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

All fixed for some pie

Q: I just read your “All the fixings” article about using the verb “fix” to mean “get ready” or “be ready.” It reminded me of a phrase my father used when he didn’t get a treat he was hoping to have: “I had my mouth all fixed for some pie.”

A: Your father was using the expression “all fixed for” in the sense of wanting something very much or longing for it.

This dialectal usage is sometimes followed by a gerund (“all fixed for eating some pie”) or, as in your father’s case, the treat itself (“I had my mouth all fixed for some pie”).

As far as we can tell from our searches of newspaper databases, the usage showed up in the late 19th century. In many of the examples, the person all fixed for something is disappointed—similar to your father’s use of the expression.

The earliest example we’ve seen is from the July, 4, 1895, issue of the Phillipsburg (KS) Herald: “Win Bissell got his mouth all fixed for a big feast of roasting ears on the Fourth, but a cow got in and cleaned up the patch Sunday night.”

And here’s one from the Oct. 21, 1909, Hammond (IN) Times: “Christ Brookham of 3619 Elm street reports to the police that duck thieves are abroad in the land, and that he is shy two nice fat ones, and was compelled to eat a third one when he had his mouth all fixed for chicken.”

In this example from the Jan. 16, 1915, Coronado (CA) Eagle and Journal, the person’s face, not his mouth, is “all fixed for” something good to eat:

“Did you ever get your face all fixed for a turkey dinner and find that the turkey supply was exhausted and all you could get was hamburger?”

And here’s a “throat” example, minus the word “all,” from the Aug. 25, 1917, issue of the Loveland (CO) Daily: “We had our throat fixed for trout, but they wan’t nothin’ come of it.”

But most of our sightings were of the “mouth all fixed for” variety. Here are a few more.

From the Nov. 4, 1921, Mohave County (AZ) Miner and Our Mineral Wealth: “J. H. Smith is short two fat ducks that were nabbed in back yard under the guise of a Halloween prank. Hubert says he would rather they had taken his chicken coop as his mouth was all fixed for a duck dinner.”

From the June 27, 1924, Clare (MI) Sentinel: “Oh, say! We are going to be invited out to supper this week and we have our mouth all fixed for chicken; but don’t mention it, as we are telling you this in confidence and wouldn’t like it to reach the ears of our expected hostess.”

And finally, from an advertisement for Junket in the April 3, 1947, San Bernardino (CA) Sun: “I had my mouth all fixed for that rennet-custard dessert you’re givin’ to Daddy! ’Course, Daddy likes it too—who wouldn’t? But you know rennet custards are my dish from ’way back. So how about it?”

This sense of “all fixed for” as longing for something is apparently derived from the use of the verb “fix” to mean be prepared or get ready, a usage that dates back to the early 1700s.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1715 entry in The Early Records of Lancaster, Massachusetts (1884), edited by Henry S. Nourse: “We’d fix things directly; I’ll settle whatever you please upon her.”

By the early 1800s, the verb was being used in the sense of preparing a drink or a meal, as in this OED example from Frances Trollope’s notes for Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832): “You must fix me a drink.” Frances Trollope was the mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope.

And later in the 19th century, the expression “all fixed for” was being used in the sense of ready for a meal.

This example is from an ad for Platt’s buckwheat flour in the Nov. 6, 1871, issue of the Hartford (CT) Daily Courant: “Now we are all fixed for a good breakfast.”

The verb “fix,” which meant to make firm or stable when it showed up in English in the 1400s, is ultimately derived from fīxus, the past participle of fīgĕre, classical Latin for to fix or fasten.

The earliest OED example is from a collection of 15th-century songs and carols edited by Thomas Wright in 1847: “I thouȝt in mynd / I schuld ay fynd / The wehle of fortunat fyxyd fast.”

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Who put the ‘dis-’ in ‘dissent’?

Q: I’ve told my students that “dis-” is a prefix in “dissenter.” But now I’m being told in grad school that a prefix isn’t a prefix if the rest of the word doesn’t exist. So can I still refer to “dis-” as a prefix in “dissenter”?

A: The “dis-” in “dissent” and “dissenter” is indeed a prefix, especially if you go back to their etymological source, dissentīre, a classical Latin verb meaning to differ in sentiment.

Dissentīre was formed by adding the prefix dis- (in different directions) to the verb sentīre (to feel or think).

The Latin sentīre is also the source of “assent,” “consent,” “resent,” “sentiment,” and other English words, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Can a lexical element at the beginning of a word be called a “prefix” if the rest of the word isn’t found by itself in standard dictionaries?

Well, some dictionaries do indeed define “prefix” in a restrictive way as an element added to the front of a word to change its meaning.

However, the two dictionaries we rely on the most, the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Unabridged, define “prefix” more broadly as an element added to the front of either a word or a stem.

The “sent” in “dissenter” is a lexical stem or base referring to the sense of feeling. You can find the same stem in all the words cited above from Ayto’s etymological dictionary.

The OED defines “dissenter” as “one who dissents in any matter: one who disagrees with any opinion, resolution, or proposal; a dissentient.”

The earliest Oxford citation is from Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (1651), by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes:

“If any one will not consent … the City retaines its primitive Right against the Dissentour, that is the Right of War, as against an Enemy.” Hobbes had published the work in Latin in 1642 as De Cive (On the Citizen).

The dictionary says “dissenter” was formed by adding the suffix “-er” to the verb “dissent,” which it defines as “to withhold assent or consent from a proposal, etc.; not to assent; to disagree with or object to an action.”

The first OED citation for the verb is from The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, a work of history written around 1425 by the Scottish poet Andrew of Wyntoun: “Fra þis he dyssentyd hale” (“From this he dissented wholly”).

The noun “dissent,” which showed up more than a century later, is defined in the dictionary as “difference of opinion or sentiment; disagreement.”

The first Oxford citation for the noun is from The Faerie Queene, an epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The first three books were published in 1590 and the next three in 1596.

Here Artegall, the hero of book five, tries to resolve a dispute: “Did stay a while their greedy bickerment, / Till he had questioned the cause of their dissent.”

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Pre-, post-, and ante- position

Q: In addition to the grammar term “preposition,” is there such a thing as a “postposition” or an “anteposition” as a part of speech? Or am I mistaking “pre-” as a prefix in “preposition”?

A: Yes, “postposition” and “anteposition” are grammatical terms, though they aren’t among the terms for the traditional parts of speech.

And yes the “pre-” in “preposition” is a prefix—or rather was a prefix in its Latin source.

All three terms are etymological cousins. They’re ultimately derived from three related classical Latin verbs:

“preposition” comes from praepōnere (to put in front of), “postposition” from postpōnere (to put after), and “anteposition” from antepōnere (to put before).

As you know, a “preposition” is a term that’s typically put in front of a noun or noun phrase to position it in relation to other words, as “by” is used in “the house by the creek,” or “in back of” in “the copper beech in back of the house.”

“Postposition” refers to the placement of a term, or to a term that’s placed, after a grammatically related word or phrase. For example, “-ward” is a postposition in “homeward,” and “royal” appears postposition in “battle royal.”

“Anteposition” refers to the placement of a word or phrase before another, especially if that position is unusual. Examples: “fiddlers” in “fiddlers three” and “echoed” in “echoed the thunder.”

The first of the three terms to show up in English was “preposition,” according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest OED example, dated around 1434, is from the writings of John Drury, a canon of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle:

“With what case xal þe [shall the] comparatif degre be construid with be cause of his degre? With an ablatif case of eyþer nownbre [either number] with oute a preposicion.” (The dictionary also cites two earlier uses of the Latin noun praepositiō in Old English.)

The first Oxford citation for “postposition” (from a 1736 English translation of a French history of China) says the prepositions in two Chinese phrases “are Postpositions, because they are put after the Nouns.”

And the earliest OED example for “anteposition” is from a 1728 Italian-English dictionary by Ferdinando Altieri: “The Position, or Anteposition causes the o to be pronounced open.”

By the way, the traditional parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection, though modern grammarians and linguists often use more precise classifications.

In Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I, she includes a sentence that uses all the traditional parts of speech:

“But [conjunction] gosh [interjection], you [pronoun] are [verb] really [adverb] in [preposition] terrible [adjective] trouble [noun]!”

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There, their, they’re

Q: Can you give me a very simplified way to remember how to use “there,” “their,” and “they’re”? I know “there” is a place or shows ownership, and “their” is more figurative, but I still sometimes get them wrong. HELP!

A: First of all, “there” does not show ownership, and “their” is not figurative. But like you, many people are confused by these sound-alike words.

Pat wrote a limerick about the various “there/their/they’re” words for her grammar and usage book Woe Is I, and it might help you to keep them straight. Here it is:

THE DINNER GUESTS

They seem to have taken on airs.
They’re  ever so rude with their stares.
They get there quite late,
There’s a hand in your plate,
And they’re eating what’s not even theirs.

Here’s the accompanying explanation:

● They’re is shorthand for “they are”: They’re tightwads, and they always have been.

● Their and theirs are the possessive forms of “they”: Their money is theirs alone.

● There (meaning “in or at that place,” as opposed to “here”) isn’t even a pronoun, unlike the others. Neither is there’s, which is shorthand for “there is.” But there and there’s frequently get mixed up with the sound-alikes they’re, their, and theirs.

We hope this helps.

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Is Angelina a celeb or a sleb?

Q: Is “sleb” a word you would find useful?

A: No, we don’t use “sleb,” and don’t expect to. If we want a short, informal version of “celebrity,” we use “celeb,” an older and far more popular term.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “sleb” as a British colloquial “alteration of celeb n., reflecting a monosyllabic pronunciation in rapid speech.”

The earliest example for “sleb” in the OED is from the title of a May 1, 1996, posting to the Usenet newsgroup alt.showbiz.gossip: “Sleb sighting.”

All the other Oxford citations are from British sources, as are most examples in the News on the Web corpus, a database from online newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters.

