Category: Usage

Q: Why does the word “bangs” refer to a fringe of hair cut straight across the forehead?

A: The use of “bangs” (or “bang”) for that short fringe of hair originated in the US in the 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But the usage has its roots in “bangtail,” an equine term seen on both sides of the Atlantic. So let’s start our investigation in the stables.

The word “bangtail” is defined in the OED as “a (horse’s) tail, of which the hair is allowed to grow to a considerable length and then cut horizontally across so as to form a flat even tassel-like end.”

The dictionary notes that the term has also been used in Australia for cattle with tails cut that way, and in the US as slang for a horse, especially a race horse.

The earliest citation for “bangtail” in Green’s Dictionary of Slang is from a Scottish journal, suggesting that the term may have first reared its head in the British Isles.

Green’s cites an 1812 issue of the Edinburgh Review that mentions a stud horse named Bangtail, but the name surely came from an even earlier use of the term.

Through a Google search we found a comic British story about fox-hunting, published in 1851, in which “bang-tail” appears least seven times in reference to tails as well as horses.

The story, “Turning Out a Bagman,” by a writer signed “B.P.W.,” is about two London greenhorns who are on vacation and want to hire a pair of hunters.

The showily groomed horses they hire are called “bang-tails,” and are described as having “such flowing bang-tails as at once stamped them in the eyes of our friends as ‘out-and-out’ thorough-breds.”

The story is chockfull of slang (like “bagman” to mean “fox”), which may explain the repeated use of “bang-tail” instead of “horse.”

Apparently it didn’t take long for “bang” to graduate from horse tails to human hair.

We found an 1844 travel book, Revelations of Russia by Charles Frederick Henningsen, that mentions a man’s hair cut “somewhat in the fashion of a thorough-bred’s ‘bang-tail.’ ”

In another travel book we came across an 1849 entry that describes a woman whose hair was braided in back and “cut in bang style” in front.

The OED’s earliest citation for the human usage is from a letter written in 1878 by Frances M. A. Roe, author of Army Letters From an Officer’s Wife: “It had a heavy bang of fiery red hair.” (The “bang” was on a face mask in a shop window in Helena, in the Montana Territory.)

Another American, William Dean Howells, also used the word in his book The Undiscovered Country (1880): “His hair cut in front like a young lady’s bang.”

A Google search turned up a plural reference in an 1883 article from the New York Times. A Catholic priest, lecturing Sunday school children, “condemned the fashion of wearing ‘bangs’ in severe terms.”

A matching adjective (as in “banged” hair) and verb (to “bang” or cut the front hair straight across) also emerged in the 1880s, according to citations in the OED.

Here are a couple of examples: “He was bareheaded, his hair banged even with his eyebrows in front” (from the Century Magazine, 1882), and “They wear their … hair ‘banged’ low over their foreheads” (from Harper’s Magazine, 1883).

So it would appear that the verb “bang” (to cut hair straight across) emerged after the hairstyle and not before, unless there are earlier verb references we haven’t found.

That still leaves us with a question: Why did “bang” mean bluntly cut?

Both Green’s and the OED indicate that since the late 1500s the verb “bang” has meant to hit or thump, and the noun “bang” has meant a blow or a thump.

And “bang” has been used adverbially since the late 18th century, the OED says, to mean “all of a sudden,” or “suddenly and abruptly, all at once, as in ‘to cut a thing bang off.’ ”

Since the bangs on a person’s forehead, like a horse’s banged tail, end abruptly—you might say with a  “bang!”—perhaps the word is simply a case of creative English.

A collection of humor pieces, Wit and Humor of the Age (1883), takes the creativity a step further. In a story by  Melville D. Landon, one chambermaid asks another “if she banged her hair.”

“Yes, Mary,” the first chambermaid says. “I bang my hair—keep a banging it, but it don’t stay bung!”

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[A May 30, 2022, post discusses “ ’til,” “till,” and “until.”]

Q: Can you tell me the origin of the expression “no money in the til”? I looked up the word “til,” but couldn’t find a definition related to purse or money box or anything other than time.

A: The phrase is “no money in the till.” The noun “till” here is spelled with a double “l.”

The word “till” has three principal meanings:

(1) It’s a noun for a cash drawer or money-box.

(2) It’s a verb meaning to work the soil.

