Category: Usage

Q: I’ve heard that the word “cop” (for policeman) comes from “constable on patrol.” Am I right?

A: The noun “cop,” meaning a police officer, isn’t an acronym for “constable on patrol” or “custodian of the peace,” as some have suggested over the years. It comes from a verb, “to cop,” meaning to seize or nab, which subsequently gave rise to the noun “copper,” meaning a person who seizes or nabs. The noun “copper” was later shortened to “cop.”

According to the Dictionary of Word Origins (by John Ayto, Arcade Publishing), the noun “copper” is what’s called an agent noun, formed from the verb “to cop.” It is thought to come from Old French (“caper”) by way of Latin (“capere”), meaning to seize or take. It’s also the root of our word “capture.”

The noun “copper” was first used to refer to a police officer in 1846, according to other sources I’ve checked. The noun “cop” is a shortened form that dates to 1859.

Q: Sometimes I see “gantlet” and sometimes I see “gauntlet.” Which one is correct?

A: The old “gantlet/gauntlet” distinction is rapidly being lost, since dictionaries these days are increasingly regarding them as interchangeable.

“Gantlet” originally came from a Swedish word similar to “lane,” and referred to the parallel lines involved in an old form of military punishment. Someone forced to “run the gantlet” was made to run between parallel lines of his colleagues, who would hit him with clubs or switches as he passed.

A “gauntlet” (French word) was a heavy, armored glove worn by a knight. As a challenge to fight, the knight would toss his glove to the ground (“throw down the gauntlet”). The opponent accepting the challenge was said to “pick up the gauntlet.”

Most dictionaries now accept the spelling “gauntlet” for both of those meanings. There’s still a technical term “gantlet” used in railroading, though.

Q: I know there’s a difference in the way one uses “awhile” and “a while,” but I can’t remember what it is. Is it correct to say “for a while” or “for awhile” – and, just for fun, where does “while” come from?

A: “Awhile” is an adverb meaning “for a time.” (The “for” is inherent in the word, so “for awhile” would be redundant.) “A while” is a noun phrase meaning “a period of time.” You could correctly say “We sat awhile and spent a while talking.” Or, “When he called a while ago, we talked awhile and laughed for a while.”

More than a little confusing, aren’t they?

“While” comes from a prehistoric Indo-European root meaning “rest” or “repose,” and it entered Old English from Germanic sources. It is a noun (for “period of time”), a conjunction (meaning “during the time that”), and a verb (to “while” means to spend time idly). I’ll take a crack at a sentence with all three: “For a while, he whiled away his time by eating while watching TV.”

Q: A caller asked you on the air if there’s a feminine equivalent to “avuncular.” The Oxford English Dictionary lists “materteral” as meaning “characteristic of an aunt.” It comes from the Latin “matertera,” which refers to a mother’s sister. That’s consistent with “avuncular,” which means “characteristic of an uncle.” It comes from “avunculus,” which refers to a mother’s brother.

A: You’re right. But the OED lists only a single published reference to the word, from 1823, and calls it “humorously pedantic.” Until it shows up in more dictionaries, not many people are likely to use it. It’s not completely useless, however, as long as we can use it to answer the question, “What’s a word meaning ‘aunt-like’?”

By the way, one listener suggested creating the word “aunticular” and another listener suggested “tantatious” as feminine versions of “avuncular.”

Q: I couldn’t get through to WNYC in time to comment on your discussion about the expression “in like Flynn.” It’s a reference to the extraordinary political staying power of Edward Flynn, chairman of the Bronx Democratic Party from 1922 until his death in 1953.

A: Thanks for writing, and for listening. There’s much conflicting evidence about the expression “in like Flynn,” and as of this writing, we don’t have a definitive answer.

The most common explanation, which may be erroneous, is that the expression originated in February 1943 in reference to Errol Flynn’s acquittal on charges of statutory rape. He had been indicted in late 1942, the trial took place in early 1943, and he was acquitted by a jury that February. Supposedly the phrase “in like Flynn” was an allusion to his legendary ability to misbehave free of consequences. In other words, he got away with it.

