Category: Linguistics

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Is “based off” off base?

Q: As I read the papers of college freshmen, I am often stopped by usages that seem wrong to me. The latest example is the use of “based off” for “based on,” as in “based off the research of Albert Einstein.” Your thoughts?

A: You’re not the first to notice the use of “based off” (sometimes “based off of”) in place of “based on,” though college students aren’t the only perpetrators.

Linguists have been discussing the usage for at least 10 years, and it was the subject of an online article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in October 2013.

The author of the article, Anne Curzan, wrote: “I have mentioned the construction to a few colleagues, and it’s clear at least some of them are circling it in student writing.”

The use is also found outside routine classroom writing. Curzan, a linguist and a professor of English at the University of Michigan, passed along this example from the academic journal Exceptional Children (March 2012):

“For our study, the parameters used in the simulation were based off of values derived from a large empirical data set.”

And we’ve found other recent examples of “based off” in academic journals, both American and British.

By the way, “based off of” is just a puffed up version of “based off.” Our suspicion is that people who use “based off of” may have the phrase “on the basis of” in mind.

We’ve written on the blog about “off of,” an extremely common redundancy. So we’ll confine these remarks to “based off.”

While “based off” may have become more popular recently, it’s not unseen in older writing. It’s been used occasionally since the early 1930s, mostly in trade journals.

The earliest example we’ve been able to confirm appeared in a May 1931 issue of National Petroleum News:

“To consumers: … discounts are based off tank wagon price, and affect purchases of 1,000 gallons or more per month” (this notation appeared several times in column listings).

Here it is again in 1952: “Based off 1951 figures, the proposed constitutional amendment would cut Federal revenues by $16,000,000,000 a year” (from the Bulletin of the Metal Trades Department of the American Federation of Labor).

And this headline appeared on a cover story in the trade journal Automotive News in January 1997: “Bigger Honda SUV will be based off Accord, minivan.”

These 20th-century appearances cropped up so seldom that nobody seems to have minded.

The use of “based off” in the sense of “based on” isn’t discussed in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. And while Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed., 2016) has a long discussion of “based on,” it makes no mention at all of “based off.”

Discussions of “based off” have come up periodically on the Linguist List, the online discussion group of the American Dialect Society, but only in the last 10 years.

Writing on the list in 2006, Seán Fitzpatrick commented: “My daughters were discussing a forthcoming movie, and the 21-year-old said you had to give the auteur credit for originality, since the movie was ‘not based off a book, not based off another movie, and not based off a TV show.’ ”

“ ‘Based off’ seemed to me to be a peculiar alteration of ‘based on,’ ” Fitzpatrick added. “The strange thing is that she denied having said ‘based off’ instead of ‘based on.’ ”

Another contributor, the linguist Arnold Zwicky, suggested that “based off” as a variation on “based on” or “based upon” may be relatively recent.

“In any case,” Zwicky wrote, “it’s now very widespread.” And it’s become even more widespread since 2006.

Writing on the list in 2014, the slang lexicographer Jonathan Lighter reported a sighting of “based off” with another meaning: “as a result of; by reason of; from.”

The quotation, from Yahoo! news: “Hawking earned his scientific reputation back in the 1970’s based off his theory of black holes as cosmic vacuums.”

We won’t bother reporting the comparative frequency of “based off” versus “based on” in Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in millions of books.

Many of the supposed examples of “based off” turn out to be misreadings of “eased off” or another phrase. And many other examples don’t represent the sense we’re talking about (e.g., “based off the coast of Cadiz”).

Though “based off” in place of “based on” sounds foreign to our ears, the usage doesn’t surprise us.

We’ve often remarked that the use of prepositions in English is highly idiomatic and subject to changing usage.

(A newcomer to English recently wrote to us in confusion about the various prepositions used in reference to copying: “print out,” “print off,” and “print up.” We explained that they’re all acceptable idioms.)

As Curzan wrote in her article: “With ‘based on’ one could argue that because things are physically built on bases, it makes more sense to say ‘based on.’ ”

“I agree: That is perfectly logical,” she added. “But language isn’t always logical, and once ‘based on’ becomes as much or more metaphorical than literal, it doesn’t seem surprising to me that the preposition might shift—especially given that one can metaphorically ‘build off’ things.”

We would add that a reinterpretation of a work is often called a “takeoff,” which may have contributed to the use of  “based off.”

“Based” here is the past participle of the verb “base,” and the Oxford English Dictionary has no examples of its use with “off.”

The OED says the verb means “to place on (also upon) a foundation, fundamental principle, or underlying basis.” (Note the prepositions in italics.)

All of the dictionary’s citations for this sense the verb and adjective, between 1776 and 2009, show the accompanying preposition as either “on” or “upon.”

As far as we can tell, people seem to use “based off” in three general ways:

● as a verb, either active (“She based her novel off Pride and Prejudice”) or passive (“Her novel is based off Pride and Prejudice”);

● as an adjective (“Figures based off speculation aren’t reliable”);

● as an adverb (“The company pays based off the hours worked”).

Now, we aren’t advocating any of these or claiming they’re standard English usage. We’re merely reporting what’s out there, so hold those indignant emails and tweets.

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Hear Pat on Iowa Public Radio

She will 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.

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Fold like a cheap X

Q: Is the expression “fold like a cheap suit” or “fold like a cheap suitcase”? Most of the people I’ve asked think it should be “suit,” but I remember it as “suitcase.”

A: The verb “fold” has been used for hundreds of years to mean “give way,” “collapse,” or “fail.” But it’s been used for only a few dozen years in expressions like the ones you’re asking about.

There are many variations on the “fold” theme, including “fold like a cheap tent,” “fold like a cheap lounge chair,” and “fold like a cheap camera” (a reference to the inexpensive folding cameras of days gone by).

These expressions, sometimes called “snowclones” by linguists, follow a verbal pattern (like “X is the new Y” or, in this case, “fold like a cheap X”) into which various words can be inserted by people too lazy to come up with new clichés.

In a 2004 post on the Language Log, the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum credits the economist Glen Whitman with coining the term for “these non-sexually reproduced journalistic textual templates.”

The linguist Arnold Zwicky, in discussing the “fold like a cheap X” formula on his blog in 2009, questions the use of the word “suit” here, then suggests a possible explanation for the usage.

“Suit would not have been my first choice as a filler for X, suits (even cheap ones) not being notable for ease of folding,” he writes. “But maybe the cliché ‘all over someone like a cheap suit’ promoted suit for X.”

Zwicky mentions several other choices as a filler for X, including “shirt,” “umbrella,” “cocktail umbrella,” “lawn chair,” “deck chair,” “card table,” “pocket-knife,” “wallet,” “blanket,” and “accordion.”

The earliest example in writing that we could find for any of these “fold like a cheap X” expressions is from White Rat: A Life in Baseball, a 1987 memoir by Whitey Herzog:

“The Phils, I think, were secretly rooting for the Cardinals to win the second half because they knew they could throw Steve Carlton at us in the mini-playoffs and we’d fold like a cheap tent.”

The earliest written example we’ve found for the “suitcase” version is from All Out, a 1988 novel by Judith Alguire: “She folded like a cheap suitcase.”

And the first written example we’ve found for the “suit” formula is from Another 48 Hours, Deborah Chiel’s 1990 novelization of the Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte film: “Wilson folded like a cheap suit to the ringing applause of everyone present.”

And now we’ll fold like a cheap laptop and call it a day.

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Sizing up YOOGE

Q: Is the Bernie Sanders/Donald Trump pronunciation of “huge” as YOOGE strictly a New York thing?

A: The usual pronunciation of “huge” is HYOOGE, according to most of the standard dictionaries we’ve checked. The “hy” sound at the beginning is a consonant cluster that combines the sounds produced by the letters “h” and “y.”

In the pronunciation you’re asking about, the “hy” sound at the beginning of “huge” is reduced to a “y” sound, resulting in the variant YOOGE.

Several standard dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.), accept the YOOGE pronunciation as an equal variant alongside HYOOGE.

However, the Dictionary of American Regional English says YOOGE occurs primarily in New York City and Long Island, NY, though it’s also heard in some other parts of the East Coast.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, which linguists generally use in referring to these sounds, the “hy” cluster is written as /hj/ and the “y” sound as /j/.

Phoneticians, linguists that specialize in the sounds of speech, would say that the phoneme, or unit of sound, represented by the consonant cluster /hj/ is replaced by the phoneme /j/ when someone pronounces “huge” as YOOGE (judʒ in the IPA alphabet).

This process is similar to what linguists refer to as glide cluster reduction, in which the “wh” cluster (originally spelled “hw”) is reduced to “w” in words like “which,” “whether,” and “where.” We wrote about such “wh” words in our recent post about “h”-dropping.

To keep things as simple as possible here, we’ll use “hy” and “y” for the /hj/ and /j/ sounds, except when we quote linguists or lexicographers using the IPA alphabet.

The earliest evidence in DARE for the YOOGE pronunciation is from the early 1940s, but we suspect that the pronunciation is much older, perhaps dating back to the 1700s, and may have been more widespread.

The dictionary’s first citation for YOOGE is from a 1942 issue of the journal American Speech: “NYC, Long Island, Omission of initial [h] before [ju] … huge … This is a somewhat greater loss of [h] than in upstate speech.”

However, DARE has a much earlier example indicating that the word “humor” (now usually pronounced HYOO-mur) was pronounced YOO-mur in American English in the late 18th century.

In Dissertations on the English Language (1789), Noah Webster criticizes the pronunciation of “human, and about twenty other words beginning with h, as tho they were spelt yuman. This is a gross error.”

Webster doesn’t list the 20 other words, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they included “huge.”

Interestingly, Webster adds that the word “humor” should begin with a “y” sound: “The only word that begins with this sound, is humor, with its derivatives.” In other words, he considered the YOO-mur pronunciation of “humor” to be standard English.

In a footnote, Webster singles out for criticism the Scottish lexicographer William Perry, author of The Royal Standard English Dictionary (1775), which says “human” should be “pron. as if began with a y.”

“I am surprized that his pronunciation has found so many advocates in this country, as there is none more erroneous,” Webster says.

It’s apparent from Webster’s remarks that the “hy” pronunciation of “humor” and some similar words was unsettled in the late 18th century on both sides of the Atlantic, probably because of the difficulty some people had in pronouncing the cluster.

In fact, several 18th-century British language authorities agreed with Webster that “humor“ (“humour” in the British spelling) should be pronounced YOO-mur.

In An Essay Towards Establishing a Standard for an Elegant and Uniform Pronunciation of the English Language (1766), for example, James Buchanan endorses the YOO-mur pronunciation, as does John Walker in A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791).

Several readers of our blog have asked if the pronunciation of “huge” as YOOGE by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (both native New Yorkers) is similar to the “h”-dropping in cockney, the working-class speech of England.

We don’t think so. In cockney, the “h” sound disappears and is not replaced by anything (as in “house” reduced to OUSE). In the New Yorkish pronunciation of “huge,” the consonant cluster “hy” is replaced by a “y” sound.

If the “h” in “huge” were a normal consonant, the word would be pronounced HOOGE, and dropping the “h” would result in the pronunciation OOGE. That’s not what is happening here.

Interestingly, people speaking the Norfolk dialect in England do change the “hy” sound in “huge” to “h,” resulting in the pronunciation HOOGE. Linguists refer to this phenomenon as yod-dropping, from the name of the Hebrew version of the letter “y.”

In fact, yod-dropping is heard on both sides of the Atlantic, but it’s more common in the US and helps differentiate standard American pronunciation from Received Pronunciation, the standard British accent.

Most Americans, for example, usually pronounce “tune” and “news” as TOON and NOOZ, while someone speaking RP pronounces them TYOON and NYOOZ. (In parts of the American South, people also say TYOON and NYOOZ, as we’ve written on the blog.)

We could go on—and on and on. There’s much to be said about yod-dropping, an ongoing process that the linguist John C. Wells dates from the early 18th century, but we’ll leave that for another day.

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Is “if you will” a verbal tic?

Q: Is there any legitimate use for the phrase “if you will,” which I hear overused and abused on TV and radio? I’ve been wondering about this since hearing John Sununu repeatedly use it as filler the other day.

