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English English language Etymology Expression Language News Pronunciation Usage Word origin

The battle for ‘Kyiv’

Q: Ukraine is dominating the news right now, and its capital, when written, is spelled “Kyiv.” But at one time the common spelling was “Kiev.” Any idea why the new spelling and how it happened so quickly?

A: This didn’t happen overnight. The change from a Russian-influenced spelling (“Kiev”) to a Ukrainian one (“Kyiv”) had been in the works for decades, though it didn’t begin appearing in American news articles until 2019.

Ukraine had been pushing for the spelling change since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the country gained independence and declared Ukrainian its official state language. The government repudiated the use of “Kiev,” a Soviet-era spelling based on a Russian transliteration, in favor of “Kyiv,” the Ukrainian transliteration.

As you probably know, neither language, Ukrainian nor Russian, is written in the Latin alphabet that English uses. Both use Cyrillic scripts; the city’s name is Ки́їв in Ukrainian Cyrillic and Киев in Russian Cyrillic.

And the governments of Ukraine and Russia also have different ways of romanizing the name—that is, transliterating it into the Latin alphabet. It’s “Kyiv” in Ukraine, “Kiev” in Russia.

The difference seems small but it’s significant. Since English is the language of international diplomacy, the spelling that any particular country approves for government use—whether “Kiev,” “Kyiv, “Kiyev,” “Kyyiv,” or something else—is the one that appears in that country’s official correspondence with other governments. And the spelling matters for practical reasons too, as you’ll see.

Ukraine’s official adoption of the “Kyiv” spelling was made law in 1995. In 2006, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names approved “Kyiv” as the preferred spelling to be used within the federal government. The board said the change was requested by the U.S. State Department, which recommended “Kyiv” because it was the romanized spelling used in Ukraine.

But though the Board on Geographic Names officially approved “Kyiv” in 2006, it also allowed the conventional spelling “Kiev” as an alternative. That later changed.

On June 11, 2019, the board voted to disallow “Kiev,” announcing that “Kyiv” was “now the only name available for standard use within the United States (U.S.) Government.” Again, the board said it made the change on the recommendation of the State Department.

The panel added that its action would affect usage “inside and outside the United States, in particular on international flights and in airports around the world.”

It went on to say that “many international organizations, including the International Air Transport Association (IATA), refer specifically to official names in the database of the United States Board on Geographic Names.”

Later that same year, news organizations in the US and the UK began changing the way they spelled the name. As far as we can tell, The Associated Press was first to make the change, in August 2019, with NPR and the BBC, along with major American and British newspapers, soon to follow.

At the The New York Times, the change to “Kyiv” became effective in articles published after Nov. 18, 2019. The paper explained at the time that the policy reflected “the transliteration from Ukrainian, rather than Russian.”

Today the “Kyiv” spelling has become almost universal throughout Western news organizations. Most recent to adopt it is the French state-owned news agency Agence France-Presse in January 2022.

Now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the pronunciation of “Kyiv” has been getting attention. The actual Ukrainian pronunciation, as heard in this YouTube video, eludes many westerners. It sounds more like KEEV than key-EV, according to a recent article in The Times.

NPR, which endorsed the new spelling in 2019, announced last month that it was also adopting a new on-air pronunciation. A similar one can now be heard on the BBC.

As for the name itself, it’s thought to come from “Kyi,” a personal name. The city, according to legend, was founded in the sixth century by a group of siblings and named for the oldest brother, Kyi. But that may be a folk etymology.

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English English language Etymology Expression Language News Usage Word origin Writing

What’s news?

Q: The word “news” looks plural but acts singular. Why is it singular? Was it ever plural?

A: Despite the “s” at the end, “news” is singular in modern English. That’s why we say “The news is good,” not “The news are good.”

Standard dictionaries all treat “news” as a mass (or uncountable) noun that’s used with a singular verb.

Merriam-Webster, for instance, labels the word “plural in form but singular in construction.” Cambridge calls it “an uncountable noun” that “takes a singular verb.” And according to Macmillan, “it is never used in the plural.”

The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.) says “news” and other mass nouns “look plural but are invariably singular.” Examples include “the news is good” and “good news is always welcome.”

But “news” wasn’t always regarded as invariably singular. We’re fans of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, and we’ve noticed that he uses “news” sometimes as a plural and sometimes as a singular:

“The news was soon all about London” (The Eustace Diamonds, 1871); “when the news were first told to Lady Ushant” (The American Senator, 1875).

In fact, when “news” first appeared in the early 1400s, it was exclusively plural. And though the singular use became established only a century later, the plural use persisted in respectable English until well into the 19th century. Here’s the story.