The problem with this theory is that the expression predates Flynn’s rape trial. During the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40, an official was quoted as telling a party of people who were to receive passes for a show, “Your name is Flynn … you’re in.” And a columnist in the San Francisco Examiner in early 1942 wrote: “Answer these questions correctly and your name is Flynn, meaning you’re in. …” (Of course, the actor had been a household name since “Captain Blood” in 1935, so these could have been roundabout references to him.)

A competing theory, advanced in a New York Times article a couple of years ago, is that “in like Flynn” originated as a reference to the Bronx Democratic machine politician Edward J. “Boss” Flynn (1892-1953), whose candidates always won. Flynn’s heyday was the 1930s. However, there’s no solid evidence that he’s the source.

The etymologist and researcher Barry Popik, whom I consulted about this problem, is dubious about both theories. He notes that there could even be a connection with Flynn’s Detective Weekly, a popular magazine in the 1920s and 1930s. But until there’s better evidence, we just can’t say.

Leonard Lopate’s explanation may be closer to the truth. Perhaps “in like Flynn” is yet another example of serendipitous rhyming slang that was already in existence and happened to attach itself to popular figures of the day.

[Note: This post has been updated several times to report comments from readers.]

Q: As a native New Yorker of Italian-American descent, I have always been plagued by the term “yous.” I stopped using it many years ago during my freshman year at college when a dorm mate from Beacon Hill grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me vigorously while proclaiming, “ ‘Yous’ is not a word, God-dammit!”

I’ve accepted this but, in the interest of regaining some dignity, I do have a theory about its origins. New York is a city of immigrants who, like my grandparents, may have learned the English language but may have also retained some of the grammar of the home country. In English we express the plural of “you” with “you two” or “you three” or, in Katie Couric’s case, “you all.” But in Latin languages it is expressed with one word that, literally translated would be “yous” (for example: vous in French or vosotros in Spanish).

I therefore think that “yous” is almost a kind of creole for Italian-Americans rather than a sign that we have a strong aptitude for being a loan shark. Does this theory make sense or is my wife correct when she tells me I have much too much time on my hands?

A: You may have too much time on your hands, but there are worse things to do with it than think about the language! At least (presumably) this preoccupation keeps you off the streets.

As you say, modern English, unlike some other languages, has only one form of “you” for both singular and plural. (This wasn’t always the case, as we’ve written before.) It’s been suggested by some linguists that “you-all,” “you-uns” (a Pittsburgh expression) and “yous” or “youse” actually originated as attempts to differentiate plural “you” from singular “you.”

We can see that this might be a natural response on the part of immigrants (and not just Italians) whose first languages had both singular and plural forms.

Another reader has e-mailed us about the same thing, suggesting that there’s a connection between Irish immigration patters and the use of “youse” in this country:

“The use of the word ‘youse’ as a plural of ‘you’ is almost universal amongst the people of Derry,” she writes. “They also use the word ‘youse-uns,’ as an emphatic form, with remarkable frequency.”

[Notes: Another reader wrote on April 19, 2018, to comment that Irish has a plural form of “you”: sibh (plural of tú). This reinforces the notion that the use of “youse” and such forms has a connection with Irish immigration.

And a reader in Britain wrote on April 18, 2021, with this comment:

“ ‘Youse’ might definitely be linked to Irish immigration. People say that in Coventry (UK) a lot. It was about a third Irish the middle of the last century. Also, people don’t use it much in the surrounding area.” We replied that Pat was currently reading a mid-19th-century novel by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu, set in a rural village just outside Dublin. In dialogue, most of the forms of “you” that are addressed to plural auditors by working-class speakers are written as “yez.”]

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Q: One of my bugbears is the word pair “careen” and “career,” particularly in the meaning of “lurch.” I learned in school that “careen” had the meaning “lurch,” among others. If a vehicle or person veered wildly out of the prescribed route, the word “careen” described what had happened. I now hear and read, however, the word “career” being used in that sense, as in, “The car careered off the highway.” While I have not taken the time to find examples, I believe that The New York Times now uses “career” in the sense of “lurch.” Do you have any background on this issue? Thanks for any information.