(3) It’s a preposition or conjunction with much the same meaning as “until.”

By the way, the preposition/conjunction is not a shortening or contraction of “until.” And it’s not etymologically correct to spell it with one “l,” though the misspelling is so common that many dictionaries list it separately as a variant.

In case you’d like to read more on the preposition and conjunction, we wrote a blog post several years ago about the convoluted history of “ ’til,” “till,” and “until.”

But getting back to your original question, the Oxford English Dictionary has no citations that include the phrase “no money in the till.” (However, it does have a mention of the “no”-less phrase “money in the till,” used in the literal sense.)

We also can’t locate “no money in the till” in slang sources or collections of idioms, but a Google search comes up with more than 900,000 hits.

An unscientific sampling of the Google results suggests that most people use the expression figuratively in the sense of being broke. It’s another way of saying the cupboard is bare or the cookie jar is empty.

The expression is used literally, however, in the earliest example in a Google Timeline search (from the Nov. 12, 1862, issue of the Daily Southern Cross newspaper in Auckland, New Zealand).

In a report about the trial of a man charged with stealing money from the Yew Tree Inn, the innkeeper is quoted as saying: “There was no money in the till when I saw it again.”

By the late 19th century, though, the expression was being used loosely. An April 12, 1882, item in the New York Times includes this quotation:

“Six days before election the Chairman of the General Committee discovers that he has four wards left to ‘take care’ of, and no money in the till.”

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Q: Why aren’t white people included in the expression “people of color”? This has bothered me for a long time. White is a color too, isn’t it?

A: You make a very good point. All people are really “people of color,” since no one’s skin is colorless.

But the description “of color” strikes us as better than “nonwhite,” which describes people in a negative way—that is, in terms of what they lack or what they are not.

And we’re not especially satisfied with “minority,” which is often inaccurate or meaningless.

The term “people of color” has surged in popularity in the last couple of decades, but it’s not as new as you might think.

Citations in the Oxford  English Dictionary show that the phrase was in use during the 18th century.

The OED’s earliest citation is from An Historical Survey of St. Domingo (1797), by Bryan Edwards, a planter and politician:

“The inhabitants … were composed of three great classes: 1st, pure whites. 2d, people of colour, and blacks of free condition. 3d, negroes in a state of slavery. … The class which, by a strange abuse of language, is called people of colour, originates from an intermixture of the whites and the blacks.” (The italics are Edwards’s.)

And here are two more early appearances of the phrase: “The Bermudian pilots are men of colour” (from  an 1803 issue of The Naval Chronicle), and “She is a woman of colour” (from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, 1883).

The OED says that in phrases like these, “color” means “the hue of the darker (as distinguished from the ‘white’) varieties of mankind,” and “in America, esp. a person of black descent.”

Obviously, today the term “of color” doesn’t necessarily mean racially mixed, as it sometimes did in the 18th century.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) has an interesting Usage Note on the subject:

“Dissatisfaction with the implications of nonwhite as a racial label has doubtless contributed to the recent popularity of the term person of color and others, such as woman of color, with the same construction. In effect, person of color stands nonwhite on its head, substituting a positive for a negative. It is interesting that the almost exclusive association in American English of colored with Black does not carry over to terms formed with ‘of color,’ which are used inclusively of most groups other than those of European origin.”

You might be interested in a posting we wrote some time ago about how blackness and darkness came to have negative associations (as in in such phrases as “black sheep” and “dark day”).

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Q: The origin of “the cat’s pajamas,” a subject that came up while Pat was on WNYC, is nicely told in Tad Tuleja’s The Cat’s Pajamas. Meow!

A: We assume you’re writing this with tongue in cheek, since Tuleja’s book is a humorous compilation of imagined origins—or “fakelore,” as he puts it—and not serious etymology.

As for “the cat’s pajamas” (or “pyjamas”), the expression was coined by the cartoonist T. A. (Tad) Dorgan (1877-1929), according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

Dorgan is also credited with coining “the cat’s meow,” though not “the cat’s whiskers.” All three expressions mean someone or something that’s outstanding.

(An early “whiskers” example is from a 1923 item in the St. Joseph (Mo.) News-Press that plugs the paper’s want ads as “the ‘cat’s whiskers,’ which, being translated for college presidents means they are o k—they get quick results.”)