The earliest OED example for “celeb” is from the December 1907 issue of the Smith College Monthly: “She is a Senior Celeb and I’m just any Freshman.”

When “celebrity” showed up in English in the late 1300s, it meant the “state or fact of being well known, widely discussed, or publicly esteemed,” according to Oxford.

The first citation is from Chaucer’s Middle English translation, dated around 1380, of De Consolatione Philosophiae, a sixth-century Latin work by the Roman philosopher Boethius:

“þat is ryȝt clere and ryȝt noble of celebrate of renoun” (“that is right worthy and right noble of celebrity of renown”).

It wasn’t until the early 1800s that the word “celebrity” came to mean “a well-known or famous person,” according to the dictionary.

The first OED example is from the August 1831 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (London): “How will the new Chamber be composed? Of mayors, and notaries, and village celebrities.”

Now, according to Oxford, the term usually refers to “a person, esp. in entertainment or sport, who attracts interest from the general public and attention from the mass media.”

Finally, for American readers who may not have seen “sleb” in the wild, here’s an example from the May 10, 2017, issue of the Spectator (London):

“It’s an open secret that the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh are none too comfortable with all the emoting and the sleb mingling.”

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Iteration and its iterations

Q: My latest pet peeve is people saying “iteration” when they could easily say “version.” It’s quite a fad in Washington journalism.

A: We’ve written a post about the meaning of “iterate” and “reiterate” (they mean the same thing), but we haven’t discussed the use of “iteration” for a version of something.

Although this usage is relatively new, standard dictionaries are beginning to accept it. Some define an “iteration” broadly as any kind of version, while others define it as a version of computer hardware or software.

We’re not particularly bugged by the new use of “iteration” for “version,” though we’re not surprised that such a stuffy-sounding word would insinuate its way into the officialese spoken in Washington.

When “iteration” showed up in English in the 1400s, it referred to the act of repeating. The ultimate source is iterāre, classical Latin for “do a second time” or “repeat.”

For hundreds of years, as “iteration” appeared in writings on alchemy, religion, medicine, mathematics, computer science, and so on, it meant either the act of repeating or a repeated action.

The earliest example of “iteration” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Ordinall of Alchymy, a 1477 illuminated manuscript by the English poet and alchemist Thomas Norton: “The multitude of their Iteration.”

The OED says the term was often used for “readministering a sacrament,” as in this example from The Apology of Iohan Bale Agaynste a Ranke Papyst (circa 1550): “the iteracyon of baptysme.” (John Bale, a Carmelite friar, converted to Protestantism during the reign of Henry VIII.)

By the late 1600s, according to citations in the dictionary, “iteration” was being used to mean a specific repetition. The first example is from Pharmacopœia Bateana (1694), a six-volume work by the English physician and medical writer William Salmon:

“For the three or four Iterations, the Regulus becomes apparently more bright and pure.” (In medieval Latin, regulus referred to metallic antimony.)

In the early 20th century, “iteration” came to be used in mathematics as “the repetition of an operation upon its product, as in finding the cube of a cube,” according to the OED.

The dictionary says this sense is especially used for “the repeated application of a formula devised to provide a closer approximation to the solution of a given equation when an approximate solution is substituted in the formula, so that a series of successively closer approximations may be obtained.”

If that left your head your head spinning, here’s a simpler definition from Merriam-Webster Unabridged: “a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result.”

The first Oxford example for the mathematical sense is from The Calculus of Observations, a 1924 treatise by Edmund Taylor Whittaker and George Robinson:

“In 1674 a method depending on a new principle, the principle of iteration, was communicated in a letter from Gregory to Collins.” We went to the source to expand on the citation, but gave up after being bogged down in a Grimpen Mire of equations.

A computer sense developed in the mid-20th century.

In programing, according to M-W Unabridged, “iteration” refers to “the repetition of a sequence of computer instructions a specified number of times or until a condition is met” or to “one execution of a sequence of operations or instructions in an iteration.”

The earliest computer example in the OED  is from Numerical Methods for High Speed Computers, 1960, by Godfrey Newby Lance:

“Whichever criterion is used to determine the end of the iteration, it is clear that the orders to evaluate f(xr) and f(xr + 1) are identical except that xr + 1 is used instead of xr. This kind of modification is made extremely simple on high-speed computers.”

The citations in M-W Unabridged suggest that this technical computer usage may have led to the looser use of “iteration” for a version of something, first in reference to versions of software, and then more broadly.

A citation from the March 10, 1998, issue of PC Magazine, for example, uses “iteration” for a version of an operating system: “Current iterations of Windows 95 and Windows NT are far from perfect, but they’re easier to use and more stable.”

The word is used similarly in this citation from the winter 2000 technology issue of Fortune: “No one cares much about the latest iteration of a spreadsheet program or word processor.”

Finally, the term breaks free of computers in this M-W example:

“The scene, and hundreds of others from the first five seasons of ‘The Sopranos’ (as well as its current, sixth iteration), are in the process of being edited ever so slightly by the A&E Network” (from the May 9, 2006, issue of the New York Times).

We’ll end with a recent Washington sighting that we found online:

“Civil and Human Rights Coalition Denounces Latest Iteration of Trump’s Muslim Travel Ban” (from a Sept. 24, 2017, news release by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights).

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I came, I seen, I conquered

Q: Greetings from the OC, where “I seen” is a fairly common regionalism among people of all ages, socioeconomic levels, and walks of life. As in, “I seen him in concert.” I even heard it in a radio commercial. Has “I seen” gone mainstream?

A: The use of “seen” for “saw” isn’t just an Orange County, CA, regionalism. This dialectal usage is heard in much of the US, as well as in England, Scotland, and Ireland, though it’s not at all mainstream.

The Dictionary of American Regional English describes the usage as “widespread” in the US, tersely adding that it appears “esp freq among rural speakers and those with little formal educ.”

We’ll add that some formally educated speakers—rural, urban, and suburban—may be slurring the expression “I’ve seen” so that it sounds like “I seen.”

DARE has examples from across the country or, in the words of Woody Guthrie, “From California to the New York Island, From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters.”

Similarly, the English Dialect Dictionary has many regional examples from England, as well as a few from Scotland and Ireland.

In fact, the use of “seen” as the past tense of “see” is often found in the news media. We saw several thousand examples in a search of the News on the Web corpus, a large database of reports from online newspapers, broadcasters, and magazines.

However, most mainstream examples were quoting people in the news, as in this recent one from the Oct. 16, 2017, issue of the Atlanta Journal Constitution: “After I seen what I seen, you know I called the police.”

And here’s an example from an Oct. 9, 2017, broadcast on the local CBS TV station in New York City: “I seen where it was going, and my friends too.”

The earliest American example in DARE is from an 1818 letter by Henry Cogswell Knight, an Episcopal clergyman in Massachusetts, about his travels in the South and West:

“Some words are used, even by genteel people, from their imperfect educations, in a new sense; and others, by the lower classes in society, pronounced very uncouthly, as … I seen.” (Knight was writing about local speech in Kentucky.)

And here’s a citation from Widow Rugby’s Husband and Other Tales of Alabama, an 1851 collection of short stories by the American humorist Johnson Jones Hooper: “That’s the last time I seen my face.”

The most recent DARE example is from a 1997 report on “coal speak” in eastern Pennsylvania: “Seen: Commonly used instead of ‘saw.’ ‘Don’t tell me yiz wasn’t dere, I seen yiz wit my own eyes!’ ”

The earliest EDD example from the British Isles cites Tom Brown at Oxford, an 1861 novel by Thomas Hughes: “I seen em.” (The novel appeared serially two years earlier in Macmillan Magazine.)

Here’s a Scottish citation from the April 3, 1899, issue of the Glasgow Herald: “Dod aye, I seen him hanged.” And this Irish example is from Mrs. Martin’s Company and Other Stories (1896), by the Irish writer Jane Barlow: “She that seen it took.”

In addition to “seen,” DARE has examples for “see” and “seed” used in place of “saw” as the past tense of “see”:

“I see him yesterday, or I see him last week, for I saw him” (from the May 16, 1781, issue of the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, Philadelphia).

“List of Improprieties … Seed for Saw” (from The Columbian Grammar, 1795, by Benjamin Dearborn).

EDD includes many other regional British dialectal past tenses for “see,” including “saigh,” “seed,” “seigh,” “zeed,” and “zid.”

We’ll end with a “zid” example from Desperate Remedies, an 1871 novel by Thomas Hardy: “When I zid ’em die off so.” (The novel, published anonymously, was Hardy’s first to appear in print. A rejected earlier novel was never published.)

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Mother, can I?

Q: God only knows how many times my parents corrected me for using “can” instead of “may” to ask permission. I probably corrected my own children just as often, but I finally gave up. I assume this is a lost cause.

A: Yes, it’s a lost cause, as you learned from struggling with your children, and it was probably a lost cause when your parents were struggling with you.

The old rule is that “can” means “able to” and “may” means “permitted to.” For example, “Jesse can run fast” and “May I go for a jog, Mom?”

However, dictionaries now accept the use of both “can” and “may” as auxiliary verbs for asking permission, though some suggest that “can” here is informal.

As Merriam-Webster Unabridged explains, “The use of can to ask or grant permission has been common since the 19th century and is well established, although some commentators feel may is more appropriate in formal contexts.”

The M-W lexicographers suggest that the permission sense of “can” evolved from the use of both auxiliaries to express possibility, “because the possibility of one’s doing something may depend on another’s acquiescence.”

Although the use of “can” to indicate permission became more popular in the 19th century, the usage actually showed up hundreds of years earlier, initially as to grant permission.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyualrye, William Caxton’s 1489 translation from the French of a work by Christine de Pisan:

“Þe lawe saithe suche a man can not make noo testament nor mary himself nor entre in to religyon.” (The term “can not” here means “is not permitted to.”)