Since early Old English, “new” has been used as both an adjective (meaning recent) and as a noun for a new person or thing (a usage that survives in expressions like “the shock of the new” and “off with the old, on with the new”).

This ancient word was inherited from other Germanic languages, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence.

But the “news” we’re talking about, as the dictionary explains, was “formed within English” and modeled after the French word nouvelles (new things).

Here’s how “news” is defined in the OED: “The report or account of recent (esp. important or interesting) events or occurrences, brought or coming to one as new information; new occurrences as a subject of report or talk; tidings.”

As we mentioned, the word was originally treated as a plural. The OED’s earliest plural example, a reference to “gracious and joyous newes,” is from an elaborately courtly letter written in 1417 to King Henry V by his Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The phrase cited has a distant plural antecedent.

However, these later OED citations more clearly demonstrate the plural use: “the newes of the seid Lord Malpertuis, which ben [be] these” (1489); “troubled with those newes” (1523); “These newes were sodainly [suddenly] spred” (1581); “these glad newes” (1621); “amazing News of Charles at once were spread” (1685); “all News that come hither” (1717); “news of your health are still worse” (1776); “There are bad news from Palermo” (1820); “There are never any news” (1846).

This plural use of “news,” the OED says, is “now archaic” and is found only in Indian English.

The dictionary includes this modern Indian example: “My news are good.” From Indian and British English, a 1979 handbook by Paroo Nihalani et al. (The same handbook is also cited for the use of “news” as a count noun meaning “a piece or item of news,” a usage the OED says is now found chiefly in Caribbean and Indian English. The quotation: “This is a good news.”)

It’s interesting that during much of the time that “news” appeared in the plural (as in “news are”), it was also appearing in the singular (“news is”), a usage that dates from the early 1500s and gradually became dominant.

The OED’s first citation for the singular use is from a letter written in 1532: “news occurraunt in theis partes sence my lait lettres hir is noon [none].” Published in Letters of the Cliffords (1992), edited by R. W. Hoyle.

The dictionary’s later examples of the singular construction include these: “ye newes therof was brought” (possibly 1566); “When Newes is printed” (1631); “there is no News” (1664); “The stocks are as the news is” (1711); “the news was fresh” (1785); “Was there any news?” (1828); “The next news was …” (1897). Singular examples continue up to the present.

Why has the singular usage emerged as standard while the plural has become archaic? This may be because, as the OED says, the singular use today has a wider meaning. Besides just “tidings” or accounts “brought or coming to one as new information,” it also means “now esp. such information as published or broadcast.”

This is particularly apparent in one of the dictionary’s later examples, from a book of political humor: “Most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated” (Parliament of Whores, by P. J. O’Rourke, 1992).

Media-related uses of “news” proliferated in the 20th century. During World War I, according to OED citations, a usage emerged in which “a person, thing, or place regarded as worthy of discussion or of reporting by the media” was said to be “news.”

The first citation is from “The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat,” a short story by Rudward Kipling published in 1917: “The great Baron Reuter himself … flashed that letter in full to the front, back, and both wings of this scene of our labours. For Huckley [the village] was News.”

And beginning in the early 1920s, people began using “the news” (the OED says “the” is usually included) to mean a newsreel or a news-related radio or television broadcast. Many familiar phrases emerged too, including these from the 1930s: “news coverage,” “news media,” and “news conference.”

Of course we can’t forget the “good news … bad news” formula, which is sometimes the setup for a joke. Oxford says it’s used in “expressing an unfortunate or undesirable downside to an otherwise welcome development or state of affairs.”

The OED’s examples begin in the 1950s, but last year the language researcher Stephen Goranson reported a much earlier example to the American Dialect Society’s mailing list. It appeared in a humorous anecdote, headlined “A Colloquy,” in the Nov. 3, 1871, issue of the New-Orleans-Republic:

Shortly after it became known that Hon. Thomas W. Conway … was attacked with yellow fever, one prominent citizen said to another whom he met:

“I have some good news to tell you.”

“What is it?” …

“It is that Conway … is very sick with yellow fever.”

The second party then said in rejoinder: “I have some bad news to tell you.”

“What is that?”

“It is that Dr. Holcombe is attending Conway, and he is going to get him well.”

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English English language Etymology Expression News Phrase origin Poetry Usage Word origin Writing

Plantation mentality

Q: After reading your post about the “master” controversy at Yale, I was shocked to be driving by an Ivy League campus in upstate NY and seeing a sign that pointed the way to “Cornell Plantations.”

A: It’s interesting that you should write to us about this, since Cornell University is even now reconsidering the name “Cornell Plantations” and may end up changing it.

More about that later, and about how Cornell’s arboretum and gardens got that name 70 years ago. But first let’s examine the word “plantation.”