A: Traditionally, usage guides have said that to “careen” means to tilt or tip over and to “career” means to rush, perhaps recklessly. This is a distinction that every copy editor in the United States knows by rote, but also one that nobody BUT a copy editor ever observes.

In practice, most people use “careen” to describe a vehicle lurching or running out of control. Copy editors always change this to “career,” which understandably looks very odd to the ordinary reader. Dictionaries of course reflect common usage, which is why they almost unanimously accept interchangeable meanings for these words.

Many stylebooks for the lay reader, including Bryan A. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, still make the old distinction and recommend “careering out of control,” not “careening.” The newest edition of the New York Times Stylebook also continues to maintain the distinction.

When I wrote my book “Woe Is I,” I deliberately omitted “careen-vs.-career” from my chapter on commonly confused words, because I felt that it had become almost pedantic to insist on a distinction that most people and dictionaries no longer recognize.

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Q: A friend in my writing group asked this question and i wonder if you
have an answer: If “fire” is spelled f-i-r-e, why is “fiery” spelled the way it is?

A: The Old English word “fyr” (fire) was transcribed into Middle English as “fier.” (The Old English letter y, representing a long “i” sound, was written as “ie” in the Middle English version of the word.)

The Modern English spelling “fire” didn’t become firmly established until about 1600, but a trace of the old spelling survived in the adjective “fiery.”

Q: Hi, my grandma has a quick question for you: Why do people say “I’m all in” when they are tired? Thank you so much.

A: According to Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the term “all in” is a colloquial expression that originated on the floors of stock exchanges in the mid-19th century. If the market was “all in,” it was down or depressed; if it was “all out,” it was rising or inflated. By extension, the term “all in” was borrowed in the early 20th century to mean “exhausted” or “used up” in reference to people or animals who were verging on collapse.

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has a somewhat different explanation: “all in” originated at the card table. If you were “all in,” you were broke (that is, out of money), because you had already put all of your money in the pot. So you couldn’t play anymore.

There may be some truth in both explanations. The poker-playing term could easily be applied to the stock market, if investors were played out and no longer putting money into the kitty. Hope this sheds some light!

Q: What is the origin of the phrase “just us chickens”?

A: The closest I can come is a reference in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Supposedly “Nobody here but us chickens” was the punchline of a joke about a chicken thief who is surprised in the act by the farmer. (The reference book doesn’t go into detail, but I would guess the farmer says something like “Who’s there?”) Later the punchline alone became a jocular catch-phrase.

Q: Watching TV over the last couple of weeks has gotten me into several discussions with friends about offensive phrases that have become common in the media. In our discussion, I was told by one of my white friends that she was told not to use the phrase “coming up spades” as a kid because it was a reference to slave ownership. Is this true? What is the origin of the spade in “coming up spades?” I had only known it in reference to gambling and the spade suit.

A: There’s nothing racially motivated or politically incorrect about the expression “in spades” or “coming up spades.” The spade is the highest rated suit of cards in contract bridge and other card games in which the suits are ranked. (The values of the suits, in ascending order, are: first, clubs; second, diamonds; third, hearts; fourth, spades.)

So to have a quality or characteristic or anything else “in spades” is to have a lot of it, or more than other people. For instance, “Jack lacks charisma, but his brother Jim has it in spades.” Or “There was a big cereal sale at the grocery store and now I have Cheerios in spades.” Or, “When she smiles, she has dimples in spades.”

I also get asked sometimes about another expression, “to call a spade a spade.” That, too, has nothing to do with race. The expression originated with the ancient Greeks, who would say of someone who spoke plainly that he liked “to call a fig a fig; to call a kneading trough a kneading trough.” But when the phrase was first translated during the Renaissance, the Greek word for “trough” (skaphe, meaning a trough, basin, bowl, or boat) was confused with the Greek for “spade” (the digging implement). So the modern English version of the expression is actually a centuries-old mistranslation. It’s purely accidental that today we don’t say, “He likes to call a trough a trough.”

Q: I’m constantly bugged by hearing people on CNN or Fox talk about two troops or three troops wounded in Iraq. I always thought the word “troops” referred to a body of soldiers or a large number of soldiers, not two or three. Am I wrong?