The first OED citation in which “can” is used to ask for permission, rather than to grant it, is from a 1677 French-English dictionary by the Swiss-born English writer Guy Miege:

“Y a-t-il moien que je lui parle? Can I speak with him?” (Literally, Y a-t-il moyen que je lui parle? means “Is there any way I can talk to him?”)

Although “may” has been used in the sense of granting permission since Anglo-Saxon times, it wasn’t used to ask for permission until the 17th century, according to citations in the OED.

At first it was used indirectly in parenthetical expressions, as in this example from Conjectura Cabbalistica, an essay by the English philosopher Henry More on cabbalistic views of Moses:

“Justice did but, if I may so speak, play and sport together in the businesse.”

As it turns out, the earliest Oxford citation for “may” used in the direct sense you’re asking about showed up two centuries after the dictionary’s first citation for “can” used that way:

“May we take your coach to town? I saw it in the hangar” (from The History of Henry Esmond, an 1852 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray).

Thus both etymology and common usage support using “can” to ask for permission.

So where did the old rule come from? Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says Samuel Johnson was one of the first language authorities to draw “a strict line of demarcation” between “can” and “may.”

The “can” entry in Johnson’s 1755 dictionary says: “It is distinguished from may, as power from permission; I can do it, it is within my power; I may do it, it is allowed to me: but in poetry they are confounded.”

The M-W usage guide says Johnson’s “definition of can shows that he was ignorant of the origin of the word” and didn’t know its earliest senses, “although such uses may have been the ‘confounded’ ones he found in poetry.”

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Hear Pat on Iowa Public Radio

She’ll be on Talk of Iowa today from 10 to 11 AM Central time (11 to 12 Eastern) to discuss the English language and take questions from callers.   Today’s topic: the latest changes in the English language.

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On teens and teenagers

Q: In his 1910 novel Daisy’s Aunt, E. F. Benson writes that Daisy’s parents died “when she was quite young, and not yet halfway through the momentous teens.” I’m shocked that people were using “teens” so long ago.

A: Prepare yourself for another shock. People have been using “teens” for the teenage years since the mid-1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

And here’s one more shocker. The OED has a British citation from the early 1800s for “teens” used to mean teenagers—more than a century before the word “teenager” showed up in American English.

The OED defines the “teens” as the “years of the life of any person (rarely, of the age of anything) of which the numbers end in -teen, i.e. from thirteen to nineteen; chiefly in phrases in, out of one’s teens.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from The Cheats, a 1664 comedy by the English playwright John Wilson: “How often have I told you, she was in her Teenes?”

The first Oxford citation for “teen” used to mean an adolescent is from the title of an 1818 guidebook by Isaac Taylor, an English clergyman: “Advice to the Teens; or, Practical Helps to the Formation of Character.”

Despite this early and apparently rare British example, the dictionary says the use of “teen” for a “young person in the teens” is “now chiefly N. Amer. and apprehended as short for teenager.”

The earliest American citation is from the July 30, 1951, issue of the Deseret News (Salt Lake City): “Doing something fun like redecorating your room … is really interesting biz for a teen who loves being busy.

The noun “teenager” showed up (with a hyphen) in the early 1940s, according to OED citations. The first example is from the April 1941 issue of Popular Science Monthly: “I never knew teen-agers could be so serious.”

The adjective “teenage” showed up two decades earlier. The first Oxford citation is from the March 11, 1921, issue of the Daily Colonist (Victoria, BC):

“All ‘teen age’ girls of the city are cordially invited to attend the mass meeting to be held this evening.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for the adjective “teenaged” is from a 1953 entry in The American Thesaurus of Slang (1954), by L. V. Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark: “The teenaged set … a teenaged person.”

We’ll end with an expanded OED citation for “teenager” from a section on American advertising in The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947), a poem by W. H. Auden:

Definitely different. Has that democratic
Extra elegance. Easy to clean.
Will gladden grand-dad and your girl friend.
Lasts a lifetime. Leaves no odor.
American made. A modern product
Of nerve and know-how with a new thrill.
Patriotic to own. Is on its way
In a patent package. Pays to investigate.
Serves through science. Has something added
By skilled Scotchmen. Exclusively used
By upper classmen and Uncle Sam.
Tops in tests by teenagers.
Just ask for it always.

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How unique is ‘unique’?

Q: When I was in knee pants, I was taught that something “unique” is “one of a kind.” But when I wasn’t looking, the uniqueness of “unique” was apparently lost. Do I have to accept that it’s now merely “unusual”?

A: We were also taught that “unique” means “one of a kind,” and that’s the way we use it. You can use it that way too.

But while you weren’t looking, the lexicographers who put together dictionaries acknowledged what most English speakers already believed: “unique” can mean “unusual” as well as “one of a kind.”

Nevertheless, many usage authorities still insist on the traditional view, so feel free to use “unique” the way you were taught. But don’t criticize the people who use the term loosely. They have the dictionaries on their side.

English speakers borrowed “unique” in the early 1600s from the French, who got it from the Romans.

In Latin, unicus means “one and only,” and that’s how “unique” was used in English for more than two centuries.

At first, “unique” was mainly used by scholars and others aware of its Latin roots. For them, “unique” was an absolute term (like “infinite” or “eternal”), so there were no degrees of uniqueness. Nothing could be very or almost or sort of “unique.”

But as the word became more popular in the 1800s, it began losing its uniqueness in everyday usage.

As we say in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions, writers who didn’t know or care about the word’s history began using it for the merely “unusual” or “remarkable” or “uncommon.”

The watered-down “unique” was often propped up with intensifiers—modifiers like “thoroughly,” “absolutely,” and “totally.” Before long, we had all kinds of uniqueness, from “rather” to “somewhat” to “very” to “most.”

For more than a century, usage guides have complained about the weakening of “unique” and berated “the illiterate” (Henry Fowler’s term) for emasculating it.

The latest version of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, a fourth edition by Jeremy Butterfield, notes that there’s still a “certain amount of hostility” toward the looser usage, and advises readers “to use it with caution.”

However, millions of people have ignored the usage gurus, and dictionaries have joined them. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged, for example, says:

“Many commentators have objected to the comparison or modification (as by somewhat or very) of unique, asserting that a thing is either unique or not unique. The objections are based chiefly on the assumption that unique has but a single absolute sense—an assumption contradicted by information readily available in a dictionary.”

The Unabridged lists many modern example of “unique” used to mean “unusual, notable,” including a 1956 comment by Arthur Miller at a news conference in London with his wife, Marilyn Monroe. Here’s an expanded version:

When Miller was asked how he saw Monroe, he responded: “Through two eyes. She’s the most unique person I ever met.”

In Origins of the Specious, published eight years ago, we acknowledged that “the horse is out of the barn here,” but we hoped that “it would come back home.”

That was wishful thinking. It’s clear today that “unique” means “unusual” as well as “one of a kind.” Thus does language change.

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The noisome origins of ‘noisy’

Q: “Noisome” and “noisy” look alike, despite their different meanings. Are they linguistically related?

A: No, “noisome” (smelly or disgusting) and “noisy” (making a lot of noise) aren’t etymologically related, though “noisy” very likely had smelly origins.

“Noisome,” which showed up in the 14th century, was derived from the combination of “noy,” an archaic form of “annoy,” with the suffix “-some”.

“Noisy,” which also appeared in the 1300s, is derived from “noise,” a word that English borrowed from Anglo-Norman in the 12th century.

Although “noisy” isn’t etymologically related to “noisome,” the noun “noise” probably had noisome origins in classical times, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says the classical source of “noise” is likely nausea, Latin for sea sickness. That literal sense apparently evolved in the Romance languages to “upset, malaise,” then “disturbance, uproar” and finally “noise, din.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “noisome” is from the Wycliffe Bible of 1382: “foolys þoo thyngis þat ben noȝesum to þem shul coueiten” (“fools shall covet those things that be noisome to them”).

The first OED example for “noisy” is from The Country-Wife, a 1675 comedy by the English playwright William Wycherley: “Your noisy pert Rogue of a wit, the greatest Fop, dullest Ass, and worst Company as you shall see.”

Finally, the dictionary’s earliest citation for “noise” is from Ancrene Riwle, an anonymous guide for monastic women that probably dates from sometime before 1200:

“Þe prude beoð his bemeres; draheð wind inward worltlich hereword, and eft wið idel ȝelp puffeð hit utward as þe bemeres doð, makieð noise” (“The proud are his trumpeters; they draw in the wind of worldly praise, and then, with vain boasting, puff it out again, as the trumpeter doth, to maketh noise”). We’ve expanded the OED citation to add context.

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Biggity: too big for one’s britches

Q: An example in your piece about “ungrateful” and “uppity” uses “bigity,” as in “too big for one’s britches.” Did it originate among African Americans? I’ve heard it only from black folks in in the South.

A: The word “biggity” may indeed have originated in the 19th century among African Americans in the South, though a somewhat similar dialectal term, “bigotty,” showed up a bit earlier in England.

The Dictionary of American Regional English defines “biggity” (also spelled “bigity,” “biggaty,'” “biggedy,” etc.) as “exhibiting a sense of superiority or self-importance; arrogant, insolent, uppity.”

The earliest DARE example for “biggity” is from Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1881), by Joel Chandler Harris: “Dey er mighty biggity, dem house niggers is, but I notices dat dey don’t let nuthin’ pass.”

Many African Americans have criticized the portrayal of Uncle Remus, the narrator, as demeaning, patronizing, or racist. But others have said the characterization, with its Gullah dialect, is accurate.

In the foreword of a 1987 retelling of the Brer Rabbit stories, for example, the black folklorist Julius Lester writes:

“There are no inaccuracies in Harris’s characterization of Uncle Remus. Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writer’s Project of the 1930s reveals that there were many slaves who fit the Uncle Remus mold.”

DARE has citations for “biggity” used by whites as well as blacks, in the American South and Midwest, from the late 19th to the early 21st century.

The states include Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and a Northeast outlier, New Jersey.

The latest example is a 2015 Louisiana entry from the dictionary’s Internet files: “I thought that everyone in a highschool band would be biggity and cocky towards freshman. It wasn’t the case though.”