To many Americans, this is a loaded word. In a country that still bears the scars of slavery, “plantation” evokes images of the antebellum South, whose economic system depended upon slave labor.

But even before its use in America, the word had meanings connected with colonialism and the domination of defeated countries. This is because from its earliest appearance in English, “plantation” has had dual meanings.

The ultimate source of “plantation” is the classical Latin plantātiōnem, propagation from cuttings, which was derived from plantāre, to propagate by cuttings.

In medieval Latin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, plantātiōnem came to mean “something that has been planted,” as in a plant, a foundation, an institution, a nursery, or a colony.

Meanwhile, plantāre gave early Old English the verb “plant,” which had two sets of  meanings: (a) to set a seed or plant into the ground; and (b) to found something like a colony or church, or to instill an idea, emotion, belief, etc.

These dual senses of the verb “plant” were first recorded at the same time, in King Ælfred’s 9th-century translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.

When “plantation” appeared in English in the early 1400s, the OED says, it was a product of both the medieval Latin plantātiōnem  and the Old English verb “plant.” Consequently it had two broad meanings—the establishment of an institution or a colony, or the placing of a seed or shoot in the soil.

The sense of “plantation” that was recorded first, according to OED citations, was “something that has been founded, established, or implanted, as an institution, a religion, a belief, etc.”

This sense of the word first appeared in the Foundation Book of St. Bartholomew’s Church, Hospital and Priory in London, which the OED dates at around 1425. The manuscript refers to St. Bartholomew’s as “this new plantacioun.”

(Sir Norman Moore, who published a history of the 12th-century hospital in 1918, places the date of the manuscript at “about the year 1400.”)

The next recorded meaning of “plantation” is defined by the OED as “the action of planting seeds or plants in the ground.”

This sense first appeared around 1429 in an anonymous book, Mirour of Mans Saluacioune: “Aarons ȝerde [rod] fructified without plantacioune.” (In the biblical Book of Numbers, Aaron’s rod sprouted buds and produced almonds.)

Both of those early senses of “plantation” are now obsolete, the OED says, but they evolved into these later meanings in the 16th and 17th centuries:

(1) “A cultivated bed or cluster of growing plants of any kind,” or “an area planted with trees, esp. for commercial purposes.”

(2) ”A settlement in a conquered or dominated country; a colony.” This usage, the OED says, is found “chiefly with reference to the colonies founded in North America and on the forfeited lands in Ireland in the 16th-17th centuries; also with reference to the ancient colonies of Greece, etc.”

(3) “An estate or large farm, esp. in a former British colony, on which crops such as cotton, sugar, and tobacco are grown (formerly with the aid of slave labour).”

An extended use of that last meaning, the OED says, developed in the 1950s: “any institution regarded as exploitative or paternalistic, esp. in fostering an environment of inequality and servitude reminiscent of slavery.”

Oxford says this sense appears “chiefly in African-American usage,” and all of its citations are from African Americans. Among them is this one from Miles Davis’s Autobiography (1989):

“All the record companies were interested in at the time was making a lot of money and keeping their so-called black stars on the music plantation so that their white stars could just rip us off.”

This OED example appeared a decade later in the New York Times: “Civil rights groups advocated a boycott of Twins games and the future Hall of Famer Rod Carew said he did not want to keep playing for Griffith’s ‘plantation.’ ”

However, we’ve found many examples of “plantation” used pejoratively by whites as well as blacks, especially in politics.

In September 2014, a Republican Congressman, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, said that Democratic Senator Harry Reid “runs the Senate like a plantation.” Cassidy added, “It is his personal, sort of, ‘It goes if I say it does, if not it stops.’ ”

Cassidy was then running for a Louisiana Senate seat, and his rival, Rep. Rob Mannes, the Tea Party candidate, jumped all over him for using the word:

“Congressman Cassidy may not realize this,” Mannes said, “but the language he used included a term that is incredibly offensive to many Americans and he should immediately apologize.”

As many journalists noticed, the controversy was reminiscent of a similar remark by Hillary Clinton in 2006, when she was a senator. She accused Republicans of running the House “like a plantation … in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard.”

But she wasn’t the first. In 1994 Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, said the Democrats “think it’s their job to run the plantation” and “it shocks them that I’m actually willing to lead the slave rebellion.”

Black public figures have even used the term against one another. In 2013, the scholar Cornel West called the Rev. Al Sharpton “the bonafide house negro of the Barack Obama plantation.”

Similarly, the phrase “plantation politics” has been used since the early 1960s to describe the control that a small, select few can exercise over a much larger group.

The term was apparently coined by the sociologist and historian Timuel Black, who used it to describe how Chicago’s mayor used black ward bosses to control the black vote.

