Category: Usage

Q: There’s a debate on an editors’ listserv about the use of “dear” in salutations for business letters. Is it too intimate to address a client as “Dear Mr. Smith”? And what is the history of this word in correspondence?

A: We’ve had a small flurry of questions about letter-writing lately, including one about indenting the salutation and the following paragraphs. Maybe the epistolary tradition is having a comeback!

There’s nothing wrong with using “dear” in letter salutations, even in business correspondence. The use of “dear” doesn’t necessarily imply an intimate or affectionate connection, as we’ll explain.

The adjective “dear” is an ancient word. It was recorded (as deoare) in Old English as far back as around 725, when it meant precious, valuable, or costly.

But it has even older cousins in other Germanic languages. The ancestor of them all is a prehistoric Proto-Germanic word that scholars have reconstructed as deurijaz (costly), according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The word “dear” (or its Old English equivalents) was applied to people early on, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest meaning was esteemed or valued, not loved, the OED says, “but the passage of the one notion into the other is too gradual to admit of their separation.”

In addressing one another, English speakers have been using “dear” since the Middle Ages. And then, as now, the word could be used either intimately or formally.

For example, the OED has citations for its use “in addressing a person, in affection or regard,” dating back to the 1300s or perhaps earlier (as in “Father dear,” or “my dear friend”).

But the “dear” that we use in letters (and, if we’re so inclined, in emails) can be regarded as either intimate, friendly, or formal, depending on the context.

The tradition of using “dear” in letters dates from the mid-15th century.

It was first recorded, according to OED citations, in a letter beginning “Right dere and welbeloved,” written in 1450 by Queen Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI.

As the OED says, uses of “dear” in letters—as in “Dear Father,” “Dear John,” and so on—“are still affectionate and intimate, and made more so by prefixing My.”

But, Oxford continues, “Dear Sir (or Dear Mr. A.) has become since the 17th c. the ordinary polite form of addressing an equal.”

And not just equals.

Our handy copy of Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, by Judith Martin, recommends that letters to dignitaries include greetings like “Dear Governor Stately,” “Dear Mr. President,” “Dear Mayor Tuff,” and (to a corporate bigwig) “Dear Mr. Pious.”

Who would dare argue with Miss Manners?

By the way, people still occasionally use “dear” in the old sense of pricey, as in “This Hermès ‘Kelly’ bag is gorgeous, but at $10,000 it comes very dear.”

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Q: I was thumbing through my M-W 11 for the fun of it (I’m easily entertained) when I noticed  that the first definition of “deadline” in the dictionary is “a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot.” Whoa! I thought a deadline was when something must be done. Why is that only the second definition?

A: The next time you thumb through your dictionary, take a moment to look at the explanatory notes at the beginning. This may not be the most entertaining part of the dictionary, but it has its attractions.

You’ll learn, for example, that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) lists its definitions in historical order, not in order of popularity.

We’ve written about “deadline” in our book Origins of the Specious. It’s in a section about old words that have lost their original meanings and are now used figuratively.

The original deadline, it turns out, was a four-foot-high fence that defined the no-man’s-land inside the walls around the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville, GA, during the Civil War.

Any captive Union soldiers who crossed the deadline were shot.

The word first appeared in an inspection report written in August 1864 by a Confederate officer, Lieut. Col. D. T. Chandler: “A railing around the inside of the stockade and about 20 feet from it constitutes the ‘dead-line,’ beyond which the prisoners are not allowed to pass.”

After the war ended in 1865, Capt. Henry Wirtz, the commandant of the camp, was tried and hanged for war crimes.

Not until the early 20th century did “deadline” come to mean a time limit. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation is in the title of a play about the newspaper business, Deadline at Eleven (1920).

This usage may have been influenced by a somewhat earlier sense of the word: a guideline marked on the bed of a printing press.

These days, as we all know, journalists aren’t the only ones with deadlines to meet.

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Q: I’m an American living in Norway. My Norwegian wife wonders why “I” is the only English pronoun that’s capitalized. Is this an ego thing?

A: English pronoun usages are interesting, to say the least! But there’s no egocentric reason why we capitalize the first-person pronoun “I.”

It’s written this way only because in a wilderness of letters, a small “i” might get lost or overlooked.

But this wasn’t always the case. In its earliest forms, the Old English pronoun was ic, ih, or ich.

Citations in the Oxford English Dictionary show that as the word developed, it had a great many spellings, some starting with “h” or “y” in addition to “i,” but these were eventually shortened to a single, lowercase letter (i).

The capitalized “I” first showed up about 1250 in the northern and midland dialects of England, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

Chambers notes, however, that the capitalized form didn’t become established in the south of England “until the 1700s (although it appears sporadically before that time).”

Capitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it more distinct, thus “avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, offers an interesting historical note: “Essentially all the Indo-European languages share the same first person singular pronoun, although naturally it has diverged in form over the millennia.”

