Category: Usage

Q: I recently ran into three uses of “principal” where it should have read “principle.” All were in distressingly unexpected contexts: a book on ethics by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, an opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, and an article about the resignation of Cathie Black as Schools Chancellor in NYC.

A: A lot of people have trouble keeping these two words straight.

A “principal” is a leading figure (the head of a school, for example) and plays a “principal” (that is, a leading) role. A “principle” is a rule or a standard.

Pat uses a time-honored memory aid in her grammar and usage book Woe Is I: “If you’re good at school, the principal is your p-a-l.”

You’re right that many educated people use “principal” to mean “principle” these days, but this isn’t a recent phenomenon.

The Oxford English Dictionary has published references going as far back as the mid-16th century for the use of “principal” to mean a primary or fundamental point.

The earliest citation is from The Exposicion of Daniel the Prophete (1545), a work of biblical commentary by George Joye:

“Let euery diligent reder knowe hymselfe miche to haue profited, if he but the cheif principalls vnderstand, although it be but meanly.”

The OED notes that the use of “principal” in this sense “is common as a non-standard spelling of principle from the 20th cent. onwards.”

In standard English, though, a “principle” is still a rule. In other words, the fundamental things apply as time goes by.

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Q: Why is an unpleasant person called a “pill”? For example, “So and so is a real pill.”

A: As you might suspect, this slang use of “pill” comes from medicine.

The word “pill” in its medical sense has been around since at least the late 1300s. It ultimately comes from the Latin pillula, which in classical times meant a little ball or pellet and in medieval times also meant a bullet.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for the medicinal “pill” is from an English translation of a Latin medical text, Guido Lanfranc’s Science of Cirurgie. The OED dates the translation to sometime before 1400.

Here’s the quotation: “He schal ofte be purgid with pillis.” (The “th” in “with” was actually a runic letter called a thorn.)

The original meaning, according to the OED, was “a small compressed ball or globular mass containing a medicinal substance, intended to be taken by mouth and usually of a size convenient for swallowing whole.”

A note in the OED adds: “Pills were originally made by mixing the drug with an inert substance and rolling it into a spherical shape.”

In the mid-1500s people began using the word to mean any remedy or solution, especially an unpleasant one that had to be endured.

That meaning gave us the expression “bitter pill,” as in this quotation from Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1814): “Mrs. Rushworth will be very angry. It will be a bitter pill to her.”

Since the middle of the 19th century, writers have been using “pill” to refer to people who are hard to swallow for one reason or another.

A person might be called a “pill” for being unpleasant, foolish, boring, weak, or otherwise difficult to take.

The OED cites an example from Carry on, Jeeves! by P. G. Wodehouse: “What’s to be done? … That pill is coming to stay here.”

When Pat was growing up in Iowa the word was often used affectionately. If her grandparents said, “What a pill!” they might be referring to someone with a mischievous or irrepressible sense of humor.

However, we haven’t found this affectionate sense of the word in slang dictionaries.

“Pill” has had many other slang meanings over the centuries. Among things that have been described as “pills” are baseballs, basketballs, billiards, cigarettes, doctors, the testicles, and even (in an echo of medieval Latin) bullets.

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Q: A story on Accuweather.com the other day referred to more than 1,300 “incidences” of severe weather and damage. I sent the website a brief note that it should have been “incidents.” You may wish to address this on your site.

A: We think the confusion in using “incident” and “incidence” can be traced to two problems.

First, writers mix up “incidence” (singular) with “incidents” (plural) because they sound alike as spoken.

This is why journalists often put the wrong words into people’s mouths when quoting them, and consequently why the Internet is rife with misusages.

Second, people don’t understand the difference between the singulars, “incident” and “incidence.”

Both words entered English in the 15th century by way of French, but they’re ultimately derived from the Latin incidere (to fall into, fall upon, happen).

Over the years, the two words have shared several meanings, including the one in that weather story.

