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Etymology Linguistics

Hello, handsome

Q: I hear the word “handsome” applied to men and women, but in somewhat different ways. A handsome man, according to Wiktionary, is attractive, dignified, and in good taste. A handsome woman, on the other hand, is striking, impressive, and elegant, though not typically beautiful. Why the difference?

A: Comeliness (now there’s a handsome old word!) is always an interesting subject.

The two standard dictionaries we consult the most—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.)—have unisex definitions of “handsome” in this sense: pleasing, dignified, beautiful.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t mention sex either, defining a “handsome” physical appearance as beautiful, dignified, stately, fine.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised 3rd ed.) , edited by R. W. Burchfield, agrees that “handsome” can be “applied equally to men and women of striking appearance.”

But Burchfield adds that “now, when applied to women, tending to be used only of such as are middle-­aged or elderly.”

As an example, he cites Sherman McCoy’s thoughts about his wife in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. (We’ve gone to the original to expand the quotation, which includes the ellipses.)

Still a very good-looking woman, my wife … with her fine thin features, her big clear blue eyes, her rich brown hair … But she’s forty years old! … No getting around it … Today good-looking … Tomorrow they’ll be talking about what a handsome woman she is.”

We think that Burchfield (a male lexicographer) may have gone a bit far in emphasizing the age angle here, but we agree that the adjective does indeed seem to be applied somewhat differently to men and women in modern times.

To begin with, it seems to be used much more often to describe men than women. And though a handsome man and a handsome woman may both be hunks, the woman tends to be hunkier (in the sense of being especially imposing or impressive).

The adjective “handsome” has had many meanings since it entered English in the 15th century, but it’s not certain why some have tended to attach themselves to men and others to women.

When the word first showed up around 1440, according to the OED, it meant easy to handle or manipulate. The adjective was formed (with the addition of the suffix “-some”) from the noun “hand.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from the Promptorium Parvulorum, an early Latin-English dictionary: “Handsum, or esy to hond werke.”

Over the years, it has meant, among other things, handy or convenient (1530); apt or clever (1547); moderately large (1577); considerable, as in a sum of money (1577); proper, decent, seemly (1583);  polite, gracious, generous (before 1625); and gallant or brave (1625).

The OED’s earliest citation for the word’s use in the sense you ask about (beautiful, dignified, stately, etc.) is from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590): “A handsom stripling.”

It’s been used for both men and women since then.

In Shakespeare’s Othello (1616), Emilia describes Ludovico as a “very handsome man,” while Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes in a 1718 letter of a woman who “appear’d to me handsomer than before.”

As we said above, the adjective “handsome” is derived from the noun “hand,” a word that appears in various forms in Old English and other Germanic languages.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says “hand” has “no relatives outside Germanic, and no one is too sure where it comes from.”

Ayto speculates that it might be related to early Germanic words for seizing, pursuing, and hunting, “and that its underlying meaning is ‘body part used for seizing.’ ”

By the way, the OED also has entries for “handsome” as an obsolete verb (meaning to make handsome) and as a rare old adverb (that is, in a handsome manner).

The dictionary says the adverbial usage survives in the proverb “handsome is as handsome does,” which uses “handsome” in two senses: you’re handsome (attractive) if you act handsomely (in a decent way).

The earliest known appearance of the proverb in writing, the OED says, is from a collection of fables, Philip Ayres’s Mythologia Ethica (1689): “Our English Proverb answers very aptly: He handsome is that handsome does.”

Since Ayres refers to it as “our English proverb,” the expression was obviously around long before he wrote his book of fables. [Update: We discuss “handsome is as handsome does” in 2021 and cite earlier examples.]

But perhaps an even earlier version of the proverb (minus the word “handsome”) may be seen in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written at the end of the 14th century.

In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the old hag lectures the Knight on gentility: “To do the gentil dedes that he kan; taak hym for the grettest gentil man.” (In Middle English, gentil means noble, refined, or excellent.)

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Etymology Linguistics Usage

Why does “anymore” have a negative attitude?

Q: Why is it that statements with “anymore” are usually negative? For example, we say “No one compromises anymore” when it’s just as logical to say “Everyone insists on his own way anymore.”

A: The use of “anymore” in a positive statement is something we’ve written about before on the blog, but it’s worth a closer look.

The adverb “anymore” is generally used in four ways:

(1) In negative statements: “We don’t date anymore.”

(2) In questions: “Do you go to the opera anymore?”

(3) In conditional statements: “If you shout anymore, I’ll scream.”

(4) In positive statements that suggest the negative: “He’s too partisan to trust anymore.”

No one raises an eyebrow over these uses, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

But Merriam-Webster’s notes that some usage writers respond with “consternation and perplexity” when “anymore” is used in a clearly positive context like the one you cite (“Everyone insists on his own way anymore”).

M-W says this positive use of “anymore” to mean now or nowadays is dialect that’s widely heard in all regions of the US except New England.

The usage guide says it seems to be “of Midlands origin—the states where it is most common appear to be Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, and Oklahoma.”

The guide adds that it “has spread considerably to such other states as New York, New Jersey, Iowa, Minnesota, California, and Oregon.” (Pat recalls hearing it when she was growing up in Iowa.)

Although M-W describes the positive usage as “predominately a spoken feature,” it gives nine examples that have appeared in print, some as “anymore” and some as “any more.” (The usual American spelling for the adverb is “anymore.”)

Here’s a comment by Harry S. Truman that’s quoted in Plain Speaking, Merle Miller’s 1973 oral biography of the 33rd president: “It sometimes seems to me that all I do anymore is go to funerals.”

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the positive usage as “Chiefly Irish English and N. Amer. colloq.

The earliest OED citation is a Northern Ireland reference from Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1898): “A servant being instructed how to act, will answer ‘I will do it any more.’ ”

The Dictionary of American Regional English has US examples of the usage dating to 1931, and mentions what may be a related usage dating to 1859.

The 1931 example is a comment from West Virginia cited in the journal American Speech: “People used to shop a lot in the morning, but any more the crowd comes in about three o’clock.”

So what is the status of the usage in the US today?

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) say it’s widespread in regional usage, especially in speech.

And DARE says it’s “in use by speakers of all educ levels.”

But Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) rejects it as dialectal and cites a linguistic study that found the usage “well-established, though controversial” in Missouri.

“That means that the informants were all familiar with it, but many didn’t like it,” Garner’s says. “The findings would probably hold throughout most of the United States.”

As widespread as the usage is, we’d recommend against using it in formal writing. It’s OK in speech and informal writing, though, as long as your audience has a positive attitude about “anymore.”

One last point: Don’t confuse the adverb “anymore” (“We don’t eat out anymore”) with the phrase “any more” (“Do you want any more pizza?”).

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Etymology Linguistics Punctuation

Stop signs

Q: I was watching “Law & Order: UK” the other day when the Crown Prosecutor (or perhaps a barrister) ended a sentence by saying “full stop.” This reminded me that the British use “full stop” where Americans say “period.” I’d be interested in the history of these punctuation terms.

A: The terms “full stop” and “period” date back to Shakespearean times. Although both were once used in Britain for the punctuation mark, the Oxford English Dictionary describes “period” as now chiefly North American.

The OED’s earliest citation for “period” in this sense is from Arte Brachygraphie, a 1597 book about shorthand, by the English calligrapher Peter Bales: “The first is a full pricke or period.” (Here, “pricke” means a dot or spot.)

We haven’t seen the text of the Bales book, but the OED says the word “period” here refers to “the single point used to mark the end of a sentence.”

The dictionary has an even earlier citation that uses “period” for the full pause at the end of a sentence, rather than for the punctuation mark itself.

Here’s the citation, from Penelope’s Web, a 1587 collection of tales by the English writer Robert Greene: “She fell into consideration with her selfe that the longest Sommer hath his Autumne, the largest sentence his Period.”

The dictionary’s first citation for “full stop” to mean the punctuation mark is from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600). In urging Salanio to get to the end of a story, Salarino says, “Come, the full stop.”

And here’s an example using both “period” and “full stop,” from Micrographia, a 1665 book by the English polymath Robert Hook about his observations with a microscope: “A point commonly so call’d, that is, the mark of a full stop, or period.”

The use of “period” for the punctuation mark is derived from the Medieval Latin periodus (spelled peri[o]dos in Aelfric’s Grammar, a text in Latin and Old English from the early 11th century).

And with that, we’ll come to a full stop.

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Lest-wise

Q: I found this sentence in a book I’m reading: “Stop, lest someone hears you.” Shouldn’t this read “Stop, lest someone hear you,” which I believe is the subjunctive? Or would it be more correct to write “Stop, lest someone were to hear you”? However, this seems stilted for dialog,

A: The word “lest” is normally used with a verb that’s in the subjunctive mood or that’s accompanied by “should.”

As we’ve written before on our blog, the subjunctive is used for only three purposes in modern English:

(1) To express a wish: “I wish I were there.”

(2) To express an “if” statement about a condition that’s contrary to fact: “If I were a carpenter, I’d fix it myself.”

(3) To express that something is being asked, demanded, ordered, suggested, and so on: “I demand that I be released.”

But, as we pointed out, the subjunctive was once much more common than it is today.

Some archaic usages have survived in the case of certain words and phrases, like “God forbid,” “come what may,” “suffice it to say,” and others.

One of these survivors is the continued use of “lest” with the subjunctive.

A few examples: “He was quiet, lest he wake the baby” … “I hurried, lest I be late” … “She’s always on time, lest she lose her job.”

Any of those could be written instead with “should,” as in “lest he should wake the baby.”

“Lest” is an interesting word etymologically, a living antique. Its meaning is “for fear that” or, roughly, “in order not that” such-and-such happen.