“French has je, for example, Italian io, Russian ja, and Greek ego,” Ayto continues. “The prehistoric German pronoun was eka, and this has produced German ich, Dutch ik, Swedish jag, Danish jeg, and English I. The affirmative answer aye ‘yes’ is probably ultimately the same word as I.”

And, as we’re sure you know, “I” is jeg in Norwegian.

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Q: In one of the scenes from Mad Men, purportedly set in a bar in 1964, some guy says, “Can I get a Dewar’s with water?” Now, I don’t remember people saying “Can I get” a drink back then. It sounds more 21st century to me.

A: It may sound 21st century to you, but people have been using “Can I get” that way since at least the late 19th century.

For example, an article in the June 20, 1880, issue of the Daily Arkansas Gazette includes this example of the usage:

“A footstep didn’t arouse the young lady. It was a voice that said: ‘Can I get a drink of water?’ Two arms and the chin of a tramp leaned on the fence.”

For a boozier example, a brief item in the Oct. 12, 1889, issue of the Knoxville Journal has this presumably fictional exchange:

“Traveler (from Kentucky): ‘Madam, can I get a drink here?’

“Lady of the House: ‘Certainly, there’s the well.’

“Traveler (with a courtly gesture): ‘Madam, you misunderstand me. I don’t want to wash my hands; I want a drink.’ ”

From what we can gather, the expression has been in steady use since then, so there’s nothing anachronistic about hearing it on Mad Men.

In case you’re interested, we wrote a blog item not long ago about a similar usage, “I’ll do a” (as in “I’ll do a Dewar’s with water”).

As you probably know, finding linguistic anachronisms in Mad Men has become something of an indoor sport among the show’s fans.

The linguist Ben Zimmer wrote an entertaining column on the subject a year ago in the New York Times Magazine.

Zimmer spoke with Matthew Weiner, the creator, executive producer, and head writer of the AMC show, who acknowledged that goofs do indeed slip into Mad Men.

For example, the character Joan used the saying “The medium is the message” in the first season, set in 1960, four years before Marshall McLuhan introduced it in print.

You’ll enjoy this YouTube video featuring Mad Men excerpts mentioned in Zimmer’s column.

Cheers!

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Q: I was wondering why newscasters (mostly) have begun using the term “home invasion.” Why isn’t it called a “break-in” any longer?

A: The phrase “home invasion” isn’t just another way of saying  “burglary” or “break-in.”

A “burglary” or a “break-in” refers to the act of entering a building with the intent to commit a crime. This crime can be committed when nobody’s home.

But in a “home invasion,” the house is occupied at the time. And often it involves the use of weapons and some kind of assault on the residents.

Several states have legally defined the crime of “home invasion,” though the definitions of the crime and its severity (first degree, second degree, and so on) vary.

The expression has been in use since 1973, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. It originated in the US and is chiefly used in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

The OED defines “home invasion” as “an act of entering a private dwelling while it is occupied, with the intention of committing a crime (usually burglary, often while threatening the resident); the action or offence of doing this.”

In the US, Australia, and New Zealand, the dictionary adds, “home invasion is a legally defined offence. Entry need not be forced, and may even be under invitation, if the offender later remains on the premises when requested by the resident to leave.”

The OED’s first citation for the use of the term is from a 1973 article in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Wilmette police were seeking the robbers in an apparently unrelated home invasion that occurred early Thursday.”

The phrase, as you’ve noticed, is becoming more widely used in the media these days.

For example, we found a news report from KFDM-TV in southeast Texas about armed men who broke into a home, locked the family in a laundry room, ransacked the house, and stole a car.

The report begins, “A home invasion has disturbed the peace in a West Beaumont neighborhood.” It ends with “If you have any information about the home invasion, call ….”

We hope this answers your question. And keep your door locked!

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Q: During a recent appearance on WNYC, Pat used two phrases that caused my wife and me some consternation: “a lot of” and “sort of.” Shouldn’t that have been “many” and “similar to” or “almost” or “possibly”?

A: Yes, Pat does say “sort of” and “a lot of” on the air, but we see nothing wrong with this.

On the radio show, she and Leonard Lopate are conversing, and consequently their style is informal or colloquial.

We wouldn’t use these phrases in the most formal writing (say, an article for a scholarly journal), but we’d use them in casual or informal writing (like this, for example) and of course in speech.

When the two of us speak, we use “sort of” in the sense of “rather” or “somewhat.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this adverbial use of the phrase as meaning “in a way or manner; to some extent or degree, somewhat; in some way, somehow.”

By the way, this usage isn’t a modern interloper. It dates back to the late 1700s.

Oxford describes the phrase as “colloquial,” a label that it defines elsewhere as meaning “characteristic of or proper to ordinary conversation, as distinguished from formal or elevated language.”

The OED also says the phrase “sort of” has passed into use “as a parenthetic qualifier expressing hesitation, diffidence, or the like, on the speaker’s part.”