The adjective “incident,” also from the 15th century, is largely used today in technical and legal writing. For most of us, it may bring to mind a phrase familiar in crime fiction: “incident room.”

In modern usage, the nouns “incident” and “incidence” have different principal meanings, but the words overlap a lot, and seem to be growing more alike.

Let’s begin with their main senses in contemporary English.

An “incident” is a definite and separate occurrence—that is, an event of some kind, as in “I reported the incident to the police,” or “The commission reviewed three incidents of harassment.”

An “incidence” refers to the frequency or rate of an occurrence, as in “The incidence of measles has declined.”

The plural “incidences” is seen mostly in scientific writing, as in “This graph plots the incidences and risk factors for four diseases.”

However, “incidence” is often used to refer to an occurrence in a general way. An example in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) refers to someone who “did not expect criticism and was surprised by its incidence.”

And an example in the Cambridge Dictionaries Online uses the word in the plural to mean separate occurrences: “There have been quite a few incidences of bullying in the school this year.”

Obviously, the difference between “incident” and “incidence” is fuzzy and getting fuzzier.

Nevertheless, we would use “incident” for a specific occurrence of something and “incidence” for the rate or frequency of an occurrence.

So if we were writing that Accuweather story, we’d refer to more than 1,300 “incidents” of severe weather and damage.

For anyone needing a good rule of thumb, Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) has one:  “Wherever incidence appears where incident would fit, a switch is probably in order.”

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Q: I’m surprised that you use the word “lame” in Origins of the Specious to mean bad. I taught a student with cerebral palsy and this use of “lame” seems insensitive to me. But perhaps it has nothing to do with actually being disabled.

A: You raise an interesting question. Is the use of “lame” in a figurative sense (as in “a lame argument” or “a lame excuse”) insensitive or politically incorrect?

We certainly didn’t intend to be insensitive when we used the word in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths. (We called a false etymology of the name Fiat “pretty lame”).

But we’re glad you brought this up, since it gives us a chance to examine the word more closely.

The word “lame,” which is extremely old, was written as lama or loma when it was first recorded in Old English in the year 725.

As for its ancestry, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that there were corresponding words in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High and Middle High German, and Old Norse. And there’s a connection with Old Church Slavonic, in which lomiti meant to break.

When “lame” first came into English, the OED says, it meant “disabled or impaired in any way; weak, infirm; paralysed; unable to move.”

This meaning is now considered obsolete, but a similar sense developed around the year 1000.

The OED defines this later meaning as “disabled through injury to, or defect in, a limb; spec. disabled in the foot or leg, so as to walk haltingly or be unable to walk.”

The word was first used this way by the Benedictine abbot and scholar Aelfric in his Lives of Saints, and this is what the word still means today in its literal sense.

But a figurative usage emerged in the 1300s. The OED defines this figurative sense as meaning “imperfect or defective, unsatisfactory as wanting a part or parts. Said esp. of an argument, excuse, account, narrative, or the like.”

Chaucer was the first to use the word in an other-than-literal way. In his short poem A.B.C. (circa 1366), he used the phrase “in soule to be lame” (that is, to be lame in one’s soul).

Chaucer later wrote, in his long poem Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1374): “Disblameth my yf ony word be lame. For as myn auctor seyde so sey I.”

(A modern version: “I pray you meekly not to blame me if any word might be lame, for just as my author said, I say the same.”)

The word has been used in this figurative way ever since. Here are a few of the examples cited in the OED.

“O most lame and impotent conclusion,” from Shakespeare’s Othello (before 1616).

“I will not contend much with him about the Proposition, which is lame to the ground,” from John  Canne’s A Necessitie of Separation From the Church of England (1634).

“Tables, or other Repertories … are oftentimes short, and give a lame account of the Subject sought for,” from Sir Matthew Hale’s Preface to H. Rolle’s Abridgment (1668).

“Our Argument … will be very lame and precarious,” from Richard Bentley’s A Dissertation Upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1699).