It developed from an Old English phrase first recorded around the year 1000: thy laes the (“whereby less that”).

During the Middle English period (about 1100-1500), the first part of the phrase was dropped, and it was written as les the (“less that”), then les te, then leste, and finally “lest,” though other spellings continued into later times.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that “lest,” which is a conjunction, is used in two senses.

First, it’s “a negative particle of intention or purpose, introducing a clause expressive of something to be prevented or guarded against.”

Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1797, used the word in that sense: “Nobody scarcely will venture to buy or draw bills, lest they should be paid there in depreciated currency.”

And here’s an example of that sense of “lest” used with the subjunctive (without “should”), from Cornwall magazine (1855): “Look to the Purser well, lest he look to himself too well.”

Second, the OED says, the word is “used after verbs of fearing, or phrases indicating apprehension or danger, to introduce a clause expressing the event that is feared.”

The mountaineer Frederick Clissold used the word in that sense in The Ascent of Mont Blanc (1823): “I felt a strong inclination to sleep, and feared lest I should drop down.”

And here’s an example of that sense of “lest” used with the subjunctive (without “should”), from Ralph Austen’s Treatise of Fruit Trees (1653): “All the danger is least we take too much liberty herein.” (Here, “least” is a variant spelling of “lest.”)

As you can see, the sentence “Stop, lest someone hear you” could also be written as “Stop, lest someone should hear you.”

The other version you mention ( “Stop, lest someone were to hear you”) uses the subjunctive correctly but it’s needlessly wordy.

We’ll stop now, lest we be needlessly wordy too.

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Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage

Do contractions have true grit?

Q: I recently viewed the Coen brothers’ film True Grit and noticed that Mattie and the other main characters don’t use contractions. Was this the “educated” or acceptable practice of the period (the 1880s)?

A: Ethan and Joel Coen were asked this very question in a Dec. 14, 2010, interview with Newsweek magazine.

“We’ve been told that the language and all that formality is faithful to how people talked in the period,”  Ethan said.

We saw True Grit a couple of days ago and noticed that contractions do pop up once in a while, though not to the degree we hear them now.

We haven’t read the 1968 Charles Portis novel that the film is based on, but a discussion on the Language Log indicates that contractions show up at times in the book too.

Were contractions considered a no-no in the late 19th century? The answer is yes and no.

As we’ve written in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths, writers have been using contractions in English since Anglo-Saxon days.

Old English contractions include nis from ne is (“is not”), naes from ne waes (“was not”), nolde from ne wolde (“would not”), naefde from ne haefde (“did not have”), and nat from ne wat (“does not know”).

Contractions were an accepted part of the language for hundreds of years. In Elizabethan times, for instance, Shakespeare used them in dialogue (“But he’s an arrant knave”—Hamlet), in titles (All’s Well That Ends Well), and in sonnets (“That’s for thyself to breed another thee”).

“In fact,” we write in Origins of the Specious, “there were many more contractions in olden days than there are now, including such quaint old dears as ha’n’t, sha’n’t, ’tis, ’twere, ’twill, ’twon’t, ’twouldn’t, and a’n’t, the father of ain’t.”

Throughout the 17th and much of the 18th centuries, contractions were normal in speech and respectable in writing, even scholarly prose. It wasn’t till the early 1700s that anybody thought to question them.

Addison, Swift, Pope, and others began raising questions about their suitability in print, even though educated people routinely used them in conversation.

By the late 18th century, contractions were in disgrace, tolerated in speech but considered by language authorities an embarrassment in writing.

Contractions remained in the doghouse until well into the 20th century, when opinion makers started coming to their senses.

In the 1920s, for example, Henry Fowler used contractions without comment in his famous usage guide, indicating he saw nothing wrong with them.

But what about the suitability of contractions in True Grit?

Both the movie and the novel open in 1928, when Mattie tells about her adventures as a 14-year-old in the early 1880s.

In 1928, as we’ve said, contractions were coming back into favor, though some usage gurus still frowned on them until late in the 20th century.

But in the 1880s, when Mattie hired Rooster Cogburn to avenge her slain father, contractions were considered a no-no by usage authorities.

It’s unlikely, though, that Mattie, Rooster, or any other character in the book would have paid much attention to usage guides, especially in speech.

Contractions may have been condemned by the language mavens of the 19th century, but they were alive and well among the people using the language.

In the Language Log posting, for example, the linguist Mark Liberman points out the prevalence of contractions in Mark Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer, which was published in 1876, just a few years before Mattie hired Rooster.

Liberman writes that that there are 58 instances of “won’t” and just one of “will not” in the novel, as well as 223 instances of “don’t” and just one of “do not.”

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Etymology Linguistics

Harmonic progression

Q: What is the Indo-European root for “harmony”? Is it older than the root for “gnosis”?

A: The Indo-European root for “harmony” has been reconstructed as ar-, meaning to fit together.

This is the prehistoric origin of the Greek words harmos (joint, shoulder) and harmonia, which means a concord of sounds but also has a more general sense: concord, joining, or agreement.

The word traveled from Greek to Latin (harmonia) to French (harmonie) and finally to English in the late 14th century.

The earliest use of “harmony” in English is in its musical sense. In The Hous of Fame (circa 1384), Chaucer wrote of “Songes ful of Armonye.”

The word was first used in English in its more general sense (agreement, concord, etc.) in the 1500s.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense as “combination or adaptation of parts, elements, or related things, so as to form a consistent and orderly whole; agreement, accord, congruity.”

The prehistoric root that gave us “harmony” (ar-) is also in the genes of such words as arm, armada, armature, armoire, army, article, alarm, disarm, gendarme, art, artisan, and words starting with the arthro– prefix.

An entirely separate Indo-European root, gno-, is responsible for the Greek gnosis (knowledge). In English, “gnosis” refers to the esoteric knowledge sought by the ancient Gnostics.

The gno- root is also responsible (through proto-Germanic) for the Old English cnawan (know) as well as the modern words know, knowledge, ken, kith, kin, cunning, and others.

Some other descendants of gno– came into English through Latin and Greek: notice, notion, cognition, recognize, ignore, noble, gnostic, diagnosis, narrate, normal, and others too numerous to mention.

These two Indo-European roots, ar- and gno-, were independent of one another, so it makes no sense to ask which came first. Remember that this is prehistory we’re talking about, before there was writing.

We can recommend, if you’re interested, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, edited by Calvert Watkins. It’s in paperback.

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Etymology Linguistics Spelling Usage

‘Here’ to ‘herein’ to ‘hereinafter’

Q: I recently started a list of words that seem to be conglomerates of smaller words (e.g., albeit, heretofore, nonetheless, and whatsoever). I’m attaching the list. I’ve always liked this kind of word, albeit under the level of my consciousness. Can you tell me anything about them, as a group?

A: What a great list! These are compound words, made up of two or three smaller ones. Many of these got their start in Middle English, though some weren’t written as one word until a later period.

Compounds aren’t unusual in English. In fact, compounding is an important way that English forms new words, like “plainclothesman” and “counterclockwise” (both triple compounds).

Most of the ones on your list, like “aforementioned” and “heretofore,” are the kind we associate with the language of legislative acts, contracts, wills, and other legal documents. And not everybody likes them.

A recent New York Times article about the economist Alfred E. Kahn, who died in December, quoted him on this very subject. Kahn, a devotee of plain English, once wrote this in a memo to the lawyers and economists on his staff:

“Every time you’re tempted to use ‘herein’ or ‘hereinabout’ or ‘hereinunder’ or, similarly, ‘therein,’ ‘thereinabove’ or ‘thereinunder,’ and the corresponding variants, try ‘here’ or ‘there’ or ‘above’ or ‘below,’ and see if it doesn’t make just as much sense.”

Here (we won’t say “hereinunder”) is a look at some of the words in your collection, plus a few more. We’ll stick with the triple compounds.

“albeit” and the archaic “howbeit”: These were originally three-word phrases, “all be it” (circa 1385) and “how be it’ (1398). The first means something like “even though it be that” or “although.” The second means “however it may be” or “be that as it may.”

“inasmuch”: When it originated (before 1300), this was three separate words, “in as much.” But it’s been written as one word for most of its history. It’s generally followed by “as.” The phrase “inasmuch as” means “in view of the fact that” or “to the extent that” or “because.”

“insofar”: This was originally three words, “in so far” (1596), and it’s also followed by “as.” The meaning of “insofar as” is “to such an extent that” or “in such measure or degree as.”

“hereinafter”: This compound (1590) means “after this point in the document” or “hereafter.” The words “hereinbefore” (1687) and “hereinabove” (1768-74) are its cousins.

“heretofore”: This one (c. 1350) means “before this time” or “formerly.” It includes the obsolete compound “tofore” (before 900), which once meant “to the front of” or “before.”

“nevertheless”: This familiar combination dates from before 1382 and means “despite that” or “all the same” or “nonetheless” (see below).  And yes, it once had an opposite number, “neverthemore,” an obsolete word that meant “not at all” or “definitely not.”

“nonetheless”: This one dates from 1533 and means the same as “nevertheless.” It was preceded by earlier forms that combined “no” + “the” + “less” or “nought” + “the” + “less” and were written as “natheless,” “netheless,” “noutheless,” and so on.

“notwithstanding”: This isn’t really a triple compound, because the “with” of “withstand” is technically a verbal prefix instead of a word. But who cares? It dates back to before 1400 and means “in spite of” or “all the same.” The similar “noughtwithstanding” is even earlier, but it didn’t last.