The phrase “a lot of” dates back to the late 1500s, says the OED, which defines it this way:

“A number of persons or things of the same kind, or associated in some way; a quantity or collection (of things); a party, set, or ‘crew’ (of persons); also, a quantity (of anything). Now only colloq., except with reference to articles of commerce, goods, live stock, and the like. Often with some degree of depreciation, either implied, or expressed by an epithet.”

Both “sort of” and “a lot of” are standard in spoken English. They are NOT grammatically incorrect or substandard. However, they’re informal in style and, like any other phrase, they shouldn’t be used monotonously.

We’ve had several items on the blog about “sort of” and “a lot of,” including postings in August, September, and November of 2008.

Here it might be helpful to insert a note about formal versus informal English. Never confuse the informal (or colloquial) with the ungrammatical!

As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out, the word “colloquial” is not a pejorative label, and “was probably a poor choice of term for describing ordinary everyday speech.”

For that reason, most standard dictionaries and usage guides now use the word “informal” instead. And informal English is not substandard or grammatically incorrect.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), which now uses the label “informal” rather than “colloquial,” says:

“Speakers of standard varieties of the language use both formal discourse and informal or conversational discourse.”

The dictionary classifies both “sort of” and “a lot of” as “informal.”

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Q: I’m bewildered by all those T-shirts that proclaim, “I ♥ ME.”  Why is “me” capitalized? And why isn’t it “myself”? I’m from Maine, and to me the message is “I love Maine.”

A: We can’t believe that you’re REALLY bewildered by the uppercase “ME” in that message.

Nobody with an Internet connection could be. We’ve been driven virtually deaf by now from all the capital letters that scream at us for emphasis in cyberspace.

Is there too much of it? Yes. Can we do anything about it? No, except perhaps to show a little restraint ourselves.

As for “I ♥ ME,” you can find it on hats, bags, compacts, valentines, stickers, cards, lighters, etc., in addition to T-shirts.

You can also find a lot of “I ♥ Maine” items. Most of them spell out “Maine” in upper- and lower-case letters, though some use all caps and others refer to the state as “ME.”

You may be interested in a posting we had a few years ago about the use of the word “heart” in place of the ♥ symbol. It turns out that the use of “heart” as a verb isn’t a modern phenomenon.

In fact, the first published reference for the verbing of “heart” dates from around 897, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Anglo-Saxon days, to “heart” meant to give heart to or inspire someone.

Last January the online OED added a draft entry on the colloquial use of “heart” as a verb meaning to love or be fond of.

The dictionary says the usage is of US origin, and adds, “Originally with reference to logos using the symbol of a heart to denote the verb ‘love.’ ”

The first OED citation for this sense of the word is from a Nov. 16, 1983, Associated Press article:

“From Berlin to the Urals, teen-agers wear T-shirts reading, ‘Elvis,’ ‘Always Stoned,’ and ‘I (heart) New York.’ ”

As for “me” versus “myself,” we’ve written about this business several times on the blog, beginning with a posting in 2006.

It would be OK to use either “me” or “myself” on the T-shirt you’ve asked about, though the shorter one is punchier and could do double-duty Down East.

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Q: There’s a debate in my home that’s getting tiresome: Is the word that means yippee and often precedes “team” spelled “yay,” “yea,” or “yeah”? There are conflicting answers on the Web, but I’ll trust you with the definitive answer.

A: This is something we’ve often wondered ourselves: How do you spell the joyous interjection that starts with a “y” and rhymes with “day”?

The answer is “yay.” That’s the word from the editors at the Oxford English Dictionary and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.).

American Heritage says the interjection is “used as an exclamation of pleasure, approval, elation, or victory.” The OED describes it as a slang “exclamation of triumph, approval, or encouragement.”

The spelling evolved, American Heritage says, as an alteration of the old word “yea,” which goes back many centuries to the Old English gea or gæ.

The older “yea” is pronounced like “yay” but it’s not a mere interjection. It can be an adverb or a noun, according to American Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

As an adverb, “yea” can mean “yes,” “aye,” “truly,” or “indeed.” And as a noun, it can mean either an affirmative statement or vote, or the person casting such a vote.

Example: “He hurried, yea, galloped to the poll to cast his yea vote, and as a result the yeas outnumbered the nays.”

The third member of the trio, “yeah,” is classified as an adverb meaning “yes.”

There are three common pronunciations of “yeah,” all of which include a diphthong (two vowels elided into a single syllable). The diphthong begins with a vowel sound like that in “pet” or “pat” or “pate,” followed by “uh.”

There’s some disagreement about the origin of “yeah.”

American Heritage says “yeah” developed as a variant of the old “yea,” but Merriam-Webster’s and the OED say it’s an alteration or casual pronunciation of “yes.”

Now for some chronology.

As we said, the old “yea” is by far the oldest of the three. The earliest form of the word was recorded in writing in the year 731, according to the OED, which makes it nearly 1,300 years old!

