book of slang: “Kudo, good standing with the management” (Jack Smiley’s Hash House Lingo, 1941).

Oxford also cites a 1950 letter from Fred Allen to Groucho Marx, in which Allen hyperbolically describes approval for a TV show expressed by customers at the Stage Delicatessen in New York: “A man sitting on a toilet bowl swung open the men’s room door and added his kudo to the acclaim.”

Merriam-Webster’s includes quite a few examples of the singular “kudo” and the plural use of “kudos.” Here are a couple from mainstream publications:

Saturday Review (1971): “All these kudos spread around the country.”

Women’s Wear Daily (1978): “She added a kudo for HUD’s Patricia Harris.”

OK, the singular “kudo” and the plural use of “kudos” are the result of mistakes. But a lot of legitimate words began life in error. Are “kudo” and “kudos” becoming legit as they spread like kudzu?

Merriam-Webster’s thinks so—sort of. The usage guides says the two usages “are by now well established,” though “they have not yet penetrated the highest range of scholarly writing or literature.”

Other usage commentators aren’t so open minded. In its entry for “kudos,” Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4th ed.) says that “in standard usage it has no plural nor is it used with the indefinite article a.”

Jeremy Butterfield, editor of Fowler’s, says “the final -s is sometimes misinterpreted as marking a plural.” But “kudo as a singular,” he writes, is not “desirable or elegant.”

“No other word of Greek origin,” Butterfield adds, “has suffered such an undignified fate.”

Lexicographers are also skeptical for the most part. Of the ten standard dictionaries we usually consul, only three (two of them published by the same company) accept the singular “kudo.”

Reflecting the majority opinion is Lexico (the former Oxford Dictionaries online), which says this in its entry for “kudos”:

“Despite appearances, it is not a plural form. This means that there is no singular form kudo and that the use of kudos as a plural … is incorrect.” Lexico provides an incorrect example (“he received many kudos”) and a corrected one (“he received much kudos”).

The three that accept the singular word “kudo” and the plural use of “kudos” are Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster Unabrided, and Dictionary.com (which is based on the former Random House Unabridged).

Dictionary.com, for instance, accepts word in two senses: (1) meaning “honor; glory; acclaim,” as in “No greater kudo could have been bestowed”; and (2) meaning “a statement of praise or approval; accolade; compliment,” as in “one kudo after another.”

For now, we still don’t recommend the usage.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

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

Is there a cat in the corner?

Q: What is the origin of the expression “catty-corner” and does it have anything to do with cats?

A: The phrase, originally seen as “catty-cornered” or “cater-cornered” in 19th-century America, has no relationship at all to cats.

Although the “catty” version appeared first in print, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, the “cater” version is closer to the phrase’s etymological roots.

The OED traces both of them back to a 16th-century verb, “cater,” meaning “to place or set rhomboidally; to cut, move, go, etc., diagonally.” So to move in a “cater-cornered” way is to go diagonally from corner to corner.

The English verb came from the French quatre (four). Since the early 1500s, the word “cater” has also meant the number four in games of dice or cards, though this usage is not common today.

The dictionary’s first citation for the verb “cater” is from Barnaby Googe’s 1577 translation of Conrad Heresbach’s Foure Bookes of Husbandry: “The trees are set checkerwise, and so catred, as looke which way ye wyl, they lye leuel [level].”

And this OED citation,  written four centuries later, describes the motion of a wagon at a level railroad crossing: “ ‘Cater’ across the rails ever so cleverly, you cannot escape jolt and jar” (from an 1873 travel memoir, Silverland, by the British writer George Alfred Lawrence).

As for “catty-cornered,” the phrase has been spelled a number of ways over the years: “catacornered,” “katterkorner’d,” “cat-a-cornered,” etc. Since the early 20th century, it has often been seen without the “-ed” ending.

John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945) has two examples in one sentence: “Lee Chongs’s grocery was on its catty-corner right and Dora’s Bear Flag Restaurant was on its catty-corner left.”

The feline-sounding version of the expression probably began with a mispronunciation of the relatively rare word “cater.” Through a process that language types call folk etymology, a cat ended up in the corner.

Both “cater-corner” and “catty-corner” are still used today and can be found in contemporary dictionaries. But a latecomer, “kitty-corner,” which first showed up at the end of the 19th century, is the most popular one these days, according to Google.

And in some versions, the “corner” element disappears, as in the mid-19th-century “catawampous” or “catawampus.” The OED calls  this “a humorous formation” that meant not only ferocious (perhaps derived from “catamount,” the mountain lion) but also askew or awry.

Slang dictionaries also have the spelling “catter-wompus” (1851) for the askew or diagonal sense of the word, followed by “cattywampus” in the first decade of the 1900s.