“whatsoever”: This combination (c. 1250) means the same as “whatever.” Then why the “so”? Because “whatsoever” incorporates an earlier, archaic compound, “whatso” (“what” + “so”), which also meant “whatever,” and which survived in poetic usage into the early 20th century. (Example: “Despatches, sermons,—whatso goes / Into their brain comes out as prose,” from a 19th-century poem by the  pseudonymous Sylvanus Urban.)

“wherewithal”: This one (1535) combines “where” with an archaic compound, “withal” (“with” + “all”), which once meant “in addition” or “along with the rest” or “moreover.” Today the triple compound “wherewithal” is a noun for “necessary means,” as in “He didn’t have the wherewithal to pay his rent.”

Having written the aforementioned, we will hereinafter sign off.

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Dicking around

Q: We’re wondering when the word “dick” (slang for the sexual organ) came to mean a stupid or obnoxious person, as in, “Don’t be such a dick.”

A: First things first. The term “dick” has been a euphemism for the penis since at least as far back as the 19th century.

Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang dates the “penis” sense of the word to the mid-19th century.

Two other sources, the Oxford English Dictionary and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, give citations from 1891 and 1888, respectively.

But sexual slang, with its euphemistic character and its tendency to show up in speech long before it appears in print, is hard to pin down.

Though there’s no solid evidence that “dick” meant “penis” before the 19th century, one scholar has suggested that the usage might have been around much further back, in the 14th century.

Gordon Williams, in A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, cites the Chaucer scholar Haldeen Braddy on a possible verbal source of the usage.

Braddy suspected, according to Williams, that the sexual use of “dick” may have originated in an old verb, dighte, which Chaucer used in The Canterbury Tales “in reference to copulation.”

In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” the narrator says she goes out at night to “espye wenches that he dighte.” Later, she mentions wives who let their lovers “dighte hire [them] al the nyght.”

We don’t know why “dick” came to mean a penis, but the OED includes this “coarse” slang sense of the word within its entry for the nickname “Dick.”

The dictionary notes that the “familiar pet-form of the common Christian name Richard” has been used generically, much like “Jack,” to mean “fellow,” “lad,” “man,” and so on.

It’s no stretch to imagine a generic masculine name being used for the preeminent masculine body part!

But how long, you ask, has “dick” been used to mean a stupid or contemptible person? Only since the 1960s, according to Cassell’s and Random House.

The earliest Random House citation is from Norman Bogner’s 1966 novel Seventh Avenue: “He’s a dick. I don’t know from respect, except for my parents.”

But why “dick” instead of, say “ralph” or “herbert”? We don’t know for sure, but we suspect that this sense comes from the sexual meaning of the word.

The usage follows several negative verbal senses of “dick” that showed up in the mid-20th century, such as “dick around” (1948, waste time), “dick off” (1948, shirk one’s duties), and “dick up” (1951, spoil).

You may be wondering how “Dick” came to be a nickname for “Richard.” The fact is that nobody knows for sure.

But if you’d like to read more, we wrote a blog entry a while back on nicknames and another on the expression “Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

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English language Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage

Hear Pat live today on WNYC

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

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Hand signals

Q: I’ve always wondered why some people say “right-hand turn” or “left-hand turn” instead of the more succinct “left turn” or “right turn.” If they’re going to use a body part, why not “right-foot turn” or “left-nostril turn”?

A: Perhaps people sometimes use “hand” in these directional phrases because they so often use their hands in gesturing to show such directions.

In any case, it seems natural to associate right and left with our right and left hands.

The Oxford English Dictionary has citations for “right-hand” or “right hand”—meaning on or toward the right—dating back to 1576.

John Milton used the adjective in Paradise Lost (1667): “Som times He scours the right hand coast.”

So did William Bartam in his Travels in North and South Carolina (1791): “On the right hand side was the Orangery.”

Similarly, “left-hand” or “left hand” has been used for centuries, meaning on, toward, or placed on the left side, the OED says.

Here’s a quotation from the satirist Samuel Rowlands (1598): “A little from that place Vpon the left-hand side.”

Both “right-hand” and “left-hand” have metaphorical meanings as well, stemming from age-old associations of “right” with correctness and “left” with wrongness.

Since Old English, “right-hand” has meant valuable or superior, as in “he’s my right-hand man,” or “to give the right hand of fellowship.”

This meaning probably came about, the OED says, “on account of the perception that the right hand was the stronger and the more appropriate for most tasks.”

And for centuries, “left-hand” has meant illegitimate (as in “a child on the left-hand side”), ill-omened, inferior, or sinister.

In fact, the Latin word sinister means left or left-hand, while the Latin dextra, which gave us “dexterous,” means the right hand.

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Shall we curate a garage sale?

Q: I’m sick of hearing the verb “curate” used loosely, as in “I’m going to curate my next garage sale … closet cleanout … laundry sorting.” AAUGH! (Forgive me, Charlie Brown.) Please do what you can to set these “curators” straight.

A: Let’s start with the noun “curate,” a word that entered English in the mid-14th century with the meaning of a clergyman.

Later, in the 16th century, the term came to mean an assistant to a parish priest in the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.

The noun “curate” comes from the medieval Latin word curatus, an adjective meaning “of, belonging to, or having a cure or charge,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

(Here “cure,” from the Latin cura, or care, means “the spiritual charge or oversight of parishioners or lay people,”  the OED says.)

Shortly after “curate” entered English, so did another noun, “curator.” This word came from the Latin curator or curatorem (meaning overseer, guardian, or agent).

When “curator” first appeared in English, in 1362, it meant a curate. But by the early 1400s it was used in a more secular way, to mean a legal guardian.

In the 17th century, it acquired a few more meanings: a manager or steward, an officer of a university, or a person in charge of a museum, art gallery, library, or the like.

This last meaning gave rise to the verb “curate,” which the OED describes as a back-formation of “curator.”

We’ve written before about back-formations, which are new words formed by dropping prefixes or suffixes from older ones.

Other examples of back-formations include “diagnose” (from “diagnosis”), “escalate” (from “escalator”), “enthuse” (from “enthusiasm”), and “surreal” (from “surrealism” and “surrealist”).

But back to the verb “curate,” which is defined in the OED this way: “to act as curator of (a museum, exhibits, etc.); to look after and preserve.”

The OED’s first printed citation is from the 1934 Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (2d ed.), but no doubt earlier examples will come to light.

We say this because the gerund “curating” was known much earlier. Here’s a quotation by the naturalist W. E. Hoyle that appeared in 1906 in The Museums Journal:

“I think it will be generally admitted that the business (or may I say ‘profession’) of museum ‘curating’ is one which demands … a special technical training.”

“Curating” is defined in the OED as “the supervision of a museum, gallery, or the like by a curator; the work of storing and preserving exhibits.”

Lately, however, the verb “curate” has been bandied about pretty freely (not to mention pretentiously), and has come loose from its museum moorings.

As Alex Williams wrote in the New York Times in an Oct. 4, 2009, article,  stores now “curate” their merchandise, nightclubs “curate” an evening’s entertainment, and websites “curate” their content.

“Curate,” Williams wrote, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting.”

Back in more “print-centric” days, the reporter added, “the term of art was ‘edit’—as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully.”

How long will this new use of “curate” last?  We suspect it will go away once it’s no longer on the cutting edge.

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How do you say “Van Gogh”?

Q: I’m a pre-kindergarten teacher in New York and my British assistant is constantly correcting my pronunciation. If I pronounce “emu” as EE-moo, she says it’s EE-myoo.  Now, we are at odds about the pronunciation of “Van Gogh.” I say van-GOH and she tells me it’s van-GOFF. Which one of us needs to go back to school?

A: Your assistant needs a couple of lessons in the history of English.

As we wrote in our book Origins of the Specious, British English (including pronunciation) is not more (or less) “correct” than American English.

This was such an important subject to us that we devoted our first chapter to it.

We’ve also written about this subject on our blog, including posts in 2010, 2009, and 2008.

The truth is that most of the characteristics that distinguish modern British pronunciation from our own developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, after the American Revolution.

Having said that, we’ll move on to the pronunciations you mention.

The word “emu,” the name of a large flightless bird, has two proper pronunciations in American English.

We can say either EE-myoo or EE-moo, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Both are standard American pronunciations, and both are given equal weight by Merriam-Webster’s.

But there’s only one standard pronunciation in British English: EE-myoo.

The name “Van Gogh” has three proper pronunciations in American English, according to most standard dictionaries: van-GOH (the most common), van-GOKH, and van-KHOKH (which comes closest to the Dutch).

The “-kh” in the second and third pronunciations are not the hard “k” of “kick,” but the guttural one we hear in the German pronoun ich and the Scottish word “loch.”

In Britain, the Dutch artist’s name can be heard as van-GOKH, van-GOFF, or van-GOH, according to the BBC’s Pronunciation Unit.

But the BBC recommends only the first, van-GOKH, with the  “-kh” sounded as in “loch.”  [Update, 2014: This opinion has been confirmed by a correspondent of ours from Oxford, who insists that the other two pronunciations are “nonsense” in British usage.]

This recommendation, the BBC says, “is codified in numerous British English pronunciation dictionaries” and “represents a compromise” between the English and Dutch pronunciations.

One source, the Collins English Dictionary, makes things easy. It gives only one pronunciation for American usage (van-GOH) and only one for British usage (van-GOKH). You can listen to them here: American and British.

And in case you’re interested, we wrote a blog entry last year about names with nobiliary particles (like the “van” in “van Gogh”).

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Hear Pat live today on Iowa Public Radio

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

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Are some numbers more equal than others?

Q: My son is completing his college application. In describing his efforts to teach rudimentary math to children at a community center, he’s written “three hammers plus one hammer equal four hammers.” Is it “equal” or “equals”? I think he’s right, but I’m not certain.