By comparison, “yay” and “yeah,” which appear to be American inventions, are practically brand-new.

The OED’s earliest citation for “yay” is from 1963, and its first example of “yeah” is from 1905 (Merriam-Webster’s has a slightly earlier date, 1902).

But we’ve found what look like 19th-century usages of both words. We’ll cite just one instance of each.

There are some jubilant examples of “yay” in Mary W. Watts’s introduction to her book Nathan Burke, a fictionalized biography of the Mexican war general.

Her introduction is dated 1908, but in it she records the cheers she heard at a military parade 40 years earlier as a child in Ohio: “Yay, Yay, Yay! Fighting Burke! Fighting Nat Burke! Yay, Yay, Yay!”

And we found many examples of “yeah” in an 1863 adventure novel by Edward Sylvester Ellis, On the Plains, which is set in the Black Hills.

Here’s a  brief bit of dialogue: “ ‘I’ve done you some good turns, hain’t I?’  ‘Yeah, and I’ve allers felt good’eal of gratertude fur it.’ ”

We found other uses as well, thanks to the miracle of digitization. Is it a boon to research? Yeah!

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Q: I use the verb “indignify” in the sense of to insult or disgrace, but I can’t find it in my dictionary and whenever I type it in an MS Word document a red line pops up under it indicating a misspelling or a nonexistent term. Am I wrong to use it?

A: If you don’t mind sounding a bit quaint, go right ahead and use the verb “indignify.” You may get puzzled or even indignant looks, however.

Such a word does exist, but it hasn’t been used much since the 19th century. We found a few hundred examples in a recent Google search, but many of them were on language sites.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “indignify” means “to treat with indignity; to dishonour; to represent as unworthy.” The dictionary says the word is now obsolete.

It was coined in the 16th century, but not in the way you might expect—by adding the negative prefix “in-” to the verb “dignify.” Instead, it was formed from the suffix “-fy” and the Latin adjective indignus (unworthy).

The verb “dignify” also entered English in the 16th century. It was borrowed from Old French (dignefier or dignifier), which in turn came from the medieval Latin word dignificare (to honor or make worthy).

So “dignify” and “indignify” made their way into the language independently, though they’re related through a common Latin ancestor, dignus (worthy).

In fact, English once had two related adjectives, “digne” (worthy or honorable) and “indign” (unworthy or undeserving), from that same Latin ancestor. But those words, which were older than “dignify” and “indignify,” are now obsolete or archaic.

The OED’s first citation for “indignify” is from a long pastoral poem by Edmund Spenser, Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe (1595):

“I deeme it best to hold eternally / Their bounteous deeds and noble fauours shrynd, / Then by discourse them to indignifie.”

(We’ve gone to the original to expand on the citation. The word “shrynd” here means venerated. In later printings of the poem, “then” is changed to “than.”)

The OED’s last citation, dated 1743, is from Edward Poston’s The Pratler, a collection of essays and letters: “The very Idea … is greatly indignified, even by our aiming or pretending to understand it.”

However, we’ve found some 19th-century usages, and even a few strays in 20th-century writing, aside from the more recent sightings on Google.

Today, you’ll find “indign” in many contemporary standard dictionaries (labeled “archaic” or “obsolete”), but “indignify” is a rarity. The only entry for it we find is in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, where it’s listed as obsolete.

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Q: What are the rules on one-sentence paragraphs? I tend to see the regular use of them as a sign of tabloid journalism.

A: Many people seem to have been told, sometime during their school careers, that a one-sentence paragraph is not legitimate. It’s this belief, however, that’s not legit.

Modern dictionaries define a paragraph as a piece of writing consisting of one or more sentences devoted to a single point or topic. It begins on a new line and is usually indented.

(We don’t indent the beginning of paragraphs on our blog. We start them flush left, with a line of white space between them. This seems to be a common convention of online writing.)

As for how many sentences in a paragraph, the writer can use as many—or as few—as the topic requires.

Quite often, as you’ve probably noticed if you read much fiction, a paragraph consists of one speaker’s quoted words. In fact, it might have just a single word:

“Right!”

There are no “rules” of English grammar about the number of sentences per paragraph. This is a matter of style, not grammar.

On our blog, for example, we often use one- or two-sentence paragraphs, confining ourselves to just a few items of information per paragraph.

We think this is easier for people to read, especially in a format consisting of a narrow vertical column with other matter abutting on either side.

But our book Origins of the Specious, with its vacant margins and roomier format, has a more classic style of paragraphing. We used as many sentences per paragraph as we needed to complete a particular point or thought.

Personally, we don’t like extremely long paragraphs, since the eye tends to get lost without a few geographical landmarks as reference points. It’s fatiguing to read a paragraph that takes up page after page, even if it’s legitimately devoted to a single argument.

Many famous writers—Samuel Johnson among them—have written paragraphs of only one or two sentences.

In The History of the English Paragraph (1894), Edwin Herbert Lewis scrutinized dozens of famous writers, examining several hundred paragraphs from the works of each.