DARE notes that the English Dialect Dictionary has an entry for “bigotty,” meaning “bumptious, overbearing, self-willed,” and suggests that both “biggity” and “bigotty” may have been derived from the noun “bigot.”

In support of this notion, DARE editors point readers to a 1902 citation from Dialect Notes, a journal of the American Dialect Society: “Bigoted or bigoty … Conceited; proud; haughty.”

The earliest citation for “bigotty” in the English Dialect Dictionary is from an 1873 issue of the journal Notes and Queries: “Maayn beg·utee luyk, id-n ur [very bumptious (like), is he not?].” The EDD adds: “Nothing suggestive of religious intolerance is implied.”

The idea that “biggity” originated among African Americans is supported by an example we’ve found in “Negro English,” an article by the American linguist James A. Harrison in the January 1884 issue of Anglia, a German quarterly devoted to English linguistics.

The article, written in English, has a glossary entitled “Specimen Negroisms” that includes this example: “To talk biggity = to talk big, to order.”

Harrison’s work “is believed to be the first linguistic study of ‘Negro English,’ ” according to the Oxford Handbook of African American Language. However, modern scholars have challenged some of Harrison’s ideas, such as his view that “Negro English” would eventually fade away.

In Figures in Black (1987), for example, Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes Harrison’s prediction that African American Vernacular English (the term linguists now use), would become, as Gates says, “a mere relic of the slave past.”

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Is it all relative … or academic?

Q: What is the difference between “it’s all relative” and “it’s all academic”? It seem to me that there’s something hypothetical about both of them.

A: The two usages, which showed up in the early 1800s, have a sense of uncertainty about them. “Relative” here means indefinite or indeterminate, while “academic” means impractical, theoretical, or inconsequential.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to be relative” as “to be evaluated differently depending on a person’s perspective; to be incapable of definitive or absolute evaluation. Frequently in it’s all relative.”

In other words, it’s all in the eye of the beholder, a usage that showed up in the early 1600s.

The earliest example for “it’s all relative” in the OED is from an 1804 case report by Christopher Robinson, a judge on the High Court of Admiralty:

“It may be difficult to lay down the precise bounds, where ordinary commerce ends, and extraordinary speculation begins. It is all relative.”

The dictionary defines “academic” in the sense you’re asking about as “not leading to a decision; unpractical; strictly theoretical or formal. Now also in weakened sense: of no consequence, irrelevant.”

The dictionary’s first example is from an 1812 issue of the Monthly Review, a British literary journal:

“His erudition must be worked into the edifice, not exhibited in lumpish disconnection. He must preserve the epic form, without sliding into academic discussion.”

The OED doesn’t have a citation for “it’s all academic.” But examples aren’t hard to find.

The earliest example we’ve found is from the February 1892 issue of Books, a publication of the Denver (CO) Public Library: “It is all academic to the last degree. It is perhaps the airiest of suspicions.”

In a recent example, Richard Posner, who had just retired as a federal judge in Chicago, said in a Sept. 14, 2017, interview that he was ordinarily polite in court but found it irritating when lawyers were unprepared or talkative or went off the point:

“So I do get annoyed; I’m criticized for that. I should control myself, but of course now, it’s all academic. I’m not a judge. Too late to correct me.”

As for the etymology, “academic” is ultimately derived from the classical Latin acadēmicus, describing the ancient Academy of Athens or its philosophy, while “relative” ultimately comes from the classical Latin relātus, past participle of referre (to refer).

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A political groundswell

Q: In The Heir of Redclyffe, an 1853 novel, Charlotte M. Yonge describes a “ground-swell” (she hyphenates it) as “a continuous low moan, or roar, far, far away.” How did it become a political term?

A: When the word showed up in the early 19th century, it referred to a “deep swell or heavy rolling of the sea, the result of a distant storm or seismic disturbance,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But the term was also used figuratively “with reference to mental or political agitation,” the dictionary says, though it doesn’t have any political examples.

In fact, the earliest citation in the OED is a figurative usage from Zapolya: A Christmas Tale (1817), a verse play by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “It is the ground-swell of a teeming instinct.”

The dictionary’s first literal example is from The Heart of Midlothian (1818), the seventh of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels: “The agitation of the waters, called by sailors the ground-swell.”

Interestingly, this literal example was used to describe the agitated state of a crowd. (The novel was originally published as Tales of My Landlord, under the pseudonym Jedediah Cleishbotham.)

By the way, the OED uses a hyphen for “groundswell,” but the dictionary’s entry hasn’t been fully updated. Standard dictionaries now list the term as one word.

Although Oxford doesn’t have any citations for “groundswell” used politically, perhaps the most common sense today, we’ve found several from the 19th century.

For example, a July 12, 1872, headline in the New York Herald sums up reaction to the nomination of Horace Greeley as the Democratic candidate for president as “The Groundswell After the Political Storm at Baltimore.”

And the Aug. 25, 1898, issue of the Minneapolis Journal has this headline on page one: “A GROUNDSWELL / What Senator Davis Predicts for the Republican Party. / Full Control of the Senate and House Is Anticipated.”

Finally, a June 17, 1902, editorial in the Morning Herald (Lexington, KY) comments on “a ground-swell of dissatisfaction against the system” for managing the state’s charitable institutions.

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Uppity language

Q: What’s up with “up”? Why is it used in so many phrases where it’s not necessary or doesn’t appear to add any information? Examples: “rise up” … “shut up” … “set up” … “clean up” … “give up” … and so on.

A: This is an interesting topic, and a much bigger one than you might think. In fact, you’ve opened (or “opened up”) a Pandora’s box here.

Let us say right away that we don’t agree that “up” is redundant when used in phrasal verbs like “shut up,” “clean up,” “give up,” and many others.

On the contrary, it often enhances verbs, not merely by adding emphasis but by contributing specific kinds of information. Telling someone to “shut” a door, for example, isn’t the same telling someone him to “shut up.”

As you probably know, “up” is an adverb as well as a preposition.

In phrasal verbs it’s an adverb, and it can have any number of functions.

The Oxford English Dictionary says it can mean “so as to raise a thing from the place in which it is lying, placed, or fixed.” This sense of “up” is illustrated in such familiar phrasal verbs as “take up,” “pick up,” “raise up,” and “lift up.”

Or it can add the sense of “from below the level of the earth, water, etc., to the surface,” as Oxford says. We see this sense of “up” in phrases like “dig up,” “grub up,” and “turn up” (as in turning earth with a spade).

“Up” can add the notion of “upon one’s feet from a recumbent or reclining posture; spec. out of bed,” the OED notes, or “so as to rise from a sitting, stooping, or kneeling posture and assume an erect attitude.”

This gives us such familiar phrases as “get up,” “sit up,” “rise up,” “stand up,” “help up,” and “leap up,” as well as the old expression “knock up,” meaning to wake someone by rapping on the door.

Figurative uses of the adverb are many and varied. For example, the OED says, “up” can mean “so as to sever or separate, esp. into many parts, fragments, or pieces.” We see this sense in “break up,” “cut up,” “chop up,” “tear up,” and so on.

And, Oxford says, “up” can imply “to or towards a state of completion or finality,” a sense that frequently serves “merely to emphasize the import of the verb.”

Consequently we have phrases like “eat up,” “sold up,” “done up,” and “swallow up.” (Certainly we could say simply that the whale swallowed Jonah, but how much more evocative to say it swallowed him up!)

In the sense of “denoting progress to or towards an end,” the OED says, we have phrase like “buy up,” “finish up,” “dry up,” “heal up,” “clear up,” “beat up,” “pay up,” “firm up,” and others.

Frequently, the OED says, “up” is used with verbs that have to do with “cleaning, putting in order, or fixing in place.”

Thus we have “clean up,” “polish up,” “brush up,” “do up,” “fix up,” “dress up,” “fit up,” “make up,” “rig up,” “trip up,” and a verb we’ve written about on our blog, “redd up.”

When used with some verbs, “up” can mean “by way of summation or enumeration,” the OED says. We see this in phrases like “add up,” “count up,” “reckon up,” “total up,” “sum up,” and “weigh up.”

In addition, “up” can mean “into a close or compact form or condition; so as to be confined or secured.” This usage is found in “truss up,” “bind up,” “bundle up,” “fold up,” “tie up,” “gird up,” “huddle up,” and “draw up.”

Yet another sense, “into a closed or enclosed state; so as to be shut or restrained,” is evident in phrase like “close up,” “shut up,” “dam up,” “pen up,” “pent up,” “nail up,” “seal up,” and so on.

“Up” can also mean “so as to bring together,” as the OED notes. We see this in “knit up,” “gather up,” “stitch up,” and others. And it can imply “toward,” as in “come up,” “bring up,” and “ride up.”

It can also mean something like “to completion,” as “fill up,” “top up,” “cloud up,” and other phrases.

In a post earlier this year, we wrote that there are many idiomatic phrases in which an uppity stickler might say the adverb is unnecessary: “face up,” “meet up,” “divide up,” “hurry up,” and others.

But as we said then, “There’s a fine line between an emphatic use and a redundancy.” And sometimes an apparent redundancy adds just the right emphasis.

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The ploy’s the thing

Q: When troops are deployed, does that mean that they were previously ployed?

A: In technical military writing, the verbs “deploy” and “ploy” have sometimes been used in contrasting ways.

“Deploy” has meant “to spread out (troops) so as to form a more extended line of small depth” while “ploy” has meant “to move (troops) from line into column,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, only two of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult, Collins and Dictionary.com, have entries for the verb “ploy,” and both describe it as an archaic military term.

(The OED is an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence; standard dictionaries focus on language as it’s used now.)

The US Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (November 2021), doesn’t have entries for “ploy” or “ployment,” and it defines “deployment” as the “movement of forces into and out of an operational area.

