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Etymology Grammar Usage

ETA: Has “arriving” arrived?

Q: Can you say, “His arriving was unexpected”?

 A:  Yes, you can, though it would be more common (and in most cases more idiomatic) to say, “His arrival was unexpected.”

Here’s the Google scorecard: “his arrival was,” nearly 2.8 million hits, vs. “his arriving was,” only 49.

There may be a slight difference in meaning here between the noun “arrival” and the gerund “arriving.” (A gerund is a word that’s made of a verb plus “-ing” and that acts as a noun.)

“His arriving was unexpected” suggests to us that he wasn’t expected at all. “His arrival was unexpected” could also mean that he arrived early, late, or by some unexpected means.   

When the verb “arrive” entered English in the 13th century (borrowed from the Old French ariver), it referred to a ship, its crew, or its passengers reaching shore.

But by the late 14th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “arrive” was being used in a more general way for ending any kind of trip or simply reaching a destination.

If you’d like to read more, we’ve written several items on the blog about gerunds and other “-ing” words, including postings in 2011 and 2007.

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Etymology Usage

It’s not quite “quite” anymore

Q: When I was growing up in the 1960s, I was expected to restrict the use of “quite” to its original meaning: completely, totally, entirely, wholly. Now nearly everyone uses it to mean something slightly north of generally or usually. I cannot get over the deeply ingrained feeling that this usage is wrong, and that the reason for it is laziness.

A: You’re right in thinking that “quite” originally meant, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, “completely, fully, entirely; to the utmost extent or degree.” But times have changed.

“Quite” entered English as an intensifying adverb around 1300 or a little before.

It’s thought to have come partly from an identical  Anglo-Norman word meaning without opposition, and partly from the rare old adjective “quit” (circa 1230), which meant free, clear, exempt or released from an obligation.

An aside: Apparently “quit,” like “quite,” once was pronounced with a long “i.” And like “quite,” it was used to underscore an idea.

Old phrases like “quit and free” and “quit and clear” meant completely free—today we might say quite free—of encumbrances.

For centuries, according to entries in the OED, the word “quite” was used in a variety of ways, but it was always unequivocal.

It was used either in the original, intensifying sense (completely, fully), or in a newer way that cropped up in the early 1600s—as an emphatic adverb meaning  actually, really, truly, positively; definitely; very much, considerably.

The weakness, as you see it, crept in at the beginning of the 19th century.

That’s when people began using “quite” as a “moderating adverb,” says the OED. Its meaning: “to a certain or significant extent or degree; moderately, somewhat, rather; relatively, reasonably.”

So “quite” went from an intensifying adverb (1300s) to an emphatic one (1600s) and finally to a moderating one (1800s).

Those earlier senses, however, are still alive, and this can lead to ambiguity. “Quite” might mean “certainly” in one sentence, “considerably” in another, and “rather” in yet another.

Here are modern examples of each, from citations in the OED:

Intensifying: “The self-praise and gross exaggeration … which we have come to expect from him had quite disappeared.” (From the Times of London, 2001.)

Emphasizing: “We could continue discussing templates for quite some time.” (From Programming Multiplayer FPS in DirectX, by V. Young, 2005.)

Moderating: “Five middle-class people and two elderly labradors. In a garage. I mean, quite a roomy garage—but really.” (From the Daily Telegraph, 2003.)

Finally, there’s a different animal entirely—the adjective “quite,” a British usage defined by the OED as “short for ‘quite a gentleman (lady, etc.)’; socially acceptable.”

Here’s an example from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Voyage Out (1915): “Mr. Perrott … knew that he was not ‘quite,’ as Susan stated … not quite a gentleman she meant.”

Also rarely heard here, except on PBS, is the British interjection “quite,” which means “just so” or “absolutely.”

Among the OED’s citations is this bit of conversation from Kyril Bonfiglioli’s comic mystery Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1976):

“Quite. By the way, I’m sorry to say ‘quite’ all the time but … my work lies amongst Americans and they expect Englishmen to say it.”

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Grammar Usage

Going, going, gone

Q: I’m confused by this sentence: “We will have been gone for five days by the end of our trip.” Is “gone” the main verb or a predicate adjective?

A: Which of those two ways of looking at the sentence is right? These are the choices:

(1) The principal verb is “go” and the tense is the future perfect passive (“will have been gone”).

(2) The principal verb is “be” and the tense is the future perfect (“will have been”), plus the adjective “gone.”

Our answer: No. 2. Here’s why.

It’s tempting to choose #1, because “will have been” is a typical passive verbal construction.

You get the passive voice by combining a form of the verb “be” with a past participle, like “baked” (as in “the cookies were baked”).

And combining “will have been” with a past participle gives you the future perfect passive (“the cookies will have been baked”).

But “will have been gone” is not a passive form of the verb “go.” In fact, “go” has no passive form, because it’s an intransitive verb—it has no object.

Only verbs that can have an object—like “bake”—can be used in the passive voice. We can say “cookies were baked” only because someone baked them. You can “go,” but some outside force can’t “go” you.

So when we speak of a person as being “gone,” we’re using an adjective. We’re talking about a condition (the state of being absent), not an action (the act of going).

We’ve discussed the passive before on our blog, as well as transitive and intransitive verbs.

In explaining all this, we’ll use another verb that’s exclusively intransitive—“die”—as an illustration. Like “go,” “come,” and some other verbs, “die” has no object.

As with “go,” we can use “die” in the future perfect tense, but only in the active voice: “We will have died.” When we say, “We will have been dead,” we’re not using a passive form of “die.” The word “dead” is an adjective.

Similarly, we can use “go” in the future perfect tense, but only in the active voice: “We will have gone.” Here, “gone” is a past participle of the verb “go.” When we say, “We will have been gone,” we’re using “gone” as an adjective.

What this boils down to is that there’s a difference between having gone and being gone, between having died and being dead.

The grammarian Otto Jespersen discussed the difference in his Essentials of English Grammar: “While he has gone calls up the idea of movement, he is gone emphasizes the idea of a state (condition) and is the equivalent of ‘he is absent.’ ”

This is especially evident, he writes, when the length of the absence is indicated, as in “I shall be gone before you wake in the morning” … “He was gone but a little time” … “Don’t be gone too long!”

Our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (2nd ed., unabridged), under its entry for the adjective “gone,” says in a note that “be” is often used with “gone” in perfect tenses.

When “gone” is used with “be,” the dictionary adds, it’s given “an adjectival force, as expressive of a condition, rather than the verbal force, emphasizing the action, which is normal with have.”

Clearly, “gone” looks like a form of the verb “go.” But when it’s used with “be,” it’s an adjective.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) says the adjective “gone” means “being away from a place; absent or having departed.”

In its entry for the adjective “gone,” the online Macmillan Dictionary says, “Someone who is gone is no longer present in a place,” and gives the example “I’ll be gone for about half an hour.”

Macmillan also says, “Something that is gone no longer exists or has all been used,” and gives the example “Sadly, those days are gone now.”

Merriam-Webster.com  gives a similar example of “gone” used as an adjective: “She’s been gone for more than an hour.”

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Etymology Linguistics Usage

What do you call a %&*&##@?

Q: Is there a term for those strings of symbols, like %&*&##@, used in comic books to represent obscenities?

A: Not only is there a term for those thingies, there are two terms: “grawlix,” coined 47 years ago by the cartoonist Mort Walker, and “obscenicon,” introduced in 2006 by the linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer.

We prefer “grawlix.” It’s far more popular (6,480 vs. 96 hits on Google when we checked), though “obscenicon” is arguably more precise.

In “Let’s Get Down to Grawlixes,” a 1964 article for the National Cartoonists Society,  Walker writes that cartoonists have a variety of acceptable curse words, “but the real meat of the epithet must always contain plenty of jarns, quimps, nittles, and grawlixes.”

In The Lexicon of Comicana, Walker’s humorous 1980 book about the conventions used in cartooning, he shows “jarns” as spirals, “quimps” as astronomical characters, “nittles” as stars, and “grawlixes” as scribbles.

(Walker’s comic strips include Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois.)