A: We once wrote a post in which we mentioned a few expressions that are “used to death in the media.” We included “in the final analysis,” “hit the ground running,” “on the ground,” “when all is said and done,” “at the end of the day,” and “if you will.”

We jokingly used the last one in a sentence: “First I take off my left shoe, and then, if you will, my right.”

Joking aside, “if you will” is much overused by interview subjects on the air and in print. The linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum, writing on the Language Log, has compared it to the use of “like” as a filler.

In his article, Pullum plucks more than a dozen sentences from the Wall Street Journal, containing what seem to be “quotes from educated and prosperous middle-aged persons—CEOs and so on.” And in each case he replaces the speaker’s “if you will” with “like.”

For example, the statement “They are, if you will, this country’s governing body” becomes “They are, like, this country’s governing body.” You get the idea: “if you will” is to pompous baby boomers what “like” is to their kids.

As Pullum says, “The people who grouse about like are myopic old whiners who haven’t looked at their own, like, linguistic foibles, if you will.”

In fact, “if you will” isn’t always empty filler. Before it became the annoying and meaningless tic it often is today, it had a legitimate usage (and it still does, among more careful speakers).

The Oxford English Dictionary says the expression is “sometimes used parenthetically to qualify a word or phrase” and can be interpreted as “if you wish it to be so called” or “if you choose or prefer to call it so.” (The OED doesn’t comment on the use of the phrase as mere throat-clearing.)

Similarly, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines “if you will” as meaning “if you wish to call it that,” and gives a literary example: “a kind of preoccupation, or obsession if you will” (Louis Auchincloss).

This is not the “will” that’s an auxiliary of the future tense. This is the verb that means to desire or wish, as well as to intend or propose “that something be done or happen,” as the OED says.

This sense of “will” is a remnant of an obsolete or archaic use that dates back to the 10th century in writing, one in which “will” is used transitively—that is, with an object (as in “she willed him to speak” or “your father wills it”). However, in the case of “if you will” the object is unstated.

The OED has this late 17th-century example: “Gravity … depends entirely on the constant and efficacious, and, if you will, the supernatural and miraculous Influence of Almighty God” (from William Whiston’s The New Theory of the Earth, 1696).

This 19th-century example is from the works of John Ruskin: “Very savage! monstrous! if you will” (from St. Mark’s Rest: The History of Venice, 1876).

Notice how the writers in those examples use “if you will” to qualify words, like “supernatural” and “monstrous,” that a reader might otherwise find startling. In effect, the meaning is “you might even say supernatural,” “you might even say monstrous.”

But “if you will” is also used in other ways, as in polite formulas like “Pass the salt, if you will,” “Imagine, if you will, a rustic cottage,” and “Tell the jury, if you will, where you were on the night of ….”

In those examples, “if you will” means something like “if you please.” (The OED’s definitions of “if you please” include “if it be your will.”)

Finally, “if you will” can be used in the sense of “if you desire” or “if you wish.”

The OED has an example from Sir Walter Scott. In a scene from the novel Kenilworth (1821), the Earl of Leicester’s wife makes a wish—that he would don the russet-brown cloak of a peasant. The Earl replies: “The sober russet shall be donned to-morrow, if you will.”

This usage is a cousin to a couple of old phrases in which the verb “will” has only an implied object: “if God will” and the later “God willing.”

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Why “children,” not “childs”?

Q: Your recent post about why “chicken” is singular has left me wondering where “-en” plurals such as “oxen,” “brethren,” “children,” “men,” “women,” and the archaic eyen come from.

A: In Old English, nouns that followed certain patterns formed their plurals with -n rather than –s.

These included the one you mention, eyen (“eyes”), as well as earan (“ears”), tungan (“tongues”), fon (“foes”), housen (“houses”), shoen (“shoes”), treen (“trees”), and oxan (the original plural of “ox”).

During the Middle English period (roughly 1100-1500), both the –en and the –an plurals that had come from Old English were spelled with –en.

Meanwhile, Middle English writers extended the -en spelling, applying it to words that didn’t originally have plurals ending in –n.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “the termination -en came to be regarded as a formative of the plural, and its use was extended in southern Middle English to many other words of Old English and French origin.”

Charles Barber, Joan C. Beal, and Philip A. Shaw note in The English Language: A Historical Introduction (2nd ed.) that Middle English had “forms like devlen ‘devils’ and englen ‘angels,’ where Old English had deoflas and englas.”

This -en  ending was so popular in Middle English that it was even added to existing irregular plurals, so that brethre (plural of “brother”) became brethren and childer (plural of “child”) became children.

You might say that the –en of “brethren” and “children,” added to words that were already plural, formed in each case a sort of double plural. (The modern “brothers” wasn’t commonly used until the end of the 16th century.)

For a time, –n and –s rivaled each other as the typical plural ending in English, Thomas Pyles and John Algeo write in The Origins and Development of the English Language (4th ed.).

In general, the -n ending was favored in the south of England and the –s in the north.

But nearly all of the –n plurals eventually disappeared as the –s plurals became dominant. By around 1400, say the authors of The English Language, the –s plurals were “almost universal.”

The only original –n plural from Old English that has survived to this day is “oxen.” And even this plural had a run for its money. It competed for a time with “oxes,” which the OED says “has survived only in regional and nonstandard use.”

(The plurals “men” and “women,” by the way, don’t fall into this category. They were formed in Old English by a change of vowel, as is also true of “feet,” “geese,” “teeth,” “mice,” and “lice.”)

We should mention a couple of other points about –en endings in English.

As we wrote in our “chicken” post, the –en suffix has been used to form diminutives. This is the case with the –en of “chicken,” “kitten,” and “maiden.”

And –en has been added to nouns to form adjectives in the sense “pertaining to” or “of the nature of,” the OED says. In Germanic languages, adjectives formed this way “chiefly indicate the material of which a thing is composed,” Oxford adds.

Only a few of these adjectives survive today in English, including “golden,” “wooden,” “leaden,” “oaken,” “woolen,” “earthen,” and “wheaten.”

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Like father, like son

Q: What is the history of the phrase “like father, like son”? Does it hark back to a time when this sort of parallel construction was common?

A: The expression “like father, like son” is an old English proverb with roots in classical Latin. Like many other English proverbs, it doesn’t conform to the usual syntax, the arrangement of words and phrases into sentences.

In “Proverbs,” an essay in the Encyclopaedia of the Linguistic Sciences, the philologist Neal R. Norrick explains that proverbs like the one you’re asking about don’t adhere to the traditional use of noun phrases and verb phrases.

“Many proverbs such as Like father, like son and The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat adhere to formulas, here like X, like Y and The X-er, the Y-er, which do not conform to customary NP + VP syntactic structure,” Norrick writes. “So special interpretative rules beyond regular compositional semantic principles are necessary to assign these proverbs even literal readings.”

Such literal readings, he says, “provide the basis on which figurative interpretations are determined.”

“One interpretative rule will relate the formula like X, like Y to the reading ‘Y is like X’ to derive for Like father, like son the interpretation ‘the son is like the father’; another rule related the formula The X-er, the Y-er to ‘Y is proportional to X’ to interpret The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat as ‘the sweetness of the meat is proportional to the nearness of the bone’; and so on for other recurrent formulas.”

Norrick, who holds the chair of English philology at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, says other proverbs, like “once bitten, twice shy” and “sow the wind, reap the storm,” are “radically elliptical, rather than formulaic, as such.”

“They require expansion before they can receive grammatical analyses interpretable by regular compositional principles,” he adds. “This suggests a cognitive procedure in which a person constructs a complete paraphrase of the elliptical proverb, then assigns the interpretation derived from the paraphrase.”

Norrick’s analysis can be heavy going for lay readers, so we’ll simply say that proverbs are often idiomatic expressions that don’t necessarily conform to the traditional rules of English.

The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs defines the proverb “like father, like son” this way: “Fathers and sons resemble each other, and sons tend to do what their fathers did before them.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, which defines the adage as “In the same manner from generation to generation,” says, “This ancient proverb has been stated in English in slightly varying versions since the 1300s.”

American Heritage cites this 17th-century variation: “Like father, like son; like mother, like daughter,” from Bibliotheca Scholastica Instructissima (1616), a book of proverbs collected by the English theologian Thomas Draxe.

Two anonymous Latin sayings, Qualis pater, talis filius (“as the father, so the son”) and patris est filius (“he is his father’s son”), are cited as the source for the English proverb “like father, like son.”

However, a mother-daughter version appears in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament (Ezekiel 16:44): “As the mother, so her daughter.”

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Why do the English drop aitches?

Q: Is there a linguistic relationship between the missing “h” sound in French and Eliza Doolittle’s aitch-dropping in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady?

A: The English have been dropping their aitches in speech and in spelling since Anglo-Saxon times, but the process accelerated as Old English gave way to Middle English in the 11th century.

Is French responsible for this “h”-dropping in English?

Well, Anglo-Norman, spoken by the Francophile upper classes in England for several hundred years after the Norman Conquest, is responsible for some of the “h” loss in Middle English, but not for Eliza’s cockney “h”-dropping.

Anglo-Norman, as well as Old French and Middle French, clearly influenced the absence of the “h” sound in some loanwords of Latin origin in Middle English, such as “honor,” “honest,” and “hour.”

But it’s uncertain whether Anglo-Norman, a Romance language formed from various French dialects, is responsible for any of the “h”-dropping in Middle English words of Anglo-Saxon origin.

One problem for linguists is determining how much of the “h”-dropping in Old English and Middle English writing reflected “h”-dropping in speech.

Some linguists have argued that the increase in “h”-dropping in Middle English texts was merely the result of errors by scribes who spoke Anglo-Norman, with its silent “h.”

But other linguists have said that the “h”-dropping in Middle English writing reflected “h”-dropping in speech, and that this was the result of the inherent weakness and instability of the phoneme, or unit of sound, represented by the letter “h.”

Today, “h”-dropping is associated with the cockney speech of working-class Londoners, but this loss of the “h” sound in words like “hammer,” “hat,” “house,” and “behind” is common in most regions of England, according to linguists.

In fact, “h” dropping is not unknown in Received Pronunciation, the standard British accent. In addition to dropping the “h” sound in the Gallic loanwords mentioned above, RP speakers used to drop it in “historic,” resulting in uses like “an ’istoric.”

RP speakers now pronounce all the letters of “historic,” but they’ve kept the indefinite article “an,” even though the article “a” would be standard before a word beginning with a sounded “h,” the phonetician John C. Wells writes in Accents of English (1982).

In A Course in Phonetics (1982), the phonetician Peter Ladefoged says “h” acts “like a consonant, but from an articulatory point of view is simply the voiceless counterpart of the following vowel.”

“It does not have a specific place of articulation,” he writes, “and its manner of articulation is the same as that of a vowel, only the state of the glottis is different.” (The glottis is made up of the vocal cords and the opening between them.)

As the linguist Larry Trask explains, “h” is “a very weak consonant, almost the last trace of anything we can call a consonant at all, and it disappears very easily.”

In classical times, Trask points out in a contribution to the Linguist List, the “h” sound “was completely gone in popular Latin speech by the first century BC, though it may have been retained for a while by a few pedants.”

“The Romance languages sometimes continue to write this long-lost /h/ in their orthographies,” he adds, “but this is purely for old times’ sake.”

However, the “h” sound was alive and well in Old English, according to linguists who have reconstructed Anglo-Saxon speech based on things like the rhyme in verse, the spelling of Latin loanwords, and related words in other Germanic languages.

The letter “h” had several pronunciations in Old English, which was spoken from about the 5th through the 11th centuries:

● In front of vowels, “h” sounded much as it does today.

● In front of consonants, it had a breathy sound.

● After a vowel pronounced at the front of the mouth (like “e” or “i”), “h” sounded like the “ch” in the German ich.

● After a vowel pronounced at the back of the mouth (like “a” or “o”), it sounded like the “ch” in the Scottish loch.

The use of “h” before consonants at the beginning of words began dying out in Old English and Middle English texts, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

For example, the noun “ring” (the finger ornament), was hringae, hringiae, etc. in early Old English, but came to be spelled ringce, ryngc, ring, and so on in later Old English.

The noun “nut” (the seed) was originally hnut- or hnute- (in compounds) in Anglo-Saxon writing, and then nut-, nute, etc., in later Old English.