Here’s the earliest OED citation for the old military sense of the verb ploy:

“In the march by echellons, the battalions may be ployed into columns with deploying intervals, as in a full line” (Army and Navy Chronicle, March 17, 1836).

And this is the first Oxford citation for “deploy” used in its old military sense:

“His columns … are with ease and order soon deploy’d” (“Progress of War,” a poem in The European Magazine, 1786, by an officer identified as “Lieutenant Christian”).

The two old military terms were undoubtedly influenced by the earlier French use of ployer and déployer in the same sense in a treatise on military tactics, Essai Général de Tactique (1772), by Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert.

When “deploy” entered English in the 15th century, it briefly meant the same thing as the earlier word “display”—to unfold or spread out. In fact, “deploy” was merely a different way of spelling “display.”

So if either “deploy” or “display” had an etymological opposite based on the same Latin roots, it would be “ply” (to fold or layer).

Both words come ultimately from the Latin displicare, which is composed of the negative prefix dis– (un-) and plicare (fold).

This is also the ancestor of “ply,” “apply,” “comply,” “complicated,” “employ,” “imply,” “pleat,” and “splay,” according to the OED and John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

So why did we once, very briefly, have these two words for the same thing? You might call it a printer’s idiosyncrasy.

The Latin verb displicare made its way into Old French (as desplier, later desployer), and from Old French it passed into Middle English in the 1300s as desplay (later spelled “display”).

In the late 1400s, the printer William Caxton chose to spell this word in the Parisian fashion: “deploye” and “dysploye.”

But Caxton’s variations, credited with being the first uses of “deploy,” didn’t really establish the word in English. As the OED explains, the actual adoption of “deploy” in a specific sense didn’t take place until the end of the 18th century.

That’s when “deploy” acquired its original military meaning (“to spread out (troops) so as to form a more extended line of small depth”).

So we might think of a line of “deployed” troops at that time as being unfolded or spread out.

[Note: This post was updated on Feb. 5, 2023.]

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The elephant in the room

Q: I’m trying to track down the origin of “elephant in the room.” My fading memory recalls something about a play from the first half of the 20th century in which the curtain opens on a living room with a body on the floor. Ring a bell?

A: When we use the expression “elephant in the room” today, the elephant we’re usually talking about is something that’s too obvious to go unnoticed but uncomfortable to mention.

For example, all the relatives attending the wake for filthy-rich Great Aunt Beatrice wonder what’s in her unopened will, but none of them bring it up. It’s the elephant in the room.

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition for this sense of “elephant in the room” and variants thereof:

“A significant problem or controversial issue which is obviously present but ignored or avoided as a subject for discussion, usually because it is more comfortable to do so.”

The OED’s first published reference for this usage is the title of a 1984 book, An Elephant in the Living Room: A Leader’s Guide for Helping Children of Alcoholics, by Marion H. Typpo and Jill M. Hastings.

Here’s a more illustrative citation, from a 2004 issue of the New York Times: “When it comes to the rising price of oil, the elephant in the room is the ever-weakening United States dollar.”

In short, the OED’s citations for this use of the phrase go back only about 30 years. And we haven’t found any evidence of a connection to an earlier “body in the room,” in either a theatrical or a real crime scene.

However, there’s an older “elephant in the room” with a different meaning—roughly, something huge yet irrelevant, or perhaps unprovable. Here’s the OED’s definition of this one:

“The type of something obvious and incongruous, esp. (in Logic and Philos.) in discussions of statements which may or may not correspond to observable facts.”

The OED credits the philosopher Harry Todd Costello with the first recorded use of this sense of the phrase.

In an essay published in 1935, Costello wrote: “It is going beyond observation to assert there is not an elephant in the room, for I cannot observe what is not.” (The essay was published that year in American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, by Horace Meyer Kallen and Sidney Hook.)

Did the philosophical use of the phrase lead to the more familiar usage that’s common today? Perhaps, but before committing ourselves we did a bit more searching. And we came across yet other kinds of elephants.

For example, here’s a quotation in which the elephant is too big to ignore, but not necessarily off-limits in conversation. It comes from a 1961 issue of the Appraisal Journal, a real-estate industry publication:

“To continue to pretend that the American economy is thriving in an isolated vacuum would be like trying to ignore the presence of an elephant in the living room.”

And in a 1969 essay entitled “Elephants in the Living Room,” David Aspy used the term “elephant experience” to mean one that’s just too much to cope with—like coming home to find a you-know-what standing you-know-where.

We’ve also found the phrase “pink elephant in the room,” an apparent reference to hallucinating or waking up with a hangover.

This example is from a collection of anecdotes called Gridiron Nights (1915), by Arthur Wallace Dunn: “ ‘It reminds me of the fellow who woke up in the night and found a pink elephant in the room.’ ‘How did he get rid of it?’ ‘Oh, it backed slowly out through the keyhole.’ ”

Even before that, Mark Twain wrote a very funny story, “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882), about something too big to miss yet impossible to find.

In the story, which caricatures detective fiction, a large white elephant, freshly imported from Siam, disappears while quarantined in Jersey City.

But if the Twain story inspired the phrase “elephant in the room,” why did it take so long?

As you can see, in searching for the roots of the expression that’s popular today, it’s hard to determine which of these elephants might have suggested it.

But we suspect that white elephants and pink elephants are mere red herrings in this case. The clue to the origin of our particular “elephant in the room” probably lies with Harry Costello, the philosopher mentioned a few paragraphs ago.

Elephants are familiar presences in philosophy and logic. For instance, many philosophers have commented on the Indian parable of the blind men who attempt to describe an elephant by touch, each “seeing” and hence defining it differently. The fable is often used to make a point about language, experience, and deniability.

The fable would have been familiar to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. The two had an argument at Cambridge University in 1911 about the certainty of knowing that there is no rhinoceros in the room (in some versions of the story, it was a hippopotamus).

Their argument was much discussed and long influential in philosophical circles. It was probably what Costello had in mind in his 1935 comment on the assertion that “there is not an elephant in the room.”

So can we trace the popular sense of the phrase back to Wittgenstein in the days before World War I? That’s our guess. But, as Wittgenstein would caution, we can’t know it with empirical certainty.

Finally, we should mention that there are earlier “elephant” expressions in other languages, but none of them have the usual metaphorical meaning of “elephant in the room” in English. And we’ve seen no etymological evidence that any of them influenced the English usage.

For example, “The Inquisitive Man” (1814), a seven-paragraph short story by the Russian writer Ivan Krylov, describes a man who looks at the beasts, birds, and bugs in a museum of natural history, and tells a friend, “I saw everything there was to see and examined it carefully.”

When the friend asks if he saw the elephant, the man says: “Elephant? Are you quite sure that they have an elephant?” When told that there was one, he adds “Well, old man, don’t tell anybody—but the fact is that I didn’t notice the elephant!”

Dostoevsky, in his novel Demons (1871-72), refers to Krylov’s elephant with a literal, not metaphorical, expression: “Belinsky was just like Krylov’s Inquisitive Man, who didn’t notice the elephant in the museum, but gave all his attention to French socialist bugs.”

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

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On holy days and holidays

Q: Happy holidays! Apropos of the holiday season, when did “holiday” become a word and when did it lose its holiness? I assume it was originally “holy day,” but I’ve never looked into it.

A: The word “holiday” was first recorded in English around the year 950, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but it looked a lot different back then.

In Old English, it was written haligdæg or hali-dægh (literally “holy day’). And later, in Middle English, the first vowel was also an “a”: halidei, halidai , halliday, haliday, etc.

A bit later in the Middle English period (12th to 15th centuries) the “a” became an “o,” and eventually the usual forms of the word became “holy day,” “holy-day,” or “holiday” (a spelling first recorded in 1460).

The different forms of the word—that is, whether it was written as one word or two—had something to do with its different meanings.

Originally, the word meant a consecrated day or a religious festival. But in the 1400s, it acquired another, more secular meaning.

The OED defines this sense of the word as “a day on which ordinary occupations (of an individual or a community) are suspended; a day of exemption or cessation from work; a day of festivity, recreation, or amusement.”

That’s how the single word “holiday” came to include the secular side of life and became identified with vacations. But the two–word versions (“holy day,” “holy-day”) retained the original meaning—a day set aside for religious observance.

Today we still recognize these different senses and spellings.

Now here’s an aside. In the Middle English period, people sometimes observed holy days by eating a large flatfish called butte. Thus this fish became known as “halibut” (“hali” for holy and “but” for flatfish).

And happy holidays to you!

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Is government the issue?

Q: I’m a reporter in the Midwest. The other day I did a story about local people in the military. I wanted to say the term “GI” is short for “government issue,” but the copy editor insisted it’s an abbreviation of “galvanized iron.” In the end, we took it out. Who’s right?

A: Both of you, depending on how the abbreviation is used. Here’s the story.

In the early 20th century, “GI” was a semiofficial US Army abbreviation for “galvanized iron.”

The term, dating back to 1907, was used in military inventories to describe iron cans, buckets, and so on, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

By 1917, however, “GI” began to take on a wider meaning.

In World War I, it was used to refer to all things Army, so military bricks became GI bricks and military Christmases became GI Christmases. Before long, we had GI soap and GI shoes and, eventually, plain old GIs.

A lot of people apparently felt this new usage needed a new family tree. So in the minds of many, “galvanized iron” became “government issue” or “general issue.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says “GI” can be an abbreviation for all three, depending on how it’s used:

It stands for “galvanized iron” when used in a phrase like “GI can” (an iron trash can or a World War I German artillery shell). It’s short for “government issue” or “general issue” when referring to American soldiers or things associated with them.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) also list all three as as the longer forms of “GI.”

The entry for “GI” in American Heritage sums up the etymology this way: “From abbreviation of galvanized iron (applied to trash cans, etc.), later reinterpreted as government issue.”

[Note: This post was updated on Nov. 11, 2018.]

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We are not bemused

Q: When I was growing up in the Jurassic period, I was taught that “bemused” meant confused. And that’s how I still use it. But everyone else uses it to mean amused. This leaves me bemused. But maybe I’m just a dinosaur who should lighten up and be amused.