“The Theory of Comets, which at present is very lame and defective,” from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726).

“Her account was so lame and imperfect, that Mrs. Mourtray lost all patience,” from Elizabeth Hervey’s novel  The Mourtray Family (1800).

“His grammatical construction is often lame and imperfect,” from William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (1818).

You’ve heard the expression “lame duck” used to mean an officer-holder who’s been defeated in an election or can’t serve another  term. This American expression dates from the early 20th century.

For example, the OED cites an article that ran in the New York Evening Post in December 1910.

“Lame Duck Alley,” according to the article, was a name reporters gave to “a screened-off corridor in the White House offices, where statesmen who went down in the recent electoral combat may meet.”

But “lame duck” had been used earlier, in 18th-century England, to refer to someone defaulting on a debt. And a still earlier use of “lame” to mean “behind time” originated in Britain in the mid-1600s. For example, news or tidings that arrived “by the lame post” was late or outdated.

All these figurative meanings led to another, one that’s become ubiquitous in modern slang.

In this newest sense, the OED says, someone who’s “lame”  is “inept, naive, easily fooled; spec. unskilled in the fashionable behaviour of a particular group, socially inept.”

This usage was first recorded in 1942, according to the OED, which labels it “slang” and says it originated in the US.

One OED citation quotes the linguist William Labov, who wrote in his book Language in the Inner City (1972): “To be lame means to be outside of the central group and its culture.”

Another quotes an article from a London newspaper, the Sun: “This DJ is lame.”

To sum up, it would appear that in modern times, figurative uses of “lame” to mean (more or less) ineffectual or out of it are so common as to be routine.

Meanwhile, use of the word in its literal sense—that is, having difficulty in walking—seems to have declined. People who are literally lame don’t often describe themselves as such, and many resent the term.

At least this is the impression we’ve gotten after visiting several websites for people with disabilities.

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Q: I grew up in England and moved to the US 30 years ago, but I never heard of the word “fascinator” until the recent royal nuptials. I’m curious to know if there’s any link between what is now, obviously, a piece of millinery whimsy atop a lady’s head and the notion of such headgear as being (somewhat) fascinating.

A: If you studied the crowds waiting outside Westminster Abbey for a glimpse of the royal couple, you probably saw lots of fascinators.

A fascinator, as we all know now, is a lady’s hat, but not just any kind of hat. It is (to quote you) “a piece of millinery whimsy.” And it is often over the top, if you’ll pardon the pun.

It’s generally concocted of things like feathers, flowers, beads, and lace, and it perches jauntily—rather like a bird—just above the forehead or off to one side.

Like many British women, Kate Middleton (now Catherine, Dutchess of Cambridge), has liked fascinators.

In fact, her liking for them has kicked off what the Wall Street Journal calls a “fascinator frenzy.”

If you have time, take a look at the Journal article, complete with a slideshow of (mostly) British ladies in their fascinators.

Since we associate fascinators with British women, it’s interesting that the word “fascinator” in the sense of headwear first appeared in 19th-century America.

Back then, though, a fascinator wasn’t as flashy as it is today.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the early “fascinator” as “a head shawl worn by women, either crocheted or made of a soft material.”

The term first showed up in print, the OED says, thanks to another Kate. In a letter written in 1878, the author Kate Douglas Wiggin recalled “Mother crocheting a fascinator.”

In another citation, the Sears, Roebuck catalogue for 1897 offered a “Ladies’ Fascinator, made of good quality Shetland yarn … colors, pink and white.”

The dictionary’s other citations for that early sense of “fascinator” extend into the 1960s, so it’s likely that the meaning of the old word was simply updated.

The OED doesn’t explain why those early head shawls were called fascinators, but we can guess.

Since they were often crocheted or made of lace, a lady could modestly cover her head and still peep out—shyly or provocatively—through the spaces in the material.

And an attentive gentleman could catch a glimpse of her shy or provocative eye. What could be more fascinating?