The adjective “loud” was hlúd in Old English and then lud(e), loude, lowd(e), and so on in Middle English.

The “h”-dropping in Old English texts presumably reflected the loss of the “h” sound in speech, according to phoneticians, linguists who specialize in phonetics.

However, scholars have debated the cause of the “h” loss in Middle English writing.

The 19th-century philologist Walter William Skeat attributed the loss of the letter “h” in Middle English writing to spelling errors by Anglo-Norman scribes.

But James Milroy, a 20th-century linguist, believed the scribes were representing the “h”-dropping in speech.

Milroy, who exhaustively studied “h”-dropping in England, writes in the Cambridge History of the English Language that in certain regions of medieval England “the syllable initial [h] was not present, or only variably present,” in speech.

Trask, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, raises an interesting point on the Linguist List about contemporary “h” dropping in working-class speech in England.

Although the “h” sound in words of Anglo-Saxon origin (like “hair,” “heart,” “harm,” and “hit”) is “completely gone in the vernacular speech of almost all of England,” Trask writes, there’s no sign of such “h”-dropping in North America.

(The “h”-less US pronunciation of “herb” is not an American version of cockney “h”-dropping. It’s the original pronunciation in Middle English, when the Old French loanword was usually spelled “erbe.” As the OED notes, in British speech “the h was mute until the 19th cent.”)

Why is cockney-style “h”-dropping common among the English, but unknown among Americans?

In Accents of English, Wells, a professor emeritus at University College London, suggests that the American colonists didn’t take such “h”-dropping with them to the New World because they left before its widespread appearance in England.

“The fact that H dropping is unknown in North America strongly suggests that it arose in England only well after the American colonies were founded,” he writes.

Although “h”-dropping did occur in Old English and Middle English, as we’ve said, it apparently wasn’t common enough in England to get the attention of language commentators and novelists until the latter half of the 18th century.

In Talking Proper (1995), Lynda Mugglestone, an Oxford historian of the English language, says the first language writer to complain about “h”-dropping was the actor-educator Thomas Sheridan.

In A Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762), Sheridan criticizes “the omission of the aspirate in many words by some, and in most by others.”

And in Propriety Ascertained in Her Picture (1786), a pronunciation and spelling guide, James Elphinston condemns the “lowliness” and “impropriety” of pronunciations like “uman,” “umor,” and “umbel” (for “human,” “humor,” and “humble”).

Later, Lindley Murray’s influential English Grammar (1795) describes the “h” sound as a requirement for “educated” speech, and blames “the negligence of tutors” and “the inattention of pupils” for its loss.

As for fiction, Winifred Jenkins, a maid in Tobias Smollett’s last novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), drops her aitches on and off, referring to “heart” as “art,” and “harm” as “arm.”

By the mid-19th century, working-class characters routinely dropped their aitches in novels. As Uriah Heep says in David Copperfield (1850):  “I am well aware that I am the umblest person going.”

(Although “humble” was the standard spelling of the word in Dickens’s day, its original spelling in Middle English was “umble.”)

We can’t conclude this discussion of “h”-dropping without mentioning the many Old English words that began with “hw” but now begin with “wh,” including hwæt (“what”), hwanne (“when”), hwǽr, (“where”), hwæs (“whose”), hwā (“who”), hwí (“why”), hwelc (“which”), hwæðer (“whether”), and so on.

The OED says the “normal Old English spelling hw was generally preserved in early Middle English,” and the “modern spelling wh is found first in regular use in the Ormulum,” a 12th-century religious work in which whillc is used for “which.”

“In Old English the pronunciation symbolized by hw was probably in the earliest periods a voiced bilabial consonant preceded by a breath,” according to the dictionary. (A voiced bilabial consonant is one in which the vocal cords vibrate and the air flow is restricted by the lips.)

Interestingly, the words that began with “hw” in Old English have given us two types of “wh” words today: those in which the “w” sound predominates (“why,” “where,” “when,” etc.) and those in which the “h” sound predominates (“who,” “whole,” “whose”).

In case you’re wondering, “whore” was originally spelled hóre in Old English, and retained its “h” pronunciation when the “wh” spelling of the word arose in the 16th century.

An 1830 edition of Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary gives two pronunciations, “höör, or höre,” and adds: “If there can be a polite pronunciation of this vulgar word, it is the first of these, rhyming with poor.”

If you’d like to read more, we’ve written several posts about “herb” and “historic,” including Herbal remedies in 2009 and Historic article in 2012.

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Why do we con-VICT a CON-vict?

Q: Why do words such as “refuse” and “project” have one pronunciation as a verb and another as a noun?

A: The usual pattern with these pairs is that the noun is accented on the first syllable while the verb is accented on the second, as with CON-vict (n.) and con-VICT (v.), REC-ord (n.) and re-CORD (v.).

[Note: A later post, on the pronunciation of “concept” as a verb (con-SEPT), appeared in June 2019.]

This is a long-established convention of English pronunciation, one that 18th-century lexicographers commented on.

Samuel Johnson, in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), had this to say about such two-syllable pairs:

“Of disyllables, which are at once nouns and verbs, the verb has commonly the accent on the latter, and the noun on the former syllable.”

He gave several examples, including con-TRACT (v.) and CON-tract (n.).

“This rule has many exceptions,” Johnson added. “Though verbs seldom have their accent on the former, yet nouns often have it on the latter syllable,” he said, as with de-LIGHT and per-FUME.

There are scores (we’ve seen lists with more than 150) of these two-syllable pairs in English. They’re often called heteronyms or heterophones, a subject we wrote about in a 2012 post.

Obviously, there’s an advantage in having different pronunciations. The speaker can distinguish one word from the other and avoid ambiguity, an advantage that we don’t have in written English. (A linguist would say the differing pronunciations serve to “disambiguate” the words.)

Occasionally, as with the noun “record,” the accent varied in early pronouncing dictionaries, and only later did the first-syllable stress become the norm.

Johnson, in the entry for “record” in his 1755 dictionary, was on the fence: “The accent of the noun is indifferently on either syllable; of the verb always on the last.”

Thomas Sheridan, in A General Dictionary of the English Language (1780), stressed only the second syllable of the noun (re-CORD).

And John Walker, in A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), stressed the first syllable of the noun (REC-ord).

Walker noted that “the noun record was anciently, as well as at present, pronounced with the accent either on the first or second syllable,” but he urged speakers to accent the first.

Accenting the second syllable, he said, “is overturning one of the most settled analogies of our language, and … it would be to the advantage of pronunciation to lean to the obvious analogy in disyllable nouns and verbs of the same form.”

The convention of accenting the nouns and verbs differently, Walker said, “seems an instinctive effort in the language … to compensate in some measure for the want of different terminations for these different parts of speech.”

In the case of “record,” Walker’s advice was somewhat slow to take hold. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Examples of stress on the second syllable can still be found in verse in the 19th cent.”

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Does that bikini still fit?

Q: Is there a term for the overly familiar and presumptuous use of “that” and “those” in advertising? For example, “Organize that messy closet” or “Get rid of those unsightly stains in your sink.” It’s as if the ad writers have peered into our homes.

A: You’ve raised an interesting question, one that highlights something most of us are all too aware of: Advertisers use language in ways that ordinary people don’t.

“That” and “those” are good examples.

In your examples, “that” and its plural, “those,” are demonstrative adjectives (some prefer the term “demonstrative determiners”). They modify a  noun, in effect pointing at it, demonstrating which one (or ones) the speaker is referring to.

In ordinary sentences like “Sam misses that dog” and “Those sneakers belong to Janet,” the demonstrative adjectives point to the nouns, as if to demonstrate which dog Sam misses, which sneakers belong to Janet.

But in the ad slogans you mention, “that” and “those” aren’t used as in ordinary English.

Normally, “that” and “those” (like “this” and “these”) refer to nouns that actually exist—“that dog,” “those sneakers.” Their existence is a fact, something the speaker and the audience take for granted.

But an anonymous, impersonal voice telling you to “organize that messy closet” or “get rid of those unsightly stains” isn’t pointing to an actual condition in your house.

Instead, the speaker is presupposing its existence and treating it as a fact. So the slogans are examples of what a linguist would call “presupposition.”

As The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says, “The information contained in a presupposition is backgrounded, taken for granted, presented as something that is not currently at issue.”

In these ad slogans, the presupposed information is that you have a messy closet and a sink with unsightly stains.

In a study entitled “Presupposition, Persuasion and Mag Food Advertising” (2012), Tamara Bouso uses the example “Do you expect to fit into that beach bikini in the New Year?”

This sales pitch presupposes not only that the consumer has such a bikini but that she’s probably too fat to wear it.

Another author, Judy Delin, says presupposition “plays an important role in the construction of advertising messages in general” (The Language of Everyday Life, 2000). The use of demonstrative adjectives, she says, is one form of presupposition.

You ask whether there’s a name for demonstrative adjectives used in this presumptuous way. As a matter of fact, a couple of names have been proposed.

In a 2006 paper, “That’s That: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Demonstrative Noun Phrases,” the linguist Lynsey Kay Wolter calls such terms “emotive demonstratives.”

Why “emotive?” Because, Wolter writes, such terms convey a sense that both speaker and listener “share some relevant knowledge or emotion about the referent of the demonstrative”—that is, the noun it points to.

And writing on the Language Log in 2008, the linguist Mark Liberman calls these words “affective demonstratives.” Like “emotive,” the term “affective” implies an emotional element—in this case familiarity or shared experience.

“Affective demonstratives,” Liberman says, “invite the audience onto a common ground of shared knowledge (or perhaps I should say, ‘that common ground of shared knowledge’).”

In response, one Language Log contributor writes, “I’ve noticed this type of device in advertising a lot,” and provides this example:

“By earning more income through our work-at-home program, you’ll be able to afford that new car, to finally take that vacation you’ve been dreaming of!”

It’s no mystery why advertisers are so fond of demonstrative adjectives. Like the definite article “the,” these words presuppose that the accompanying nouns actually exist.

So they hint that the speaker knows you: “that messy closet” points at your closet. In this way, demonstrative adjectives can create a false sense of familiarity, of intimacy with the consumer.

It’s interesting to note that in the neutral examples we mentioned earlier (“Sam misses that dog” and “Those sneakers belong to Janet”), you could say the same thing less demonstratively by substituting “the” for “that” or “those”:

“Sam misses the dog” and “The sneakers belong to Janet.”

But “the” works only when the audience knows which dog or sneakers are referred to. “The” wouldn’t work in the advertising examples, unless the nouns had been mentioned before.

The ad writers would have to use an indefinite article (“organize a messy closet”) or nothing at all (“get rid of unsightly stains”). But then, of course, they’d lose the familiar tone they’re trying to cultivate.

This forced intimacy can strike listeners as intrusive or annoying, especially those with tidy closets and spotless sinks. A presupposition that’s wrong can backfire.

As Lynsey Wolter says in her paper, “Consider a situation in which the speaker assumes that an emotion is shared, but the addressee resists this assumption. In these circumstances an emotive demonstrative … feels intrusive or patronizing.”

As we said above, demonstrative adjectives point to things. And this isn’t always appropriate. After all, weren’t we taught that it’s not polite to point?

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As the passive progressed

Q: I’ve recently noticed a construction in Emma that doesn’t occur in modern English. When Frank Churchill and Emma entered Ford’s, “the sleek, well-tied parcels of ‘Men’s Beavers’ and ‘York Tan’ were bringing down and displaying on the counter.” Is this a common usage from Jane Austen’s era?

A: You’ve stumbled across a very interesting old usage, from a time when houses were “building” instead of “being built,” portraits were “painting” instead of “being painted,” and boots were “mending” instead of “being mended.”

People used this now-archaic construction, which grammarians call the passival, because the passive progressive tense—“was being built,” “is being painted,” and so on—hadn’t yet come into English.

Although a few examples of the passive progressive were recorded in Jane Austen’s day, the usage was rare at the time.

Austen  wrote that the gloves “were bringing down and displaying” instead of “were being brought down and displayed” because the latter construction was probably unknown to her.

Emma was published in late 1815, when only one form of the verb “be” was commonly used as an auxiliary in standard English.