Despite its scribbled origins, “grawlix” generally seems to be used now for those strings of symbols in comic books, at least that’s the impression we have from checking out a few dozen Google results.

As for “obscenicon,” Zimmer introduced the term in a Language Log posting in which he describes a New Yorker cartoon as “meta-commentary on cursing characters (let’s call ’em obscenicons).”

The linguists Arnold Zwicky and Gwillim Law, among others, later commented on the Language Log about the merits of the two terms.

Zwicky, citing the squiggly origins of “grawlix,” leaned toward “obscenicon” as more precise (it’s a blend of “obscene” and “icon”). Law,  a “grawlix” supporter, noted its early origins and popularity.

If you’d like to read more, Law has written an interesting article, “Grawlixes Past and Present,” with illustrations of various typographical obscenities in comics over the years (from a 1909 Katzenjammer Kids to a 2010 Jump Start strip).

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Etymology Grammar Usage

Were the files shred or shredded?

Q: At a meeting with my staff, I used the word “shredded,” but was informed by one of my employees that the correct word is “shred.” Was I wrong in saying, “He shredded the patient files”?

A: You can use either “shredded” or “shred” in all good conscience—that is, as long as you’re shredding what you ought to be shredding.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) gives both forms as standard English, so if you prefer to use “shredded,” you have an authority you can cite.

This means you can give yourself permission to say “I shred” (present tense), “I shredded” (past), “I have shredded” (present perfect), and “I had shredded” (past perfect).

However, another source, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), gives only “shred.”

So your employee can justify a preference for “I shred” (both present and past tenses), “I have shred” (present perfect), and “I had shred” (past perfect).

The advantage of “shredded,” as you can see, is that there’s no ambiguity. Someone who says “I shred the documents” could be referring to either the present or the past.

It may be that your colleague prefers “shred” in the past tense because of its similarity to “shed,” which is the same in present and past (as in, “I shed my coat”).

The word “shred” is extremely old. It was screadian in Old English, when it was a horticultural term meaning to prune or lop off a branch or other growth. It was first recorded in about the year 1000.

Both “shredded” and “shred” have been used as participles for hundreds of years, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here are two examples: “begynne at the toppe of ye tree whan he shall be shred or cropped” (1523-34), and “Trees and hedges which hang over the kings high waies must be cut and shredded” (1620).

The two words have also been used for centuries as adjectives, though “shredded” is more common nowadays (“shredded wheat,” ”shredded paper,” and so on).

“Shred” has had many related meanings, all involving tearing things into strips or bits. The word has most often been used in reference to food and cooking (since the 1300s), textiles (1600s), and finally paper (early 1900s).

The first published reference to document shredding appeared in Arthur Conan-Doyle’s historical novel Sir Nigel (1906): “With his own hands he had shredded those august documents.”

Shredding became easier, of course, when machines were invented to do the job. Motor-driven shredders have been marketed since around World War II, mostly to government agencies at first.

Shredders have been used in businesses since the 1950s, and later became popular in home offices.

The OED cites this 1950 advertisement: “The ‘Watford’ Shredder and Duster … gives most excellent results in shredding and dusting waste papers.”

Finally, one more sense of “shred,” this one a figurative usage to mean “trounce” or “defeat,”  especially in sports.

The OED’s first citation is from a 1966 issue of the New York Times’s International Edition: “The Celtics shredded the Los Angeles Lakers … with a third-quarter explosion and scored a 120–106 victory.”

In this case, the past tense “shredded” (not “shred”) is the term of choice.

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Etymology Usage

Porch swings

Q: We’re planning to hold a reception “on” the West Porch of our museum. Or do we say “in” that particular room? Does it matter whether the room is enclosed?

A: The noun “porch” can refer to either an exterior, covered structure at the entrance of a building or an interior vestibule or hallway, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) says it can also refer to an open or enclosed room attached to the outside of a building.

We haven’t found any authoritative answer to your question about the appropriate prepositions.

But we ourselves happen to prefer “on” for exterior, open structures and “in” for enclosed, interior areas.

For example, in referring to an exterior, unenclosed porch we would say, “In summer we put the potted palm outside on the porch.”

But if we called our entry hall or vestibule a “porch,” we would say, “Come inside and leave your wet things in the porch.”

We may not be in the majority, however. A cursory Google search of “in the porch” turned up eight times as many hits as a search for “on the porch.”

The word “porch” entered English around 1300, according to the OED. A brief examination of the OED citations shows an early preference for “in” rather than “on.”

For example, this comes from William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman (circa 1400): “I hym seigh as I satte in my porche.” (“I saw him as I sat in my porch.”)

The word came into English by way of Anglo-Norman and was originally spelled like the French porche. The word’s ultimate ancestor is the Latin porticus (a colonnade, arcade, or porch).

In fact, English borrowed “porticus” itself directly from Latin in the early 17th century, and it’s still sometimes used as an architectural term today.

The OED describes a “porticus” as “a formal entrance to a classical temple, church, or other building, consisting of columns at regular intervals supporting a roof often in the form of a pediment.”

But “porticus” can also mean “a covered colonnade in this style,” according to the OED.

Another word that means the same thing is “portico,” which is more common than “porticus” and was adopted at about the same time.

We got “portico” from Italy, where it’s the Italian version of the Latin porticus.

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Etymology Usage

Two-part invention: mental and musical fugues

Q: I was at a concert last week and began wondering if there’s a correlation between the “fugue” that’s a musical construction and the “fugue” that’s a psychiatric state. Any ideas? Such are the thoughts that sometimes come into my mind while listening to a particularly interesting piece of music.

A: There is indeed a relationship between the “fugue” that’s a musical composition and the “fugue” that’s a mental state. Both have to do with fleeing and come from the same Latin source.

We’ve written about the two fugues before on our blog, but now we’ll go into a bit more detail. Call this a variation on a theme.

We’ll start with an obsolete English word spelled “fuge,” which was a noun for the act of fleeing and a verb meaning to flee.

It was adapted in the 15th century from the Latin fugere (to flee), which is also the source of the words “fugitive,” “refuge,”  “refugee,” “subterfuge,” and others.

The noun “fuge” first appeared, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, in a 1436 poem: “Assaute was there none; No sege, but fuge.” (“Assault was there none; no siege, but fuge [i.e., retreat].”)

The verb “fuge” came along in 1566, in George Gascoigne’s translation of Supposes, a comedy by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto: “I to fuge and away hither as fast as I could.”

The old senses of “fuge” quickly disappeared. But soon a more lasting “fuge” entered English, this one meaning a polyphonic composition in which one or more musical themes are interwoven in different voices.

The OED’s first citation for the word is from the composer Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597):

“We call that a Fuge, when one part beginneth and the other singeth the same, for some number of notes (which the first did sing).”

For its first 70 years, this word was spelled “fuge.” It was borrowed directly from the Italian word fuga (flight), a descendant of the Latin fuga (the act of fleeing), a relative of fugere (to flee).

A new spelling, “fugue,” was introduced by the poet John Milton, who used the French version of the word in Paradise Lost (1667):

“His volant touch /  Instinct through all proportions low and high / Fled and pursu’d transverse the resonant fugue.”

(Notice Milton’s play on words in the last line. He uses both “fled” and “fugue,” the original sense of fugere as well as the musical sense derived from the Latin verb. And “volant,” or flying, comes from the Latin volare, to fly.)

We come now to the mental state known as a “fugue.” This sense of the word entered English in the early 20th century, according to OED citations, and is defined in the dictionary as “a flight from one’s own identity.”

The term first appeared in 1901 in Caroline Corson’s translation of Dr. Pierre Janet’s The Mental State Hystericals: “Those long flights (fugues)those strange excursions, accomplished automatically, of which the patient has not the least recollection.”

Mrs. Corson was translating a book published in French in 1894, and apparently felt the word’s first appearance needed an explanation. But later in the book, she refers to “these fugues” without translating the word.

French doctors, who were the first to describe the psychiatric condition, had been using fugue in the medical sense since the late 1880s. The French also used l’état de fugue before the equivalent term “fugue state” showed up in English.

It’s easy to see why “fugue,” a word having to do with fleeing or flight, seemed appropriate to both composers and doctors.