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Q: If people aren’t doing well—or feeling well—we say they’re “under par.” But shooting “under par” in golf is a positive thing, and not a negative. Any thoughts?

A: The term “par” comes from an identical word in Latin that means “equality” or “that which is equal.” (Think of “parity.”)

When it was first recorded in English, in 1601, “par” was a term in economics, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It was short for “par of exchange,” a phrase that meant “the recognized value of the currency of one country in terms of that of another.”

Later, in the early 1700s, the term “par” acquired another financial meaning: “the face value of a share or other security as distinct from its market value,” the OED says.

So “at par” meant a price at face value; “above par” meant a price above that, or at a premium; “below par” meant at a discount.

Meanwhile, “par” acquired a more general meaning: “equality of value or standing; an equal footing, a level,” in the words of the OED.

And “on a par” meant equal or on the same level.

It’s not surprising that people in the late 1700s would begin using “par” in reference to health and well-being.

If you weren’t feeling quite up to scratch, you were feeling “under par,” and vice versa.

The OED’s first citation for this use of the word comes from a letter written in 1776 by Lady Hester Newdigate: “As to my Spirits they are rather above than below par.”

And since we never pass up a chance to quote P. G. Wodehouse, here’s a citation from his novel Quick Service (1940):

“Mrs. Chavender’s Pekinese, Patricia, had woken up that morning a little below par, and Sally was driving her and it to the veterinary surgeon in Lewe.”

(The OED replaced the Pekinese’s name with an ellipsis, but we think that anyone who’d drop “Patricia” must be dotty.)

When did golf enter the picture?

The term “par” was first used in the late 1880s to mean “the number of strokes which a scratch player should need for a hole or for a course,” the OED says.

The word “par” was also used as a noun meaning “a score of this number of stokes at a hole.”

Here’s the OED’s first recorded golfing use, from W. Simpson’s Art of Golf (1887): “He easily recalls how often he has done each hole in par figures.”

A more recent citation comes from the Times of London in 2000: “Westwood’s closing 71 took him to a total of 270, 14 under par.”

So when we say we’re feeling “a bit under par,” we’re not borrowing a golfing term. It was golfers who borrowed the word from common usage.

But we are using golf terminology when we say, “That’s par for the course.”

This figurative usage was first recorded in the 1940s, according to published references in the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from short story in a 1947 issue of The Partisan Review:

“Nancy had married and moved to San Francisco and had had three children immediately. ‘Par for the course,’ said Seymour to Jasper.”

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Q: When do we stop correcting everyone around us and acknowledge that language has evolved? For instance the lovely distinction between “jealous” and “envious” has been so thoroughly blurred that it’s widely lost. At what point do we throw in the towel?

A: This is a complicated question. It’s a myth that English has been formal up until now and has suddenly become casual. English has always been in transition and always will be.

As the inevitable shifts in usage occur, there’s going to be a certain amount of  hand-wringing on the part of those who think English should remain frozen in time—their time!

One concrete thing you can do is keep your dictionary up to date. Lexicographers always have their ears to the ground. It’s the words that are out there, in common usage, that make it into dictionaries in the first place.

A dictionary entry in effect tells people that this is a word people use, this is how they spell it, this is how they pronounce it, and this is what they mean by it.

Inevitably, its meaning, its spelling, its pronunciation will change over time in common usage.

And as these things change, so does a word’s entry in the dictionary. This is why dictionaries of only fifty years ago are very different from those of today.

We wrote a blog posting last year about how words can change their stripes over the centuries.

As for “jealous” and “envious,” you may be surprised at how much these two words have evolved over the years.

The adjective “jealous,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has meant wrathful, furious, devoted, eager, amorous, lustful, zealous, and so on, though many of these senses are now obsolete.

The word is ultimately derived from zelus, Latin for zeal.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says “jealous” apparently entered English sometime before 1200, and originally meant “distrustful of the faithfulness of a spouse or lover.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from The Owl and the Nightingale, a Middle English poem from the 12th or 13th century: “He was so gelus of his wive.”