It wasn’t until later in the 19th century that people began regularly combining two forms of the verb “be” (as in “is being,” “was being,” “were being”) to form the passive progressive tense.

In searches of literary databases, we’ve found many illustrations of the older construction, which uses the active voice to describe what is passive in meaning.

Austen uses it in this Feb. 8, 1807, letter to her sister Cassandra: “Our garden is putting in order, by a Man who bears a remarkably good Character, has a very fine complexion & asks something less than the first.”

She also uses it in Northanger Abbey, which was written in the late 1700s, revised several times in the early 1800s, and published after Austen’s death in 1817:

“The bustle of going was not pleasant. The clock struck ten while the trunks were carrying down, and the general had fixed to be out of Milsom Street by that hour.”

We’ve found many other examples of the usage. In this one, hymns are “singing” instead of “being sung”:

“He saw the [them] al kneele down, and whilest each Gloria Patri, &c. was singing, they al fell prostrat on their faces.” (From An Admirable Method to Love, Serve, and Honour the B. Virgin Mary, written in Italian by Alexis de Salo and published in English in 1639.)

In this humbler example, a “house of office” (that is, a privy) is “emptying” instead of “being emptied”:

“So from thence home, where my house of office was emptying, and I find they will do it with much more cleanness than I expected.” (From a July 28, 1663, entry in Samuel Pepys’s Diary.)

In this passage, ships are “mending” instead of “being mended”:

“Here we found Ruy Freira with part of his Ships, of which some were mending.” (From The Travels of Sig. Pietro della Valle, a Noble Roman, Into East-India and Arabia Deserta, published in English in 1665.)

And here we find a bridge that’s “finishing” instead of “being finished”:

“For whilst the Bridge was finishing with incredible Expedition, some Soldiers for Spyes swam over to the other side.”  (From The History of the Turks, by Sir Paul Rycaut, 1700.)

In an account of a trial for seditious libel, the sentence is “reading” instead of “being read”:

“Whilst his sentence was reading he appeared sometimes to mutter against it.” (From The History of the Reformation and Other Ecclesiastical Transactions in and About the Low Countries, originally written in Low Dutch in 1703 and published in English in 1722.)

Finally, in a usage found often in 17th- and 18th-century writing, tea is “preparing” instead of “being prepared”:

“Tea was preparing. Sir Charles took his own seat next Lord L. whom he set into talk of Scotland.” (From Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, 1753.)

This use of “preparing” survived until well into the 19th century: “They were seated in the coolest seats on the piazza, and melons and other fruit brought while tea was preparing.” (From an unsigned story in the January 1836 issue of a New York monthly, the Ladies Companion.)

Jane Austen was among the last generation of writers to use the old verb form without the passive “being.” Later writers made greater use of “being” as they shifted to the new passive progressive tense (or “aspect,” a term many linguists prefer).

But the transition wasn’t a smooth one. As the OED notes, early 19th-century grammarians condemned the new usage.

Oxford cites criticism from David Booth’s An Analytical Dictionary of the English Language (1830): “For some time past, ‘the bridge is being built,’ ‘the tunnel is being excavated,’ and other expressions of a like kind, have pained the eye and stunned the ear.”

That passage does not appear in the original, 1805 edition of Booth’s book, so the new construction must have come to his attention sometime between then and 1830.

The linguist Mark Liberman, in a Jan. 11, 2013, post on the Language Log, notes that the new usage was still being criticized in the second half of the 19th century.

The literary critic Richard Grant White, for example, wrote in Words and Their Uses (1870) that the construction served “to affront the eye, torment the ear, and assault the common sense of the speaker of plain and idiomatic English.”

But there were good reasons why the passive progressive developed, as we’ll see.

Long before Austen’s time, in fact since the late 1300s, people had been combining the old preposition “a” with gerunds used passively to describe an action in progress.

Here’s an example from the King James Bible (1611): “In the dayes of Noah while the Arke was a preparing.”

Here, “preparing” is a gerund—essentially, a noun—rather than a present participle. The “a” preposition, the OED says, was used with a gerund in “expressing process,” and meant “in process of, in course of,” or “underdoing (some process)” such as making, building, mending, etc.

“On,” and “in” had been used the same way. So a theoretical 16th-century writer might say that court papers were “on preparing” or “in preparing” or “a preparing” and mean the same thing—the papers were in preparation.

By Austen’s time, the prepositions had mostly fallen away. But eventually these “-ing” usages led to ambiguity, since in identical constructions one “-ing” word was a participle and the other a gerund.

Someone might write, for example, that his lawyers “were preparing” papers (participle), but also that the papers themselves “were preparing” (gerund).

For an extreme example of the confusion this might cause, take a look at this OED citation from Henry More’s An Antidote Against Atheisme 1653): “The shreeks of men while they are a murdering.”

The writer didn’t mean that the men shrieked as they murdered people. He meant that they shrieked as they were being murdered: “a murdering” here meant undergoing murder. But only the context would tell the reader which meaning was intended.

Obviously, English needed a new tense—one combining a form of “be” + “being” + past participle, as in “were being murdered.”

The OED’s earliest use for the new tense is dated 1772, in a letter written by the Earl of Malmesbury: “I have received the speech and address of the House of Lords; probably, that of the House of Commons was being debated when the post went out.”

Two later examples are cited from the 1790s, also from private letters. But it wasn’t until after Jane Austen’s time that the passive progressive became common.

Remnants of the old usages are still with us today. We still say “time’s a-wasting” for “time is being wasted.”

And we still say “nothing doing,” a leftover from the Middle Ages when people said that things were “doing” instead of “being done.”

As the OED says, the old passive construction “to be doing” meant “to be in the course of being done, to be happening.”

Here’s the old usage in action: “Little thought false Reyner what was doing at Canterbury, whiles hee was trotting to Rome.” (From The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans, by John Speed, 1614.)

And here’s one with a very modern sound, quoted in the OED: “He always says there is nothing doing.” (From a letter written by the Earl of Manchester in 1700.)

Eventually, in the 19th century, the phrase became simply “nothing doing.” The OED gives this example:

“A friend of mine hailed an outfitter the other day, ‘How is business?’ ‘Nothing doing.’” (From a Liverpool weekly, the Porcupine, 1870.)

And in the first decade of the 20th century, the meaning changed. “Nothing doing” became “an announcement of refusal of a request or offer, failure in an attempt, etc.,” Oxford says.

The dictionary gives this example from the Dec. 13, 1910, issue of the New York Evening Post: “Spottford offered the porter a dime. The negro waved it aside and said: ‘Nothing doing; my price is a quarter at least.’ ”

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We are met on a great battle-field

Q: Watching a recent rebroadcast of “The Civil War” on PBS, I was struck by this sentence in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “We are met on a great battle-field of that war.” Is “we are met” just a poetic usage? Or is something else going on?

A: “We are met” is a present-perfect construction, parallel to “we have met.” The usage dates back to the Middle Ages, but by Lincoln’s time it was considered archaic and poetic.

You can still hear it today, though the usage sounds unusual to modern ears because it combines “met” (the past participle of “meet”) with a form of “be” as the auxiliary verb instead of the usual “have.”

So, for instance, a speaker uses “we are met to honor him” in place of “we have met to honor him”—or, to use the simple present tense, “we meet to honor him.”

The poetic “we are met” gives the message a solemnity and gravity it wouldn’t otherwise convey.

Here “met” is used in the sense of “assembled” or “gathered” or “brought together.” And the auxiliary “be” is possible only when this sense of “met” is used intransitively—that is, without a direct object.

In its entry for “meet,” the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “in intransitive use the perfect tenses were freq. formed with the auxiliary be in Middle English and early modern English; subsequently this became archaic and poetic.”

The OED has citations from the 14th century onward, including this Middle English example from Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem “The Complaint of Mars” (circa 1385): “The grete joye that was betwix hem two, / When they be mette.”

This one is from Thomas Starkey’s A Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, written sometime before 1538: “Seying that we be now here mete … accordyng to our promys.”

And here’s a poetic 19th-century use from William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Virginians (1859): “The two gentlemen, with a few more friends, were met round General Lambert’s supper-table.”

Today, we’re more likely to encounter this usage on solemn occasions, as when people gather for religious worship or funeral eulogies.

Lincoln isn’t the only American politician to use “we are met” in elevated oratory. In 1965, in a speech before Congress in support of equal voting rights, President Lyndon B. Johnson said:

“There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.”

A somewhat similar use of “met” with the “be” auxiliary is also antiquated today. This is the expression “to be well met,” first recorded in the 15th century and meaning to be welcome or well received.

This is the source of the old expression “hail fellow well met,” which evolved in the late 16th century from the slightly earlier phrase “hail, fellow!”

“Hail, fellow!” was a friendly greeting of the 1500s that was also used adjectivally, the OED says, to mean “on such terms, or using such freedom with another, as to accost him with ‘hail, fellow!’ ”

We’ll quote 19th-century examples of the shorter as well as the longer adjectival phrases, courtesy of the OED:

“He crossed the room to her … with something of a hail-fellow bearing.” (From Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886.)

“He was popular … though not in any hail-fellow-well-met kind of way.” (From H. Rider Haggard’s novel Colonel Quaritch, V.C., 1888.)

We’ll close with a more contemporary example we found in a letter to the editor of the Bergen (N.J.) Record in 2012:

“The most exciting thing about the Republican National Convention was the hurricane. … Where is the enthusiasm, the fire they need to capture the voters? Where is the ‘Hail fellow, well met’? This convention was a snore fest.”

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Ing-lish spoken here

Q: What do you think of the recent Doonesbury strip on the use of present participles in TV talk? I’ve been foaming at the mouth over this for years.

A: We’re not foaming at the mouth, but too much of any trendy usage can be annoying.

The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, who commented on this usage more than a dozen years before the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, has coined a term for the use of “-ing” participles in broadcasting: “ing-lish.”

In a Dec. 8, 2002, article in the New York Times, Nunberg notes that “the all-news networks have begun to recite their leads to a new participial rhythm.”

“Fox News Channel and CNN have adopted it wholesale, and it is increasingly audible on network news programs as well,” he says.

A sentence like “The Navy has used the island for 60 years but will cease its tests soon,” Nunberg explains, comes out in ing-lish as “The Navy using the island for 60 years but ceasing its tests soon.”

“What ing-lish really leaves out is all tenses, past, present or future, and with them any helping verbs they happen to fall on—not just be, but have and will,” he says.

Interestingly, Nunberg adds, this usage “doesn’t actually save any time—sometimes, in fact, it makes sentences longer. ‘Bush met with Putin’ is one syllable shorter than ‘Bush meeting with Putin.’ ”

If it doesn’t save time, why do broadcast journalists use ing-lish?

The linguist Asya Pereltsvaig suggests that it may be because the present progressive tense (“I am dancing”) denotes “something that happens at this very moment” while the simple present (“I dance”) refers to “a broader range of temporal points.”

In a Sept. 21, 2015, post on Languages of the World, she explains that the present tense (“I dance”) can refer to dancing “often/every day/from time to time” and so on.

The linguist Mark Liberman, in a Sept. 20, 2015, comment on the Language Log about the Doonesbury strip, says the “idea that short phrases convey urgency is a well-established principle of writing advice.”

“But it’s not obvious to me that either in headlines or in broadcast news, the use of present participles rather than tensed verbs is generally the more urgent-seeming choice,” he says.

Liberman gives these two examples to make his point: “The town reels, its dreams of a better tomorrow up in smoke!” versus “The town reeling, its dreams of a better tomorrow up in smoke!”

He also points out that “there are famous examples where a sense of urgency is associated with long run-on sentences,” like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

And yes we’ll end with the last few lines of the soliloquy: “and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

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Slash talk

Q: What is your take on using the word “slash” when speaking of something with various attributes, as in “He is a husband slash father”? We don’t usually pronounce symbols, but it seems as if I hear “slash” spoken more often than I used to, maybe due to its use in Internet addresses.

A: Is “slash” in that example merely a lexical rendering of the / symbol? Or does it have a life of its own apart from the symbol? Or has the symbol itself come to represent an actual word, as the ampersand is a stand-in for “and”?

We’ve checked eight standard dictionaries and all but one of them describe the word “slash” as a lexical rendering of the diagonal symbol. Oxford Dictionaries online, for example, defines the noun this way:

“An oblique stroke (/) in print or writing, used between alternatives (e.g., and/or), in fractions (e.g., 3/4), in ratios (e.g., miles/day), or between separate elements of a text.”