These “caticisms” are examples of zoological whimsy from the flapper era that we discussed in a blog posting in 2009.

Similar feline phrases include “the cat’s cuffs,” “the cat’s lingerie,” “the cat’s mac,” and “the cat’s spats,” according to Green’s Dictionary.

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Q: Do you have any insight into the saying “invest is a code word for spend”? How has it been so rapidly placed in the brains of so many people? Is Frank Luntz lurking? Was it created as a kind of poison pill in advance of President Obama’s State of the Union speech?

A: We checked out various combinations of “spend” (or “spending”) + “code word” (or “codeword”) + “invest” (or “investing” or “investment”) and got millions of hits on Google.

Although many of the hits appeared just before or after the  president’s Jan. 25 State of the Union Address (in which he called for investing in the future), the saying originally showed up long before that 2011 speech.

A cursory Google search came up with a version of the expression in a July 11, 1988, Time magazine article that appeared the year Mr. Obama entered law school.

In commenting on Michael Dukakis’s presidential platform, Walter Shapiro and Michael Duffy wrote in Time: “Read invest as the new Democratic code word for spend.”

Did the political consultant, pollster, and self-described word doctor Frank Luntz have anything to do with it? Not as far as we can tell.

The use of the phrase “code word” in the sense of a secret word has been around since the 19th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED doesn’t mention the newer sense we’re discussing, but both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) include euphemism as a meaning of “code word.”

For an example of the usage, American Heritage cites the New Republic: “The Democrats’ ‘populism’ is a code word for bigger farm subsidies and protectionism.”

We don’t know exactly when this usage first showed up, but it appears to go back at least as far as the 1960s.

A June 27, 1969, column by C. L. Sulzberger in the New York Times, for example, says, “Vietnam has become a code word for everything that is wrong or vulnerable in American life.”

Update: After this entry was posted, we got this email from Walter Shapiro, the former Time magazine writer mentioned above:

“Just a brief note to say that I wrote the 1988 Time magazine story that called ‘invest’ the new Democratic code word for ‘spend.’ (My then-colleague Michael Duffy provided the reporting in that old-fashioned news-magazine division of responsibility).

“While my precise memory has, of course, faded with the years, I am pretty certain that this was my observation based on the prevalence of the word ‘invest’ in Democratic rhetoric coming out of the Reagan years. This linguistic sleight-of-hand by the Democrats was an obvious response to the way that Ronald Reagan had demonized government spending. And, as a long-time political reporter (and Jimmy Carter speechwriter), I can testify that political consultants in both parties were tinkering with rhetoric before Frank Luntz was born.”

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Q: You say in your March 7, 2011, posting that you don’t know a female equivalent of male interjections like “man oh man” and “boy oh boy.” Our legendary Nebraska broadcaster, the late Lyell Bremser, had a signature phrase to introduce key plays: “Man, woman and child!” It became probably THE most beloved phrase in the state during Lyell’s long reign on radio station KFAB—and it does seem to use “woman” in the “boy oh boy” sense.

A: You’re right. Bremser did use “woman” that way, though most people use the phrase “man, woman, and child” as an expression of universality or in its literal sense, not as an interjection.

For any Husker fans too young to remember Bremser, here’s an excerpt from his 1973 broadcast of a Nebraska-Minnesota football game:

“OOHHH, MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD WHAT A THROW THAT WAS BY DAVE ‘THE DEALER’ HUMM! He faked his hand-off into the middle, Frosty Anderson went down the left side on a fly pattern, Humm RIFLED that ball, he had to throw that 45 to 50 yards in the air!!!….here’s the try for the point, the kick is up, and Sanger’s kick is good!…But believe me, he threw that absolutely a TON!!! Frosty Anderson NEVER broke stride! He had his man beat! He was in behind Kevin Keller, #42, flying down the left sideline … he had him beat by a couple of steps. And that ball was laid right on his FINGER TIPS! He never broke stride, and you knew that was TOUCHDOWN ALL THE WAY!! … ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PASS PLAYS YOU’LL EVER WANT TO SEE!!!”

The transcript (including the creative punctuation and capitalization) comes from the website HuskerMax.com, which notes that Bremser nicknamed the quarterback David Humm “The Dealer” because Humm was from Las Vegas.