A: Either one is OK, though the singular usage (“equals”) is far more popular nowadays.

A couple of Google searches produced these results: “three plus one equals four,” 12,500 hits; “three plus one equal four,” only 7.

The choice of a singular or plural verb in such equations depends on whether you consider the first part a single unit or a compound.

Here’s what Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) has to say on the subject:

“It’s possible to treat one and one as a single mathematical idea, so the appropriate verb is is. Or it’s possible to treat the two ones separately—hence are.”

Garner’s goes on to say that the same is true for multiplication: “both four times four is sixteen and four times four are sixteen are correct. But the singular is much more common and natural in modern usage.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “plus” in this mathematical sense doesn’t get into the issue of singular versus plural verbs.

But the OED’s entry for the conjunction “and” says two numbers connected by it are “freq. treated as a unitary subject with singular verb.”

In fact, the earliest published reference in the OED for “and” used to connect two numbers (from a 1697 essay by Jeremy Collier) treats the subject as a singular: “The … notion … is as clear as that Two and Two makes four.”

However, the OED also has citations for the plural usage. Here’s one from Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs (1848): “When will you acknowledge that two and two make four, and call a pikestaff a pikestaff?”

In short, your son could use either “equal” or “equals” in his college application, but the singular is more popular now and would probably raise fewer eyebrows in the admissions office. We’d recommend going with it.

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The some of its parts

Q: Why do we use the word “some” when we approximate a number instead of, say, “about” or “nearly” or any of the other appropriate terms? Also, is this use of “some” related to “sum”?

A: English has a humongous number of words—hundreds of thousands, depending on how you count them—so it’s not surprising that we have a lot of ways to approximate a number.

The word “some” (originally spelled sum in Old English) has been used “with numbers to indicate an approximate amount or estimate” since Anglo-Saxon days, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED adds that “some” here is acting like an adverb “with the sense of ‘about, nearly, approximately.’ ”

The earliest published reference in the dictionary for this usage is from King Alfred’s translation (circa 888) of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae.

The use of “about” in this sense also dates from Anglo-Saxon days, but “nearly” didn’t show up in English until the 16th century. And it took another century for it to mean approximately.

As for “approximately” itself, this is the real newbie and didn’t show up in English until the mid-19th century.

You also asked whether “some” is related to “sum.”

Although “some” was spelled sum in Old English, as we noted above, the modern words “some” and “sum” aren’t related.

“Some” has cousins in many old Germanic languages, including Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old Norse. It may ultimately come from the Sanskrit sama (every, any).

“Sum,” on the other hand, entered English in the late 13th century. We got it from the Anglo-French summe or somme, but it ultimately comes from the Latin summa (total number or amount).

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Wha’ happen?

Q: I’ve noticed a proliferation of “What happen?” (instead of “Excuse me?” or “Come again?”) among younger friends in NYC (I’m 42). Also worth noting, it’s often collapsed into “Wha’ happen?” I suspect a Hispanic or Caribbean influence.

A: A teacher once emailed us to report that his students in the Bronx would say, “What happened?” or “Wha’ happen?” when they failed to hear something he’d said. Some of their parents would say it too.

A search of the Internet finds only a sprinkling of examples, probably because the expression is more common in speech than in writing.

We can’t say where or when this usage first happened, what influenced it, or whether it will have staying power.

But we can discuss expressions like these that a listener uses to ask a speaker to repeat or elaborate on something just said.

The linguist Dwight L. Bolinger coined a name for the usage: “reclamatory questions.”

In his 1989 book Intonation and Its Uses: Melody in Grammar and Discourse, Bolinger discusses the rising and falling tones in such questions.

We’ve written before on the blog about the practice of saying “What?” when you didn’t quite catch what somebody said.

This usage is occasionally criticized (mostly by our elders) as rude, though it has a long history.

We have lots of ways of saying “Huh?” Some of our 19th-century ancestors used “What say?” or “How?” when their ears didn’t catch some bit of conversation.

Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang says “What say?” and “How?” emerged in 19th-century America as synonyms for “What?” or “What did you say?”

“What say?” might be seen as a shorter version of “What did you say?” And it seems likely that “How?” is a shorter form of  “How’s that?” or “How’s that again?”

Now we apparently have a new variation on the theme, “What happened?” or “What happen?” or the even shorter “Wha’ happen?”

None of the slang reference sources we use include this usage.

But Cassell’s says three similar questions with another meaning (“What happen?” … “Wha’appen?” … “What happening?”) originated in the 1950s among Black speakers in the West Indies and the UK.

These questions, according to Cassell’s, are used as “a general form of greeting, hello, how are you?”

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says the use of “What’s happening?” as a greeting originated among Black Americans in the 1950s.

These slang dictionaries no doubt will catch up with the reclamatory usage.

Meanwhile, we can add “What happened?” and “What happen?” and “Wha’ happen” to “What?” and “What say?” and “How?” and “Huh?” and “Eh?” and “Mmm?” and “Yo?” and “Come again?” and “Whazzat?” and “Say what?” and all the rest!

Our hearing may occasionally be faulty, but fortunately there’s no shortage of reclamatory questions.

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Why do we have both “less” and “fewer”?

Q: I’m careful to observe the distinction between “less” and “fewer,” but I wonder why this distinction developed in the first place and why we still have it?

A: We observe the distinction too, but we may be in the minority.

We’ve written before on our blog about the decline of “fewer,” a word that seems to be occurring fewer and fewer times.

As we point out in that blog entry and others, the traditional distinction between “fewer” and “less” is that “fewer” means a smaller number of things (“fewer ice cubes”) while “less” means a smaller amount of something (“less ice”).

However, that explanation doesn’t do justice to “less,” which has many other usages besides. It’s used with percentages and fractions, and in expressions like “one less,” “no less than twenty,” and others.

But on to their development. Both “less” and “few” were derived from old Germanic languages, and they were first recorded in Old English writings in the 700s or 800s.

“Fewer,” the comparative form of “few,” came along later, and was first recorded in writing around 1340, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Less” originally was a comparative form of “little,” the OED says. Its meaning was “smaller” or “of not so great size, extent, degree,” and so on.

“Few,” meaning “not many,” is just as old as “less.” It was recorded in such sources as Beowulf (perhaps as early as the 700s), the Vespasian Psalter (circa 825), and the Venerable Bede (c 900).

Keep in mind that the line between “less” and “fewer” was not always as distinct as it is in modern usage guides.

In fact, the OED has examples from the year 888 to modern times of “less” used to mean “fewer”—that is, a smaller number of things.

This isn’t surprising, of course, since “fewer” wasn’t even available until the 14th century.

At any rate, people happily used “less” to mean “fewer” for some 900 years before anybody minded.

In 1770, the grammarian Robert Baker suggested that “fewer” would be “not only more elegant … but more strictly proper” than “less” in a phrase like “no less than a hundred.”

And that, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, is how the “rule” for using these words was born.

Today, the OED says, this use of “less” to mean “fewer” is “freq. found but generally regarded as incorrect.”

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Opposing views

Q: Is there a distinction between words that are true opposites—equidistant in opposite directions from a neutral midpoint—and words that are characterized by more or less of something? Mathematically, “east” and “west” are true opposites (opposite directions from a central geographical point), while “white” and “black” aren’t (one has all colors, the other none).

A: We assume your question was inspired by our recent blog entry about antonyms. If not, have a look at it.

In answer to your question, we don’t know of any distinction in language between words that are notional opposites and those that are mathematically measurable opposites.

But don’t confuse the two categories. Language is not quantum physics or differential geometry.

“White” and “black” are clearly notional opposites, or antonyms, words that convey opposite ideas.

The fact that to a scientist one represents the presence of something (color) and the other its absence is irrelevant from the point of view of language.

In fact, the words “absence” and “presence” themselves are notional opposites.

“Hot” and “cold” are also notional opposites. They represent opposing concepts, regardless of what is being measured and whether there is any midpoint between them.

In fact, some words that meet your idea of “true opposites” may not be antonyms at all.

“Red” and “green,” for example, may be opposites on a color wheel, but this doesn’t make them antonyms. The only “colors” that are antonyms are “black” and “white.”

While abstract (or unmeasurable) terms may be regarded as “false” from the scientist’s or mathematician’s point of view, they are nevertheless legitimate linguistic concepts.

Of course many words are opposites to both literary and scientific blokes.

As Rudyard Kipling puts it in his Barrack-Room Ballads (1892): “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

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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. If you miss a program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.

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Asses and big asses

Q: I know this might sound slightly vulgar, but I’m really curious. I’ve been wondering how to classify the word “ass” in a phrase like, “That’s a big-ass house.” What part of speech is this?

A: “Big ass” alone isn’t hard to classify, as in “My big ass makes it difficult to zip my jeans.” Here, “big ass” is a noun phrase consisting of the adjective “big” plus the noun it modifies: “ass.”

But “big ass” can play the role of an adjective as well as a noun. In the sentence “That’s a big-ass house,” it’s an adjectival phrase modifying the noun “house.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has several citations for “big-assed” with a literal meaning (that is, having large buttocks).

The first is from a 1944 entry in H. L. Mencken’s diary: “The marines’ chosen name for their female aides is bams, from big-assed marines.”

An extended use of this literal meaning—applied to airplanes with big rear ends—was recorded in the military beginning in 1945.

Both the OED and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang have citations from that time, when a plane with a large tail section (especially the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress) was referred to as a “big-ass bird” or “big-assed bird.”

But in addition to these more or less literal meanings, both dictionaries have citations for “big-assed” and “big-ass” to mean simply big or impressive.

The OED’s first citation is from a 1945 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology:

“A big white bastard stood up in front of the door, cop of course, hit me in my head with that big ass nightstick, which really rocked my brains.”