In a polyphonic “fugue,” melodic strands are introduced that flee or diverge from the original theme, like musical flights of fancy. A psychiatric “fugue” or “fugue state” represents a flight or a fleeing from reality.

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Punctuation Usage

Quotes of many colors

Q: I’m puzzled by the way you use quotation marks/inverted commas on your blog. I thought they were only used for speech and longer quotations, but you use them in other ways.

A: No, quotation marks are not used solely for speech and other quotations. And the quotations don’t have to be long.

They can also set off words referred to as words (“restaurateur,” for example).

The convention with words used as words is to enclose them in quotation marks or to use italics, and we’ve chosen the former, which is newspaper style.

We’ll quote The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), section 7.58: “When a word or term is not used functionally but is referred to as the word or term itself, it is either italicized or enclosed in quotation marks.”

Here’s an example given in this same section: Many people say “I” even when “me” would be more correct.

In addition, we use quotation marks when we make up examples that illustrate our points (“with Trixie and me,” not “with Trixie and I”).

This is a common practice and helps in readability. Otherwise, it can be unclear where an example ends and regular text begins.

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Etymology Usage

Is “sensual” sexier than “sensuous”?

Q: I don’t know if the distinction between “sensuous” and “sensual” is still alive, but I see it as a sort of thought control. It’s hard to even articulate without leaning on suspect concepts like baser vs. higher nature. I’d welcome your thoughts, and any other sources you might refer me to.

A: In a sense (if you’ll pardon the expression), you’re right about this. The word “sensuous” owes its existence to prudery.

The poet John Milton invented “sensuous” because he apparently felt that the existing word, “sensual,” was getting too sexy for his purposes.

“Sensuous” first appeared in writing, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, in Milton’s essay Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England (1641).

In the relevant passage, Milton contrasts the “Soule” with “her visible, and sensuous collegue the body.”

He used the word again in a 1644 essay on education. This quotation comes from a passage in which he discusses practical arts like logic and rhetoric:

“To which Poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being lesse suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.”

It seems the author of Paradise Lost regarded “sensual” as inappropriate for exalted writing and needed something a bit drier.

But “sensual” didn’t always have a juicy reputation. 

It entered English around 1450, adapted from the late Latin adjective sensualis. The ultimate source is the noun sensus, which the OED defines as meaning “perception, feeling, faculty of perception, meaning.”

With that etymology, it’s not surprising that “sensual” originally meant “of or pertaining to the senses or physical sensation; sensory,” according to the OED.

But it soon took on other, sometimes pejorative meanings, like base or lewd or unchaste.

It began appearing in phrases like “sensuall appetite” (1477), “sensuall luste” (before 1513), “the foule yoke of sensuall bondage” (before 1541), “sensual excesses” (1742), and so on.

And as an adjective applied to people, says the OED, “sensual” came to mean voluptuous, sexually passionate, or otherwise “absorbed in the life of the senses,” even to excess.

So the word’s original meaning was almost swamped in these new—and, in the view of some, depraved—usages.

We can understand why Milton might feel the need for a new word to supply the lost innocence of the old one.

When “sensuous” was introduced, the OED says, its meaning was “of or pertaining to the senses; derived from, perceived by, or affecting the senses; concerned with sensation or sense-perception.”

Milton’s new word took a while to catch on, however. “Sensuous” wasn’t seen again until 1814, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge took it up.

Coleridge wrote in an essay: “Thus, to express in one word what belongs to the senses, or the recipient and more passive faculty of the soul, I have reintroduced the word sensuous, used … by Milton.”

But an element of sensory enjoyment has crept into “sensuous,” too.

As the OED says, “sensuous” pleasure is pleasure “received through the senses,” a notion “implying a luxurious yielding up of oneself to passive enjoyment.”

As an example, the OED cites a line from Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret (which Stewart happens to be reading at the moment).

Here’s the citation: “There is in the first taste of rustic life a kind of sensuous rapture scarcely to be described.”

So how are “sensual” and “sensuous” treated today? If properly used, they apply to different kinds of pleasures.

For the past 100 years or so, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, language commentators have maintained that “sensuous emphasizes aesthetic pleasure while sensual emphasizes gratification or indulgence of the physical appetites.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) puts it this way: “Sensuous usually applies to the senses involved in esthetic enjoyment, as of art or music. … Sensual more often applies to the physical senses or appetites, particularly those associated with sexual pleasure.”

The problem, of course, is that this can be a fine line.

As the editors of M-W point out, “The distinction is true enough within one range of meanings, and it is worth remembering. The difficulty is that both words have more than one sense, and they tend often to occur in contexts where the distinction between them is not as clear-cut as the commentators would like it to be.”

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Etymology Usage

Have a good one, George!

[An updated post about “have a good day,” “have a nice day,” and “have a good one” appeared on Oct. 19, 2018.]

Q: In your “Have a good one” posting, you never say where the expression comes from. I know. I coined it in 1979 or ’80 as a student at Michigan State University. When a cashier at a Quality Dairy in Lansing uttered the annoying “Have a nice day,” I blurted out, “Have a good one.” The phrase spread around town and migrated to other parts of the US. If you know how I can collect royalties, please let me know.

A: Well, the timing may be right, but don’t count on those royalties.

We did a Google Timeline search and found that the use of “have a good one” in the sense of goodbye apparently showed up about 30 years ago.

The earliest appearance is from the headline of an article about Washington’s Birthday in the Feb. 10, 1981, issue of the Spokane (Wash.) Daily Chronicle: “Whatever, George, / Have a good one!”

If you had in fact coined the usage, we would expect to see a few appearances of it in Michigan newspapers before the expression migrated out to Spokane.

But who knows? As more newspaper archives are digitized, maybe we’ll find a 1979 or ’80 example from Michigan, perhaps even from the Lansing State Journal.

Have a good one!

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Etymology Grammar Usage

Is “upstate” an adverb, an adjective, or a noun?

Q: I claim the “in” is redundant and unpleasant to the ear in this sentence: “Senator Gillibrand was campaigning in upstate NY.” I am quite sure we could do without it, and would be better off without it.

A: There’s nothing wrong with that sentence. Here “upstate” is an adjective modifying “New York.” It’s used much like “northern” would be.

The word “upstate,” according to dictionaries, can be used as an adverb, an adjective, or a noun. Here are examples of each:

Adverb: “They drove upstate last weekend.”

Adjective: “They drove to upstate New York last weekend.”

Noun: “They came back Sunday night from upstate.”

So the writer of that sentence could correctly use either “campaigning in upstate New York” or “campaigning upstate.”

And by the way, the state in “upstate” doesn’t have to be New York. In fact, “upstate” doesn’t necessarily have to be up.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the adverb as meaning “in that part of a state which is (regarded as) higher than another, or is more remote from the chief centre. Freq. with reference to the State of New York.”

The adjective means “of, pertaining to, or characteristic of, an area upstate; situated upstate, rural; also, designating part of a State remote (esp. north) from a large city.”

And the noun means “an upstate region” or “a rural area,” the OED says.

When the term was first recorded in print (in 1901, according to OED citations), it was used as an adverb in an article about prostitution in New York City.

Here’s the OED’s citation, which comes from the North American Review: “American girls … imported from small towns up-State.”

But the OED has non-New York references as well.

Jonathan Daniels, the editor of the Raleigh (NC) News and Observer, used the adverb in A Southerner Discovers the South (1938), his book about a 10-state tour of the South: “I heard about it upstate.”

And the noun form appeared in a 1974 issue of a southern newspaper, the Easley (SC) Progress: “Many of us in the upstate do not appreciate the value of the Tidelands … to our environment.”

We should add that the use of “upstate” as a noun is much less common than its use as an adverb and an adjective. The noun use is limited and is governed by idiom.

While it’s idiomatic to say, “He is in upstate [adjective] New York,” it is not idiomatic to say “He is in upstate [noun]” or “He is going to upstate [noun].” We do, however, say, “He is from upstate [noun].”

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Etymology Linguistics Pronunciation Usage

How classy is your speech?