A: Most of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult agree with you, but three of them now include amused as well as confused as standard meanings for “bemused.”

Merriam-Webster has three senses: (1) marked by confusion or bewilderment; (2) lost in thought or reverie, and (3) having or showing feelings of wry amusement especially from something that is surprising or perplexing.”

Merriam-Webster Unabridged and Dictionary.com, based on The Random House Unabridged Dictionary, have similar definitions. American Heritage includes the amused sense, but labels it a “usage problem.”

We’d like to side with American Heritage, but Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster Unabridged, and Dictionary.com seem to have their fingers on the pulse of the language.

Our sense, like yours, is that “bemused” is rarely used in the traditional way these days, and anyone using it that way is almost certain to be misunderstood.

However, we can’t bring ourselves to use it to mean amused. We’d rather retire “bemused” and fill the gap with other words—“puzzled,” “bewildered,” “confused,” and so on.

But before we abandon the subject, here’s a little history.

For nearly three centuries, “bemused” has meant confused, muddled, or lost in thought, as in this 1735 couplet from Pope: “Is there a Parson, much bemus’d in beer, / A maudlin Poetess, a rhyming Peer?”

An earlier noun, “muse,” has meant a state of thoughtfulness since about 1500. And the verb “muse,” meaning to be absorbed in thought, has been around since 1340.

Both come from the Old French muser (to ponder or gape in wonder) and have nothing to do with the nine Muses of antiquity.

Interestingly, when “amused” first appeared in the 1600s, it meant to be in a muse— that is, absorbed, preoccupied, or distracted (not all that different from “bemused”).

It wasn’t until the next century that “amused” came to mean entertained, thanks again to our friend Pope. By the early 1800s, the two words had gone their separate ways. “Bemused” meant befuddled or lost in thought, while “amused” meant having fun.

And so things remained until the late 20th century, when newspaper and magazine writers, broadcasters, and Internet pundits started using “bemused” to mean amused.

Why? Our guess is that they were bored with “amused” and thought “bemused” would be more amusing.

[This post was updated on Feb. 18, 2022.]

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Can one make a concerted effort?

[Note: This post was updated on June 10, 2020.]

Q: Can a single person make a concerted effort? The dictionaries I’ve checked say a “concerted effort” is something done collectively. But I often hear the phrase being used for an effort by one person.

A: Traditionally, “concerted” has meant done in concert—that is, jointly.

However, the adjective had an earlier meaning of organized, coordinated, or united. And since the 19th century people have used “concerted” without any collective sense to mean purposeful and determined.

The newer usage can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence. The entry for “concerted” (updated September 2015) includes this definition: “Of an effort, attempt, etc.: characterized by purpose and determination.”

Standard dictionaries, too, are now recognizing this more recent sense. So a determined effort can be described as “concerted” whether it’s made by one person or many.

Six of the ten standard American and British dictionaries we usually consult accept this use without reservation.

The definitions in American Heritage, for example, include these senses: #1, “planned or accomplished together,” and #2, “deliberate and determined.” Similarly, Lexico (formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online) includes #1, “jointly arranged or carried out,” and #2, “done with great effort or determination.”

While “concerted” is most often used to modify “effort” or “efforts,” it’s seen with other nouns too. A cursory internet search finds it paired with “movement,” “action,” “approach,” “measure,” “struggle,” and “activity,” as well as plural versions.

The earliest recorded sense of “concerted” dates from the mid-17th century and is defined in the OED as “showing coordination, organized, united.”

In the first citation, the well-organized parts of a sentence are said to have “the insinuating harmony of a well-concerted period.” From Thomas Urquhart’s Εκσκυβαλαυρον, 1652. (The Greek title means “gold from garbage,” but the book is often referred to as The Jewel).

Similar examples of this coordinated sense include “concerted Reasoning” (1659) and “concerted Falshoods” (1716).

By the late 1600s, however, people were also using “concerted” in what are now considered the traditional senses. These are defined by the OED as “united in action or purpose; working or acting in concert,” and “jointly arranged or carried out; agreed upon, prearranged; planned, coordinated.”

This is apparently the first OED example in reference to people working together: “that which opposed the sending the concerted Troops into Tuscany and making further attempts, being the disturbance which rose from the Duke of Parma.” The History of the Republick of Venice (1673), Robert Honywood’s translation from the Italian of Battista Nani.

Later OED examples that imply more than one person or force working together include “the concerted powers” (i.e., sovereigns of Europe, 1793); “a concerted scheme” (1785); “a concerted opposition” (1834); “a concerted front” (1948); “concerted attack” (1968); “concerted practices” (1999), and “a concerted group” (2009).

Finally, the more recent sense of “concerted”—determined, purposeful, strenuous—emerged in the 19th century. It can involve one person or more than one. In the dictionary’s first example, many people are involved:

“We have but to make a vigorous and concerted effort throughout the State to effect a complete overthrow of Locofocoism in Alabama.” (The Locofocos were a faction of the Democratic Party of the 1830s and ’40s.) From the Mobile Daily Advertiser, July 23, 1844.

In this OED example, from the late 19th century, a single country is involved:

“He says that Germany should make a concerted effort to have an exhibit that would photograph the magnitude of its manufacturing industries.” From the Anglo-American Times, London, Oct. 9, 1891.

And in this example, the effort is made by a single person:

“When Horace Abbott … was chairman of this committee he made a concerted effort to get some graduate schools to work out a plan for study in absentia.” From the Extension Service Review, Washington, June 1938.

As for its etymology, the OED says the adjective “concerted” was formed within English, derived partly from the verb “concert” (to work jointly; to mutually agree or arrange) and partly from the noun “concert” (agreement or harmony; a working together; a public performance).

The verb “concert” (accented, like the adjective, on the first syllable) was first recorded in 1581 and came into English through several routes. As the dictionary explains, it was borrowed partly from Spanish (concertar), partly from French (concerter), and partly from the ultimate source of them all, Latin (concertare).

The noun “concert” was first recorded in 1578, the OED says, borrowed partly from French (concert, originally an agreement, accord, or pact), and partly from Italian (concerto, a group of musicians performing together).

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What’s the skinny?

Q: Are you aware of any references to “the skinny” prior to 1967? I was in the US Air Force then and provided an information sheet to briefers on data like runway length, aircraft, equipment, etc. The four-inch-wide sheet was known as “the skinny sheet,” and one of the briefers referred to its information as “the skinny.”

A: The earliest example we’ve found for “the skinny” used in this sense is from the 1932 Lucky Bag, the yearbook of the US Naval Academy:

“If you don’t get the skinny of things, Eddie can usually set you right” (from the entry for Harold Edward Baker, a cadet from Yakima, WA).

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Rolling World, a 1938 autobiography by the adventurer and writer Richard Matthews Hallet:

“Had she really given me the skinny of an actual legend from the archives of her race, or was she wafting me the native poetry of her soul?”

The OED defines the expression this way: “slang (orig. and chiefly U.S.). With the. Detailed and esp. confidential information about a person or topic, ‘the low-down’; (also more generally) news, gossip.”

The dictionary has one other pre-1967 citation for the usage, from The Big War, a 1957 novel by Anton Myrer: “I’ll cut you in on some hot skinnay.”

There’s no reliable explanation for the origin of this sense of “skinny,” as we wrote in a brief blog item on the subject in 2006.

But it’s been speculated that “to get down to the skinny” (that is, to get the essential information about something), was like getting down to the skin of an issue.

For what it’s worth, the Old Icelandic word skinna (a cousin of our “skin”) referred to a piece of parchment or vellum, perhaps influencing a couple of English usages related to information.

The old word may have given us “skin book,” a term that entered English in the 19th century with the meaning of a manuscript made of parchment or vellum.

And though it’s quite a stretch, an imaginative wordie might also see flakes of skinna in the 20th-century slang sense of “skin book” as a pornographic work.

The word “skinny,” by the way, didn’t refer to a scrawny person or animal when it entered English as an adjective around 1400.

The earliest citations in the OED use “skinny” to mean covered with skin, affecting the skin, looking like skin, and perhaps even having beautiful skin.

The colloquial sense of “skinny” as thin or lean didn’t show up until the early 1600s when Shakespeare used it in Macbeth: “Each at once her choppie finger laying Vpon her skinnie Lips.”

[Note: This post was updated on June 9, 2021.]

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Scot, Scotch, or Scottish?

Q: In your remarks about the verdict “not proven” in Scotland, you refer to “Scottish law.” I hate to contradict you, but the proper expression is “Scots Law.” And as an aside, I wonder if you realize that in Scotland’s courts, the word “proven” has a long-O sound, as in “woven.” My father was a judge in Scotland, and I had to listen to the long O since I was … oh, 36 months old! Even today, after 40 years in Canada, I still can’t get used to the PROO-ven pronunciation.

A: Thanks for your interesting comment. We could plead “not proven,” and argue that we were simply referring in a general way to the laws in Scotland. But why quibble? We’ve updated the blog item to add a reference to Scots Law.

This also gives us a chance to write about the three adjectives “Scot,” “Scotch,” and “Scottish.”

In Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, the adjective was Scyttisc or Scottisc. In Middle English, about 1100 to 1500, it was written all sorts of ways (Scottysc, Scottisc, Scottissh, etc.), often depending on where you lived.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, for example, it was pronounced like “Scottish” (with various spellings) in the south of England, and “Scottis” in the north as well as in Scotland.

Writers in England began contracting “Scottish” to “Scotch” in the late 16th century, while writers in Scotland began shortening “Scottis” to “Scots” in the early 18th century.

But language is a messy business, and some Scottish writers, notably Robert Burns (1759-96) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), regularly used “Scotch” as an adjective.

By the late 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, there was “uncertainty among the educated classes in Scotland concerning the relative ‘correctness’ of the three competing terms”—“Scots,” “Scottish,” and “Scotch.”