Here are a few more quotations from the OED and Random House:

“We ain’t enough, in case of a big-ass attack” (1955, from Thomas Anderson’s Your Own Beloved Sons, a novel of the Korean War).

“Abraham opened the door of his big-ass Cadillac” (1961-64, from Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn).

“He’ll sit there in this big-ass office downtown in Manila” (1977, from John Langone’s Life at the Bottom: The People of Antarctica).

“Somehow it seems daring for a big-assed conglomerate to put an artist in charge of a label’s direction” (1999, from Down Beat magazine).

In short, “big-ass” can be used adjectivally to mean simply big.

In similar adjectival usages, “smelly-ass” just means smelly; “jive-ass” means jive;  “sad-ass” means sad; “skinny-ass” means skinny, and so on. So in a sense, “ass” is a slang intensifier.

Your question gives us an excuse to explain a bit about the etymology of “ass”—or, rather, the etymologies.

Contrary to popular opinion, the two versions of “ass”—one for the posterior and one for the donkey—aren’t the same word. They’re unrelated etymologically and weren’t always identical.

The four-footed “ass” comes from an Old English word, assa, which was recorded sometime before 830 and may have been a diminutive form of an earlier word, esol.

The Old English was similar to words in Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic languages. But whatever its direct source, the Old English probably has its roots in the Latin asinus (donkey), which also gave us the word “asinine.”

The Latin asinus, like its Greek counterpart onos, is thought to have Semitic origins (in Hebrew, “she-ass” is athon).

But on to the anatomical “ass,” which is no relation to the donkey.

This “ass” was originally spelled “arse” (it still is in Britain).

“Arse” has its source in the far reaches of antiquity, a prehistoric Indo-European word that’s been reconstructed as orsos.

As you would expect, “arse” has counterparts from Ireland to Armenia, or “practically from end to end of the geographical range of the Indo-European language family,” as John Ayto puts it in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

The OED has citations for “arse” (spelled aers or ars in Old English) dating back to around 1000. The “ass” spelling and pronunciation originated in the 1930s in the US, where it’s chiefly used today.

Here are a couple of early citations:

“My ass to habeas corpus” (1930, from the John Dos Passos novel 42nd Parallel).

“You give me a pain in the ass” (1934, from John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra).

With that, we will demurely butt out.

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You no good rat!

Q: I’m wondering how the use of “you” originated when calling someone a name, as in “You no good rat!”

A: Here the pronoun “you” is being used as a vocative, a word that identifies the one being called out to or addressed.

The word “vocative” comes from the Latin verb vocare (to call), which is also the ancestor of words like “vocal,” “vocalize,” “vocation” (a calling), “evoke” (call forth), and “invoke” (call upon).

When “you” is used as a vocative, it often appears side by side with the noun or noun phrase it refers to, as in your example, “You no good rat!”

In grammatical terms, the vocative “you” is being used in apposition to (roughly, as the equivalent of) the noun phrase “no good rat.”

We’ve written several blog items, including one in 2008, that deal with apposition, a grammatical construction in which one word or phrase is the explanatory equivalent of another.

The word “you” here can be either singular or plural. Both constructions have been around since the 1500s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here are some examples from the OED of the plural usage:

“Farwell you Ladies of the Court” (Thomas Preston, 1569);

“Heare me, you wrangling Pyrates” (Shakespeare, 1594);

“You Lords of Florence, wise Machavil, and You Lord Barbarino” (Sir Aston Cokaine, 1658);

“And you, my daughters” (Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1799);

“You sirs, I said, what are you conspiring about?” (Benjamin Jowett, 1875).

As a singular, “you” is used either once (before the noun) or twice (before and after). The before-and-after version, the OED says, is often meant “in reproach  or contempt.”

Here are citations for the singular usages, some contemptuous and some not:

“My lord and you my lady” (from the French legend Melusine, circa 1500);

“Fie, fie, you counterfeit, you puppet, you” (Shakespeare, 1590);

“You asse you” (George Chapman, 1606);

“You old Sot you” (John Dryden and William Cavendish, 1667);

“You little hussy, you!” (Oliver Goldsmith, 1768);

“You young hangdog, you!” (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1840);

“You scamp not to write before” (Edward Burne-Jones, 1852);

“I love you for trying, you dear” (Bernard Capes, 1919).

By the way, the old singular pronoun “thou” was also used in a vocative way, a usage that dates back to King Alfred in the late 800s.

The Old English citations won’t be understandable, but here’s one from the 15th century: “thow olde dotyng foole” (John Lydgate, c1425).

And here’s a later one: “Thou lyest, thou iesting [jesting] Monkey thou” (Shakespeare, 1610). 

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Is this a superlative idea?

Q: Recently a friend referred to one of his two daughters as “eldest.” His wife corrected him with “elder.” All six of us present then argued over whether to use “er” or “est” here. We choose you as the final arbiter.

A: Your friend’s wife is an adherent of a very common belief: the idea that you shouldn’t use a superlative adjective like “eldest” when speaking of only two things.

Is she right? As with many of the questions we answer on the blog, this one deserves both a “no” and a “yes.”

Everyone agrees on the general idea. A comparative adjective (one ending in “er,” like “elder”), allows us to compare two things, while a superlative (ending in “est”) lets us compare several.

In its definitions of the grammatical terms, the Oxford English Dictionary says a “comparative” is used “in comparing two objects,” while a “superlative” is used “in comparing a number of things.” 

Clearly, when speaking of three or more things, one would have to use a superlative.

But the question is, can “two” go either way? Do two objects qualify as “a number of things”? If so, then it would be legitimate to use either a comparative or a superlative when speaking of two.

As we wrote in a blog entry a couple of years ago, “er” and “est” suffixes (or versions of them) have been used to compare things since the earliest days of Old English.

The practice was handed down from older Germanic languages and ultimately from ancient Indo-European.

However, the belief that a superlative shouldn’t be used for comparing two things originated much later, in the late 18th century.

And at least one language authority questioned the new rule as early as the mid-19th century, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

M-W quotes the grammarian Goold Brown as saying in 1851 that this rule “is not only unsupported by any reason in the nature of things, but is contradicted in practice by almost every man who affirms it.”

The dictionary agrees that the rule against using a superlative for two “has never reflected actual usage,” adding:

“Among the writers who found the superlative appropriate for two are Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Addison, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Chesterfield, Austen, Bryon, Scott, Irving, Hawthorne, Thackeray, Disraeli, Ruskin, Emerson, Stevenson, Thoreau, and James Russell Lowell.”

By the turn of the 20th century, M-W says, more grammarians began to come around to Goold Brown’s point of view.

Today, the M-W editors say, grammarians no longer subscribe to the old rule, though “hard-line commentators” do.

For example, the generally conservative Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) calls the superlative for two a “blunder.”

Where does that leave us? With the “no” and the “yes” we mentioned above.

Here’s M-W’s conclusion:

“The rule requiring the comparative has a dubious basis in theory and no basis in practice, and it serves no useful communicative purpose. Because it does have a fair number of devoted adherents, however, you may well want to follow it in your most dignified or elevated writing.”

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Is “chalant” the opposite of “nonchalant”?

Q: I hear “nonchalant” used all the time to mean unconcerned, but I never hear “chalant” used to mean concerned. Is there such a word in English?

A: No, there’s no “chalant,” just “nonchalant.” Only the negative form of the word has found a home in English.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “nonchalant” was borrowed from French sometime before 1734.

It’s defined as meaning “calm and casual; (deliberately) lacking in enthusiasm or interest; indifferent, unconcerned.”

In French, nonchalant is the present participle of the verb nonchaloir (the earlier form was nonchaler), meaning to neglect or despise.

Its roots are the negative prefix non and the verb chaloir (earlier chaler), meaning to interest or to be important.

Those French verbs came from the classical Latin verb calere, which the OED defines as “to be warm, to be roused with zeal or anger, to be active.”

But though we don’t have “chalant,” we once had an adjective derived from that Latin verb: “calent.”

It’s no longer used, but back in the 1600s and 1700s it meant  warm or hot.

We’ve written before on the blog about words like “disgruntled” and “inscrutable” that seem to have only negative forms.

The third edition of Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I includes a section about words like these. We’ll quote the passage:

“Some words are sourpusses. They’re negative through and through, and have no positive counterparts. I’m thinking of words like unkempt, inept, disgruntled, and uncouth. We might joke about looking ‘kempt’ or being ‘couth,’ but in fact the negatives have no opposite forms—they’re either obsolete rarities or whimsical inventions.

“Other negatives with nonexistent or obscure opposite numbers include debunk, disappointing, disconcerting, disconsolate, disheveled, dismayed, immaculate, impeccable, inadvertent, incapacitated, inclement, incognito, incommunicado, incorrigible, indefatigable, inevitable, indomitable, insipid, misnomer, mistake, nonchalant, noncommittal, nondescript, nonpareil, nonplussed, unassuming, unbeknownst, ungainly, and unwieldy.

“Some similar words without opposite versions may look like negatives, but they aren’t. Their negative-looking prefixes (im and in) emphasize or intensify instead. Actually, intensify and instead are among these words, and so are insure, impromptu, inscribe, and inflammable.”

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War of the words: Buckley vs. Wills

Q: I heard Garry Wills say on the radio that “oxymoron” got its present meaning (a pair of contradictory words) because William F. Buckley misunderstood its actual meaning (sharply foolish) and used it incorrectly in the National Review. Can you clear this up for me?

A: We didn’t hear Wills on the radio, but he did write in The Atlantic last year that Buckley liked to use “big words for their own sake, even when he was not secure in their meaning.”