For the works he studied, he calculated the percentage of single-sentence paragraphs in Defoe at 62 percent; Bunyan, 61; Laurence Sterne, 55; Spenser, 48; Scott, 45; Dickens, 43; Fielding, 38; Hobbes, 35; Bacon, 32; George Eliot, 27; Johnson, 27. The writers Locke, Lamb, Swift, De Quincey, Addison, Ruskin, Dryden, Sidney, and Milton were in the 18 to 10 percent range. (The novelists among these writers were in some cases using one-sentence paragraphs to quote speakers.)

Paragraphing itself is very old. Lewis said that indented sections of writing can be found in some of the oldest English manuscripts.

“In a manuscript of the sixth century,” he wrote, “quotations are written as in modern paragraphs,—carried in evenly from the marginal line.”

One-sentence paragraphs are found in “every period in English Literature,” Lewis said, but they were more common in the 18th than in the 19th century.

Reading between the lines, it appears that prejudice against the one-sentence paragraph came from 19th-century writers on rhetoric and composition.

Lewis quotes a contemporary of his who believed that “a paragraph is to a sentence what a sentence is to a word.”

And this hierarchy—from word to sentence to paragraph—may have encouraged the belief that a paragraph must be a group of sentences.

Lewis notes that most of the multiple-sentence definitions he found in books of rhetoric and composition “were framed primarily for purposes of pedagogy.”

“This,” he said, “may explain why so much stress is laid upon the idea of a paragraph as a sentence group.”

Teachers, he suggested, wanted to discourage pupils from simply making each new sentence a paragraph.

It seems, though, that they taught their pupils too well.

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Q: Is the expression “I will have none of it” acceptable when referring to someone’s behavior or actions? For example, “His excessive praise is a thinly veiled attempt to jinx my research project and I will have none of it.”

A: Yes, it’s fine to use the expression that way. People have been doing it for more than a century and a half.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the expression as “to refuse or reject something outright.” And that something can be someone’s behavior or actions.

In the earliest example cited, Henry David Thoreau rejects friendship with someone who disagrees with him about right and wrong.

Here’s the citation from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849): “If Friendship is to rob me of my eyes, if it is to darken the day, I will have none of it.”

And we never miss an opportunity to quote P. G. Wodehouse. This is from Very Good, Jeeves! (1930): “Her name was Maudie and he loved her dearly, but the family would have none of it. They dug down into the sock and paid her off.”

The most recent OED example of the usage is from Swing Hammer Swing! (1992), a novel by Jeff Torrington: “I tried to coax the old woman into her apartment but she was having none of it.”

The pronoun “none” is one of the oldest words in English. We’ve written several times on the blog about the myth that it always means “not one” and always is singular.

If you disagree and are having none of it, take a look at our latest posting on the subject.

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Q: The NYC parks commissioner considers a “concrete boardwalk” an oxymoron, but he argues that the usage is OK because the word “boardwalk” had become eponymous. As I see it, he’s using the words “oxymoron” and “eponymous” incorrectly. If I’m wrong, you can bet I won’t tell anyone I consulted you!

A: Thanks for sending that New York Times article about the fight to keep the boards in the boardwalk at Coney Island.

In the article, Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, is quoted as saying last year that a concrete boardwalk is an “oxymoron.”

He’s also quoted as saying  that “boardwalk has become eponymous, in the way Kleenex is for paper tissue. It is a generic term for an elevated oceanfront walkway, and other communities use concrete.”

We think the parks commissioner is being a little loose with his terms, misusing both “oxymoron” and “eponymous.”

The phrase “concrete boardwalk” may be a misnomer, though that’s debatable, but it’s not an oxymoron.

The word “oxymoron,” as we’ve said before on our blog, is a figure of speech with a pair of opposite or markedly contradictory terms. Wood and concrete are different building materials, but they aren’t opposites or markedly contradictory.

And it may be true that “boardwalk” is now a generic term, as the parks commissioner says, but it’s definitely not eponymous.

The adjective “eponymous,” which we’ve also written about on the blog, refers to the person something is named for. For example, Hamlet is the eponymous hero of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

Perhaps the parks commissioner meant that “boardwalk” is ubiquitous—that is, found everywhere. Many people confuse the words “eponymous” and “ubiquitous,” but as we’ve also pointed out on the blog, they’re not synonymous.

One thing we can say for “boardwalk” is that it’s an all-American word. We associate it with Coney Island, Atlantic City, and similar American vacation spots, and as it turns out the word was born in the USA.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for “boardwalk” is from a letter written in 1872 by Frances M. A. Roe, author of Army Letters From an Officer’s Wife:

“We reached a narrow board-walk that was supposed to run along by her side fence.”

Notice that the word wasn’t originally associated with waterfronts. But a 1906 citation from a story by Abby Meguire Roach in Harper’s Magazine has a whiff of salt air:

“A few days later, on the board walk at the seashore, she came face to face with Hugh Wilberding.” (A later version of Roach’s story, collected in a book, has “on the board-walk at Atlantic City.”)