It wasn’t until a couple of centuries later, according to citations in the OED, that people began being “jealous” of their rivals (or imagined rivals) in love.

Here’s an early citation from The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, a mid-15th century translation of a French etiquette guide for young women: “She loued hym so moche that she was ielous ouer alle women that he spake with.”

The adjective “envious” has meant “vexed or discontented at the good fortune or qualities of another” since it entered English around 1300.

But over the centuries it has also meant malicious, spiteful, grudging, stingy, and odious, though most of those senses are now obsolete.

Why all those nasty meanings? Perhaps because the word ultimately comes from the Latin invidere, to look with ill will upon or cast an evil eye on someone.

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Q: I’m trying to track down a term from my days at Power Memorial Academy in New York. I believe it’s praeteritio. Brother Hickey told us in Latin III that it was a rhetorical device for when you say you won’t mention something and then proceed to mention it.

A: The English word for the rhetorical figure you’re talking about is “preterition” (pronounced pret-uh-RISH-un).

The word dates from 1602, and the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a rhetorical device “in which attention is drawn to something by professing to omit it.”

The use of preterition is easy to spot, since it’s usually introduced by “I needn’t mention …” or “to say nothing of …” or “needless to say …” or “it’s not my intention to …” or something of that nature.

In Trollope’s 1857 novel Barchester Towers, for example, this is how the wife of Bishop Proudie is introduced:

“It is not my intention to breathe a word against the character of Mrs Proudie, but still I cannot think that with all her virtues she adds much to her husband’s happiness. The truth is that in matters domestic she rules supreme over her titular lord, and rules with a rod of iron. Nor is this all. Things domestic Dr Proudie might have abandoned to her, if not voluntarily, yet willingly. But Mrs Proudie is not satisfied with such home dominion, and stretches her power over all his movements, and will not even abstain from things spiritual. In fact, the bishop is henpecked.”

The English term “preterition” ultimately comes from the Latin verb praeterire (to go past). In the third century, the post-classical Latin noun praeteritio came to mean the rhetorical device, according to the OED.

Henry Peacham, in a 1577 treatise on rhetoric, The Garden of Eloquence, coined a short-lived English version of the Latin noun:

“Preteritio, when we faine and make as though we would say nothing in some matter, when notwithstanding we speake most of al, or when we say something, in saying we will not say it.”

As we said, the “preteritio” that Peacham used did not last long in English (the OED calls it an “unassimilated borrowing”).

However, “preterition” as well as another term for the same rhetorical device, “paralipsis,” did survive in English.

“Paralipsis” (also spelled “paraleipsis”) entered English in 1550.

The OED says it was borrowed from the post-classical Latin paralipsis, a “rhetorical device of emphasising or drawing attention to something by professing to say little or nothing about it, or affecting to dismiss it (3rd cent.).”

The Latin word came from the Greek paraleipein (to leave out).

The Romans must have used this rhetorical gambit a lot, since they had two words for it—praeteritio and paralipsis. Here are their etymologies.

praeteritio: a passing by or over, from Latin praeter (past or by) + ire (to go)

paralipsis: a leaving aside, from Greek para (aside) + leipein (to leave)

Brother Hickey may have mentioned both of those terms when he discussed the rhetorical device at Power Memorial, an all-boys high school that existed from 1931 to 1984.

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Q: You say on the blog that the idiomatic use of “the” in “the half of it” isn’t acceptable in formal English. However, I’ve found this usage in the King James version of the Bible, where the Queen of Sheba tells Solomon: “Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard.”

A: In our 2009 posting, we discussed many of the idiomatic uses of “the.” Among others, we talked about the expressions “the both of us” and “the half of it.”

We said those two constructions, while acceptable in speech and informal writing, wouldn’t be appropriate in formal written English in the US.

But perhaps we were a bit shortsighted about “the half of it.” After doing some additional research, we’ve decided to fill in the other half of the story. So here goes.