“One of his most famous usages,” Wills wrote, “poisoned the general currency, especially among young conservatives trying to imitate him.”

These conservatives began using “oxymoron” in the sense Buckley gave it, he said, “though that was the opposite of its true meaning.”

Here’s how Wills explained Buckley’s thinking about “oxymoron”:

“He thought it was a fancier word for ‘contradiction,’ so young imitators would say that ‘an intelligent liberal’ was an oxymoron. But the Greek word means ‘something that is surprisingly true, a paradox,’ as in a shrewd dumbness.”

What do we think? We’re with Buckley on this and we’d say Wills’s etymology here is an example of dumb shrewdness.

To begin with, the word apparently didn’t exist in Greek, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, though English writers coined an ersatz Greek version of it (using Greek letters) in the 17th century.  

The Romans coined oxymorum in the 5th century from the Greek roots oxus (sharp, keen, or pointed) and moros (foolish).

But the word never meant “sharply foolish” (or “shrewd dumbness”) either in Latin or in English.

To claim that as the word’s original meaning would be overly literal. A closer interpretation would be “pointedly incongruous.”

In modern English “oxymoron” has two meanings. The first is the one it’s had since it entered English in 1640, quite a few years before Buckley used it in the National Review.

Here’s how the OED defines this traditional sense of the word: “A figure of speech in which a pair of opposed or markedly contradictory terms are placed in conjunction for emphasis.” (This is also the definition in Latin.)

Here’s an example from the Quarterly Review of 1890: “Voltaire … we might call, by an oxymoron which has plenty of truth in it, an ‘Epicurean pessimist.’ ”

And that’s pretty much how Buckley uses the word in Miles Gone By: A Literary Biography (2004), when he refers to “martial Quakerism” as an oxymoron.

A newer, more general meaning is “a contradiction in terms,” which the OED says originated in 1902.

A couple of quotations from food writing are good illustrations of this looser usage:

“ ‘Healthful’ and ‘Mexican food’ need not be an oxymoron” (Texas Monthly, 1989);

“This opened up an oxymoron too dreadful to contemplate: affordable caviar” (The Guardian, 1993).

You can see the difference. In the newer usage, the contradictory terms aren’t deliberately juxtaposed for emphasis; they’re merely contradictory. And sometimes the contrariness is humorous, as in “jumbo shrimp.”

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Why did we start “she”-ing ships?

Q: I was wondering if the old custom of referring to a ship as a female derives from the use of gender in other languages for inanimate things. I haven’t found any support for this idea, but it does fit nicely.

A: As we’ve written on our blog, the personification of nonliving nouns (e.g., ships or nations) as “she” has fallen out of common usage. It’s now generally considered quaint or poetic.

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition), as well as the style books of the Associated Press and the New York Times, recommend using “it” or “its” to refer to ships.

In 2002, Lloyd’s List, the 276-year-old London-based shipping newspaper, officially dropped the gender personification and now refers to ships with the pronouns “it” and “its” instead of “she” and “her.”

We can’t say for certain why ships were traditionally referred to with feminine pronouns, but we’ll pass on some theories that we’ve come across.

Under its entry for “she,” the Oxford English Dictionary describes the usage this way: “Used (instead of it) of things to which female sex is conventionally attributed,” such as “a ship or boat.”

The earliest example of this usage in the OED is from a medieval work, John Barbour’s The Bruce (1375), a history of Robert the Bruce, King of Scots.

In the quotation, which uses Middle English spellings, a “schip” (ship) is referred to as “scho” (she).

And since that time, some other things besides ships have been, as the OED says, “personified as feminine.” 

These include “natural objects considered as feminine,” including “the moon, or the planets that are named after goddesses.”

Also included are “the soul, a city, the church, a country,” and even (though the usage is now obsolete) an army.

In addition, the pronoun “she” has been used—and still is in colloquial usage or dialect—to refer to “a carriage, a cannon or gun, a tool or utensil of any kind; occas. of other things.”

Why was “she” used in these cases?

The fact that nouns had grammatical gender in Old English probably doesn’t account for it. But other languages may have had some influence.

In two early OED citations, which come from English translations of French works, “she” is used in reference to a door (c. 1380) and to a room or chamber (c. 1475).

The words for “door” (porte) and “room” (chambre) are feminine in French, and the OED says “the grammatical gender of the Fr. words rendered may have influenced the translators.”

A couple of 15th- and 16th-century citations in which “she” is used in reference to the sun “may possibly be due to misprint,” the OED says.

Any survival of the Old English grammatical gender for the word “can hardly be supposed,” Oxford adds, but the 15th-century citation “may have been influenced by the fact that the sun is fem. in Flemish.”

This seems likely, since that 15th-century work was printed by William Caxton, whose assistant, Colard Mansion, was a Flemish printer and scribe. 

But we’re still left scratching out heads and wondering why some people to this day use “she” for things that have no gender.

Perhaps the grammarian Otto Jespersen came closest to an explanation in his Essentials of English Grammar (1933).

Jespersen wrote that some inanimate things may be personified “to show a certain kind of sympathy with or affection for the thing, which is thereby, as it were, raised above the inanimate sphere.”

“In such cases,” he adds, “the speaker does not really attribute sex to the thing in question, and the choice of a sexual pronoun is occasioned only by the fact that there is no non-sexual pronoun available except  the inert it.”

So sometimes we may feel that “it” is simply too lifeless and inadequate—or, as Jespersen says, “inert.”

That seems as good a reason as any for why people have wanted to give ships a feminine touch.

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Junk mail and male junk

Q: I was listening to a discussion on talk radio about the use of the word “junk” in reference to the male genitalia. Some people were saying it goes back to the ’60s. Do you have a take on this? The subject was inspired, of course, by the TSA’s body scans and pat-downs.

A: The use of “junk” as a slang term for the male genitalia is a fairly recent development, as these things go.

It’s probably been around for only about  20 years, according to discussions on the mailing list of the American Dialect Society, which is composed largely of linguists and lexicographers.

Jonathon Green writes in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang that “junk” was first used to mean the male genitals during the 1990s on American college campuses.

The sports blog Deadspin has used it lately in a lot of posts, including one last month about Brett Favre.

Speaking of “junk,” the noun entered English around 1400, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word has meant a lot of things over the years, including inferior rope, narcotics, and rubbish. (Inferior rope? Hmm.)

And it’s given us such noun phrases as “junk art,” “junk bond,” “junk food,” and “junk mail.”

We’d guess that the genital usage will be going viral now, thanks to the Transportation Security Administration, though the lexicographers at the OED Online haven’t lassoed it yet.

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Object lessons

Q: My fellow English teachers and I are stumped by how to diagram this sentence: “See Spot run.” The subject is the missing but understood “you,” the verb is “see,” and the direct object is “Spot.” But what part of speech is “run”?

A: In the sentence “See Spot run,” the implied subject is “you,” the verb is “see,” the indirect object is “Spot,” and the direct object is the infinitive “run.”

An infinitive or infinitive phrase (an infinitive preceded by “to”) can be the direct object of a verb. Here’s another example: “I want you to go.”

Subject, “I”; verb, “want”; indirect object, “you”; direct object, “to go” (infinitive phrase).

If those sentences did not include the infinitives (that is, if they consisted of “See Spot” and “I want you”), then “Spot” and “you” would be direct objects. When a verb has only one object, it’s a direct object.

Similarly, in the sentence “I intend to go,” the verb has only one object, a direct object (the infinitive phrase “to go”). 

Another so-called “verbal,” the gerund, can also be a direct object, as in “I intend going [direct object].”  

We’ve written several times on the blog about direct and indirect objects, including a post earlier this year entitled “Object oriented.”

By the way, when you have both kinds of objects following the verb, the indirect object nearly always comes first:

“Give them my love” … “Bake me a cake” … “Make it go” … “I helped him escape” … “You made me understand.”

In the last three examples, the direct objects are infinitives: “go,” “escape,” “understand.”

The only exception in which the direct object comes before the indirect object is a British usage involving two pronouns. Examples: “Give it me” … “Tell it her.”

Incidentally, a prepositional phrase like “to me” or “for her” can be used in place of an indirect object, but the phrase is not technically considered an indirect object.

The pronouns “me” and “her” here are objects of a preposition, not objects of a verb.

If you’d like to know more, we can direct to you Otto Jespersen’s Essentials of  English Grammar (1933). The book has been reissued in paperback.

Jespersen, a renowned grammarian, discusses the use of infinitives as objects on pages 271-272.

In addition, if you have access to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, see the section starting on page 244. This is a very technical book.

The authors, the linguists Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, discuss clauses that have one object (“monotransitive”) and two (“ditransitive”).

Where only one object exists, they write, “that object is always a direct object, even if it corresponds semantically to the indirect object of a ditransitive clause.” (Page 251).

We’ll simplify the examples they use to illustrate this point:

(1) “She teaches students [indirect object] logic [direct object].”

(2) “She teaches students [direct object].”

(3) “She teaches logic [direct object].”

So the direct object in sentence #2 corresponds to the indirect object in sentence #1.

We hope this sheds some light.

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Anne Boleyn, part 2

Q: In your post about poor Anne Boleyn, you discuss whether she was beheaded or deheaded. I have another choice: was she beheaded or debodied? And after the execution, which piece WAS poor Anne? Just parsing the language.

A: After Anne was beheaded, she consisted of TWO parts. It was the whole that was beheaded (or debodied, if there were such a word).

Although the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have an entry for “debody,” it does have one for “detrunk,” a verb meaning to cut off or lop off.

However you refer to the process, Anne was neither here nor there as a result of it, but in two places at once!

You might say, though, that her soul was disembodied.