Q: Did I hear Pat suggest on WNYC that there are no longer any class distinctions in American speech? I was born in Egypt and have an Ivy League education. People meeting me for the first time are shocked that I speak “white.” I have never met Pat, but I can tell from her voice that she is white and from a middle-class background in the Northwest.

A: We’re sorry if anything Pat said on the air gave the impression that speech differences don’t exist to some degree among races, nationalities, and social classes in the US.

They certainly do. And differences in regional speech are becoming, if anything, more pronounced.

We’ve had many, many items on the blog about regional, idiomatic, or colloquial English, including postings in 2010, 2009, and 2008.

But not every pronunciation identified with a region or racial group is limited to that group.

The AX pronunciation of “ask,” for example, isn’t limited to some African-Americans or Southern whites, as many people believe. Pat heard it when she was growing up in Iowa, from whites as well as blacks.

As we say in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths, the AX pronunciation is heard across the country, across racial lines, and even across the Atlantic.

In fact, the verb “ask” was spelled “ax” or “axe” for hundreds of years. Chaucer, in the “Pardoner’s Tale” (1386), writes of a man who “cometh for to axe him of mercy.”

If you’d like to read more about this, check out our “You axed for it!”  posting.

One correction, however. You write that you could tell from Pat’s voice that she “is white and from a middle-class background in the Northwest.”

Pat is white, but she’s from a working-class background in Iowa (the Midwest). She was of the first generation in her family to go to college.

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Etymology Usage

Can an animal die tragically?

Q: I foolishly decided to pick a nit with a zealous animal lover over the euthanizing of a young dog. I maintained that the death an animal could be unexpected, untimely, sad, lamentable, etc., but not tragic (though I believe there’s a goat in the etymology of “tragedy”). My friend maintains that if the traumatized owners felt it was tragic, then it was so. Your thoughts?

A: There is indeed a goat element in the word “tragedy” (more on this later). However, we’re inclined to agree with you. While the death of an animal may be all of the adjectives you suggest, we wouldn’t call it tragic.

Of course, this is a value judgment on our part, not a matter of correctness or incorrectness. Certainly the loss of a treasured pet can be devastating.

The two of us are still grieving over the dog we lost last summer. When she died, we might have felt her death as tragic on a personal level, but we would not have used that word in speaking about it.

That’s because in recent years we’ve experienced real tragedy; several friends and relatives have died needlessly and much too soon. Such things give one a sense of proportion.

Remembering those losses, we could not in good conscience use the word “tragic” to describe our dog’s death, no matter how traumatized we felt.

Definitions of “tragedy,” the noun from which “tragic” derives, don’t specifically say the calamity has to befall a human being.

But this is clearly the way most people interpret “tragedy.” And this is how the word was used in classical times, when it got its start in Greek drama.

Although animals appear in Greek tragedy, the tragic heroes are human. (The classicist Chiara Thumiger has written about animal imagery in Greek tragedy.)

The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek tragoidia, which the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology defines as “a dramatic poem or play in formal or stately language and action having an unhappy resolution.”

The Greek word literally means “goat song,” from the roots tragos (goat) and oide (song or ode). The reason for the goat connection can only be guessed.

Chambers notes that several theories have been proposed. One is that the original actors or singers wore goatskins to represent satyrs. Another is that “a goat may have been the prize for the best performance.”

When “tragedy” came into English in the 14th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it meant “a play or other literary work of a serious or sorrowful character, with a fatal or disastrous conclusion.”

In English, “tragedy” was exclusively a dramatic term until the 16th century, when people started using it figuratively to describe real-life events.

The OED defines its new meaning as “an unhappy or fatal event or series of events in real life; a dreadful calamity or disaster.”

When the adjective “tragic” came along in the mid-16th century, it was used both in reference to “tragedy as a branch of the drama,” the OED says, and to events “characterized by or involving ‘tragedy’ in real life; calamitous, disastrous, terrible, fatal.”

People choose their own words to describe their own experiences. If they prefer to call the loss of a pet tragic, they’re free to do so, of course.

But you asked for our thoughts, and there they are.

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Etymology Grammar Usage

A likely story

Q: Most people use “like” instead of “as” these days. In a blog posting a few years ago, you presented the case for using “like” as a conjunction, but then recommended against doing it. Have you changed your mind since then?

A: The use of “like” as a conjunction introducing a clause (“If you knew Susie like I know Susie”) is extremely common in both written and spoken English.

But the prohibition against it is familiar to anyone old enough to have learned grammar in public school—that is, roughly anyone over 50. 

Is the usage still considered a crime? That depends on whom you ask. As we said in our 2007 blog post, opinions were then shifting and edicts against “like” were softening. Four years later, that’s still the case.

When re-examining a familiar old edict, it’s always worth asking why the edict was laid down in the first place.

The truth is that writers have been using “like” as a conjunction since the 14th century. Chaucer did it. Shakespeare, too. So did Keats, Emily Brontë, Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, Kipling, Shaw, and so on.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says that objections to “like” as a conjunction were apparently “a 19th-century reaction to increased conjunctive use at that time.”

Furthermore, Merriam-Webster’s says, “the objectors were chiefly commentators on usage rather than grammarians or lexicographers.”

But after World War I, all three groups—usage commentators, grammarians, and lexicographers—were in agreement: “It was incorrect to use like for as or as if,” says M-W; “like was a preposition, not a conjunction.”

By 1959, the authors of The Elements of Style went so far as to call the usage  “illiterate.”

And now? After an extensive examination of the history of the usage, Merriam-Webster’s concludes that “Strunk & White’s relegation of conjunctive like to misuse by the illiterate is wrong.”

R. W. Burchfield, writing in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised 3rd ed.), agrees.

After doing his own extensive examination of the usage, Burchfield concludes that “like as a conjunction is struggling towards acceptable standard or neutral ground” and that “the long-standing resistance to this omnipresent little word is beginning to crumble.”

After reviewing the subject for our book Origins of the Specious, we came down on the side of Burchfield and Merriam-Webster’s, with this caveat:

“But let’s face facts— or, rather, myths. Anyone who uses ‘like’ as a conjunction, especially in formal writing, risks being accused of illiteracy.” 

So until further notice, be aware that conservative usage guides (and grammar sticklers) still condemn the use of “like” as a conjunction. If you’re inclined to use it this way, consider your audience.

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Etymology Usage

Was a dick a dummy in Jane Austen’s day?

Q: You say in your posting about the word “dick” that it wasn’t used to mean a stupid or obnoxious person until the 20th century. I believe Jane Austen uses the word in just that way in Persuasion when she describes Richard Musgrove in Chapter 6.

A: Oh, my gosh! Both of us recently re-read Persuasion, but we didn’t make the connection when we researched the history of the pejorative “dick.”

We even recall being a bit startled by Austen’s scathingly witty characterization of “poor Richard,” the black sheep of the Musgrove family.

In writing about his death at sea, Austen says “the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son, and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year.”

The passage that caught your attention is in the next paragraph. We’ll repeat it for other readers of the blog:

 “He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him ‘poor Richard,’ been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done any thing to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead.”

In writing here about the ne’er-do-well Dick Musgrove, was Austen slyly referring to the pejorative “dick”? That’s certainly one way to interpret the passage. We’re not sure, though.

Perhaps now that early newspapers, broadsheets, and pamphlets are being digitized, researchers will come up with more definitive uses of the pejorative “dick.” Something to look forward to!

Austen, who finished writing Persuasion in 1816, died the next year at the age of 41. What a loss!

Both of us have read and reread her novels many times. And with each reading, we discover things we hadn’t noticed before. (Now you’ve brought another one to our attention.)

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Don’t touch my junk food

Q: The recent NY Times obit for Jack LaLanne says he “craved junk food” when he was a 15-year-old in the Bay Area in 1929. Did “junk food” exist in 1929? If not, what was the stuff called back then?

A: Of course junk food existed in 1929. Cracker Jack, for example, has been around since the late 19th century. But as you suspect, the phrase “junk food” is a more recent concoction.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “food that appeals to popular (esp. juvenile) taste but has little nutritional value.”

Standard American dictionaries describe it as food that’s high in calories and low in nutrition.