(Humm went from Nebraska to the Oakland Raiders, Buffalo Bills, Baltimore Colts, and Los Angeles Raiders.)

By the way, we got nearly a million hits when we googled the phrase “man, woman, and child,” including more than 400 from Bremser, but most of the hits we looked at used the phrase in its universal sense.

President Obama, for example, said in his Jan. 20, 2009, Inaugural Address that “America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity.”

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have an entry for the phrase “man, woman, and child,” but it has six citations that include it, all of them in the universal or literal sense.

An 1806 citation in the entry for the verb “drag” is the earliest published reference in the OED: “Having dragged the whole neighbourhood for every man, woman and child.”

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Q: I’ve always believed that “elite” is a collective noun, both singular and plural. I’m aware the word “elites” emerged during the George W. Bush years, generally in a pejorative sense. Is there in fact such a word as “elites”?

A: The use of “elites,” especially in a negative sense, may have increased during the Bush years, but it had been around for decades before then.

A May 27, 1982, article in the New York Times, for example, mentions “a trenchant critic of the power of unbridled elites in a pluralist society.”

And a June 13, 1982, piece in the Times discusses “confronting local power elites locked into quid pro quo relationships with the ruling party” in India.

OK, the usage has a history, but is the word “elites” legit?

The short answer is yes. However, the use of the noun “elite” in English often seems arbitrary. Here’s the story.

The  word, borrowed directly from the French élite, comes ultimately from the Latin verb eligere (to choose). It’s the same source that gave us “elect.”

In English, “elite” refers to the choice part of something—the most respected, skillful, or influential members of a society or class or body.

With the Latin verb eligere in mind, we might refer to the elite as the chosen.

Although the term is often used in a negative way, as you point out, that sense hasn’t made its way yet into standard dictionaries.

Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) say “elite” has two plurals, “elite” and “elites.”

But the two dictionaries aren’t as clear as we’d like about when to use “elite” as a singular and when to use each of the plurals.

In fact, the AH and M-W entries give the impression that it would be hard to go wrong in using these terms.

As for us, we’d use “elite” as a singular noun if we were emphasizing the group as a whole: “The Washington elite has lost touch with Middle America.”

We’d use “elite” as a plural if we were thinking of members of the group: “The Wall Street elite are reeling from the banking scandal.”

And we’d use “elites” as a plural if we were speaking of two different groups: “The political and literary elites are at odds over support for public broadcasting.” 

We think “elites” is overused today and unnecessary if “elite” could just as easily be used. But that’s only our opinion. And maybe it’s an elitist attitude.

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Q: A poster at my local hospital in Idaho uses the term “securement devices” for bandages, Band-Aids, and Velcro-like wraps that the techs put around my arm (along with gauze or a cotton ball) when I get blood drawn. This is a new one on me.

A: This use of “securement” is new to us too. But then “securement” is a noun that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “rare” even in its recognized meanings.

The noun generally means “the action or an act of securing,” according to the OED, but that broad definition includes two more precise meanings.

One of them, now obsolete, is “making safe from or against”; the other is “ensuring or making sure.”

There are only a handful of OED citations for this second sense (“ensuring or making sure”), all from the 17th to the 19th century.

The first is from William Foster’s The English Factories in India 1622-23, a calendar of historic events. In this entry from 1622,  the OED provides the missing language in brackets:

“[Willoughby has also been furnished with money, and left to take his choice of means] for his best securmentt.”

The most recent OED citation is from an 1883 issue of the Century Magazine: “Liberty, however, is so highly prized that society condemns the securement in all cases of perpetual protection by means of perpetual imprisonment.”

However, a Google Timeline search finds examples dating up to the present. Most of these seem to use “securement” in its established senses, but there are also extended meanings in the mechanical sense—to fasten or make secure.

We found a lot of references relating to the security of freight being transported (“cargo securement systems,” for example).

But we also found medical usages. Recent phrases from medical literature include “securement straps” for wheelchairs, “intravenous catheter securement techniques,” and “sutureless securement devices.”

Our guess is that “securement” will remain in specialized technical language, but that it won’t cross over into everyday usage.

Why should it, when in most cases we could just as easily use “security” or “securing”?