By the way, the verb “disembody” and the past participle “disembodied” are relatively new, dating back to the 18th century.

Before that, a soul was said to “unbody” or be “unbodied,” as in this example from Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1374): “The fate wold his soule sholde vnbodye.”

At any rate, all of Anne was buried together in a chapel near the Tower Green, and the body was identified as hers centuries later, when renovations were done to the chapel in Queen Victoria’s time.

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To “be,” or not to “be”

Q: I want to use “Where be thy jewels?” in a poem set in Elizabethan times. I know “be” is now regarded as incorrect. Was it correct then? I don’t like throwing around the words “correct” and “incorrect,” but I do like being accurate.

A: We agree with you that people should be careful about using words like “correct” and “incorrect” where language is concerned, though sometimes we have to take a position one way or the other.

As we’ve noted many times on the blog, a usage that’s frowned upon today may have been perfectly acceptable a few hundred years ago.

In answer to your question, the unadorned verb “be” was used in place of  “am,” “is,” or “are” at various times in history.

One of those times, it turns out, was the Elizabethan age. So, yes, it would be historically accurate to use “Where be thy jewels?” in your poem.

Shakespeare (1564-1616), that most famous Elizabethan, used “be” for “are” quite a bit. These are only a few examples:

“Where be thy brothers?” (King Richard III); “Where  be your powers?” (King John); “Where be my horses?” (Merry Wives of Windsor); “Where be these bloody thieves?” (Othello).

Such uses of “be” were common in Old English and date back into the 800s, according to examples in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Although this kind of “be” was rare during most of the Middle English period (1100-1500), it came to life again in the late 1300s. Chaucer, for example, used “we be” around 1385.

In fact, the OED has citations from Chaucer’s time until well into the 19th century for the use of “be” in place of “am,” “is,” or “are.” Here are some 19th-century examples of “be” in action:

1820, in Byron’s Marino Faliero: “And who be they?”

1861, in Thackeray’s The Four Georges: “Where be your painted houris?”

1864, in Tennyson’s Northern Farmer: “I beänt a fool.”

And on the other side of the Atlantic, the American lexicographer Noah Webster writes in his Dissertations on the English Language (1789): “The verb be … is still used after the ancient manner, I be, you be, we be, they be.”

As for today, the OED says, this usage is obsolete. But while it’s now considered nonstandard, it lives on and can still be heard in dialects spoken in both England and the United States.

In England, the OED says, this use of “be” (or the variants “beest,” “be’st,” and “beth”) occurs widely in some dialects, mostly in the southern and midland regions.

“The negative I ben’t, beant, baint is even more widely used dialectally,” the OED says.

In our own country, the Dictionary of American Regional English has collected scores of 20th-century examples of the nonstandard use of “be.”

They were recorded among both blacks and whites, mostly in the South, the southern Midwest, and the Northeast.

How did this now obsolete use of “be” come about?

First, it’s important to know that the verb “be” started out as three different verbs of Germanic origin: “be,” “am,” and “was.”

These eventually were combined under the umbrella of the infinitive “be,” but the various tenses and conjugations took centuries to sort themselves out.

For example, “are” originated in the north of England and didn’t make its way south, and thus into standard English, until the early 1500s.

However, the OED says, “be continued in concurrent use till the end of the century (see Shakespeare, and Bible of 1611).”

In England today, the OED notes, “the regular modern Eng. plural is are, which now tends to oust be even from the subjunctive. Southern and eastern dialect speech retains be both in singular and plural, as ‘I be a going,’ ‘we be ready.’ ”

By the way, don’t confuse the obsolete use of “be” we’re discussing here with the “be” that’s used in the subjunctive mood, as in “I asked that I be excused.”

We’ve written on the blog about the subjunctive, which is losing ground in British English (as the OED notes) but is holding its own (for now) in standard American English.

In short, “be” (along with similar forms like “beest,” “be’st,” “beth,” and so forth) was once “correct” for singular as well as plural in the first, second, and third person present indicative.

And “be” (along with its cousins) is still being used that way dialectally in the US and England.

Finally, the obsolete use of “be” for “are” lives on not only in dialect but also in the familiar expression “the powers that be.”

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Was Anne Boleyn deheaded?

Q: I’ve been puzzled by the word “beheaded” and why it’s not “deheaded,” since the letters “be” preceding a word typically add a feature (e.g., “bewitch,” bedeck,” “bedazzle”), and the letters “de” generally detract a feature (e.g., “defrock,” “demote,” “defrost”). Could you please explain this?

 A: The prefix “be-” has many senses in English. To mention only a couple, it can mean not only to give but also, more rarely, to take away. 

It comes from old Germanic sources, and ultimately from a prehistoric Indo-European root reconstructed as bhi.

In Old English, the prefix was a form of the preposition and adverb we now know as “by.” 

Words with this prefix that were not accented on the first syllable came to have “be-” rather than “by-” spellings. For example, the word “because” was once written as “by cause” or “bycause.”

The prefix “be-” has several functions in English that are explored in detail in the Oxford English Dictionary and other language references.

We’ll try to simplify the various meanings of this very versatile prefix.

Originally, “be-” was used in the sense of “about,” as seen in words like “bespatter,” “bestir,” “beset,” “become” (literally, to “come about”), and “bedeck” (to “deck about”).

This sense was later enlarged to include “at or near,” as reflected in “behind,” “beyond,” “below,” “beneath,” “beside,”  and “between,” which literally means “by two.”

The prefix is also used in the sense of “thoroughly” or “completely” to form intensive verbs, like “bewilder,” “bewitch,” “bedazzle,” “becalm,” and “bemuse” (to make utterly confused or muddled).

When used to form participial adjectives, the prefix means furnished with “in an overdone way,” the OED says, as in “beribboned,” “bewigged,” “bedeviled,” etc.

In addition, “be-” is used in the sense of “make” or “cover with” or “furnish with,” and is added to adjectives and nouns to form verbs: “befoul,” “besot,” “befool” (to make a fool of), “beknight” (to make a knight of), “bedew,” “bewhisker,” “beguile,” “bejewel,” “befriend,” and so on.

The prefix is also used to make verbs transitive by giving them a prepositional sense, as in “bespeak” (“speak about/for”) “bemoan” (“moan about/over”), and “bewail” (“wail about”).

Finally we come to the meaning you’re puzzled  about. The prefix “be-” was once used (and occasionally still is) in the sense of “off” or “away” to form verbs.

Most of these old verbs are no longer with us, but traces of the old usage remain in the verbs “bereave” (originally, to dispossess), and “behead.”

There’s another class of words that we’ve barely mentioned—the ones that kept the old “by-” or “bye-” prefix. Unlike the “be-” words, these are accented on the  first syllable.

Examples include some descended from Old English like “bylaw” and “byword,” as well as more modern words like “bygone,” “byroad,” and “bystander.” 

Incidentally, don’t confuse “be-” prefixed words with those, like “begone” and “beware,” in which the first syllable represents the verb “be.” These were once expressed in two words: “be ware,” “be gone.” 

The above information comes from the OED, the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, and John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Something tells us you’d be interested in a blog item we wrote last year that touches on so-called “debone verbs.”

These are verbs (like “bone” and “debone”) that mean the same thing with or without the “de-” prefix.

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Are husband and wife antonyms?

Q: My son, a fourth grader, has a homework sheet that gives “brother/sister” and “husband/wife” as antonyms. Somehow this doesn’t seem right to me. What do you think?

A: The school worksheet misused the word “antonym.” It means “opposite.”

In its entry for “antonym,” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) defines it as “a word having a meaning opposite to that of another word.”

The dictionary give this sentence as an example: “The word wet is an antonym of the word dry.”

Words like “brother,” “sister,” “husband,” and “wife” do not have opposites, or antonyms. The only possible opposites of “brother” and “husband” would be “not brother” and “not husband.” Such terms wouldn’t have any meaning.

You might say that “brother” has a feminine counterpart: “sister.” And “wife” has a masculine counterpart: “husband.” But they aren’t opposites.

Neither are, for example, the nouns “dog” and “cat.” The dog might be called a canine counterpart to the cat; the cat might be called a feline counterpart to the dog. But they aren’t opposites.

The adjectives “male” and “female” may be said to be opposites, however. Most antonyms tend to be adjectives and represent extremes of some condition or state: “black/white,” “wet/dry,” “dead/alive,” “light/dark,” and so on.

We’re not saying that opposite nouns don’t exist. “Good” and “evil” might be described as opposites, for instance.

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Widow thou goest

Q: I’ve always wondered why women are widows and men are widowers. Can you shed some light?

A: This is something we’ve wondered about ourselves, and now we have an excuse to ferret out the answer.

As you might imagine, “widow” is a very old word. It came into English in the 800s through old Germanic sources.

But its ancestry goes far back into prehistory, to an ancient Indo-European stem reconstructed as widh (to be empty or separated).

This same prehistoric root may be seen in the Latin verb dividere (to separate), as well as in the English “divide,” “individual,” and other words.

In Old English, there were two versions of “widow”: the masculine widewa and the feminine widewe. So there was one word for a bereaved husband and another for a bereaved wife.

The “er” ending for the masculine version developed in the late 14th century, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest citation for the new word is from the poem Piers Plowman (1362), in the phrase “widewers and widewes.”

The two words were spelled various ways until the modern “widow” and “widower” emerged as the standard forms in the 18th century.

This may sound pretty straightforward, but the actual evolution of “widow” and “widower” was a bit messier.

The feminine version was used now and then to refer to men from around 1000 to the late 19th century, sometimes by itself and sometimes in the phrase “widow-man.”