As for what a boardwalk should be made of, the word was—and still is—defined by the OED as “a footway or walking-path constructed of boarding.”

Though the OED doesn’t say so, boardwalks these days are sometimes built of things other than wooden boards.

Perhaps if Coney Island’s boarding continues to be replaced with concrete, the OED will revise its definition.

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Q: Just the other day, I saw a “POSTED: NO HUNTING” sign at a nature preserve. It made me wonder why the word “posted” appears in signs forbidding hunting, fishing, trespassing, etc. Doesn’t the fact that the sign was actually posted make the inclusion of the word at best redundant?

A: In our area of rural New England, we see endless examples of “POSTED: NO HUNTING,” “POSTED: NO TRESPASSING,” and so on. The signs are there, so obviously somebody “posted” them—why underscore the fact?

The short answer is that there’s no short answer.

If you regard a sign as a simple communications tool, the “posted” part is of course redundant. But if you regard it as a legal notice, the wording is another matter.

As you might imagine, this business of sign posting has become a thorny issue involving the rights of hunters on one side and landowners on the other. So, naturally, sign requirements vary widely from state to state.

In some states no signs are necessary, because a hunter must get permission before hunting on private property. In other states, hunting is allowed unless a sign is posted that says otherwise.

And among those states where a sign is necessary, not all require that it include the word “posted.” (It should be noted that municipalities, too, sometimes enact their own ordinances.)

Mark R. Sigmon wrote in the Duke Law Journal in 2004 that 29 states “have statutes requiring landowners to post their land to exclude hunters; the other states have statutes requiring hunters to get explicit permission from landowners before they hunt.”

In his article, “Hunting and Posting on Private Land in America,” Sigmon said that of the states requiring signs, most “set an exact number of signs that must be posted, their size, what they must say, and even their height off of the ground and their color.”

But even in states where the word “posted” isn’t required, its presence on signs seems to have become a hoary American tradition.

Perhaps a sign that shouts “POSTED” underscores the seriousness of a landowner’s intentions. But it may simply be the kind of sign the hardware and farm-supply stores tend to sell. At any rate, here’s a little etymology.

The noun “post,” meaning a support or column of timber, has been in the language since the days of Old English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was taken from the classical Latin word postis, meaning a doorpost.

When the verb “post” first entered English in the mid-1500s, it meant to cut timber into posts, the OED says. A century or so later, it came to mean “to affix (a notice, poster, etc.) to a post, or in a prominent position.”

In the 19th century, “post” began to be used more generally to mean to put up a notice. Here’s a modern citation from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Bellefleur (1980): “All of the Bellefleur property was posted against trespassers.”

Similarly, the adjective “posted” has been used since the 19th century to mean “set up or fixed in a prominent place; displayed so as to provide information; advertised, made public.”

This adjectival usage is “chiefly” North American, the OED says. The dictionary’s first citation is from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick (we’ve gone to the original to expand the quotation).

In searching for a leaking cask, Ishmael imagines finding deep in the hold of the Pequod a “mouldy corner-stone cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards, vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood.”

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Q: In your 2007 posting about “media,” you write that “data” is now “considered singular by a great many usage experts.” As a consulting economist, I’ve long observed that “data” is usually singular in technical literature.

A: You’re right in observing that in scientific and technical literature, “data” has long been treated as a singular collective noun.

We mentioned this in a discussion of “data” in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions.

Here’s what we wrote:

“ ‘Data’ first appeared in English in the seventeenth century, but it didn’t become a common word until a century or so ago. Since then, people have been arguing about its singularity. In its modern sense—information in the form of facts and figures—is ‘data’ singular or plural? It was first used as a singular in 1902, and the practice soon became widespread, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. But battle lines formed.

“English handbooks reared up in protest over the next couple of decades. Their reasoning? In Latin, data is plural and the singular is datum. But no less an authority than the journal Science joined the fray in 1927 on the opposite side, insisting that ‘ “data” in the sense of facts is a collective which is preferably treated as a singular.’ As Science pointed out, the term ‘datum’ (plural: ‘datums’) is a technical word used in surveying, while ‘data’ means information. Even the revered Webster’s Second of 1934, the dictionary that nobody with back problems should attempt to lift, endorsed the singular ‘data.’ As the usage authors Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans noted dryly in the 1950s, ‘No one should think that he must treat data as a plural merely because Julius Caesar may have done so.’ The lesson? Tempus fugit.

“In Caesar’s day, data referred to things that were given, such as the givens in a scientific hypothesis. (It came from dare, the Latin verb for ‘give.’) But we use ‘data’ more broadly today to refer to factual information in general. In fact, the English word is closer to indicium, the Romans’ word for ‘information,’ than it is to the Latin data. When a Latin word has a life of its own in English (think “audio” or “video”) there’s no reason to treat it as Caesar did.