A search of the Early English Books Online database shows that respectable writers—and not just writers of Bibles—have been using phrases like “the half” and “the half of it” for centuries.

Examples in the ordinary sense (that is, half of something) are numerous: “the half of my kingdom,” “the half of their goods,” and so on.

But we also found many examples of negative or ironic constructions built around the phrases “the half of” and “by the half.”

These are early versions of such modern expressions as “you don’t know the half of it” and “he’s too clever by half.”

Here’s a sampling from the 16th and 17th centuries.

1571: “Excuse if I writ euill [evil], ye may gesse the halfe of it” (from George Buchanan’s condemnation of Mary Queen of Scots).

1587: “If men but knew, the halfe that he did write” (from a eulogy on the death of Sir Phillip Sidney).

1652: “O, quoth the Goat-Heard, I doe not yet know the half of the Adventures succeeded to Marcela‘s lovers” (from a translation of Don Quixote).

1655: “Is it not as well to have it [money] without blows?” “Not by the half” (dialogue from The Passionate Lovers, a tragicomedy by Lodowick Carlell).

1667: “few of the Laity know the half of them” (from an anti-papist treatise by Jeremy Taylor).

1677: “But truly I have not come to the half of that which I intended” (from a London minister, Thomas Wadsworth).

1685: “report of the Glory was true, but the half of it was not told” (from a theological treatise by George Keith).

1686: “it was too little by the halfe” (from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland).

1686: “the half of it is not mentioned” (from Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury).

1690: “I found that the half was not told you then of what is commonly known in this place” … “They have not done the half of what will be necessary to save them” (sentences from a theological work by Thomas Morer).

1696: “It were tedious to number the half of its omissions” (a comment on the Litany by a Presbyterian minister, Richard Baxter).

We could go on, but you get the idea.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s citations for “the half of it” (meaning “a significant or more important part of something” and generally used “in negative contexts”) don’t begin until the 20th century.

The OED’s first citation is from Hot Water (1932), a novel by P. G. Wodehouse.

Since we never pass up an opportunity to quote Wodehouse, here’s the relevant passage: “It makes me sick. And that’s not the half of it. … She told me I’ve got to be American Ambassador to France.”

Here’s another OED citation, from Minute for Murder (1947), by the pseudonymous Nicholas Blake (actually Cecil Day-Lewis): “ ‘We’ve not seen the half of it yet,’ said the Messenger darkly.”

The OED’s citations for “by half” (meaning “by a great deal; much, considerably, far”) go back much further—to before the year 1000.

The first quotation—which translates into Modern English as “sweeter by half”—is from the Metres of Boethius, an Old English adaptation from the Latin of the sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius.

We’ll give a few more lines of the poem for context: “The comb of the honey cannot but seem / To each son of men sweeter by half, / If he have tasted before the honey / Aught that is bitter.”

A 1780 citation in the OED—“Oh, he’s too moral by half”—is from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy The School for Scandal.

And  later comes “too clever by half,” from George John Whyte-Melville’s novel The Interpreter (1858). The OED says the phrase means “trying too hard to be clever.”

And with that, we’ll stop. We don’t want to be too wordy by half.

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Q: In an appearance on WNYC, Pat mentioned the “cat’s-paw” fable of La Fontaine. As an attorney and an ailurophile, I might add that “cat’s paw” is the name of a legal theory of employer liability for discrimination. In a recent Supreme Court opinion, Justice Scalia explained the fable in footnote 1.

A: We’re ailurophiles (or cat lovers) ourselves, and we found your comment an interesting footnote to Pat’s discussion on the radio about feline expressions.

As Pat said on the show, a “cat’s-paw” (now often “catspaw,” but usually “cat’s paw” in employment law) is a dupe, someone used as a tool.

The term, first recorded in the mid-17th century, is an alteration of the earlier phrase “cat’s foot,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED explains that it’s a “reference to the fable or tale of a monkey (or a fox) using the foot or paw of a cat to rake roasted chestnuts out of the burning coals.”