When Black ran for the Chicago City Council in 1963, he “took on the political machine of Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of ‘plantation politics’—a phrase that garnered national attention,” according to a page honoring him on the University of Chicago’s website.

While the OED has no entry for the phrase “plantation politics,” it does have one for “plantation mentality.”

Oxford describes this as a “derogatory” term for “an attitude likened to that which was prevalent on plantations operating with slave labour, esp. in accepting or condoning racial inequality or paternalism.” We’ll quote a couple of the citations, beginning with the earliest:

“The plantation mentality still prevails and policy tends too strongly toward rehabilitation of the bankrupt planter.” (From the Journal of the Royal African Society, 1936.)

“The continuation of the plantation mentality in both blacks and whites, the white student activists told us, has got to stop.” (From Black Power and Student Rebellion, 1969, by James J. McEvoy and Abraham H. Miller.)

The six standard dictionaries we’ve checked don’t mention slavery in their entries for the noun “plantation.” They use terms like “resident labor” or “resident workers” to describe the people cultivating crops on a large estate or farm.

Considering all the evidence, though, we believe that more Americans associate the word “plantation” with its slave past than with its purely horticultural meaning.

This brings us back to Cornell University, which named its vast complex of arboretum, gardens, and nature preserves “Cornell Plantations” in 1944. Why that name?

This use of “plantations,” according to university websites, was an attempt to cleanse the term and re-establish its purely horticultural sense.

Don Rakow, a former director of the Cornell Plantations, said the name “Cornell Plantations” was coined by the botanist and horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey, the first dean of the Cornell College of Agriculture.

“We believe that Bailey purposely chose to dismiss older associations of the word ‘plantations’ with slavery in favor of its proper meaning: ‘areas under cultivation or newly established settlements,’ ” Rakow said in a 2011 interview with the Ithaca Times.

Bailey (along with his father) was named “Liberty” because his grandfather was “an ardent abolitionist, one of the earliest in Vermont,” according to a 2011 article in Verdant Views, the Cornell Plantations magazine.

“When it came time in 1944 for Bailey to name Cornell’s newly established botanical garden and arboretum,” the magazine says, “it was perhaps this history and his own passion for democracy and education that led him to choose Cornell Plantations. He purposely chose to dismiss old associations with slavery in favor of the proper meaning of the word.”

Apparently this linguistic rehabilitation never came to pass, at least not in the view of A. T. Miller, Cornell’s associate vice provost for academic diversity.

“There have been rather steady expressions of surprise and objections to the name by individuals since 1944 itself, when there were clearly misgivings,” Dr. Miller told us in an email.

We heard much the same thing from Prof. Edward E. Baptist.  “I have also noted the weirdness of this name in my own lectures,” said Dr. Baptist, who specializes in 19th-century American history, particularly the history of slavery in the South.

But as we mentioned above, change may be in the air.

Christopher P. Dunn, current director of the Cornell Plantations, said in an email that the institution has begun a process that “will determine if our current name does or does not support our brand, vision, mission, and values.”

He announced this “rebranding” in a column he wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun on Oct. 8, 2015:

“There is one key element that all botanic gardens have in common: celebrating, displaying and studying the rich diversity of the world’s plants,” he wrote. “Yet to be truly effective, this celebration of natural diversity must also embrace human diversity.”

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Can a woman be testy?

Q: A headline on Politico about an exchange between Hillary Clinton and an NPR reporter said, “Hillary gets testy over gay marriage.” It strikes me as inappropriate to use a word derived from the male reproductive organs to describe a woman.

A: The word “testy” doesn’t refer to the testes. It comes from an entirely different part of the human anatomy—the head.

In the 14th century, English adopted “testy” from testif, an Anglo-French term derived from teste, the Old French word for head and the ancestor of the modern French word tête.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the ultimate source is testa, the classical Latin term for an earthenware pot. In the post-classical period, Ayto notes, testa “was used humorously for ‘head.’ ”

When “testy” first showed up in English in the 1300s, according to Ayto, it meant headstrong or impetuous. But by the 1500s the meaning of “testy” had evolved from impetuous to impatient to irritable.

The earliest example of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary (used in the headstrong sense) is from Chaucer’s Middle English poem Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1374), in which Diomede is described as “Hardy, testyf, strong and cheualrous.”

The first OED citation for “testy” used in the irritable sense is from Pylgrimage of Perfection, a 1526 treatise by William Bonde: “Whiche wyll suffre his pacient though he be neuer so testy or angry.”

None of the Oxford citations use “testy” to describe a woman, but we’ll end with an example from Buried Alive (2011), Myra Friedman’s biography of Janis Joplin.

Dave Richards is quoted as saying he was initially terrified by Joplin when he was hired to help with the band’s equipment: “She was testy, testy about masculinity, about femininity, about everything.”

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