The latest citation for this usage is from an 1894 novel by the Scottish writer Samuel R. Crockett: “I had been a widow three years when I began to gang aboot Parton Hoose to see her.”  

Meanwhile, the verb “widow” (to make a widow of) and the participial adjective “widowed” have continued to apply to both sexes.

A “widow” is defined in the OED as “a woman whose husband is dead (and who has not married again); a wife bereaved of her husband.”

And a “widower” is “a man whose wife is dead (and who has not married again); a husband bereaved of his wife.”

Here’s an etymological aside. John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that the Indo-European root we mentioned above “produced a large number of words for ‘widow’ in the Indo-European languages.”

Those words include the Latin vidua (source of the French veuve, Italian vedova, and Spanish viuda), the Russian and Czech vdova, Welsh gweddr, German witwe, Dutch weduwe, and of course our English “widow.”

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A sigh is just a sigh

Q: Is there an approved pronunciation for the word “scythe” that sounds like “sigh”?

A: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and the Oxford English Dictionary give only one pronunciation, with the “th” sounded at the end.

The OED’s pronunciation key renders the vowel sound like that in “buy” and the final consonant sound as a hard “th,” like the one in “bathe.” 

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) lists that pronunciation too, but it also lists a variant that sounds like “sigh.”

M-W gives both pronunciations equal weight, meaning both are equally acceptable.

The dictionary’s acceptance of “sigh” as a pronunciation may be a relatively recent development, however.

Our 1956 copy of Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition) doesn’t list it.

As you might expect of such a venerable old tool, “scythe” is a word of great antiquity. The OED’s first citation for its appearance in writing is from about 725.

In Old English, it was spelled something like sithe or sigthi, and its older cousins from other Germanic languages also show evidence of a pronounced “th” or “g” sound at or near the end of the word.

The Latin-influenced spelling with “sc” was a later development, and didn’t become widespread until the 17th century.

The OED notes that the 18th-century lexicographer Samuel Johnson preferred the “etymologically correct spelling sithe.”

But it adds that “his authority has not prevailed against the currency of the spelling with sc, due to erroneous association with L. scindere to cut.”

Getting back to the end of the word, the “th” in “scythe” was indeed pronounced in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to several editions of John Walker’s pronouncing dictionaries (the entries are labeled “SITHE, or SCYTHE”).

In checking a 1791 edition of Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language, though, we found a surprise.

The word “sigh” apparently was sometimes pronounced much like “scythe”!

In a note attached to his entry for “SIGH,” Walker notes that a “very extraordinary pronunciation of this word prevails in London, and, what is more extraordinary, on the Stage.”

He describes this pronunciation as “so different from every other word of the same form as to make it a perfect oddity in the language.”

“This pronunciation approaches to the word scythe,” he adds, “and the only difference is that scythe has the flat aspiration as in this; and sigh the sharp one, as in thin.”  

Walker goes on to condemn this pronunciation as a “palpable contempt of orthography.”

He may have been unaware that in an old British dialect, a verb spelled and pronounced like “sithe” was a variant of “sigh.”

The OED has citations for this use of “sithe” at various periods ranging from about 1275 to 1875.

One example of its use in print comes from William Holloway’s A General Dictionary of Provincialisms (1838): “I knew a clergyman who always read ‘Sithing,’ for ‘sighing of a contrite heart.’ ”

The OED describes this usage as a remnant of a long dead verb, siche, which dated back to the ninth century and also meant “sigh.”

In fact, siche may have been the ancestor of “sigh,” which actually came along later, sometime before 1300.

When siche became obsolete in the 1400s, the OED says, its past tense forms became associated with the newer “sigh” and remained in use.

So what sounded to Walker like a mispronunciation of “sigh” as “sithe” was actually the dying gasp of a much older verb—and one more example of how language changes as time goes by.

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Why do “label” and “table” rhyme?

Q: I’m baffled that “el” and “le” are often pronounced the same at the end of a word (e.g., “label” and “table”), but always sound different at the beginning (“elbow” and “legal”). Is there a reason or is it just a weirdness of English?

A: When “le” comes at the front, the “e” must be pronounced in some way or other because it supplies the first syllable’s vowel sound. But an “e” at the end of a word is frequently silent. 

This isn’t unusual. It’s true no matter what consonant you pair with “e.”

For example, take “e” plus “m”: the “e” is pronounced at the front of the word (as in “mesa”), but it’s silent at the end (“same”).

Or take “e” and “z”: the “e” is pronounced in “zebra” but it’s silent in “amaze.”

A silent “e” at the end of a word is not itself pronounced, but it can influence the pronunciation of the preceding vowel.

For example, “sit” has a short “i” but “site” has a long one. “Dam” has a short “a,” but “dame” has a long one.

Now back to “l.” Generally, English words ending in “el,” “al,” and “le” all have a final syllable that sounds like “ul.” Example: “vowel,” “final,” “little.” 

But when these same letter combinations are found at the beginnings of words, the vowel sounds vary widely: “elegant/eleven,” “alderman/altitude/ale,” “lenient/leg,” and so on.

Our point is that vowels can sound very different depending on their position. And when “e” comes last, it’s often silent.

There’s another question hidden in all this: Why do some English words have the suffix “le” and some the suffix “el”?

This is a complicated question, because there are two kinds of “el” endings and three kinds of “le” endings! So if you’re still interested, read on.

Words ending in “el” generally are nouns and come from either Old English or Old French.

(1) A few Old English words that once ended in el, ela, or ele are still spelled with “el” in Modern English, though most have since changed to “le.” The words that have retained the earlier spellings include “hovel,” “brothel,” and “kernel.” 

(2) Most modern-day nouns that end in “el” came into English from Old French, including “tunnel,” “bowel,” “chapel,” “novel,” “pimpernel,” “apparel,” “jewel,” “vowel,” “satchel,” and “kennel.” In French these words had the endings el (masculine), elle (feminine), eil, and il.

And now for the three types of “le” endings, which are found on the following kinds of words.

(1)  Nouns. Some are derived from Old English and earlier Germanic languages and are names of tools or implements: “handle,” “thimble,” “bridle,” “kettle,” “girdle,” and others. Some are derived from Old French: “castle,” “bottle,” “battle,” “mantle,” “cattle.” The French endings were el, aille, or eille.

(2) Adjectives. These are from Old English and often have the sense of aptness to do something, as in “brittle,” “fickle,”  and “nimble.”

(3) Verbs. These are from Old English or earlier Germanic sources, and they tend to express repeated action or movement, diminutive senses, or echo-like sounds. Examples include “nestle,” “twinkle,” “wrestle,” “crackle,” “crumple,” “dazzle,” “hobble,” “niggle,” “paddle,” “sparkle,” “topple,” “wriggle,” “babble,” “cackle,” “gabble,” “giggle,” and “mumble.”

More than you wanted to know? Blame the Oxford English Dictionary and the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, which are the sources for much of this information. 

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Etymology Linguistics Uncategorized

Birth of the cool

Q: My impression is that “cool” in modern usage (“cool it” or “she’s cool”) derives from black culture. Now, of course, it’s been appropriated by the general culture and everyone uses it. Am I right?

A: Black slang has enriched English in ways that most people (including many African Americans) don’t realize. And it goes way beyond “cool.”

Mention African-American slang to the man in the street and he might come up with a scant handful of recent coinages: “dis,” “chill,” “cred,” “phat,” “bling,” and “gangsta.”

But the story is much bigger than that. BE (linguist-speak for Black English) has been contributing to the general American vocabulary, both standard and slang, since the 19th century.

“Cool” is a good example.

The use of it as a noun meaning composure (as in “keeping one’s cool”) was first recorded in 1953 and originated in Black English, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

But the dictionary, edited by Jonathan Lighter, says “cool” had been used among African Americans as early as 1933 in another sense, as an adjective meaning exciting, enjoyable, or superlative (as in “the coolest drummer alive”).

Here’s a sampling of popular terms, both old and new, that were either invented or adapted to colorful new uses by speakers of Black English.

Words:  “hip,” “dig,” “soul,” “funky,” “gig,” “jam,” “jive,” “boogie,” “boogie-woogie,” “corny,” “heavy” (amazing or admirable), “bad” (that is, good), “jones” (an addiction or habit), “do” (hairdo), and “lame” (foolish).

Also, “righteous” (honorable), “attitude” (also ’tude), “girlfriend” (as a form of address between women), “homeboy,” “ ’hood,” “yo,” “ride” (a skateboard), “uptight,” “props” (respect), “man” (used in direct address), and “the man” (the police or white society).

Phrases: “get with it,” “bad-mouth,” “chill out,” “talk trash” (to lie), “strut your stuff,” “chump change” (small change), “kick back” (relax), “live large” (that is, extravagantly), “do your (own) thing,” “get-go” (the beginning), “go down” (to take place), “get down” (to work), “nitty gritty,” and “rip off” (to exploit).

Other expressions: “Right on!” … “Don’t go there” … “What’s up with that?” … “You go, girl!” … “You’re the man” (expressing admiration) … “Say what?” … “Tell it like it is” … “What goes around comes around.”

Gone are the days when commentators on English dissed the language of the streets. It has crossed over into mainstream use.

Margaret G. Lee made that point in a 1999 article in the journal American Speech called “Out of the Hood and into the News: Borrowed Black Verbal Expressions in a Mainstream Newspaper” (1999).

She notes that slang in general, not just African-American slang, “is no longer perceived as a low, vulgar, nonmeaning language of the vagrant or illiterate classes as it was in the 1800s and early 1900s.”

The use of slang by mainstream journalists and other educated professionals, she adds, “indicates its respect and status among some outgroup speakers.”

As two former journalists and “outgroup speakers” who appreciate slang, we couldn’t agree more.

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