The Oxford Guide to Style says the most common use for the symbol is “as shorthand to denote alternatives,” but adds that the symbol is “sometimes misused for and rather than or.”

The sentence you cite (“He is a husband slash father”) is an example of “slash” used for “and” rather than “or.”

Is the term, as the style manual suggests, “misused” in your example?

Well, most standard dictionaries don’t recognize this use of the term—or, for that matter, this use of the symbol itself. An exception is The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.).

American Heritage describes a “slash” as either a symbol used in the traditional way or an informal conjunction (represented by word or symbol) meaning “as well as” or “and.”

The dictionary gives these examples of the conjunction: “an actor-slash-writer; a waiter/dancer.” It adds that the symbol is often used in print.

We suspect that the appearance of “slash” in American Heritage is a sign of things to come. In fact, the usage isn’t all that new. The word has been used this way for more than a dozen years.

The linguist Brett Reynolds, who blogs about language at English, Jack, has found a couple of examples from the 1990s.

This one is from the Sept. 28, 1992, issue of Time magazine: “Meet urban planner Campbell Scott (‘a realist slash dreamer’).” And this one is from the script for the 1999 movie Mumford: “sexual surrogate slash companion.”

In an Aug. 27, 2010, posting, Reynolds compares “slash” to “cum” (a Latin preposition meaning “with” that is often used in the sense of “and” or “along with”).

Although most standard dictionaries still consider “cum” a preposition, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) recognizes it as a conjunction and has this example from George Bernard Shaw: “a credible mining camp elder-cum-publican.”

In an Aug. 27, 2010, post on the Language Log, the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum discusses the use of “slash” in two sentences like yours: “There is also a study slash guest bedroom” and “We need a corkscrew slash bottle opener.”

In considering which part of speech this use of “flash” falls into, Pullum concludes that it’s a coordinator (also known as a coordinating conjunction) like “and” or “but.”

“We seem to have actually added a coordinator to the language,” says Pullum, the co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

(The scholarly Cambridge Grammar lists the parts of speech as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, determinative, subordinator, coordinator, and interjection. Cambridge includes what most people would call conjunctions among coordinators and subordinators.)

Pullum describes the coordinator use of “slash” as “a new discovery about English” and “a fairly surprising one.”

He points out that “the class of coordinators is thought of as an extremely small, closed category that has hardly ever expanded since the Middle Ages (when at some point the preposition buton, meaning ‘outside,’ turned into the modern-day coordinator but).”

As for the etymology of “slash,” it showed up as a noun in the 1500s, when the word meant a cutting stroke with a sword or whip, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest OED example for the noun is from A Panoplie of Epistles, a 1576 letter-writing manual in which Abraham Fleming translates works by Cicero, Pliny, and others into English:

“Because euery one was ready to cutte his throte as to haue a slash at his fleshe.”

English adopted “slash”—the noun as well as the verb—from esclachier, an Old French verb meaning to break.

The noun didn’t become a term for the symbol / until well into the 20th century. The OED’s earliest example is from a 1961 entry in Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (3rd ed.).

Webster’s Third says “slash” and “slash mark” mean the same as a similar sense of the noun “diagonal,” which it defines as “the symbol / used especially to denote ‘or’ (as in and/or), ‘and or’ (as in straggler/deserter form), ‘per’ (as in feet/second), ‘in’ or ‘of’ (as in U.S. Embassy/Paris), ‘shilling’ (as in 6/8d),” and several other uses.

Of the various terms for the / symbol (“solidus,” “slash,” “slash mark,” “stroke,” “oblique,” “virgule,” “diagonal,” and “shilling mark”) the oldest is “solidus,” which dates from the late 1800s. (Some of the other terms appeared earlier, but not in the symbol sense.)

Here’s a 19th-century example for “solidus” from George Chrystal’s Introduction to Algebra (1898): “The symbols / (solidus notation) and : (ratio notation) are equivalent to ÷.”

The OED doesn’t have an entry for the word “slash” used as a coordinator. It has entries only for the noun or verb.

However, the lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, a former OED editor, has cited several examples of the usage from the dictionary’s files.

In commenting on Pullum’s Language Log post, Sheidlower listed these examples with multiple slashes:

“I’m a dishwasher slash cake maker slash cookie scooper slash and whatever else they want me to do,” from the Dec. 15, 2002, issue of the New York Times.

“Halcyon, the café-slash-restaurant-slash-record store, is closing its doors in April,” from the Feb. 25, 2004, issue of the Village Voice.

“I’m an actress-slash-model-slash-hostess,” from Beth Kendrick’s 2005 novel Fashionably Late.

Getting back to your question, we believe that “slash” is evolving as a part of speech—in writing as well as speech. In our opinion, it’s only a matter of time before more standard dictionaries accept its use as a coordinator/coordinating conjunction/conjunction.

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Not every “uu” is a “double-u”

Q: I’ve read your article about why a “w” is called a “double-u.” What puzzles me is why we still have words with “uu”—i.e., “vacuum,” “continuum,” and “triduum.” And why the “w” in “weltanschauung” is pronounced like a “v.” Just curious.

A: As we said in that 2011 post, English words were written in runic letters until the seventh century, when the Latin alphabet was introduced.

But the Latin alphabet of that time had no symbol for the sound of “w,” so such a symbol had to be invented.

At first the symbol used was “uu” or “double u.” But in the eighth century the runic letter ƿ (called a “wyn”) was borrowed for this purpose and was used in English writing for several centuries.

In the meantime, the old “uu”, the Oxford English Dictionary says, “was carried from England to the continent.”

There, the OED explains, it was used to represent the “w” sound “in the German dialects, and in French proper names and other words of Germanic and Celtic origin.”

It was Norman scribes who introduced a ligatured version of the old “uu,” forming the letter “w.” This new letter traveled from France to England in the 11th century, and by about 1300 it had replaced the old rune ƿ in English writing.

Although this new “w” was probably regarded as a single letter from the beginning, “it has never lost its original name of ‘double U,’ ” the OED says.

Now for your question about why some English words continue to be written with “uu.” The reason is that they have retained the “uu” spellings they had in Latin.

For example, “vacuum” is from the Latin noun spelled the same way: vacuum.

However, the “uu” combination in English does not sound like “w.” In the case of “vacuum,” it can sound like “yoo” or like “yoo-uh.”

The latter pronunciation is a diphthong—two syllables merged into one sound. This double sound is observable in the spelling of the word in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese: vacuo.

A handful of similar words spelled with “uu” also come from Latin words with identical spellings. And in these the “uu” is pronounced as a diphthong: “continuum,” “residuum,” and the uncommon “triduum,” meaning three days (or specifically the last three days of Lent).

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Editing the Editors

An “Open Book” interview with Patricia T. O’Conner in the New York Times Book Review

By JOHN WILLIAMS

This week, one grammar guru writes about another, as Patricia T. O’Conner reviews Mary Norris’s “Between You & Me.” Norris has been a copy editor for more than 30 years at The New Yorker, the notoriously fastidious magazine, and O’Conner, a former copy editor at the Book Review, has written several books about language usage, including “Woe Is I.”

In an email interview, O’Conner said her favorite book on writing is “The Reader Over Your Shoulder,” by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. “There’s no hand-holding, no coddling, no nonsense about ‘finding a voice,’ ” O’Conner said. It was first published in 1943, and O’Conner cautions readers to find early copies, since “some of the best parts are lost” in revised editions.

For the last word on grammar, she recommends “The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,” by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. “It’s an awesome feat of scholarship, and it’s not for sissies — this book is dense, to say the least,” she said. “But it has all of the answers and none of the superstitions.”

Asked for a favorite obscure title on the subject, O’Conner cited “a little green book called ‘Gobbledygook Has Gotta Go,’ published in 1966 by the U.S. Government Printing Office,” given to her by a friend. “The author was John O’Hayre, an employee of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, and I hope he got a medal.”

Like Norris, O’Conner knows the hazards of writing about writing. (Norris started a recent Q. and A. on Reddit with a disclaimer: “Forgive the typos, it’s my day off.”) O’Conner said: “There are always people who will pounce and say, ‘Gotcha! You just broke your own rule!’ But my real feeling is that the world needs fewer writers and more readers.”

From the April 19, 2015, print edition of the New York Times Book Review.

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Consider the Comma

A review of Mary Norris’s Between You & Me, from the New York Times Book Review

By PATRICIA T. O’CONNER

Copy editors are a peculiar species (I’ve been one myself, and at the very publication you are now reading). But those at The New Yorker are something else entirely, a species nova that mutated into existence in 1925 and would hurl itself off a cliff rather than forsake the dieresis in “coöperate.”

For the uninitiated, The New Yorker is a magazine that until 2003 spelled the word “deluxe” with a hyphen: “de-luxe.” It inserts periods into “I.B.M.,” though IBM itself dropped them long ago. It phonetically splits the word “England,” when it breaks at the end of a line, like this: “En-gland.” (One imagines a verb, “england,” meaning to provide with glands.)

A regular reader might be forgiven for wondering, “Are these people nuts?” In Mary Norris’s “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen,” we have our answer: They most certainly are. And their obsessions, typographical and otherwise, make hilarious reading.

Norris, a pillar of the copy department for decades, is not crazy herself, or not entirely. For instance, she knows when to stay her hand and let the writer’s voice come through. She also admits occasionally doubting the sanity of The New Yorker’s storied grammar goddess, Eleanor Gould Packard: “I had the unsettling thought ‘What if Eleanor ever loses it?’ ” But what to do? “No one would enter the copy department and say to Eleanor, ‘Drop the pencil and step away from the desk.’ ”

“Between You & Me” is mostly a memoir, but it’s part usage guide, too. Norris shares her views on spelling, punctuation, dangling participles and troublesome pronouns, providing apt illustrations from an editing life. V. S. Pritchett, we learn, was “a terrible speller,” but “when Pauline Kael typed ‘prevert’ instead of ‘pervert,’ she meant ‘prevert.’ ” James Salter adds control to a word “by smacking it with a comma as one would put English on a cue ball.” And by judiciously placing a colon, “Kelefa Sanneh, writing about Scotch, can sound like Henry James.”

But the grammar advice is less illuminating. Norris defends a friend of hers who actually said, while looking for her sunglasses, “Are those they?” Mary, drop the pencil and step away from the desk. Yes, one may use “It is I” if one wishes, but “It is me” is faultless English. The old prescription requiring the nominative case after the verb “to be” has long been discredited as a Latin construction mistakenly applied to English.

Despite the extreme grammar, this book charmed my socks off. Norris tracks down the person responsible for the hyphen in the title of “Moby-Dick” (it wasn’t Melville). There’s a chapter about dirty words, suitably salty. And Norris is passionate on the subject of pencils, describing them as seductively as others write about wine. Her current love is the “delicious” Blackwing, with its soft lead and flat eraser. On a pilgrimage to a pencil sharpener museum in Ohio (yes), only a sign warning that patrons were under surveillance, she writes, “kept me from dancing.”

Norris is a master storyteller and serves up plenty of inside stuff. When Mark Singer wrote an article about the cost of going to the movies and buying refreshments, the editors cut his reference to Junior Mints. As one editor intoned, “A New Yorker writer should not be eating Junior Mints.” Norris tells of the night she mopped up after Lillian Ross’s poodle, Goldie. She was even propositioned by Philip Roth! Well, sort of. She made a good catch in one of his pieces, and he replied: “Who is this woman? And will she come live with me?” She’s been smitten ever since: “If he should ever read this I just want to say I’m still available.”

(Patricia T. O’Conner’s books on language include “Woe Is I” and, most recently, “Origins of the Specious,” written with Stewart Kellerman. They blog about language at Grammarphobia.com.)

From the April 19, 2015, print edition of the New York Times Book Review.

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That’s not us—it’s nature!

Q: My dictionary says nature is the entire physical universe. But for most of us, nature is what’s out there and not human. My question (which I don’t expect answered) is thus: When did we humans look around and say, “That’s not us—it’s nature”?

A: You’re right. We can’t tell you when the first human beings said, in whatever prehistoric language they were speaking, “That’s not us—it’s nature.”