The earliest published reference for “junk food” in the OED is from a 1973 article in the Washington Post: “How many children are going to fill up on junk foods and be too full to eat a nutritious lunch now?”

However, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) dates the phrase to the 1960s. And the word sleuth Barry Popik has tracked down a definite 1952 appearance as well as a near sighting from as early as 1948.

Writing on his Big Apple website, Popik dismisses suggestions that it was coined in the 1970s by either the food critic Gael Greene or Michael Jacobsen, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Popik cites a headline in the July 28, 1952, issue of the Lima (Ohio) News: “Candy, Cake, ‘Junk Foods’ / Cause Serious Malnutrition.”

It appeared above a reprint of an article about nutrition that was originally published in the Nov. 22, 1948, issue of the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner with this headline: “Dr. Brady’s Health Column / More Junk Than Food.”

The author of the article, William Brady, MD, comments on a complaint from Mrs. R. D. H. that her daughter “eats more junk than food.”

“What Mrs. H. calls ‘junk’ I call cheat food,” Brady writes. “That is anything made principally of (1) white flour and or (2) refined white sugar or syrup. For example, white bread, crackers, cake, candy, ice cream soda, chocolate malted, sundaes, sweetened carbonated beverages.”

So there you have it: “cheat food”!

A Google Timeline search finds dozens of newspaper citations for “cheat food” from 1916 to 2009, though most of them appeared before the term “junk food” became popular in the ’70s.

If you haven’t had your fill of “junk,” we had a blog posting last year about the use of the term for the male genitalia.

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English language Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage

Hear Pat live today on WNYC

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

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English language Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage

Hear Pat live tomorrow on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show this month on the third Tuesday instead of her usual appearance on the third Wednesday. Pat will be on the air around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. If you miss a program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.

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Etymology Spelling Usage

Why did the Emperor of Russia rusticate?

Q: In my dotage, I’ve finally gotten around to reading The Innocents Abroad. A few things jumped out at me. Spelling differences: “staid” for “stayed,” “ancles” for “ankles,” etc. And strange usages, especially a reference to the Emperor of Russia “rusticating” at a watering hole. I know rusticate as an architectural term, but what was the Emperor doing at that watering hole?

A: One of the pleasures of reading 19th-century writing—British as well as American—is watching language change from generation to generation.

The spellings you found in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain’s 1869 travel book, show just how fluid the conventions of English orthography can be.

Usage, too, changes over time. In 150 years, someone reading a 2011 newspaper will no doubt find a lot that looks odd, just as Twain’s use of “rusticating” looked odd to you.

In American English, we don’t use the verb “rusticate” much these days. But in the 18th and 19th centuries it had several meanings, some of which are still alive today in Britain, if seldom heard in the US.

For instance, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, one meaning of  “rusticate” is to “stay or sojourn in  the country,” as the Emperor did.

Here’s an example from an 1886 letter by the English artist Charles Samuel Keene: “I went and smoked a pipe with Challoner the other evening, and heard from Mrs. C that you were going to rusticate on some riverside.”

And in British usage, to be “rusticated” can mean to be sent to the country, or to be dismissed or suspended from a university as punishment. This is the OED’s definition of “rusticate” in its academic sense: “to dismiss or send down (a student) from university on a temporary basis, as a punishment; to suspend.”

Here it is in Trollope’s 1858 novel Doctor Thorne: “This son had been first rusticated from Oxford and then expelled.” Later OED examples extend into the 21st century.

“Rusticated” can also mean “countrified” or “rendered rustic in manners.”

In Washington Irving’s 1822 novel Bracebridge Hall, for example, a squire was “rusticated a little by living almost entirely on his estate.”

And, as you say, the term is still used in the architectural sense of giving masonry a rustic appearance by marking it with sunk joints or roughened surfaces.

John Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice (1851), alludes to this technique when he asks whether “Nature rusticates her foundations,” and answers himself by saying “She does rusticate sometimes” by crumbling foundations and leaving ripple marks.

A variation on this sense of the word has made its way into the art world. Since the 1930s, potters have used it to describe pottery deliberately roughened to look rustic.

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Ups and downs of English

Q: I was speaking with Russian friends about “up” and “down.” As I understand it, Russians would never go down to New Orleans or up to Chicago.  They would go south or north. This led to “uptown” and “downtown.” From my small-town perspective, I use the words interchangeably. As I think back, though, I seem to have gone uptown more as a kid and downtown more in my mature years. I would be interested in your thoughts.

A: Idiomatic English is particularly rich in odd uses of prepositions. The use of “up” and “down” in geographical references is an interesting case.

Take, for example, the words “uptown” and “downtown.” In New York City, “uptown” is north and “downtown” is south, but that’s not necessarily the case in other towns.

The Oxford English Dictionary and other sources say “downtown,” which originated in American English in the 19th century, has at least four meanings.

It can mean a part of town that’s at a lower elevation, or that’s southerly, or that’s geographically central, or that’s devoted to business.

And “uptown” is sometimes used in different ways in British and American English.

In both countries, it can mean at a higher elevation. But in the US, it can also mean northerly, or more residential or more prosperous than “downtown.”

The prosperous usage probably reflects the tradition of wealthier neighborhoods being built on higher ground.

In the US, “up” and “down” are commonly used to mean higher or lower on a map—hence, north or south. But there are exceptions.

For example, it’s not unusual for residents of New Jersey to drive “up to Maine” or “down to Florida.” But, as one of our readers tells us, “In New Jersey dialect we almost never go to the beach or to the ocean. We always go ‘down the shore,’ whether we live in north, south, or central New Jersey.” We’ve written about this before on our blog

Oddly, the OED has no entries for “up” meaning north or “down” meaning south—that is, at the top or the bottom of a map.

In fact, the British uses of “up” and “down” can be downright bewildering to an American reader.

The two of us enjoy 19th-century British novels, and used to wonder why a young man who was kicked out of Oxford was always “sent down,” even if his home was to the north.

And Londoners going to points north always traveled “down” to get there.

As the OED explains, “down” in Britain can mean “from the capital to the distant parts of a country,” or it can mean “away from a university.”  

And the reverse is true with “up.” That’s why an incoming student goes “up” to Oxford, even if it means traveling south to get there. And a Londoner coming back from the north travels “up” to get home.

There’s a certain class consciousness at work here, with “up” and “down” used to mean superior or inferior—upper or lower—in importance.

In other words, someone would go “up” to sophisticated London and “down” to the provincial countryside.

In these more democratic times, though, such usages aren’t universal in Britain. But they live on in old fiction.

In Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873), for example, Lizzie Eustace often travels between London and Scotland. The phrase “down to Scotland” appears 12 times in the novel  and “down in Scotland” 10 times, all from the perspective of points to the south, mostly London.

As we said, this isn’t the way all Britons speak nowadays. But they still use “up” and “down” in reference to the “upper” and “lower” houses of Parliament.

And both Britons and Americans use them in speaking of “upper” and “lower” courts.

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Yinz, you-uns, you-all, and company

Q: I was at a meeting of my southern New Jersey quilting club when the newsletter editor asked, “Do any of yins have an article to put in?” I was not the only one who stopped the meeting right then and there and asked if she’d really said “yins.” What’s the story here?

A: “Yinz” is Pittsburghese. Sometimes spelled “yins” or “yunz,” it’s a plural form of “you.”

This puts it in the same category as “you-uns,” “yous,” “y’all,” “you guys,” and other terms that have been described as attempts to reestablish a separate plural of “you.”

As we’ve written before on the blog, “you” once had four forms in English: the singulars “thou” (subject) and “thee” (object), and the plurals “ye” (subject) and  “you” (object).

From 1300 to 1600, these were gradually combined into one all-purpose “you.”

But for some people, one “you” just isn’t enough, and nonstandard plural forms have emerged over the last couple of hundred years.

A linguist would call them dialectal variants of the personal pronoun “you,” used with a plural inflection.

Does the persistence of these terms mean that people somehow feel the need to differentiate the plural “you” from the singular, and re-establish a separate plural form?

Some linguists have suggested as much.