“Then why do so many people ignore the data on ‘data’? There’s an old joke in journalism that when all else fails, you can always blame the media. And here, it seems, publishers of newspapers, magazines, books, and so on are largely to blame. For decades, the house style for most companies required treating ‘data’ as a plural. That means generations of editors diligently changed ‘data is’ to ‘data are,’ and ‘this data’ to ‘these data.’ ”

As we note in our book, we did this ourselves for many years when we were journalists. Our former employer, the New York Times, changed its house style to favor the singular “data” in 1999.

By the way, as you probably noticed in that 2007 posting about whether “media” is singular or plural, we advised readers to “stay tuned.”

“Many usage experts,” we wrote, “have predicted that in a generation or two ‘media’ will be considered acceptable as a singular noun.”

This has now come to pass, at least when “media” refers to the world of mass communications as a whole, as we wrote last year in an updated blog entry.

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Q: L.L. Bean sells something called a “bug bivy,” a mini-tent made of mosquito netting for keeping out insects. No dictionary I have access to has an entry for “bivy,” and not even the Bean people could give me a definition. Have you ever heard of it? I went on an etymological flight of fancy and decided that it’s a diminutive of “bivouac.”

A: Your instincts are right on track.

“Bivy,” more commonly spelled “bivvy,” originated during World War I as army slang, short for the older “bivouac.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “bivvy” as “a temporary shelter for troops; a small tent.”

The OED’s first citation for its use in print is from The Anzac Book (1916), which was written and illustrated in Gallipoli by the men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps: “We lays down in the open / W’en our ‘bivvies’ isn’t dug.”

Here are a few more OED citations.

1918: “We arrived at our allotted spot, somewhere in Palestine, and erected our bivvies” (from the Chronicles of the N.Z.E.F., a journal published for soldiers of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force).

1920: “The Egyptian Camel Corps and Gurkhas arrived, bringing ‘Bivies’ and other luxuries” (from Blackwood’s Magazine).

1925: “That word was ‘tambu’, meaning a rough and ready shelter made of branches, planks, corrugated iron, a ‘bivvy’, in fact” (from the Glasgow Herald).

But L.L. Bean isn’t using a military term. As it happens, “bivvy” later acquired a more peaceful meaning as a slang word among mountaineers, climbers, and backpackers.

This sporting sense of the word was first recorded as a verb in 1943 and as a noun in 1961, according to citations in the OED.

As a verb, the dictionary says, to “bivvy” is “to spend the night in the open air without a tent (esp. in a bivvy bag); to camp with little or no shelter.”

The verb also appears with prepositions, so a camper can “bivvy down,” “bivvy out,” or “bivvy up.”

As for the noun, the OED says a “bivvy” is “a night spent in the open air without a tent” or “an open air encampment.”

In mountaineering slang, a “bivvy sack” (1977) or “bivvy bag” (1982) refers to a waterproof sleeping bag used outdoors instead of a tent, according to the OED.

And in L.L. Bean slang, a “bug bivy” is a lightweight, waterproof, and bug-proof shelter for “the minimalist outdoor adventurer.” 

The original “bivouac” has had many similar meanings over the years.

The noun was first recorded in 1706, when it meant a “night-watch by a whole army under arms, to prevent surprise,” Oxford explains.

In today’s military usage, the dictionary says, it means “a temporary encampment of troops in the field” without tents.

The nonmilitary meaning of “bivouac,” which came along in the mid-19th century, is simply “an encampment for the night in the open air” or “a camping out.”

The verb “bivouac” was first recorded in 1800, when it meant to remain, especially overnight, in the open air with no shelter.

As for its etymology, the word comes from the French bivouac and bivac, terms that the OED says are “generally said to have been introduced during the Thirty Years’ War” (1618-48).

But ultimately “bivouac” probably comes from beiwacht, an old term in Swiss German dialect. It was used in the cantons of Aargau and Zürich in the Old Swiss Confederacy to mean a nighttime citizens’ patrol for keeping order.

As the OED says, “This remaining of a large body of men under arms all night explains the original sense of bivouac.”

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Q: I’m a copy editor who’s often wondered why the style guide where I work considers it a cardinal sin to use “over” in place of “more than.” The rationale is that “over” can only convey position. But it seems to me that its use to mean “more than” is pretty darned ingrained, and certainly sounds right to my ear. Am I nothing more than a victim of new-fangled language or is there some overarching history to be had?

A: No, you’re not a victim of new-fangled language. And, yes, you’ve got history on your side. This is something we’ve written about before.

As we said in a blog entry in 2007, “over” and “more than” have been used interchangeably for six centuries or more, and there’s no reason to think this is wrong.

But we didn’t say much in that post about the origin of the belief that “over” shouldn’t be used to mean “more than.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, which has an excellent entry on the subject, says, “Disapproval of over meaning ‘more than’ is a hoary American newspaper tradition.”