But we can tell you when English speakers began referring to the physical world, as opposed to humans and their creations, as “nature.” It was around 600 years ago. Here’s the story.

English borrowed the noun “nature” in the 13th century from the Anglo-Norman and Old French word nature, but its ultimate source is Latin, where natura meant birth, constitution, character, the physical world, and many other things.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that natura and nature had many earthy meanings in Latin and Anglo-Norman.

In classical Latin, for example, natura could mean the genitals, while in medieval Latin, it could mean the need to urinate or defecate; in Anglo-Norman, nature could mean semen or menstrual discharge.

Those bodily senses carried over into English, where “nature” at one time or another meant excrement, semen, menstrual discharge, the female genitals, sexual desire, and female sexual secretions.

Those senses are now obsolete or rare, but one earthy meaning is still with us: the need to urinate or defecate, as in “the call of nature.”

When “nature” first showed up in English, according to the OED, it referred to the “vital or physical powers of a person; a person’s physical strength or constitution.”

The earliest example in the dictionary is from a Kentish sermon, written around 1275: “Þe nature of Man is of greater strengþe and of greater hete ine þo age” (“The nature of Man is of greater strength and greater promise in early age”).

A little over a century later, “nature” came to mean the “inherent dominating power or impulse in a person by which character or action is determined, directed, or controlled,” according to the OED.

The earliest Oxford citation for this sense is from “The Tale of Melibeus” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (circa 1390): “Nature defendeth and forbedeth by right that no man make hym self riche vn to the harm of another persone.”

Around the same time, “nature” took on the sense of the “innate or characteristic disposition of a particular person, animal, etc.,” the OED says.

In Confessio Amantis, a poem written by John Gower sometime before 1393, Morpheus is described as someone “whos nature Is forto take the figure Of what persone that him liketh.”

Rather than describe all the many meanings of “nature,” we’ll skip ahead to the sense you’ve asked about, which the OED defines as the “phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Cleanness, an anonymous  Middle English poem, written around 1400, about married life. The citation here refers to the infant Jesus:

“Þe ox & þe asse … knewe hym by his clannes for Kyng of nature” (“The ox and the ass knew him by his purity for the King of nature”).

We’ll end with a 20th-century example from The Age of Gods, a 1928 study by the British historian Christopher Dawson about prehistoric culture:

“Man was entirely at the mercy of nature—a mere scavenger who eked out a miserable existence as a food-gatherer and an eater of shell-fish.”

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A “thank-you,” and an appeal

We’d like to extend our thanks to those of you who contributed to the Grammarphobia Blog when we asked for help a few months ago, as well as to our long-time contributors.

One of our readers responded, “I really enjoy the blog, but I never thought about the business model (or lack thereof).”

Well, if we have a “business model,” this is it. The blog is free. We don’t have a paywall, we don’t charge for subscriptions, and we don’t accept ads.

Of course this means we don’t have any income, either! The two of us spend several hours a day researching and writing all our own content. We also answer many reader questions that don’t make it onto the blog.

We pay all our own expenses: Web hosting, tech support, maintenance, and so on. And we try to keep our standard dictionaries and other reference books up to date, besides covering our annual subscriptions to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, and other online resources.

This is why your donations are important. Every reader who clicks the “Donate” button helps keep us blogging, and every donation makes a difference, no matter how small.

So bless all of you who have contributed in the past. And for those who haven’t, please consider supporting the Grammarphobia Blog with a donation.  But whether you contribute or not, thank you for reading and for continuing to send us your questions.

And now, back to work!

Pat and Stewart

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Let there be light

Q: After reading your post about the imperative use of “let,” I have a question. What is the function of “let” in the biblical command “Let there be light”? God can’t be addressing the light, since it doesn’t exist yet. So who or what is being addressed? And what purpose does “let” serve here?

A: The English expression “Let there be light” isn’t a literal translation of the Hebrew wording in Genesis: יהי אור. A word for word translation would be “exist light” or “light will be” or some variation.

So a literal translation of the full Hebrew text of Genesis 1:3, ויאמר אלהים יהי אור ויהי־אור, could be “And God said, ‘Light will be,’ and light was.” (We’ve added capitalization and punctuation.)

However, let’s not get too literal. The usual English translation (“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”) accurately and elegantly reflects the sense of the Hebrew.

Although the Hebrew phrase יהי אור may literally mean “light will be,” it’s in the jussive mood, which in Semitic languages expresses a weak or an indirect command.

Biblical translators have generally felt that “Let there be light” is the best wording to represent the jussive mood of יהי אור in Genesis 1:3. And we can’t think of a better one.

The biblical scholar Nahum M. Sarna, in the JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, discusses the use of יהי (“be” or “exist”) in Verse 3: “The directive yehi, found again in Verses 6 and 14, is reserved for the creation of celestial phenomena.”

In our opinion, you’re right that God isn’t addressing the light. He’s not addressing anyone or anything here. He’s simply creating light—that is, ordering that light exist.

In fact, it’s not clear that God is even speaking. The Hebrew verb אמר may mean “intend” as well as “say.” In this case, it may simply be a way to express divine will in human language.

(We won’t get into the old question of where the light came from, since the sun hadn’t been created yet. Biblical scholars have spent a lot of time on this already.)

What purpose, you ask, does “let” serve in the expression “Let there be light”?

When the imperative “let” is used in the sense of “allow” or “permit” or “cause,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can function as an auxiliary to the infinitive that follows—“be,” “bring forth,” and so on.

The OED gives several examples of the usage, including this one from The Mariner’s Magazine, a 1669 book by Samuel Sturmy about nautical navigation: “Let there be an hole about an Inch deep, which shall serve to Prime it with Powder-dust.”

The English scholar and clergyman William Tyndale is credited with introducing the expression “Let there be light” in his 1525 translation of the Bible.

His Bible was the first to appear in print in English, though John Wycliffe and others translated full or partial versions in English before the advent of printing.

Tyndale’s poetic biblical writing has given us such familiar phrases as “flowing with milk and honey,” “the apple of his eye,” “eat, drink, and be merry,” “the salt of the earth,” “the powers that be,” and “my brother’s keeper.”

And his translation heavily influenced the King James Version. In The Social Universe of the English Bible (2010), Naomi Tadmor writes that “about 83 per cent of the New Testament is deemed to be based on Tyndale and 76 per cent of the Old.”

But Tyndale ran afoul of Henry VIII by opposing the king’s plan to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. As a result, Tyndale met a grisly end.

On Oct. 6, 1536, he was convicted of heresy and put to death at Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels by being strangled and burned at the stake.

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She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers.
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Paralinguistically speaking

Q: My wife and I were alone in our car and having a general discussion when she lowered her voice and said, “Everyone knows her husband is having an affair.” Has anyone studied this strange behavior in mentioning a sensitive topic?

A: Yes, language scholars have indeed looked into this behavior. The study of pitch, loudness, speed, hesitation, and similar qualities of speech is referred to as “paralinguistics,” and this aspect of communication is called “paralanguage.”

In his 1975 paper “Paralinguistics,” the linguist David Crystal says the “para-” prefix (meaning “beyond” or “outside of”) “was originally chosen to reflect a view that such features as speed and loudness of speaking were marginal to the linguistic system.”

However, Crystal writes, studies in social psychology, psychiatry, sociolinguistics, and other areas “suggest that the vocal effects called paralinguistic may be rather more central to the study of communication than was previously thought.”

“Certainly, observations of people’s everyday reactions to language suggest that paralinguistic phenomena, far from being marginal, are frequently the primary determinants of behaviour in an interaction,” he says.

Although “the most widely recognized function” of paralanguage is for emotional expression, he adds, a “far more important and pervasive” function “is the use of paralinguistic features as markers of an utterance’s grammatical structure.”

In other words, the use of paralanguage in speech replaces the punctuation and spacing that’s so important in making written language intelligible.

Crystal discusses several kinds of paralanguage. An extended low pitch, for example, may be used “as a marker of parenthesis (e.g. ‘My cousin—you know, the one who lives in Liverpool—he’s just got a new job’).”

A rise in loudness may be used “as a marker of increased emphasis (‘I want the red one, not the green one’).”

An increase is speed may indicate “that the speaker wishes to forestall an interruption, or to suggest that what he is saying need not be given careful attention.”

A sentence spoken with a noticeable metrical beat may “suggest irritation, e.g. ‘I really think that John and Mary should have asked.’ ”

The kind of voice-lowering you’re asking about could be considered a marker of parenthesis. Crystal doesn’t cite an example like yours, but other language researchers say a whispered or lowered voice may accompany confidential or embarrassing comments.

In Principles of Phonetics (1994), for example, the linguist John Laver writes that the paralinguistic use of whisper may “signal secrecy and confidentiality.”

And in Simultaneous Structure in Phonology (2014), the linguist D. Robert Ladd writes, “A speaker’s voice may be raised in anger or lowered to convey something confidential.”

The linguist Carlos Gussenhoven, writing in The Phonology of Tone and Intonation (2004), says people may raise their pitch “to express surprised indignation” and “lower it to suggest confidentiality.”

And in a study entitled “The Roles of Breathy/Whispery Voice Qualities in Dialogue Speech” (2008), Carlos Toshinori Ishi, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita say that a “more whispered and low-powered voice quality” may reflect embarrassment.

(The three authors, who specialize in robotics, attempt to apply paralinguistics to synthesized speech.)

We can’t end this without mentioning a book that we came across while researching your question.

In Playing With My Dog Katie: An Ethnomethodological Study of Dog-Human Interaction (2007), the sociologist David Goode discusses his embarrassing “over-reliance on paralinguistic features of vocalization” in relating to his pet.

As the owners of two young golden retrievers, we know what’s he’s ethnomethodologically talking about.

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When the subject is a dummy

Q: I’ve read your recent post on deconstructing “it” and I have one additional question. What does “it” refer to in sentences like “It is raining” and “It is snowing”? I’ve heard various explanations of this usage, but I’d appreciate your take on it.

A: English speakers have been using the pronoun “it” to talk about the weather since Anglo-Saxon days. The “it” that we use to denote weather conditions (“it was drizzling” … “it’s hot”) is often called a “dummy” or “empty” or “artificial” subject.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says the “it” here has no semantic meaning and serves “the purely syntactic function of filling the obligatory subject position.”

The Oxford English Dictionary describes this “it” as “a semantically empty or non-referential subject” that dates back to Old English, where it was frequently used in statements about the weather.

The OED’s earliest recorded usage in reference to weather is from an Old English translation, possibly written around the 10th century, of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, which he probably completed in Latin in 731.

In the relevant passage, “hit rine & sniwe & styrme ute” (“it rain & snow & storm out”), the verbs are in the subjunctive.

We’ll expand the OED citation and give a modern English translation: “as if you at feasting should sit with your lords and subjects in winter-time, and a fire be lit and your hall warmed, and it should rain and snow and storm outside.”

This Middle English example from around 1300 needs no translating: “Hor-frost cometh whan hit is cold.”

The  “it” we use in statements about the weather, according to the OED, is part of a broader category of usages in which the pronoun is “the subject of an impersonal verb or impersonal statement, expressing action or a condition of things simply, without reference to any agent.”

These usages would include statements about the time or the season (“it was about noon” … “it was winter”); about space, distance, or time (“it was long ago” … “it’s too far”); and about other kinds of conditions (“how is it going?” … “it was awkward” … “if it weren’t for the inconvenience”).

The Cambridge Grammar wouldn’t use the term “dummy subject” to describe most of these non-weather usages. In its view, a dummy subject “cannot be replaced by any other NP [noun phrase].”

So Cambridge regards the “it” in a sentence like “It is five o’clock” or “It is July 1” as a predicative complement rather than a dummy subject, because “it” could be replaced by “the time” or “the date.”

Some linguists, however, might argue that none of the “it” usages we’ve discussed are true dummy subjects, but we’ll stop here.

To quote Shakespeare (Macbeth, around 1606), “If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twer well, / It were done quickly.”

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No problem at all

[Note: A May 30, 2022, post discusses “all,” “albeit” and “although.”]

Q: I’m struck by the strangeness of the phraselet “at all.” It seems to pop up everywhere, with a clear connotation but not much denotation at all. Is it shorthand for “at all events”? Seems to me it’s used in cases where the full phrase wouldn’t work at all.