For whatever reason, plural forms of “you” are familiar in many dialects of English, and not just in the US. They’re also heard in British, Canadian, Irish, Scottish, and Australian English.

Most of these colloquial forms were first recorded in the 19th century, but some are undoubtedly older.

Colloquialisms—that is, usages more common in speech than in writing—take a while to show up in published works. Many times, they first appear in the speech of fictional characters.

We’ll examine these plural “you” forms one at a time, concluding with “yinz.”

(1) “You-all” and “y’all” (we’ve written about them before on the blog): This usage is associated with the American South, but at least one linguist has suggested it could be an Irish import.

Alan Crozier, writing in the journal American Speech in 1984, pointed out that this use of “all” with pronouns is characteristic of Ulster.

He suggested it may have been brought to the Colonies by Ulster Scots—that is, Scots who settled in Ireland and later immigrated to the US in the 18th century.

(2) “Yez” (also spelled “yees,” “yeez,” and “yiz”) originated in Anglo-Irish, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But a little poking around finds that it’s also used in Liverpudlian and other British dialects, as well as in Australia, the US, and Canada’s Maritime Provinces. We have a hunch this is a variation on “yous” (read on).

(3) “Yous” (also spelled “youse”) is familiar in dialects of American, Australian, and Irish English.

Crozier calls “yous” a “characteristic Hiberno-English plural form” and suggests that it was brought to this country by 19th-century Irish immigrants.

He says that while one researcher claims the American usage “is restricted to eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey,” it may be more widespread than that.

In explaining the possible Irish origins of “yous,” Crozier says the usage “seems to have arisen when speakers of Irish switched to English,” mostly in the 19th century, and “felt a need for a plural second person pronoun like Irish sibh.”

But “yous” has been used in a singular sense too, according to the OED.

For example, there are both plural and singular usages in Stephen Crane’s novel Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893): “Youse kids makes me tired,” and “Ah, Jimmie, youse bin fightin’ agin.”

Among Irish examples of the usage, the OED cites this one from a drama, The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge: “Is it mad yous are?”

And here’s an Australian example, from My Brilliant Career (1901), by the novelist Miles Franklin: “Ye and Lizer can have a little fly round. It’ll do yous good.” (In the same novel, she writes, “have the table laid out for both of yez.”)

(4) “You-uns” (also seen as “youns,” “yuns,” and “yunz”) was first recorded in Ohio in 1810, the OED says. But it’s also heard in Pittsburgh and other parts of Pennsylvania, as well as in the Ozarks and the Appalachians.

Crozier and another linguist, Michael Montgomery, suggest “you-uns” was introduced into the Colonies by the Scotch-Irish. The plural “you ones,” the source of “you-uns,” is known to be of Scotch-Irish origin.

(5) We come at last to “yinz,” which some regard as another variant of “you-uns.” The linguist Barbara Johnstone has called it “a form of you ones.”

It should also be noted that “one” was (and sometimes still is) written as “yin” in dialects of Scotland, Ireland, and the north of England. The plural, of course, is “yins.”

Here’s a singular example from a Scottish poet, Robert Tannahill (1807): “A third yin owns an antique rare.”

And here’s a plural example from another Scot, the writer William McIlvanney (1975): “You young yins think ye inventit men an’ women.” (Quotations courtesy of the OED.)

But any Steelers fan will tell you that “yinz” is pure Pittsburghese.

Johnstone and another linguist, Dan Baumgardt, wrote in American Speech in 2004 that “the second person plural pronoun yinz (in any of its spellings: yunz, younz, yins, and so on) is the most salient and iconic lexical feature of ‘Pittsburghese.’ ”

The word  “appears in every dictionary-like list of local words,” the two linguists write, and it’s so strongly associated with Pittsburgh that “a local term for a local person is yinzer.”

With that, we’ll—or, rather, we-all will—stop.

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Does the mayor’s English have a ways to go?

Q: NYC Mayor Bloomberg habitually says things like this: “We’ll find a ways to do that.” Why?

A: You’re right. Mayor Bloomberg uses the word “ways” a lot, often in a surprising way. He’s especially fond of finding “a ways” to do things.

On his weekly radio show last summer, for example, he said New York State judges “should have found a ways to interpret the law … to accomplish what’s good for society.”

A Google search finds several dozen other examples.

Why, you wonder, is the Mayor using “a ways” here to mean a manner or method, when the singular “a way” would be appropriate?

He may be confused by a similar usage in which “a ways” is considered standard English: “The Mayor has a ways to go to balance the New York City budget.”

Here, “a ways” roughly means “a distance” or a “way.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage notes that “ways” has been used as a synonym for “way” in expressions like “a long ways off” since at least 1588.

“Such usage is standard American English,” the usage guide says. “In British English, on the other hand, it appears to have died out.”

Merriam-Webster’s notes that some commentators frown on the usage and label it colloquial or informal.

But the guide lists a half-dozen examples of the usage from American publications, including these two:

From a 1972 issue of Barron’s: “the downturn still has a ways to go.”

From Wilfrid Sheed’s 1973 novel People Will Always Be Kind: “Casey’s idea of fund-raising was quite a ways from mine.”

Not surprisingly, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) lists this singular use of the plural “ways” as standard English without any qualification.

But the more conservative editors at The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) add a caveat: “The usage is acceptable but is usually considered informal.”

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“That” tricks

Q: Pat’s discussion of “that that” on WNYC reminded me of a classic sentence—I forget who originated it—with five consecutive appearances of “that”: “I told him that that ‘that’ that that editor had deleted, was not that ‘that’ that I had marked.”

A: We think that that “that” sentence is pretty ingenious!

It reminds us of a punctuation puzzle popularized by Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keys’s 1966 science fiction novel, and Charly, a 1968 movie based on it:

that that is is that that is not is not is that it it is

Here’s one solution: That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.

We wrote a blog post a few years ago about the sometimes optional use of “that,” but you’ve inspired us to be expansive here and write about “that” in its many guises.

The word “that” is very old. It appears in Beowulf, which may be as old as the early or mid-700s.

(And incidentally, “that” is much older than “who,” and contrary to popular opinion it’s quite legitimate to use “that” to refer to a person, as we’ve written before on the blog.)

“That” has many functions in English. So let’s do a “that” roundup.

Demonstrative pronoun. Here, “that” can refer to a thing, a person, a fact or circumstance, and so on. Examples: “That was excellent” … “That’s a good boy!” … “That’s the question” … “After that, we went to bed” … “Take that!” … “Is that so?” … “That’s him all over.”

Demonstrative adjective. Here, “that” can modify a word for a person, a thing, a time, and so on. Examples: “That boy will be the death of me” … “I’ve never forgotten that one” … “Where’s that money you owe me?” … “By that time she was gone.”

Demonstrative adverb. Here, “that” means “to that extent or degree.” Examples: “It’s not that cold” … “I’ve known him since he was that high.”

Relative pronoun. Here, “that” refers to or adds to something already mentioned. It can introduce a clause or be the object of a preposition.  “Is this all that you have to say?” … “The dress that she wants is red” … “It’s a fact that you can’t deny” … “Pittsburgh is the town that he came from” … “Fool that I was!”

Conjunction. Here, “that” introduces a clause that’s dependent on the main clause. Examples: “I was certain that she’d gone” … “It was for this that I studied” … “We had hoped that you would stay” … “It was so cold that I had to come inside” … “I said that I was sorry.”

With those last two usages—relative pronoun and conjunction—it’s often hard to tell which is which. And in both of them, the use of “that” is sometimes optional.

A final note: Like any other word, “that” can be a noun if it refers to the word itself, as in “Is ‘that’ the right word here?”

Now let’s go back to your original sentence: “I told him that that ‘that’ that that editor had deleted was not that ‘that’ that I had marked.”

It has eight examples of “that,” which we’ll identify in order of appearance.

(1) Conjunction; (2) demonstrative adjective; (3) noun; (4) relative pronoun; (5) demonstrative adjective; (6) demonstrative adjective; (7) noun; 8) relative pronoun.

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Why does “anymore” have a negative attitude?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Etymology Grammar Usage

He’s, like, you know, a hunk!