The objection, according to M-W, began with William Cullen Bryant’s book Index Expurgatorius (1877).

It was picked up in Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right (1909), the usage guide says, and from there “passed into almost all of the newspaper handbooks.”

What was Bryant’s beef with using “over” to mean “more than”? He never said, according to the M-W editors.

We checked Bierce’s book, and he never explained it, either.

You’re right, however, that many editors believe “over” should refer only to position, but that belief is waning.

We have an old Associated Press stylebook that insists “over” refers to “spatial relationships” and “is not interchangeable with more than.” But the latest AP stylebook doesn’t include this bugaboo.

Here’s what the editors at the Merriam-Webster’s usage guide conclude: “There is no reason why you need to avoid this usage.” We agree.

[Update, March 24, 2014: The Associated Press has officially changed its policy. Last week, the editors of the AP Stylebook announced at a session of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) Conference that in reference to a quantity, “over” may now be used. “We decided on the change because it has become common usage,” said Darrell Christian, the editor of the AP Stylebook. “We’re not dictating that people use ‘over’—only that they may use it as well as ‘more than’ to indicate greater numerical value.”]

 

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Q: Pat had a brief discussion on WNYC of why “we” has been insinuated so much into professional writing. I tried—but was not fast enough—to email and remind her that the noun for this procedure is “nosism,” taken (I believe) from the French for “we.”

A: Thanks for calling this rare and interesting noun to our attention. And “our” in this case really does refer to two of us—Pat and Stewart. It’s not an example of nosism!

“Nosism” is the practice of referring to oneself in the plural, as when a writer calls himself “we” instead of “I.” The word comes from the Latin nos (“we”), so it literally means we-ism.

When it was first recorded in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “nosism” was the use of “we” in reference to a self-centered group rather than to an individual, so it meant something like clubbiness.

The OED’s first citation comes from Black’s Edinburgh Magazine (1819): “The egotism or nosism of the other luminaries of the Lake School, is at times extravagant enough, and amusing enough withal.”

It didn’t take long for “nosism” to mean the use of “we” by an individual.

The earliest example is from an 1829 issue of the Examiner, a 19th-century British weekly: “We will be consistent according to the fashionable virtue of the day in nos-ism.”

And here’s how Ben Zimmer used the word in a 2010 On Language column in the New York Times Magazine:

“Given the accumulated resentment of ‘nosism’ (using we for I, from the Latin pronoun nos), it’s little wonder that modern literary writers have rarely tried to write narratives in the first-person plural.”

The noun “nosism” may be rare, but the practice of nosism isn’t. The use of “we” for “I” dates back to early Old English, according to the OED.

One of the purposes of this usage, the dictionary says, is “to secure an impersonal style and tone, or to avoid the obtrusive repetition of ‘I.’ ”

The earliest example of the usage in the OED is from an Old English translation of a 5th-century Christian history written in Latin by Paulus Orosius, a student of St. Augustine.

In more modern times, this sense came to be known as the editorial “we” because it was used by journalists writing unsigned articles and editorials.

But, as the OED says, “This practice has become less usual during the 20th cent. and is limited to self-conscious and humorous contexts.”

Here’s an example from Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): “We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect, with which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy days.”

We have to disagree with the OED about the use of the editorial “we” today by journalists. The practice isn’t all that unusual, especially in signed articles that refer to the author.

A New York Times reporter, for example, used it repeatedly in a recent nightlife column, including a mention that Gwyneth Paltrow “agreed to an interview if we waited while she and Molly Sims schmoozed.”

Another kind of we-ism is sometimes called the royal “we” because of its use by sovereigns and rulers.

But the early history of this usage is unclear, the OED says, because some apparent Old English quotations “may rather show an inclusive plural use of the pronoun.”

Genuine uses of the royal “we” from Middle English and later include citations from Henry III (1298), King James I (1603), and King Charles I (1642).

But perhaps the best-known example of the royal “we” is the famous “We are not amused” quotation attributed to Queen Victoria.

Fred R. Shapiro writes in the Yale Book of Quotations that the comment  was first reported in an 1887 newspaper article that cited Victoria’s private secretary, Sir Arthur Helps, as the source.

Sir Arthur, according to this account, said the Queen used the line to snub him for telling a funny story to her ladies-in-waiting in an attempt to enliven a boring dinner.

But we’re not through with we-ism yet! There’s a kind of “we,” the OED says, that’s used “confidentially or humorously” to the person being addressed and that dates back to the early 18th century.

Here’s Oxford’s first such citation, from the playwright John Vanbrugh’s comedy The False Friend (1702): “Well, old Acquaintance, we are going to be Married then?”

It’s this kind of “we” that Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage is talking about when it describes two sub-genres of we-ism.

Quoting a 1972 usage guide, M-W characterizes these as “the kindergarten we (We won’t lose our mittens, will we?)” and “the hospital we (How are we feeling this morning?).”

With that, we’ll sign off—both of us.

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