A: “At all” is one of those phraselets (we like your term) that defy literal interpretation.

It functions as an adverb, but taken individually the words “at” and “all” don’t seem to add up to what the idiom means. And what exactly does “at all” mean?

The Oxford English Dictionary says “at all” has been used three ways since it showed up in the mid-1300s: in negative or conditional statements, in interrogative usages, and in affirmative statements (though this sense has generally died out).

When used in negative or conditional “if” statements, according to the OED, “at all” means “in any way,” “to any degree,” “in the least,” or “whatsoever.”

Examples date back to the 15th century and include “stryve not at al” (1476); “no peace at all” (1535); “If thy father at all misse me” (1611); “not at all visible” (1664); “If he refuses to govern us at all” (1849), and “no problem at all” (1975).

When used in questions, the OED says, “at all” has somewhat similar meanings—“in the least,” “in any way,” “for any reason,” “to any extent,” and “under any circumstances.”

Interrogative usages date back to the 16th century, and among the OED’s citations are “what power can it haue on you at all?” (1566); “shall I not vse Tabacco at all?” (1600); “why should he at all regard it?” (1683), and “Why should people care about football at all?” (2008).

But before these negative, conditional, and interrogative usages came into being, “at all” was used in affirmative statements to mean “in every way,” “altogether,” “wholly,” and “solely,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest example, from about 1350, is  “I þe coniure & comande att alle” (I thee conjure and command at all).

The affirmative use of the phrase has died out in common usage, however, and now survives only in some regional dialects of American and Irish English.

A 1945 article in the journal American Speech says this affirmative use “lives on in Irish dialect and in colloquial speech in certain parts of America, especially after a superlative.”

The article, which gives “We had the best time at all” for an example, says the usage was reported in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, elsewhere in the South, and the Midwest.

The Dictionary of American Regional English has 20th-century examples of the affirmative usage from Virginia, Louisiana, West Virginia, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

In affirmative constructions in US regional English, “at all” means “of all” or “only,” according to the DARE.

The regional dictionary cites such examples as “He is the greatest man at all” (1916), “We had the best time at all” (1936), “She’s the finest girl at all” (1942), and “Use one statement at all” (1976).

As for the preposition in “at all,” the OED has this to say: “At is used to denote relations of so many kinds, and some of these so remote from its primary local sense, that a classification of its uses is very difficult.”

Well, we hope this sheds a little light on an idiomatic phrase (or phraselet) that today eludes a word-for-word interpretation.

Finally, a few words about “all,” an extremely useful word.

It functions as many parts of speech: adjective (“all day” … “we all went”); pronoun (“all you need” … “all is well”); noun (“he gave his all” … “the one versus the all”); and adverb (“all dirty” … “it’s all a dream”).

For many centuries, since the days of Old English, the adverb has been used with prepositions in interesting ways to emphasize, affirm, or otherwise modify a verb.

This is where “at all” comes in. But there are many other such phrases, too many to mention in all (there’s one now!).

For example, we use “all” with prepositions to mean “the entire way” or “fully.” The OED’s citations, dating back to early Old English, include quotations from Lord Nelson (“all round the compass,” 1795); Thomas Macaulay (“all down the Rhine,” 1849); and Bob Dylan (“all along the watchtower,” 1968).

We use both “all of” and “of all,” but for different purposes. Similarly we use “in all” and “all in” (as in “I’m all in”). And we often use “all” with “for” and “to”—as in “all to [or for] nought,” “all to hell,” “a free for all,” “all for it,” “all for one and one for all,” and many others.

“All” is also used with words that look like prepositions but are in fact adverbs: “I knew all along” … “they’re all alone” … “go all out” … “look all over” … “fall all round” … “lie all around,” hemmed all about,” and more.

“All” is such an ancient part of the language that its fossilized traces were evident in words from as far back as early Old English, when it appeared as ael– in compounds.

Remnants are seen today in words like “also,” “always,” “although,” “altogether,” “almighty,” and others.

We mentioned above that “all” can be an adjective, a pronoun, a noun, or an adverb. But once upon a time it was a conjunction as well.

The use of “all” as a conjunction is almost unknown today, but a trace of the old conjunction lives on in the word “albeit,” which is derived from the old phrase “all be it.”

With that, we’re all done.

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

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Goody goody

Q: I’m fascinated by reduplicatives, especially those whose segments have no particular meaning on their own: “bow-wow,” “choo-choo,” “flim-flam,” “helter-skelter,” etc. I’ve often wondered why we refer to them as “reduplicatives” rather than “duplicatives.”

A: We once wrote a post on the reduplicative copula (“the thing is … is”), a usage that bugs a lot of people. But we haven’t written about the kind of reduplicatives you’re talking about.

In their Dictionary of Linguistics (1954), Mario Pei and Frank Gaynor define “reduplication” as “the complete or partial repetition of an element or elements.” And “reduplicative words” are “words of recurring sound and meaning (e.g., chit-chat).”

In the 60 years since then, other linguists have defined “reduplication” in other ways. Some, for example, have drawn a distinction between repeated sounds and repeated meanings. But we won’t get into that.

Suffice it to say that “reduplication” is a technical term in linguistics, and that the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions for “reduplication” and “reduplicative” used in the linguistic sense are similar to those of Pei and Gaynor.

But as the OED says, “reduplication” in a more general, nonlinguistic sense simply means a doubling, repetition, or duplication.

So you ask a very good question—why do linguists use the “re-” prefix? If “duplication” means copying something once, then “reduplication” would imply copying something more than once, wouldn’t it?

Well, not necessarily, because “re-” doesn’t always mean “again” or “once more.” Sometimes it implies “back” or “backward,” as in words like “respect” (whose Latin roots mean to look back at), “revoke” (call back), “repay” (pay back), “remit” (send back), “remove” (move back), and others.

It could be that the “re-” of “reduplication” in the linguistic sense originally had this same meaning, implying “back” instead of “again.” Unfortunately, we can’t say for sure that this is the case; we can only suggest it.

The word ultimately comes from the classical Latin verb reduplicare, meaning to double. (The Latin verb duplicare also meant to double.)

In the Latin of the third century and later, reduplication– or reduplicatio came to be used as a rhetorical term for the repetition of a word, according to the OED.

But it’s difficult to tell how the Romans—classical or later—viewed the “re-” in these words, and whether it originally meant “back” or “again.”

As the OED explains, “The original sense of re– in Latin is ‘back’ or ‘backwards,’ but in the large number of words in which it occurs it shows various shades of meaning.”

“Even in Latin,” the dictionary continues, “the precise sense of re– is not always clear, and in many words the development of secondary meanings tends greatly to obscure its original force. This loss of distinct meaning is naturally increased in English, where a word has often been adopted in a sense more or less remote from its original sense.”

In English, “reduplication” has had several meanings since it first entered the language, perhaps as long ago as the early 1400s. Early on, it was used in anatomy and zoology, for instance, to mean a doubling over or folding.

The “reduplication” we’re talking about, the name we now use for words like “mishmash” and “namby-pamby,” came into English in the 16th century. It’s defined in the OED as the “exact or partial repetition of a word, phrase, etc.”

But in some early uses of “reduplication” in this linguistic sense, it meant something similar to “epanalepsis,” a rhetorical device in which a an earlier word or phrase is repeated at some later point. This might be interpreted as a looking backward. Here are two OED citations:

“Marke heere againe, how the Prophet resumeth his first admiration, by a Poeticall Epanalepsis or reduplication.” (From the undated Atheomastix, a posthumously published religious treatise by Martin Fotherby, 1560-1620.)

“Reduplication … is a figure in Rhetoric, when the same word that ends one part of a verse or sentence, is repeated in that which follows.” (From Thomas Blount’s dictionary Glossographia, 1656.)

So it’s reasonable to suggest that “reduplication” in poetry or rhetoric originally meant something like “backward duplication” instead of “repeated duplication.”

The modern linguistics terms “reduplication” and “reduplicative” are derived from those earlier literary and rhetorical uses. But though the words have been handed down intact, today the “re-” seems far removed from the “back” sense and apparently means simple repetition.

Here, for example, is a contemporary citation, from L. J. Brinton’s Structure of Modern English (2000): “In English, reduplication is often used in children’s language (e.g., boo-boo, putt-putt) … or for humorous or ironic effect (e.g., goody-goody, rah-rah).”

And this OED citation, for the adjective “reduplicative,” is from B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour (1959): “A fragmentary self-echoic behavior … may be shown in reduplicative forms like helter-skelter, razzle-dazzle, and willy-nilly.”

In the end, what we’re suggesting is that the “re-” in “reduplication” and “reduplicative” may have originally implied “back” or “backward.” And the modern terms in linguistics have preserved the “re-” prefix even though the meaning of it has changed. That would explain why today the prefix looks redundant.

In our readings about reduplication, we came across an interesting use of the term in art criticism to refer to a visual doubling.

In an essay on photography, the art critic Craig Owens uses the word “reduplication” to characterize a mid-19th-century “double portrait” of a woman who is seen alongside her reflection in a mirror:

“If we speak of this image, and of others like it, as reduplicative, it is because reduplication signifies ‘to reproduce in reflection,’ ” he says in his book Beyond Recognition (1994).

Owens seems to be using the term in the going-back sense to refer to an image seen in reflection. In fact, he draws a parallel to rhetorical reduplication.

“In classical rhetoric,” he writes, “reduplication was a species of repetition, distinguished by the reiteration of a word or phrase within the same part of a sentence or clause.”

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Deconstructing “it”

Q: I’m flummoxed by the word “it” in a sentence such as “I like it when you sing.” What in the world is “it” doing there?

A: The sentence that puzzles you, “I like it when you sing,” is a familiar construction, especially in spoken English. We find nothing grammatically wrong here, as we’ll explain later.

But you’re right—on close examination, this familiar old pattern seems curiouser and curiouser.

In sentences like this a verb, often one expressing a state of mind (“like,” “love,” “hate,” “appreciate,” etc.), has as its object the pronoun “it,” followed by a clause beginning with “when.” (A clause, as you know, is a group of words that has a verb and its subject.)

Here are some similar examples: “She loves it when he smiles” … “I hate it when people swear” … “Mom and dad appreciate it when you do the dishes” … “He always regrets it when he’s rude.”

All of these examples seem quite innocent on the surface. But what’s happening underneath?

As you can see, there are two clauses here. Using your original sentence as our model, the clauses are “I like it” and “when you sing.”

In the main clause, “it” is the direct object of the verb “like.” And to identify what “it” is, the speaker follows with a subordinate clause that begins with “when” and names an event or circumstance.

So the “when”-clause is an object too, in a sense. It explains what the object “it” refers to: an occasion on which someone sings. So in that sense the “when”-clause resembles a noun clause.

But it also seems to have an adverbial use, since it says when something happens. It describes the condition required for the main clause to be true. So instead of referring to a time, this “when” refers to a situation.

Often sentences like these can be reversed: “I like it when you sing” neatly corresponds to “When you sing, I like it.” In the second version, “it” refers back, instead of forward, to the explanatory “when”-clause.

But you wouldn’t want to move a “when”-clause to the front unless it’s fairly short and simple. Here’s a sentence that would sound clunky if flipped:

“I hate it when a birthday invitation says ‘No gifts, please’ and then everyone but you brings one anyway.” There’s no felicitous way to move “I hate it” to the end.

Linguists have interpreted this kind of construction in many different ways over the years. For example, they’ve used a variety of terms in discussing the role played by “it.”

In A Grammar of the English Language (1931), George O. Curme interprets this “it” as “an anticipatory object” that points forward to a fuller object clause.

In his book When-Clauses and Temporal Structure (1997), Renaat Declerck calls this a “cataphoric” or “anticipatory” pronoun, one that depends on the “when”-clause for its meaning. (A “cataphoric” pronoun is one that refers to a following word or phrase.)

Other commentators have described this “it” as an “expletive” or “pleonastic” pronoun—one with no meaning of its own, but merely a sort of placeholder required by the word order.

But we’ve also found arguments that the pronoun is not “pleonastic”: it’s not without meaning, since it refers to an event.

Linguists have also disagreed in their views of the “when”-clause in sentences like these—is it a relative clause, a noun clause, an adverbial clause, or perhaps some combination of those?