Q: Any idea when teenagers starting using “like” and “you know” in place of “um”? I’m an author working on a story set in 1978 and I’m trying to get it right.

A: You’re safe putting “you know” into the mouths of 1970s characters. It’s been a common verbal tic for centuries. (We’ve written several items on the blog about the empty expressions  that litter our speech, including a posting last year.)

As for “like,” there are two colloquial usages of the word, and one of them may be too recent for your purposes.

(1) The first (and earlier) usage has been a part of American slang since the 1950s. Here, “like” is used as an interjection, either for emphasis or to hedge a statement. Examples: “He’s, like, a hunk!” … or … “This weighs, like, a ton” … or … “You’re, like, the best.”

(2) In the second usage, the verbal phrase “be like” introduces quotations (real or approximate), as in “She’s like, ‘Who’s that?’ ” … or … “I’m like, ‘You gotta be kidding!’ ”

This “quotative like,” as it’s sometimes called, is the one that was popularized in the 1980s in Valley Girl speech.

So your characters might be expected to use “like” No. 1, but not “like” No. 2.

We’ve written about “like” in our book Origins of the Specious, and Pat has done an On Language column on the subject for the New York Times Magazine.

In case you’d like to know more, read on.

“Like” No. 1, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, was first recorded in 1950. The quote, from Neurotica magazine: “Like how much can you lay on me?”

This use of “like,” according to Random House, was originally associated “with jazz musicians, later with beatniks, hippies, and teenagers.”

Interestingly, some usages very similar to “like” No. 1 (if not indistinguishable from it) have a history dating back nearly 500 years, according to entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.

In these cases, “like” is used parenthetically to qualify a preceding statement, or before an adjective. Its meaning is roughly “in a way,” “so to speak,” “as it were,” or “in the manner of one who is” (with adjective following), the OED says.

The dictionary cites scores of examples. We’ll give just a few here, along with their dates.

1513: “Yon man is lyke out of his mynd,” from a poem by William Dunbar. (We love this one!)

1596: “All looking on, and like astonisht staring,” from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

1778: “Father grew quite uneasy, like, for fear of his Lordship’s taking offense,” from Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina.

1801: “Of a sudden like,” from the novel Mysterious Husband by Gabrielli (the pseudonym of Mary Meeke).

1815: “In honour of the twelve apostles like,” from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering.

1838: “If your Honour were more amongst us, there might be more discipline like,” from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Alice.

1840: “Why like, it’s gaily nigh like to four mile like,” from an essay on style by Thomas De Quincey in which he ridicules the overuse of “like.”

1911: “He hasn’t passed his examinations like. … He has that Mr. Karkeek to cover him like,” from Arnold Bennett’s novel Hilda Lessways.

Perhaps the most common pairing of “like + adjective” is “like mad,” which has been going strong since the 17th century.

The earliest citation is from Henry More’s An Antidote Against Atheism (1655): “For she was then seen … in her fetters, running about like mad.”

Samuel Pepys, in his famous Diary, used the expression in 1663: “Thence by coach with a mad coachman that drove like mad.”

And Samuel Richardson used it in his novel Pamela (1741): “Several Harlequins, and other ludicrous Forms, that jump’d and ran about like mad.”

Here we’ll stop, lest we drive you, like, mad.

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Grammar Usage

How close is “close to” to “nearly”?

Q: Is it OK to use “close to” instead of “nearly”?

A: We all know that it’s fine to use “close to” in place of the preposition “near,” as in “They live close to Baltimore.” So what about using it in place of an adverb like “nearly” or “almost” (“We drive close to 50 miles to get there”)?

That’s OK too, and here’s why.

Modern grammarians describe “close to” as a complex preposition, meaning that it’s a preposition that consists of more than one word.

There are scores of complex prepositions in English. In the Oxford English Grammar, Sidney Greenbaum lists some of them, including these:

“close to,” “according to,” “as opposed to,” “away from,” “in connection with,” “outside of,” “next to,” “except for,” “instead of,” “contrary to,” “regardless of,” and “up to.”

Some of these are used in prepositional phrases that include numbers or quantities of some kind. “Close to” is often used this way in the sense of “nearly” or “almost.”

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, gives the numerical example “close to a hundred tickets” and a similar one, “up to twenty minutes.”

So we can correctly write or say things like “Every day, I drive close to 50 miles,” or “She sold close to a hundred tickets,” or “We waited close to 20 minutes.”

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Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage

Do contractions have true grit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what about the suitability of contractions in True Grit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Etymology Linguistics Spelling Usage

‘Here’ to ‘herein’ to ‘hereinafter’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having written the aforementioned, we will hereinafter sign off.

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Etymology Punctuation Usage

A tussle over tousle?

Q: I looked up the word “tousle” in my dictionary today and was surprised to find that it’s pronounced TAU-zul. I always thought it was TAU-sul. I asked a couple of other people, one American and the other British, and there was no tussle. We all pronounce it TAU-sul. What is your ruling on this?

A: We assume you’re referring to the verb “tousle,” which means to rumple or dishevel. The less common noun refers to a tangled or disheveled mass of something, such as hair.

Both Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) list two acceptable pronunciations of the verb: TAU-zul and TAU-sul. (The first syllable rhymes with “now.”)

However, Merriam-Webster’s gives only one pronunciation for the noun: TAU-zul. American Heritage has the same two for verb and noun.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists only the TAU-zul pronunciation for verb and noun, and it includes “touzle” as well as “tousle” as spellings.

The verb showed up in English in the 15th century, several hundred years before the noun.

In addition to the verb’s usual meaning of to rumple, the OED lists one that’s new to us: “to handle (esp. a woman) rudely or indelicately.”

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Etymology Linguistics Usage

Dicking around

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Etymology Usage

Eurocentric English

Q: If I were to ask one of my Irish relatives how much is left over after spending half a euro, they would reply “50 cent” while I (an American) would say “50 cents.” I would appreciate any enlightenment you could provide.

A: This usage does indeed sound odd to an American. We would use the conventional English plural and say the euro has 100 cents, or two euros have 200 cents.

However, your Irish relatives can justify using “cent” and “euro” as plurals. They could also justify adding “s” and using “cents” and “euros.” Here’s the story.

It all depends on which official European Commission document you consult.

For example, the commission has standardized the way these monetary units are referred to in legislation from country to country.

This is explained in a document entitled “Spelling of the Words ‘Euro’ and ‘Cent’ in Official Community Languages as Used in Community Legislative Acts.”

The column devoted to English gives the singulars as “euro” and “cent” and the plurals as “euro” and “cent.”

A footnote for each plural says: “This spelling without an ‘s’ may be seen as departing from usual English practice for currencies.”

But another official manual, “English Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors and Translators in the European Commission,” says otherwise.

The handbook, published by the European Commission Directorate-General for Translation, has this to say:

“Like ‘pound,’ ‘dollar’ or any other currency name in English, the word ‘euro’ is written in lower case with no initial capital. Where appropriate, it takes the plural ‘s’ (as does ‘cent’): This book costs ten euros and fifty cents.”

Why have one standard for legislation and another for ordinary usage? Maybe you can figure it out; we can’t.

In fact, the legislative standard isn’t even consistent. Singulars and plurals change in some languages, including Spanish and French, while they stay the same in others, including German and Italian.

As of January, 17 countries have adopted the euro, including Ireland. The UK, which includes Northern Ireland, has “agreed an ‘opt-out’ clause in the Treaty” that exempts it from participation, the European Commission says.

The euro symbol looks like a capital “C” with  two horizontal strokes through it, and was inspired  by the Greek letter epsilon.

The European Commission says that “on many computers the euro symbol can be obtained with the <ctrl>+<alt>+e keystrokes.” (Doesn’t work in our email program, though.)

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Etymology Usage

Facts and damn facts

Q: With some regularity, I catch people rejecting something by making the ridiculous statement “I don’t accept the fact that….” If it ain’t a fact, don’t call it one.

A: We agree with you that it doesn’t make much sense to say, “I don’t accept the fact that…” in such cases. If you acknowledge something to be a fact, then you’ve accepted it as the truth.

But language isn’t mathematics, and words are sometimes used less than literally. They also change over time.