And by the mid-19th century, there was “a growing tendency among educated speakers to favour the more formal Scottish or (less frequently) the more traditional Scots over what was perceived as the more vulgar Scotch,” the OED says.

In England, “Scotch” was the “the prevailing form” from the late 17th century until the 19th century, according the OED, though “Scottish” was used in more formal writing.

“By the beginning of the 20th cent.,” Oxford notes, “disapproval of Scotch by educated Scots was so great that its use had become something of a shibboleth (much to the bafflement of speakers outside Scotland for whom this was the usual word).”

And “during the 20th cent. educated usage in England gradually began to adapt in deference to the perceived Scottish preferences.”

Nevertheless, the adjective “Scotch” survives in a few phrases like “Scotch whisky,” “Scotch broth,” and “Scotch barley.” Although “Scotch pine” has survived in the US, the tree is “Scots pine” in the UK, where it’s the national tree of Scotland.

So which adjective should a writer use today? A usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) suggests that “forms involving Scotch are best avoided in reference to people; designations formed with Scots are most common (Scot, Scotsman, or Scotswoman), but those involving the full form Scottish are sometimes found in more formal contexts.”

The dictionary notes that “Scotch-Irish is the most commonly used term for the descendants of Scots who migrated to North America, but lately Scots-Irish has begun to gain currency among those who know that Scotch is considered offensive in Scotland.”

“There is, however, no sure rule for referring to things,” the AH usage note concludes, “since the history of variation in the use of these words has left many expressions in which the choice is fixed, such as Scotch broth, Scotch whisky, Scottish rite, and Scots Guards.”

So if in doubt, look it up in the dictionary!

[Note: This post was updated on Jan. 3, 2021, and May 19, 2022.]

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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.”

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Black (or African) American?

Q: I was reading an article in the New York Times that used “Black American” and “African American” interchangeably. Is there a proper time for using one term or the other?

A: In general the terms “Black American” and “African American” are synonymous.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), for example, defines “African American” as a “Black American of African ancestry.”

The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) have similar definitions.

Definitions aside, debates about the nomenclature of race are nothing new. How accurate, or appropriate, is the term “African American”? How meaningfully connected to Africa are most Black Americans anyway?

The linguist John McWhorter, for instance, has argued in The New Republic that the “African” part should be dropped. He is, he says, a Black American.

But you don’t have to look hard to find other opinions. Keith Boykin of The Daily Voice, a Black news organization, has this to say:

“I don’t care if you call yourself Negro, colored, African American or black (in lower case or upper case). … The true diversity of our people cannot be fully represented by any one term.”

We recently came across an interesting and fairly exhaustive analysis of this subject by Tom W. Smith, whose article “Changing Racial Labels: From ‘Colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ to ‘African American’ ” ran in The Public Opinion Quarterly in 1992.

Smith (who, by the way, capitalizes all racial terms throughout his article) sets out to discuss “changes in the acceptance of various labels, not the creation of new terms.”

He notes that “colored,” “Negro,” “Black,” and “African” were all “established English terms for Blacks when America was first settled. ‘African American’ was in use at least as early as the late 1700s.”

The dominant label in the mid- to late-19th century, he writes, was “colored,” which was accepted by both Whites and Blacks. But “colored” was too inclusive, because it covered “not only Blacks but Asians and other non-White races.”

Consequently “Negro” began to replace “colored” as the favored term in the late 19th century, in a movement that Smith says was “led by such influential Black leaders as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.”

By the 1930s, he says, “Negro” had supplanted “colored,” which had begun to seem antiquated.

“But as the civil rights movement began making tangible progress in the late 1950s and early 1960s,” Smith writes, “the term ‘Negro’ itself eventually fell under attack.”

Thus “Black,” like “Negro” before it, according to Smith, was seen as “forward-looking” and “progressive,” besides appearing to promote “racial pride, militancy, power, and rejection of the status quo.”

So “Black” became ascendant in the 1970s, though it briefly competed with “Afro-American,” which was popular among academics.

But for the most part, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, “the position of ‘Black’ was virtually unchallenged,” Smith writes.

This all changed in December 1988, when the National Urban Coalition proposed that “African American” replace “Black” as the preferred term.

The goal “was to give Blacks a cultural identification with their heritage and ancestral homeland,” Smith writes.

“Furthermore,” he says, “it was seen as putting Blacks on a parallel with White ethnic groups.” By using a term based on culture and homeland, Blacks were redefined “as an ethnic group rather than a race.”

This distinction – race versus ethnic group – is important, because “racial differences are viewed as genetically based and thus as beyond the ability of society to change,” Smith writes.

“Racial prejudice and discrimination have greatly exceeded ethnic intolerance,” he adds. “On balance, America has a better record of accepting and fairly treating ethnic groups than it does racial groups.”

Smith also touches on the criticisms of the “African American” label, which many people feel “calls for identification with a culture to which almost no actual ties exist.”

In addition, the term “has the classic ‘hyphenated American’ problem.” Whether or not there’s an actual hyphen, he notes, ethnic compounds like “German-American” sometimes have been “regarded as symbolizing divided loyalties.”

Smith, who was writing in 1992, says that “among those with a preference, ‘African American’ has grown in acceptance although ‘Black’ still is preferred by more Blacks.”

A usage note in American Heritage (the fourth edition was published in 2000) points out that “African American,” despite its popularity, “has shown little sign of displacing or discrediting black, which remains both popular and positive.”

[Update, Sept. 5, 2021: American Heritage dropped the usage note from later editions. “African American” is now overwhelmingly more popular than “Black American,” according to our searches of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the News on the Web corpus, a database of articles from online newspapers and magazines. Furthermore, the capitalization of “Black” has now become widely established.]

Does  any of this really matter? Smith quotes DuBois as saying: “The feeling of inferiority is in you, not in a name. The name merely evokes what is already there. Exorcise the hateful complex and no name can ever make you hang your head.”

“Yet names do matter,” Smith says. “Blacks have successively changed their preferred term of address from ‘Colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ and now, perhaps, to ‘African American’ in order to assert their group standing and aid in their struggle for racial equality.”

“While symbolic, these changes have not been inconsequential,” he adds. “For symbols are part and parcel of reality itself.”

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“Disc” vs. “disk”

Q: My dictionary says “disk” and “disc” are simply variant spellings of the same word. But I’ve run across a technical article from Apple that asserts “disc” refers to optical media while “disk” refers to magnetic media. Have you ever heard of this distinction?

A: It’s true that “disc” is a variant spelling of “disk,” but Apple is technically right. Each spelling has marked out its own territory in the technological wilderness, though many non-techies seem to be unaware of the distinction.

As Apple’s support site says, discs are “optical media, such as an audio CD, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, or DVD-Video disc,” while disks are “magnetic media, such as a floppy disk, the disk in your computer’s hard drive, an external hard drive.”

If you’re like us, you may find the optical-vs.-magnetic distinction hard to remember. When in doubt, we go to a dictionary or usage guide. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage has a helpful entry:

“Use disc in references to phonograph records (disc jockey, discography), optical and laser-based devices (compact disc, laser disc, videodisc), farm implements (disc harrow), and brakes (disc brakes). Use disk in references to the magnetic storage devices used with computers (floppy disk, hard disk) and to the fiber and cartilage between the vertebrae (slipped disk).”

In ordinary usage, as we mentioned, many people don’t follow the distinctions found in dictionaries, style manuals, and technical articles.

Experts do prefer “disc jockey” to “disk jockey,” and a comparison with Google’s Ngram viewer shows that “disc jockey” is considerably more popular than “disk jockey” in published books.

The word was spelled “disk” when it entered English in 1665 and referred to either the discus that athletes throw or the flat, circular form of a celestial object like the sun or moon. It’s ultimately derived from the Latin discus and the Greek δίσκος (diskos).

Standard dictionaries, like American Heritage and Merriam-Webster, generally say “disc” is a variant spelling of “disk.” The  Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, gives “disk” as a variant of “disc.”

The OED, under its entry for “disc, disk,” adds that “disc is now the more usual form in British English,” except in the computing sense, “where disk is commoner as a result of US influence.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has this as one definition of “disk”: “a round flat plate coated with a magnetic substance on which data for a computer is stored.” But it says that an “optical disk” (like a “videodisc” or a “CD”) is usually spelled “disc.”

And The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), under its entry for “compact disk,” has an extensive usage note that we’ll quote in its entirety (we’ll add paragraphing to make it easier to read):

“When new words come into the language, they often have different forms for a period until one form wins out over the others. There are occasions when competing forms remain in use for a long time. The word disk and its descendant compound compact disk represent good examples of this phenomenon.

“Disk came into English in the mid-17th century and was originally spelled with a k on the model of older words such as whisk. The c-spelling arose a half century later as a learned spelling derived from the word’s Latin source discus. Both disc and disk were used interchangeably into the 20th century, with people in Britain tending to use disc more often, and Americans preferring disk.

“The spellings also began to be sorted out by function. Late in the 19th century, for reasons that are not clear, people used disc to refer to the new method of making phonograph recordings on a flat plate (as opposed to Edison’s cylindrical drum). In any case, the c-spelling became conventional for this sense, which is why we listen to disc jockeys and not disk jockeys.

“In the 1940s, however, when American computer scientists needed a term to refer to their flat storage devices, they chose the spelling disk, and this became conventionalized in such compounds as hard disk and floppy disk. When the new storage technology of the compact disk arose in the 1970s, both c– and k-spellings competed for an initial period. Computer specialists preferred the familiar k-spelling, while people in the music industry, who saw the shiny circular plates as another form of phonograph record, referred to them as compact discs.

“These tendencies soon became established practice in the different industries. This is why we buy compact disks in computer stores but get the same storage devices with different data as compact discs in music stores. Similarly, the computer industry created the optical disk, the format that the entertainment industry used to create the videodisc.”

[Note: This post was updated on March 9, 2022.]