Declerck regards these clauses as adverbial. And when preceded by “it” acting as an object, he writes, they are “extraposed when-clauses.” (Essentially, an element is “extraposed” when the pronoun takes its place and shoves it aside.)

Without the “it” (as in “I don’t like when people argue”), the “when”-clause itself “fills the object position,” Declerck writes. So in that case the clause is not “extraposed.”

As we mentioned above, we find nothing grammatically wrong with sentences such as “I like it when you sing.” They seem natural and idiomatic, and they work well. But they do seem more at home in informal or spoken English.

No usage authorities, to our knowledge, have condemned the use of a “when”-clause to describe an event. And the use of “it” as an object that’s then echoed by the “real” object is also a common feature of English, as in “I like it, this movie,” and “He loathes it, that old eyesore.”

So we have no quarrel with these “when”-clauses in spoken or informal English, but if you prefer to avoid them you certainly can. Many constructions are similar, though in some cases they may be subtly different.

Declerck says, for example, that “I hate it when you talk like that” will generally be interpreted as similar to “I hate your talking like that.”

But the two don’t mean precisely the same thing. One refers to an occasion, the other to what could be habitual behavior. If the person you’re addressing always talks like that, then either construction would be appropriate.

Another kind of substitution comes to mind. You can often replace “when” by “that” and still make grammatical sense.

But again, your meaning may be changed. “I like it when you sing” isn’t the same as “I like it that you sing.” In the first sentence, the object of the liking—“it”—is not the fact that the person sings, but occasions when the person sings.

A few years ago we wrote a post on a similar subject, the use of “when”-clauses in definitions after forms of the verb “be.” (Example: “Despair is when you see no way out.”)

As we wrote then, this construction is common and has a long history, but it’s been considered colloquial since the mid-19th century. It’s common in speech and casual writing, but it’s generally avoided in formal English.

If you see “when”-clauses after the verb “be” in formal writing, it’s usually in reference to time, as in “Yesterday was when I heard the news” or “This is when you should change the oil.”

And now is when we should sign off.

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Have you got rhythm?

Q: Near the bottom of your home page, you ask, “Have you GOT rhythm?”  No, Simple Simon Babblers, I AIN’T GOT NO rhythm. I’m sick of YOU GOT. What ever happened to YOU HAVE? Correct English would be “Have you rhythm?”

A: Calm down.

The title “Have you got rhythm?” on our home page uses “got” quite correctly. “Have you got” here is the present-perfect form of the verb “get,” used in the second person.

The present-perfect of “get” has been used to denote mere possession (that is, to mean “have”) since the 16th century, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

The earliest example of the usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, written in the late 1590s:

“What a beard hast thou got; thou hast got more haire on thy chinne, then Dobbin my philhorse hase on his taile.”

Merriam-Webster’s also cites examples from Jane Austen, Charles Lamb, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and others.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some language commentators objected to the usage, complaining that “got” was superfluous. However, contemporary usage guides accept “have got,” though some consider it informal.

There are two theories about why English speakers began using “have got” to mean “have.”

One is that the verb “have” began losing its sense of possession because of its increasing use as an auxiliary.

The other theory is that “got” was originally inserted because of the tendency to use contracted forms of the verb “have.” So a clunky sentence like “I’ve a cat” became “I’ve got a cat.”

Philip Boswood Ballard, writing in Teaching the Mother Tongue (1921), argues that the “have got” version “implies a stronger sense of possession”  than a simple “have.” We tend to agree.

In case you didn’t know, the headline on our home page was a play on words, a reference to the song “I Got Rhythm,” by George and Ira Gershwin.

Granted, the song title used “got” in a deliberately slangy, nonstandard way. The technically correct version would have been “I’ve Got Rhythm,” though as we’ve said before, song lyricists are allowed poetic license.

The title we wrote, however, is correct. In Teaching the Mother Tongue, Ballard dismisses the objection to “have got” as “a counterfeit invented by schoolmasters.”

Sir Ernest Gowers, writing in the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1965), cites Ballard’s comment and adds, “Acceptance of this verdict is here recommended.”

Nobody objects, of course, to the use of “have got” to mean “have acquired,” though Americans generally use “have gotten” in this sense. The British once used “have gotten” too, as we pointed out back in 2006.

Keep in mind that “get” is an entirely separate verb from “have,” though some of its tenses use the auxiliary “have,” as we wrote on our blog in 2008 and 2010:

We’ve also examined the modern colloquial usage “I got this” (meaning something akin to “This one is mine” or “I’ll take care of this”).

And you may be interested in a comparison of two “have got” usages in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language: “She has got a swimming pool” and “She has got to swim each day.”

In examples like the first, the Cambridge Grammar notes, “have got” appears “with an NP [noun phrase] object … expressing possession and similar relations.”

In examples like the second, according to Cambridge, it’s “a catenative verb with a to-infinitival complement  … where the meaning is of obligation or necessity, much like must.”

A catenative verb is one linked to another verb form—in this case, “has got” and “to swim” are linked in meaning “must swim.”

We’ll end with an example of the “have got” usage you asked about, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis Carroll:

“Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me see—how is it to be managed?”

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An interview with Pat

She discusses books, blogs, and journalism in an interview with Grammarist.

 

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: On Thanksgiving tables, New World foods with Old World names. If you miss the program, you can listen to the show  on Pat’s WNYC page.
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Hear Pat on Iowa Public Radio

She’s 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.

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The imperative’s new clothes?

Q: I’ve searched all over the Internet for an explanation of the third-person imperative, but everybody seems to have a different opinion. I’m thoroughly confused. If you can help, I’ll be forever thankful.

A: Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the “third-person imperative.” But there are second-person imperatives that are addressed to third-person subjects, as we’ll explain.

The imperative mood is used for expressing commands, requests, and so on. So by its very nature an imperative is directly addressed to someone, and an imperative sentence typically has the second-person “you” as its implied subject.

This “you” is generally omitted, as in “Have a drink” … “Hurry up!” … “Look!” … “Be a pal.” But sometimes it’s present: “You be careful” … “Go away, you!”

At times, the implied “you” is represented by “someone” or “somebody” or some other subject that’s grammatically in the third person. Examples: “Someone please make coffee” …  “Dim the lights, somebody” … “Those with tickets form a line to the right” … “Passengers please remain seated.”

Those are examples of imperatives in which the people being addressed are expressed in the third person and not as “you.” But nevertheless, these are all second-person constructions, because the speaker directly addresses the subject.

As Otto Jespersen writes in his Essentials of English Grammar (1933), “Any imperative is virtually in the second person, even if seemingly addressed to a ‘third person.’ ”

Jespersen uses these examples: “Oh, please, someone go in and tell her” … “And bring out my hat, somebody, will you.”  He says that in such sentences, words like “someone” or “somebody” mean “one of you present.”

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language explains that when an imperative is addressed to “somebody” or “all those in the front row,” the subjects “are also interpreted as ‘somebody among you,’ ‘all those of you in the front row.’ ”

So don’t be misled by imperatives addressed to subjects expressed in the third-person. These are still second-person constructions.

We found another explanation in A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of the English Imperative (2012), by Hidemitsu Takahashi.

The author says “an inherent feature of the imperative” is “the second person of the understood subject.”

This is true, Takahashi says, even when an imperative has an apparently third-person subject, as in (a) “Someone get the barf bag!” (b) “Everyone stand up!” and (c ) “All the boys come forward.”

As the author writes, “The form of imperative subjects such as someone and all the boys is clearly in the third person but their referent is in the second person.”

Those subjects, Takahashi says, are “only superficially in the third person” and “are conceptually in the second person, where the imperative is directed at non-individuated addressees”—that is, to no one in particular.

Even when you’re mentally speaking to yourself (“Where did I put my keys? Let me see. Stop and think now”), you’re addressing yourself from the outside, as if you were speaking to a second-person “you.”

In fact, the addressee doesn’t have to be a person at all—you could be swearing at your car: “Start, dammit!” The car may not be a person, but you’re addressing it as if it were—in the second person.

In short, there is no “third-person imperative.”

Many grammarians, however, recognize another kind of imperative. The Cambridge Grammar calls this the “1st person inclusive let-imperative”—as in the examples “Let’s open the window” and “Let’s borrow Kim’s car.”

Don’t misunderstand us here. This is not the same “let” as the one used to mean “allow,” as in “Let them go” or “Just let the baby cry.” Those are second-person imperatives addressed to an assumed “you.”

This “1st person inclusive let-imperative,” sometimes called the “let’s imperative,” has an implied “we” as its subject. The command, request, or whatever is addressed to the speaker plus one or more others, so it’s in the first-person plural. (Some grammarians, in fact, call it the “first-person plural imperative.”)

As Cambridge says, the verb “let” in sentences like “Let’s open the window” and “Let’s borrow Kim’s car” has been “bleached” of the old meaning (“allow”), and now “serves as a marker of this special type of imperative construction.”

Although all of this may seem complicated, the imperative form itself couldn’t be simpler—it’s always identical to the bare (that is, the “to”-less) infinitive. And it can be complete in itself, since an imperative sentence can consist of only a single word: “Eat!”

Imperatives are probably among the most primitive grammatical constructions, and they’re an indispensable feature of language. What would we do without them?

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The genitive wars

Q: I question the use of an apostrophe in “Seven Years’ War.” I assume that “Seven Years” is simply an adjectival phrase modifying the noun “War.” However, your “Sui Genitive!” post supports the apostrophe. I have a book on the subject due for publication next year, and I want the correct punctuation on the cover!

A: In our 2010 post, we say expressions like “a three weeks’ holiday” and “in three weeks’ time” have traditionally taken apostrophes.

If you used the noun phrase “a three-week holiday,” no apostrophe would be used; in that case, “three-week” is simply an adjectival phrase.

But “a three weeks’ holiday” is a different animal. Here “three weeks” is a what’s called a genitive construction—the equivalent of “a holiday OF three weeks.”

Similarly, note the apostrophe in such constructions as “he has five years’ experience,” which is equivalent to “experience OF five years, and “a four days’ journey,” which is equivalent to “a journey OF four days” (alternatively, you could use “a four-day journey”).

We’ll quote the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed., p. 356) on the use of the apostrophe with genitives:

“Analogous to possessives, and formed like them, are certain expressions based on the old genitive case. The genitive here implies of: in three days’ time; an hour’s delay (or a one-hour delay); six months’ leave of absence (or a six-month leave of absence).”

Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed., p. 647), has the same information. Periods of time and statements of worth are expressed with apostrophes. Garner’s gives these examples: “30 days’ notice (i.e., notice of 30 days), three days’ time, 20 dollars’ worth, and several years’ experience.”

Getting back to your question, “Seven Years’ War” generally takes an apostrophe for the same reason, though it’s sometimes seen without one. Ditto “Hundred Years’ War” and “Thirty Years’ War.”

It would be grammatically correct, of course, to refer to the three conflicts as the “Seven-Year War,” the “Hundred-Year War,” and the “Thirty-Year War,” but those aren’t their traditional names.

However, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War is often referred to as the “Six-Day War,” using an adjectival rather than a genitive construction.

In a 2013 post on our blog, we describe the difference between an adjectival phrase like “two-dollar word” and a genitive phrase like “Thirty Years’ War.”

As we note, “adjectival phrases consisting of a number plus a noun (like “thirty-year” and “two-dollar”) are normally formed with a singular noun (“year,” “dollar”).

In a genitive version of such a construction, the phrase becomes plural, loses its hyphen, and gains an apostrophe.

Our 2013 post includes a note about historical names, including the names of wars, which “develop through common usage, and not according to grammatical rules.”

“That accounts for why we see both ‘the Thirty Years’ War’ (a genitive usage for ‘a war of thirty years’), and ‘the Six-Day War’ (a simple adjectival phrase),” we write.

If you need a big gun as your authority, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the subject of your book this way: “Seven Years’ War, the third Silesian war (1756–1763), in which Austria, France, Russia, Saxony, and Sweden were allied against Frederick II of Prussia.”

The OED also has this citation, from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, an 1837 book in which the phrase “seven years” is used in the genitive case (though Carlyle uses a hyphen): “In that seven-years’ sleep of his, so much has changed.”

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