The phrase “the fact that” has been around since the early 19th century, and it’s often used to mean “the circumstance that,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In fact (if you’ll pardon the expression), the OED’s earliest published reference for “the fact that” uses the phrase in just the way you object to.

Here’s the citation, from a diary entry in Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh (1803): “I would not agree to the fact that ennui prevailed more in England than in France.”

Although the usage has a history (more on this later), we find it a bit sloppy, especially in writing. We’d say we didn’t agree that such-and-such WAS a fact.

But on to the word “fact,” which once had a meaning somewhat different from today’s.

It comes from the Latin factum (“thing done”), a past participle of the verb facere (“do”).

This explains why the word meant simply an action, a deed, or a “feat” (another word from the Latin factum) when it entered English in the mid-1500s.

“Fact” retained some of its original flavor for centuries. In the early 1800s, people were still using the phrase “caught in the fact” the way we now use “caught in the act.”

And when Jane Austen, in her novel Emma (1815), described the people of Enscombe as “gracious in fact if not in word,” she was contrasting words with deeds.

Like most words, “fact” has gone through some changes in its lifetime.

In modern English, a “fact,” according to the OED, is “something that has really occurred or is actually the case … hence, a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred, or to a conjecture or fiction.”

This meaning was first recorded in 1632 in James Hayward’s translation of Eromena, a novel by Giovanni Francesco Biondi: “They resolved that the Admirall should goe disguised … to assure himselfe of the fact.”

Here’s a later use, in Tobias Smollett’s 1749 translation of Alain René Le Sage’s novel Gil Blas: “Facts are stubborn things.”

We can’t argue with that.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t had your fill of facts, you might  be interested in a blog item we wrote last year about the word “factoid.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

What’s the skinny?

Q: Are you aware of any references to “the skinny” prior to 1967? I was in the US Air Force then and provided an information sheet to briefers on data like runway length, aircraft, equipment, etc. The four-inch-wide sheet was known as “the skinny sheet,” and one of the briefers referred to its information as “the skinny.”

A: The earliest example we’ve found for “the skinny” used in this sense is from the 1932 Lucky Bag, the yearbook of the US Naval Academy:

“If you don’t get the skinny of things, Eddie can usually set you right” (from the entry for Harold Edward Baker, a cadet from Yakima, WA).

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Rolling World, a 1938 autobiography by the adventurer and writer Richard Matthews Hallet:

“Had she really given me the skinny of an actual legend from the archives of her race, or was she wafting me the native poetry of her soul?”

The OED defines the expression this way: “slang (orig. and chiefly U.S.). With the. Detailed and esp. confidential information about a person or topic, ‘the low-down’; (also more generally) news, gossip.”

The dictionary has one other pre-1967 citation for the usage, from The Big War, a 1957 novel by Anton Myrer: “I’ll cut you in on some hot skinnay.”

There’s no reliable explanation for the origin of this sense of “skinny,” as we wrote in a brief blog item on the subject in 2006.

But it’s been speculated that “to get down to the skinny” (that is, to get the essential information about something), was like getting down to the skin of an issue.

For what it’s worth, the Old Icelandic word skinna (a cousin of our “skin”) referred to a piece of parchment or vellum, perhaps influencing a couple of English usages related to information.

The old word may have given us “skin book,” a term that entered English in the 19th century with the meaning of a manuscript made of parchment or vellum.

And though it’s quite a stretch, an imaginative wordie might also see flakes of skinna in the 20th-century slang sense of “skin book” as a pornographic work.

The word “skinny,” by the way, didn’t refer to a scrawny person or animal when it entered English as an adjective around 1400.

The earliest citations in the OED use “skinny” to mean covered with skin, affecting the skin, looking like skin, and perhaps even having beautiful skin.

The colloquial sense of “skinny” as thin or lean didn’t show up until the early 1600s when Shakespeare used it in Macbeth: “Each at once her choppie finger laying Vpon her skinnie Lips.”

[Note: This post was updated on June 9, 2021.]

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Grammar Usage

David Crystal being right

Q: I was reading David Crystal’s blog the other day and I noticed his post “On me/my being right.” He said either “me” or “my” could be correct. “The non-possessive one highlights the verb phrase,” he wrote, “whereas the possessive one highlights the noun phrase.” Strunk and White would insist on “my” here. Who’s right, Crystal or S&W? Is this a US-vs.-UK thing? Please clarify.

A: No, this isn’t an American-vs.-British issue. We think Crystal (a linguist and a Brit) is right. As for Strunk and White, its strong suit is style, not grammar.

It’s true that a noun or pronoun modifying a gerund (an “–ing” word acting as a noun) should be in the possessive case: “Dick’s [or his] skiing has improved.” We’ve written about this subject before on our blog.

But as we write in that entry, not every “-ing” word is a gerund. It could be a participle (as in “I saw Dick skiing yesterday”).

The difference is one of emphasis: a gerund functions as a noun, while a participle functions as a verb. So if the “-ing” word could be replaced with a noun, then it’s a gerund.

We could say either “Dick’s athleticism [noun] has improved” or “Dick’s skiing [gerund] has improved.” In both cases, the modifier is in the possessive case.

Here’s another example. Say a singer and a record producer are talking. The producer might say either (1) “I’ve heard you singing” or (2) “I’ve heard your singing.” Both are correct, but the statements have different meanings.

In #1, “singing” is a participle; the speaker is emphasizing the verb (the act of singing).

In #2, “singing” is a gerund; the speaker is emphasizing the noun (the singing itself).

To use another example, the word “standing” can be either a participle or a gerund.

Participle: “I saw you standing on the cliff.”

Gerund: “I was alarmed by your standing on the cliff.”

We hope this makes things a bit clearer.

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Etymology Usage

Falling on one’s sword

Q: It seems to me that the phrase “fall on one’s sword” has been overused and watered down to the point of meaninglessness. At one time it meant to commit suicide, but it’s now used to describe a minor mea culpa. The public editor at the New York Times, for example, recently referred to the sports editor’s acknowledgement of a mistake as “falling on his sword.”

A: The practice of committing suicide by running oneself through with a sword is thousands of years old—probably as old as swords themselves. 

The English expression “to fall on one’s sword” is much younger, naturally, but it’s difficult to say just when it first showed up. We do know that it appeared in the first English translation of the Bible, in the late 14th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that in Bible translations, to “fall on” a sword means “to throw oneself upon” it.

The OED gives an example from the 1382 Wycliffe translation of the Bible: “So Saul caught his swerd and felle vpon it.” A 1611 version of the Bible has “Therfore Saul tooke a sword, and fell upon it.”

In Virgil’s Aeneid, written in Latin in the first century BC, the lovelorn Dido, queen of Carthage, does away with herself in this grisly manner, stabbing herself with Aeneas’ sword as her horrified attendants look on.

When Sir William Mure translated Dido and Aeneas (the early books of the Aeneid) into English in about 1614, he wrote: “Her Dams attending see their mistris fall / On piercing sword.”

Here’s another 17th-century citation, from Sir Robert Stapylton’s 1647 translation of Juvenal’s Sixteen Satyrs: “He converted his fury upon himself, and … fell upon his own sword.”

Similarly, Plutarch’s Lives has a passage describing how Brutus handed his sword to his friend Strato, then “he fell on the point, and died.” (From an 1832 translation by John and William Langhorne.)

For a later example, here’s Richard Le Gallienne, writing in From a Paris Garret (1936), a collection of columns written for the New York Sun:

“Vatel … committed suicide by falling on his sword … because the ‘roti’ at the twenty-fifth table was wanting.” (The reference is to a 17th-century chef who took his job too seriously.)

These days, “to fall on one’s sword” doesn’t necessarily mean to commit suicide. It can mean to sacrifice one’s career and livelihood in admitting an error, like an executive or other public figure who resigns in shame.

A more watered-down usage—meaning simply to accept the blame or responsibility for something—has recently emerged.

That’s how Arthur S. Brisbane, the Times’s public editor, used the expression in his Dec. 26, 2010, column.

It’s our opinion that with this new usage, the phrase loses a lot of its edge (no pun intended).

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