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Q: I saw an ad for a bank—I can’t remember which one—that said: “XYZ banks me and my business.” If Mr. Murray were still putting together the OED, I’d add a slip to his pigeonhole for the word “bank.”

A: The verb “bank” in the money sense has a couple of well-established meanings.

It’s commonly used as an intransitive verb—that is, one without an object—meaning to have a bank account, as in “Where do you bank? I bank with First National.”

“Bank” is also used as a transitive verb—one with an object—in the sense of “deposit,” as in “I banked my paycheck,” or “He banks the receipts every week.”

But the usage you mention is a less familiar one. Here, “bank” is a transitive verb meaning “provide banking services to.” Examples: “Who banks you? First National banks me.”

It was noted recently by a subscriber on the American Dialect Society’s online mailing list that the word “bank” (or, rather, “unbank”) was used this way in a Jan. 5 article in the Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper said banks were looking for new fees to charge customers, replacing  old charges that had been disallowed by government regulators.

It quoted a spokeswoman for J.P. Morgan Chase as saying, “We don’t want to raise fees on our customers, but unfortunately, regulation is forcing us to do it, and as a result, some customers may end up unbanked.”

By “unbanked” she meant “unprovided with banking services.”

In using this inverted form of expression, you’ll notice, she was able to avoid saying WHO was pulling the plug. “You may end up unbanked” is another way of saying, “We may unbank you.”

A second ADS list subscriber pointed out that the usage dates back to the 1980s.

A third subscriber pointed out a different use of “unbank.” Credit unions use the term to differentiate themselves from banks. An ad for the credit union Connex, for example, says: “Unbank with us.”

We’ve found many similar usages ourselves. A financial services center in Minnesota, for instance, calls itself “The Unbank Company.” It even offers “unloans,” but presumably discourages “unpaying.”

So far, odd transitive uses of “bank” seem confined to corporate and advertising language. We haven’t found any examples of real people using “bank” this way in the real world.

The word “bank” entered English around 1200 as a noun meaning a ridge or mound or other raised area of the ground, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. There are similar words in Old Norse and Old Icelandic.

The verb “bank” showed up in the late 1500s in the transitive sense of to form a border and the intransitive sense of to border upon something.

The verb was first used in a financial sense in the 18th century. Initially, it was an intransitive verb meaning to run a bank or act as a banker, but that usage isn’t seen much now.

The OED’s first financial citation is from Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (2nd ed., 1738): “Banker, a person who banks, that is, negotiates, and trafficks in money.”

In the 19th century, the verb “bank” took on another intransitive sense: “to deposit money or keep an account with a banker.”

The earliest OED cite for this sense is from Harriet Martineau’s novel Berkeley the Banker (1833): “A man who brings a splendid capital, and will, no doubt, bank with us at D——.”

As a transitive verb meaning to deposit, “bank” appeared slightly later. The first OED citation is from an 1838 issue of a stage journal, Actors by Daylight, in which a writer refers to theater managers “having ‘banked’ their cash.”

The word that the Chase spokeswoman used (“some customers may end up unbanked”) hasn’t made it into James Murray’s OED or any other published dictionaries.

Frankly, we think it smacks of corporate gobbledygook and wouldn’t bank on it.

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Q: A friend of mine used the expression “rant and rave” the other day. That got me thinking. To “rave” about something is positive, but the word turns negative when it’s linked with “rant.” Just wondered if you have any comments!

A: Yes, to “rant and rave” (to shout angrily and wildly) might be described as negative. But to “rave” isn’t quite as positive as you seem to believe.

The verb “rave” can be negative as well as positive. You can rave in anger about something or rave in praise of it.

The verb “rave” has undergone a few changes over the centuries. Let’s follow its history, with a few interruptions along the way.

When “rave” came into English in the 1300s, it didn’t involve shouting or other forms of self-expression.

It meant “to be mad, to show signs of madness or delirium,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word’s origins are uncertain, but there’s a connection with “reverie,” which originally meant wild and uncontrolled behavior.

“Reverie” came into English in the 1300s from Middle French, where it implied madness, delirium, wandering of the mind, and so on.

Going back to “rave,” the OED says it developed new senses in the 1500s and 1600s, when it came to mean “to rage furiously or intensely” and “to speak or declaim wildly, irrationally, or incoherently.”