The dictionary adds parenthetically that some versions of the story say the monkey belonged to Pope Julius II (1503-13). Depending on the version, the cat is either tricked or forced into letting the monkey use its paw.

The earliest citation in the OED for “cat’s-paw” is from a political pamphlet, Killing Is Murder, written by Michael Hawke in 1657: “These he useth as the Monkey did the Cat’s paw to scrape the nuts out of the fire.”

The earliest reference to a “cat’s foot” used in this sense comes from a 1623 translation of The Spanish Rogue, a picaresque novel by Mateo Alemán that was published in Spanish the year before.

The English version of the Alemán quotation: “To take the Cat by the foote, and therewith to rake the coales out of the Ouen.”

As for the fable that gave rise to these terms, it was “current in the sixteenth century, but varying considerably in details,” according to John S. Farmer’s Slang and Its Analogues (1890).

“The earliest printed version,” Farmer writes, “occurs in John Sambucus’ Emblemata (Plantin, Antwerp, 1564), where the sufferer is a dog, and not a cat. There is, however, a story of the same kind told … of Pope Julius II.”

Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) also notes that the monkey was said to have belonged to Pope Julius II.

And a contributor to the journal Notes and Queries wrote in 1884 that he had found an account written in 1600, stating “that the occurrence took place while the chamberlains of Julius II were waiting for the Pope to retire to rest, and that the monkey held the cat with his left arm and took the paw in his right.”

Pope or no pope, the definitive version of the tale is the one written by Jean de La Fontaine in the 17th century.

La Fontaine’s “Le Singe et le Chat” (“The Monkey and the Cat”) first appeared in a collection of fables published in 1679.

This version of the tale is less violent than some earlier ones, because La Fontaine’s cat is persuaded by flattery, not wrestled by force, into sticking a foot into the hot coals.

As the cat blisters his paws to claw the chestnuts out one by one, the monkey gobbles them up.

The footnote in Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion says La Fontaine’s fable was “conceived by Aesop.”

Though the idea has often been attributed to Aesop, we haven’t found any positive evidence of this. Perhaps Justice Scalia knows something we don’t.

We can’t close without explaining the etymology of “ailurophile,” which comes from the Greek roots ailouros (cat) and phile (one who loves).

Despite its ancient connections, the word is a relative newcomer, coined in the 20th century.

The OED’s first citation is from 1931, but a Google Books search turned up one from a 1927 issue of Scribner’s Magazine:

“You are really an ‘ailurophile,’ or ‘lover of cats.’ I think ailurophile is a beautiful word, is fluent, and rolls trippingly on the tongue with catlike fluency.”

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Q: The other day an Irish friend wished “bad cess” to the bankers responsible for Ireland’s economic woes. Is that “cess” as in “cesspool”? Too bad this is too late for St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe next year.

A: Why wait for St. Patrick’s Day to come around again? In fact, tax day (yes, today is the deadline for filing) may be just as appropriate. More on this later.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “bad cess to” as an Anglo-Irish phrase meaning “bad luck to” or “evil befall.”

The OED’s first published reference for the usage is from Punch in 1859: “Carlisle and Russell—bad cess to their clan!”

But a Google Books search turned up a much earlier example.

In a story published in 1833 in the Dublin University Magazine, a character named Barny O’Reirdon says, “Whist, whist! and bad cess to you both.”

And the busy scanners at Google have also provided us with several 19th-century appearances of “good cess,” meaning good luck.

Here’s an 1857 example from Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art: “Oh, he’s a curious crayther, tho pig, an has his own ways, good cess to him!”

How did “cess” come to mean luck or fortune? The etymology here is a question mark, though the OED offers two suggestions:

(1) It could be short for “success.” This seems unlikely to us, since “good success” is redundant and “bad success” is an oxymoron.

(2) It could have something to do with taxes—a timely subject today, even if we’re too late for St. Patrick’s Day!