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Everyone here is frightfully gay

Q: Why does the New York Times use “gays” to refer to male homosexuals and “lesbians” for females? “Gay” has always covered men and women. When did it become a term for male homosexuals?

A: The Times does indeed often refer to gay men as “gays” and gay women as “lesbians,” as in its reporting on a gay rights rally in Washington last month. The phrase “gays and lesbians” crops up over and over again in the paper.

Why not use the single term “gays” for both men and women?

The simple answer is that many gay women want a term of their own—at least in public discourse. This is what we’ve been able to gather after reading extensively in lesbian discussion groups and other forums on the Web.

The preference for the term “lesbian” appears to reflect a desire among many gay women to have a public label all their own and to emphasize the fact that gay men and gay women are not a homogeneous group.

So much for the public terminology. Privately, however, it’s a different story.

We’ve concluded that the terms “gay woman” and “lesbian” are often used interchangeably, and that a woman’s choice of a personal label for herself is highly individual.

We also get the impression that some women who identify with the masculine or “butch” end of the spectrum prefer to call themselves “gay,” while some at the “femme” end think of themselves as “lesbian.”

But some of the women commenting online see no difference at all between the labels, and still others reject both labels in favor of “queer.”

In short, there are not only public and private aspects to the use of “lesbian,” but there are intensely personal and idiosyncratic aspects as well.

Let’s examine the terms. (First let us note that many gay women as well as gay men discourage the use of “homosexual” because they see it as a medical or psychological term.)

The word “Lesbian” (originally capitalized) has been in the language since 1601, when it had no sexual meaning. It was an adjective pertaining to the Greek island of Lesbos.

A “Lesbian rule,” for example, was a pliable mason’s rule made of a kind of lead, found on the island, that was flexible enough to be shaped to fit a curved edge. (We wrote a blog entry on the subject earlier this year.) And “Lesbian wine” was made from grapes grown on Lesbos.

Lesbos, as you probably know, was also the home of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, who addressed some of her love lyrics to girls.

This connection, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, gave the word “lesbianism” the meaning of “female homosexuality,” a sense that originally appeared in print in 1870. The adjective “lesbian” first showed up in the sexual sense in 1890 and as a noun in 1925.

“Gay” has had many meanings since it was introduced into English around 1300. Its etymology is murky, but it was borrowed from Old French (gai) and may come from Frankish or Old High German (gahi).

In English, according to the OED, it first meant noble, beautiful, or excellent. In the later 1300s it came to mean “bright or lively-looking, esp. in colour; brilliant, showy.”

In the 1400s it was first used in the modern sense of merry or cheerful, though it was also used to mean wanton, lewd, dissolute, or even (in the case of women) living by prostitution. All of these negative meanings are now either rare or obscure.

The adjective “gay” has been used as slang term for homosexual since at least as far back as 1937. As the OED explains, some citations from the 1920s and ’30s could be read that way by innuendo, but such interpretations might just be the result of hindsight.

Here’s one such example, from the writings of Gertrude Stein in 1922: “Helen Furr and Georgina Keene lived together then. … They were together then and traveled to another place and stayed there and were gay there … not very gay there, just gay there. They were both gay there.”

And here’s another, from a 1939 song lyric by Noel Coward: “Everyone’s here and frightfully gay, / Nobody cares what people say, / Though the Riviera / Seems really much queerer / Than Rome at its height.”

As the OED says, those examples can’t be regarded as definitive, though they are certainly suggestive in hindsight. But we do know that “gay” was used to mean homosexual when Coward wrote that lyric, because the OED’s first definitive example is from an anonymous typescript believed to be from 1937:

“Al had told me that Kenneth was not gay but jam [i.e. heterosexual], and so I acted very manly.” (The quotation is from research documents contained in the Ernest W. Burgess Papers at the University of Chicago Library. Burgess was a professor of sociology at the university.)

Another definitive OED citation comes from Gershon Legman’s “The Language of Homosexuality: An American Glossary,” which was published in 1941 as an appendix to a two-volume medical study of homosexuality.

Legman’s glossary includes this entry: “Gay, an adjective used almost exclusively by homosexuals to denote homosexuality, sexual attractiveness, promiscuity … or lack of restraint, in a person, place, or party. Often given the French spelling, gai or gaie by (or in burlesque of) cultured homosexuals of both sexes.”

You asked when “gay” became a term for male homosexuals. The answer is that it doesn’t necessarily mean males—or not always.

In their book Language and Sexuality (2003), Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick write: “Many lesbians prefer the gender-specific term ‘lesbian’ to ‘gay,’ which, they argue, obscures the presence of women by subsuming them under a label whose primary reference is to men.”

And indeed the OED says the term is more frequently used to refer to men.

One final note about “gay.” There’s no evidence, according to the OED, that there was an earlier use of gai or gaie in French to mean homosexual. Rather, the French use of the word in this sense is a late-20th-century borrowing from English.

As for “queer,” its origins are uncertain but it may be related to the German quer (oblique or at odds). It’s been in English in the ordinary sense (peculiar or strange) since the 1500s.

The OED’s first citation for the use of “queer” in the sexual sense is from a letter written in 1894 by Oscar Wilde’s archenemy, the Marquess of Queensberry, who used the word as a noun: “I write to tell you that it is a judgement on the whole lot of you. Montgomerys, The Snob Queers like Roseberry & certainly Christian hypocrite Gladstone.”

The adjective “queer,” according to the OED,  was first recorded in a 1914 article in the Los Angeles Times: “He said that the Ninety-six Club was the best; that it was composed of the ‘queer’ people. … He said that the members sometimes spent hundreds of dollars on silk gowns, hosiery, etc. … At these ‘drags’ the ‘queer’ people have a good time.”

As the OED points out, “queer” was a derogatory term until it was reclaimed as a positive or neutral word by gays in the 1980s. It’s since become a respectable term in academia.

“In some academic contexts,” the OED says, “it is the preferred adjective in the study of issues relating to homosexuality (cf. queer theory …); it is also sometimes used of sexual lifestyles that do not conform to conventional heterosexual behaviour, such as bisexuality or transgenderism.”

[Note: This post was updated on Jan. 8, 2019.]

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.]

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Sympathy strike

Q: An FAQ on Dictionary.com says “sympathy” is compassion for another person while “empathy” is imagining oneself in another person’s position. That’s backward from how I understand the two words. Who’s right?

A: Sorry to disappoint you, but we’re with Dictionary.com here. The new third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage nicely differentiates the two terms, so we’ll pass along the definitions:

“Empathy is the ability to imagine oneself in another person’s position and to experience all the sensations connected with it. Sympathy is compassion for or commiseration with another.”

“Sympathy,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, entered English from Late Latin (sympathia), but comes ultimately from the classical Greek συμπάθεια (sympatheia), or “fellow feeling.” The roots literally mean “together” + “feeling.”

The word was first recorded in English in the mid-16th century, and its earliest meanings had to do with affinity, conformity, harmony, and the like. It came to mean feelings of compassion or commiseration in 1600, the OED citations suggest.

The noun has cousins in French (sympathie), Italian (simpatia), Spanish (simpatia), and Portuguese (sympathia).

“Empathy” is the English version of a German word, einfühlung (“in” + “feeling”), which the Germans adapted in 1903 from the Hellenistic Greek word for “passion” or “physical affection,” ἐμπάθεια (empatheia), also literally “in” + “feeling.” (In modern Greek, the word has the opposite meaning—hatred, malice, and so on.)

The OED defines “empathy,” which entered English in 1909, as “the power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.”

In the 1940s the word acquired a meaning in the field of psychology, the OED says: “The ability to understand and appreciate another person’s feelings, experience, etc.”

The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English gives these examples of the two words at work: (1) “I have a lot of sympathy for her; she had to bring up the children on her own.” (2) “She had great empathy with people.”

Again, sorry to disappoint you. We sympathize with you over the disappointment, and we empathize with what you’re feeling.

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‘Anyways,’ said the damsel

Q: I grew up in the Midwest (Chicago, Catholic school) and never added an “s” to “anyway.” I live now in New York (Manhattan) and hear “anyways” all the time. I also hear it on TV. Pat has said on the air that she grew up in the Midwest. Did she say “anyway” or “anyways”?

A: Growing up in Iowa, Pat occasionally heard people say “anyways,” but that wasn’t the usual practice. Mostly it was “anyway.”

The 10 standard dictionaries we regularly consult label “anyways” as informal, dialectal, colloquial, or nonstandard. In other words, you wouldn’t use it when your language should be at its best.

Nevertheless, “anyways” is heard across the US, according to citations in the Dictionary of American Regional English, which notes that it first showed up in English in the early 13th century and was in standard literary use into the early 19th century.

In fact, the term was originally spelled with an “s” (actually two of them) when it appeared in Middle English in the early 13th century, meaning “in any manner” or “by any means,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s first citation (with “anyways” spelled “eanies-weis”) is from a manuscript about the legendary life of St. Margaret the Maiden and Martyr:

“Ȝef ich mahte eanies-weis makien ham to fallen” (“if I might in any-ways make them fall”). From Seinte Marherete þe Meiden ant Martyr, edited in 1934 by Frances May Mack for the Early English Text Society.

The usage was standard for centuries, as in this expanded citation from the Anglican Communion’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer: “Finally, we commend to thy fatherly goodness all those who are any ways afflicted, or distressed in mind, body, or estate.”

Today, however, the OED describes this use of “anyways” for “anyway” as colloquial and chiefly North American.

Similarly, the dictionary says the use of “anyways” as a sentence adverb (one that modifies an entire sentence or clause) is colloquial and chiefly North American, though the earliest two Oxford examples are from British sources.

The OED cites this example from the 1865 Dickens novel Our Mutual Friend: “ ‘Anyways,’ said the damsel, ‘I am glad punishment followed, and I say so.’ ” We’ve expanded the citation, one of five appearances of “anyways” in the book.

Would we use “anyways”? No way.

[Note: This post was updated on June 24, 2020.]

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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.

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