These are the senses of the word used in the expression “rant and rave,” which was first recorded in the 1600s.

Here we have to interrupt again to discuss the verb “rant,” a word dating from 1602. It came from the Dutch randen (to talk foolishly or rave).

To “rant,” according to the OED, originally meant “to talk or declaim in an extravagant or hyperbolical manner; to use bombastic language; (esp. of an actor) to orate or speak in a melodramatic or grandiose style.”

Later, in the mid-1600s, ranting became angrier. “Rant” came to mean “to speak furiously; to storm or rage violently.”

So to “rant and rave” means, in the words of the OED, “to talk or declaim hyperbolically, wildly, or furiously, now esp. as if mad or delirious.”

But how about a review that’s described as a “rave”? This comes from a quite different meaning of the verb “rave.”

In 1621, “rave” was first used to mean “to speak or write about someone or something with great enthusiasm or admiration,” the OED says.

The verb “rave” in this sense is generally used with “about” or “over” as in the following citation from the Independent (2002): “Several friends rave about this bra. It’s the sort to wear if you want something simple yet sexy.”

The noun form of “rave,” meaning a wildly favorable review, first showed up in print in 1926, according to OED citations.

An article in the American Mercury magazine gives credit to Variety, the show-biz weekly:

“One of the paper’s coinages should be officially embraced by the dictionary and bred into the language. It refers to a flattering, enthusiastic review by a sycophantic critic as a rave.” 

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Q: We of a certain age consider “records” synonymous with the vinyl discs we grew up with, and are reluctant to use the term for MP3 or iTunes downloads. But I wonder if the wax cylinders that preceded vinyl were also called “records”?

A: You’re right. Those early wax cylinders developed by Thomas A. Edison in the 1870s and ’80s were indeed called “records,” as of course were the vinyl discs that succeeded them.

In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “record” in the musical sense broadly as “a piece or collection of music issued on record, cassette, CD, etc.”

We imagine that “etc.” would include an iTunes download from Apple and an MP3 download from Amazon, as well as whatever recording technology succeeds them.

The OED‘s earliest published references for “record” in the sense of a recording of speech or music date from  the late 1870s.

The first one, from the Jan. 19, 1878, issue of the journal Design and Work, is a bit technical, but here’s the next, from the June 1878 issue of Cassell’s Family Magazine:

“Mr. Edison is now engaged in devising a finished instrument capable of storing up speeches and music of all kinds, and of allowing the records to be sent by post.”

When the noun “record” showed up in English in the early 1300s (via Anglo-Norman and Middle French), it referred to “the documentation or recording of facts, events, etc.”

So even in the beginning, according to that OED definition, the term “record” was used broadly. And when it comes to recordings, we’re pretty broadminded too.

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Q: I’ve always heard “enamored of,” but lately I’m hearing “enamored with,” and it sounds wrong to me. Which is correct? And what might it be about the word “enamored” that makes one choice more correct than the other?

A: The usual phrase is “enamored of,” but lots of people use “enamored with,” and both are accepted by standard American dictionaries.

We googled “enamored” and each preposition. The results: “enamored of,” 2 million hits; “enamored with,” 825,000.

Here are a couple of examples from among those hits:

“I really love Rudy. He is totally enamored of me.” (Ginny, the Blanch Baker character, in the 1984 film Sixteen Candles.)

“I was enamored with him. And I was excited. And I was enjoying it.” (Monica Lewinsky on Bill Clinton, from a March 3, 1999, interview with Barbara Walters.)

“Enamored” (the British spelling is “enamoured”) was borrowed into English in the early 1300s from the Old French verb enamourer, which came from the noun amour (love).

The verb “enamor,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means “to inspire or inflame with love.”

The adjective “enamored,” the OED says, means “full of the passion of love” or simply “in love.” In a weaker sense, “enamored” can mean charmed or fascinated.

“To be enamored,” the dictionary adds, is “to be in love.” And in this sense, “enamored” isn’t the adjective but a passive form of the verb.

This passive form, the OED says, has historically been used with the prepositions “of,” “on,” “upon,” and “with.”

But constructions using “on” and “upon” are now obsolete. Today, the OED says, we use either “enamored of” or, less commonly, “enamored with.”

The dictionary’s first recorded usage is an example of “enamored on,” from 1303.