And naturally there’s a “kitty” version too. The Dictionary of American Regional English has examples of “kittywampus” dating from the 1940s.

[Note: This post was updated on March 22, 2020.]

Buy our books at a local store, Amazon.com, or Barnes&Noble.com.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Phrase origin Pronunciation Usage Word origin

Vice isn’t nice!

Q: At my place of employment, management has circulated a memo requiring employees to use the word “vice” instead of “versus.” So a company document might read: “Consider performing maintenance vice replacing the faulty part.” I would appreciate any insight you can provide.

A: Your bosses are recommending a term that’s not common, except perhaps in the military. This is the use of the preposition “vice,” a Latin borrowing, to mean “instead of” or “in place of.” 

(Think of the related term “vice versa,” which is also from Latin and means “conversely,” or “in reversed order.”)

This “vice” can be pronounced as one syllable (rhyming with “nice”) or as two (VYE-see), according to standard dictionaries.

A Google search finds that your bosses aren’t alone in using “vice” instead of “versus,” though this is certainly not common in ordinary English. These days, the “instead of” sense of the word is more common in prefixes and adjectival nouns in titles.

For example, we use it (pronounced as a single syllable) in terms like “vice president” and “vice consul,” where it means someone who represents or serves in place of a superior. A  “viceroy,” to use another example, rules a province or country as the representative of his sovereign.

The preposition “vice” as used by your bosses first showed up in written English in a military usage in the 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s the OED citation: “6th reg. of foot: Capt. Mathew Derenzy to be Major, vice John Forrest; by purchase.” (From a 1770 issue of the Scots Magazine.)

[Note: The military use is still alive. Two readers of the blog report that “vice” is used for “in place of” in armed-forces documents.]

Later OED citations include uses in sports, diplomacy, and music. Here’s one from a book Pat is currently reading:

“He was gardener and out-door man, vice Upton, resigned.” (From William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Pendennis, 1849.) 

As a noun, of course, “vice” can mean a lot of nasty things: depravity, corruption, evil, and so on. The OED says the noun, first recorded in English in 1297, is from a different Latin source: vitium (“fault, defect, failing, etc.”).  

But getting back to your company’s memo, we see nothing wrong with “versus,” a preposition meaning “against” that’s been in steady since the 15th century. Like the prepositional “vice” and its derivatives, “versus” is from Latin, in which it means “against.”

As you’re probably aware, “versus” may have inspired a popular colloquial usage: the word “verse” as a verb meaning to compete against. We recently wrote on the blog about  this use of “verse.”

[Note: This post was updated on Oct. 13, 2016.]

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. 
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Phrase origin Usage Writing

Bigger than the both of us

Q: I pricked up my ears when I heard Pat say “the both of us” on WNYC. I have always thought that one says either “the two of us” or “both of us.” I grew up in Norway and was taught British English. I also had an English grandmother who would never have said “the both of us.” Please let me know your thoughts.

A: “The both of” is an extremely common idiom, especially in the United States. But it’s not unheard-of in Britain and Ireland.

When the usage showed up in the mid-19th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first two examples were from Irish writers

In fact, the phrase “the both” was first used to mean “the two” in the 1500s, according to the OED, though the usage is now considered colloquial or regional.

Speakers in Ireland (and, in some of the following cases, Wales and elsewhere) often insert the definite article (“the”) in contexts where it’s not commonly found in standard British English.

Examples: “the both of” … “the half of” … “the whooping cough [mumps, etc.]” … “in the hospital” … “the cold [heat, etc.]” … “on the bus [plane, etc.]” instead of “by bus [plane, etc.]” … “in the summer [winter, etc.],” and others.

Some of these are also found in certain dialects in England as well. This information comes from The Grammar of Irish English, by Markku Filppula.

Americans are familiar with every one of these constructions. We commonly say “the both of us” (especially in the expression “bigger than the both of us”), “you don’t know the half of it,” “he has the measles [flu, etc.],” “she’s in the hospital,” “he can’t take the cold [heat, etc.],” “we go there in the summer.”

The use of the definite article is a complex subject, and in practice very idiomatic. Of the above-mentioned uses, only “the both” and “the half” would not be appropriate in formal written English in the US, though they’re acceptable in speech and informal writing. All the rest are considered standard in American English.

(We’ve revised our opinion on this use of “the half” and now consider it standard English. We discuss our change of heart in an April 21, 2011, posting on the blog.)

As for the usage experts, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage isn’t worried about “the both of us [you, etc.].” The conclusion: “There is no reason you should avoid it if it is your normal idiom.”

The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage includes some British examples: “In spoken English, the use of both preceded by the is not uncommon: Good Morning from the both of us – BBC Radio 4, 1977. It is more frequently encountered in regional speech, as, for example, the both of you heard on The Archers (BBC Radio 4, 1976). The both should not be used in formal prose.”