A “cess” has meant an assessment, tax, or levy since at least as far back as the 16th century. It’s an aphetic (or shortened) form of  “assess.”

(While the proper etymological spelling of the shortened term would be “sess,” the word generally appears as “cess.”)

“Cess” seems to have  been a product of English officialdom.

The OED’s first citation is from an act of Henry VIII in 1531 that makes reference to “divers and sundry Cesses, Scots, and Taxes.” (A “scot” is an assessment.)

Jonathan Swift in the 18th century refers to a “parish cess,” or church tax. Similar usages spread to other parts of the Empire.

In Scotland, for example, a “cess” referred to a land tax in the 17th and 18th centuries.

And in 19th-century India, a journalist wrote of “the road cess, the irrigation cess, the public works cess, and the education cess.” (Today all taxes in India are subject to an education cess of 3 percent.)

In Ireland, “cess” is still the official term for a local tax. But it once had another and more sinister meaning, and we think this is where “bad cess” comes from.

The OED defines this meaning of “cess,” first recorded around 1571, as “the obligation to supply the soldiers and the household of the lord deputy with provisions at prices ‘assessed’ or fixed by government.”

In other words, the Irish populace was arbitrarily forced to support the occupying soldiers and the personal needs of the lord deputy.

At any rate, to wish someone “bad cess” would be a curse indeed. A contributor to the Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland had this to say in 1889:

“Before barracks were commonly built in Ireland, it was usual to quarter soldiers permanently upon the inhabitants, and this was called ‘cessing’ them. It was possible that the soldiers thus quartered might be well conducted and respectable men, but if (which was more than probable) they were not very desirable persons to have the run of a man’s house and premises, this might  be reasonably called a ‘bad cess’; and a few things can be imagined to have been more disagreeable.”

As for “cesspool,” the OED says the word is “of uncertain origin,” though the dictionary offers several theories.

The most likely, in our opinion, is that the English term is somehow related to the Italian word for privy, cesso, which is derived from the Latin secessus, a secluded place.

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Q: Your posting on the idiomatic use of prepositions with “odd” and “even” left me to wondering how these two little words got their numerical meanings.

A: And now we’ve been wondering about the conventions of “odd” and “even” numbering.

Let’s begin with “even” and save the odder history of “odd” for later.

The adjective “even” has had several related meanings over its more than 1,000-year history.

Among other things, it has meant level, equal, alike, uniform, straight, direct, parallel, exact, precise, balanced, and equable (that is, unruffled).

In the mid-16th century, the Oxford English Dictionay says, “even” acquired a numerical meaning: “divisible integrally into two equal parts.” 

“Even” first appeared this way, according to OED citations, in Robert Record’s The Whetstone of Witte (1557): “Euen nombers are those, whiche maie be diuided into equalle halfes.”

It’s easy to see how a word that meant equal could evolve over a few hundred years into one that meant dividable into equal parts.

The adjective “odd,” however, didn’t have to evolve to get its numerical sense.

It’s been used for numbers since it showed up in a Middle English religious poem in the late 13th century, according to OED references.

The original meaning of “odd” in English was one in addition to (or one shy of) an even number.

“Odd” got this meaning from associations it had in early Scandinavian.

For example, oddi in Old Icelandic meant a triangle, and later a third or an odd number. Here’s how the OED explains it:

 “The senses ‘odd,’ ‘odd number’ in early Scandinavian apparently developed by metaphor from ‘triangle’ (as being three-cornered), and thence by extension from the third or unpaired member of a group of three, to any single or unpaired member of a group, and from three as the primary ‘odd number,’ to all numbers containing an unpaired unit.”

Meanwhile, a century of so after it entered English, “odd” started taking on non-numerical meanings: left over, unpaired, irregular, strange, and generally the opposite of “even.”

So “even” developed its numerical meaning because of an earlier sense of evenness, while “odd” developed its sense of oddness because of an earlier numerical meaning.

Now isn’t that odd!

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