Both “on” and “upon” were commonly used for centuries, as in this line that John Palsgrave wrote in 1530: “She hath as many craftes to enamour a foole upon her as any queene in this towne.”

But today, the verb is generally used in the passive voice—as in “I am enamored” rather than “I enamor.”

And the preposition of choice is “of,” according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

In fact, the OED says “with” is obsolete in the weaker sense, in which “enamor” means “to charm, delight, fascinate.”

Dickens used “enamored of” in this way in a letter written in 1866: “I am not so much enamoured of the first and third subjects.”

Why is “enamored of” now on top and “enamored with” No. 2?

We can’t explain it. Perhaps for many to be “enamored” is to be consumed by the love OF someone.

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Q: If I heat my oven to 350 degrees, am I doing the same thing as people who preheat their ovens to 350 degrees?

A: We just bought a double oven and asked ourselves the same question while reading the section in the owner’s manual on preheating.

The answer? Yes and no. Although something that’s preheated is also heated, the verb “preheat” does have a more precise meaning than the verb “heat.”

Here’s how “preheat” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary: “To heat before use or further treatment; to heat beforehand.”

So one “preheats” an oven to a certain temperature before putting in the food.

And here’s the OED’s definition of “heat” in the sense you’re asking about: “To communicate heat to; to make hot, to warm; to raise the temperature of.”

Although “heat” is a very old verb, dating back to around the year 1000, “preheat” isn’t exactly a newbie. It’s been with us since the mid-19th century.

The earliest published reference for “preheat” in the OED, from an 1862 article in Scientific American, describes a pipe that “traverses the furnace for pre-heating the crude sap.”

The dictionary also has citations for preheating tools, an oven, an auto engine, blankets, a sandwich press, and the air.

The two of us say “heat,” not “preheat,” when we talk about stoking up one of our new ovens for a cassoulet. But we don’t get heated up when we hear other people talk about preheating their ovens.

If you’re still bothered by that prefix, you might take a look at a blog item we wrote a couple of years ago about whether “pre-” words need a fix.

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Q: In my family, a child who pushes himself or herself to keep up—on a hike, for instance—is referred to as “a real trooper.” I was just told that, correctly, the child is a “real trouper.” In other words, a good performer in a troupe, not a brave soldier in a troop. That makes sense—or does it?

A: Yes, it does indeed make sense, sort of. Here’s the story.

A “trouper” is a member of a performing company (theatrical, singing, or dancing); the company itself is a “troupe.”

The earliest citation for “trouper” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Turnover Club, William T. Hall’s 1890 collection theatrical anecdotes: “As the ‘troupers’ come into the station where I sat, they were a sorry-looking lot.”

The word “troupe,” which was borrowed from French, entered English earlier in the 1800s. The OED’s first citation is from an 1825 issue of the New York Evening Post: “The whole troupe were equally excellent.”

But getting back to your question, another meaning of “trouper” evolved in the 20th century: it can also refer to someone who’s a hard worker, a good sport, a reliable person, a mensch.

The earliest citation in the OED for this sense of the word is from the actor Peter Bull’s 1959 memoir I Know the Face, But ….

“The phrase ‘she’s a trouper’ now has an old-fashioned and faintly derogatory air and is usually bandied about when someone continues to play with a high temperature or a shattering bereavement.”

That quotation suggests, however, that the phrase was around for quite some time before Bull used it in his memoir.

And a Google search finds a lot of earlier citations. The first clear example is this comment about Babe Ruth in a 1933 issue of the Pittsburgh Press:

“This looks like a good spot for trifling encomium for Mr. Ruth, who in his mental travail has conducted himself like a real trouper.”

As you can see, the expression originated as “real trouper” and most language mavens would describe that as the proper usage.

But a recent Google search suggests that “real trooper” has virtually supplanted the “proper” usage among the people who speak English.

Here’s the scorecard: “real trooper,” 397,000 hits, versus “real trouper,” 60,400.  

We’ll stick with “real trouper” for now, but in English the majority ultimately rules.

If you’d like to read more, we wrote a blog item a few years ago that discussed, among other things, “trooper” vs. “trouper.”

As the posting says, “trooper” is commonly used to refer to a state police officer or to a soldier in a horse, armored, air cavalry, or other troop.

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