If you’re interested in reading more, a blog item a while back on UK-vs.-US English touches on the subject of the use (or non-use) of articles .

Was it OK for Pat to use “the both of us” on the air? Well, she does misspeak once in a while during her impromptu exchanges in the broadcast booth. But not in this case.

There’s nothing wrong with using this idiomatic expression in conversation, even on public radio. However, we wouldn’t use it in formal writing.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. 
And check out our books about the English language.

Categories
English English language Expression Grammar Language Usage Writing

What may (or might) have been

[Note: This post was updated on April 30, 2020.]

Q: When I taught 8th-grade grammar back in the ’70s, I used to tell my students that “may” meant permission, while “might” meant possibility. Is that no longer the case? I often hear the words used interchangeably now.

A: That’s not the case. There are two issues here. As a modal auxiliary verb (a subject we wrote about in 2012 and 2018), “may” can be used to indicate permission. But “may” is also used—like “might”—to indicate likelihood or possibility.

So when speaking about the possibility of something’s happening, you can use either “may” or “might.” You can say, “I might go,” or “I may go.” Let’s explain this possibility business by quoting a section from Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I (4th ed., 2019):

May is a source of our word maybe, and that’s a good clue to how it’s used. We attach it to another verb (may take or may forget or may have learned, for example) to show that something is or was possible.

We can use might in the same way, attaching it to a main verb to indicate possibility (might take, might have forgotten, might learn). Then how do we know which to choose as our auxiliary, or “helping,” verb—may or might?

Tradition says that what may happen is more possible than what might happen. But never mind. Today most people see little or no difference in the degree of possibility, and that old distinction is largely ignored. In modern English, may and might are interchangeable—almost. Grammarians still recommend might in certain cases.

Here’s what to remember.

• If the sentence has only one main verb (with or without have), you can accompany it with either may or might. Here we’re talking about things that are still possible.

  Hermione may [or might] take the train.

  Hermione may [or might] have taken the train.

  She may [or might] forget her wand.

  She may [or might] have forgotten her wand.

  She may [or might] learn new tricks at the conference.

  She may [or might] have learned new tricks at the conference.

• If the sentence has an additional verb in the present tense (underlined here), you can use either may or might with the other verb. Here again, we’re talking about things that are still possible.

  Hermione thinks she may [or might] take the train.

  She is afraid she may [or might] have forgotten her wand.

  She says she may [or might] learn new tricks at the conference.

• If the sentence has an additional verb in the past tense (underlined here), I recommend using might with the other verb, though may is often seen in informal English. Here we’re talking about things that were possible in the past.

  Hermione thought she might take the train.

  She was afraid she might leave [or might have left] her wand behind.

  She said she might learn new tricks at the conference.

Why use might in speaking of possibilities from the past? Since might is technically the past tense of may, it mixes better with past-tense verbs.

NOTE: Because there’s an “iffy,” hypothetical element in may and might, they’re often used in if statements. Don’t let that throw you. Just follow the rules above about using either may or might when there are other present-tense verbs and might when there are other past-tense ones:  If Hermione goes to the Arithmancy lecture tonight, she may [or might] run into Professor Vector.  If Hermione went to the Arithmancy lecture tonight, she might run into Professor Vector. If Hermione had gone to the Arithmancy lecture tonight, she might have run into Professor Vector.

What Might Have Been

In some kinds of sentences, as you’ve just seen, there’s not much difference between might and may. Here comes one now: Moose might [or may] have flunked the course. Both versions express a possibility: Moose could have flunked.

But sometimes might branches out on its own. It no longer acts like a version of may, so it loses its sense of possibility and becomes negative. This might—often it’s a might have—is about things that are contrary to fact.

Here’s the kind of sentence I mean: Given enough time, Moose might have graduated. This means that in retrospect, he didn’t have enough time, so he didn’t graduate.

When we’re being contrary, we often use might and might have to speak of nonevents—things that “might be” but aren’t, or that “might have been” but weren’t. Here are some more examples of this contrary‑to‑fact might:

“You might have helped me move that heavy armoire,” snapped Moose’s mom. (He didn’t help.) “You might tell me next time you have to miss a test,” said Moose’s professor. (He didn’t tell the prof.) Had Moose gone to class, he might have learned something. (He didn’t learn.) If Moose hadn’t played hooky, he might not have flunked. (He did flunk.)

Only certain kinds of situations lend themselves to a contrary‑to‑fact might. This is the might that refers to possibilities that never came to pass, or that reproaches someone who fails to fulfill an expectation. (Sometimes, the failure is our own, so we reproach ourselves: “I might have known!”)

As for the issue of “can” versus “may” when asking for permission, we wrote a blog item about this in 2017.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.