A: You and umpteen (roughly) other WNYC listeners have e-mailed me about “trooper/trouper/troop/troops” and all the permutations.

I agree with you that the use of “troops” to refer to a small number of soldiers, sailors, marines, and so on sounds clunky, but we seem to be in the minority on this.

Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) say “troops” can refer to soldiers. Neither reference suggests that the number of soldiers has to be large.

Even a relatively fussy language reference like Garner’s Modern American Usage (3d ed.) accepts the use of the plural “troops” to mean a small number of soldiers.

“In this sense, troops refers to individual soldiers (three troops were injured in the raid), but only when the reference is plural,” the usage guide says. “That is, a single soldier, sailor, or pilot would never be termed a troop.”

Although “some may object” to using “troops” to refer to individuals, the book adds, “the usage is hardly new.” It cites an 1853 item in the New York Times reporting that “three of the Government troops were killed and five wounded.”

“Today,” Garner’s says of the usage, “it’s standard.”

Since this issue has generated such interest, here’s a summary of current usage:

(1) “Troop” (singular) means a group. It can refer to a group of soldiers, Boy or Girl Scouts, or (loosely) any collection of people or animals or things.

(2) “Troops” (plural), in the military sense, properly refers to members of the armed forces collectively or a number of individuals (as in, “Five thousand troops were deployed.”) Although many authorities now accept the use of “troops” for a small number of service members, I’d recommend being more specific. Instead of saying “Three troops were wounded,” say “Three soldiers [or marines or sailors] were wounded.”

(3) “Trooper” is commonly used to refer to a state police officer or to a soldier in a horse, armored, air cavalry or other troop.

(4) A “trouper” is a member of a performing company (theatrical, singing, or dancing); the company itself is a “troupe.” But “trouper” also means someone who is a hard worker, a good sport, a reliable person, a mensch. Nine times out of ten, when someone uses a word that sounds like “trooper,” what he means is “trouper,” as in “What a trouper,” “She’s a real trouper,” and so on.

Again, I’m talking here about current usage. Feel free to read no further.

But in case you’re interested, the English military term “troop” (16th century) comes from Middle French troupe, which comes from Old French trope, probably derived from tropeau (flock, herd).

Tropeau, in turn, comes from the Latin troppus, which may derive from the ancient Germanic sources that gave us thorp and throp, the Middle English terms for hamlet or village. Hundreds of years later, we reborrowed it from the French!

The Oxford English Dictionary says the original English meaning of the singular “troop,” from the mid-1500s, was “a body of soldiers,” and soon after that it meant “a number of persons (or things) collected together; a party, company, band.”

In 1590 it acquired a technical meaning in the military: “A subdivision of a cavalry regiment commanded by a captain, corresponding to a company of foot and a battery of artillery.”

By 1598, the plural “troops” had come to mean “armed forces collectively,” the OED says. Here’s a 1732 citation: “Certain sums of money to raise troops.” And here’s another, from 1854: “The courage displayed by our troops.”

If you’ve read this far, congratulations. You’re a real trouper!

(This item was updated on Nov. 4, 2009)

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Q: Is it appropriate for someone to say, “That’s a whole nother issue.” Is “nother” a word?

A: No, “nother” is not a word. I discussed this in my first book (Woe Is I) because I found it so commonplace. You hear it a lot in speech but almost never see it in writing, which is true of so many bad usages.

“A whole nother” is probably a merging of “whole other” and “another.” It’s also been suggested that this error reflects a misunderstanding of the word “another” as two words: “a … nother.”

[Note: An updated and expanded post on “beg the question” appeared on Nov. 29, 2021.]

Q: My biggest pet peeve with language is the use of the phrase “beg the question.” When I hear it used on talk shows of a political nature it goes like this: “That statement he just made begs the question….” My understanding is that “begs the question” means “to answer a direct question with another question.”

A: The expression “begging the question” comes up now and then on WNYC, and we’ve talked about it two or three times that I can recall. Almost no one uses the phrase in its traditionally accepted meaning.

What it was not originally intended to mean is raising, avoiding, prompting, mooting, or inspiring the question. And it also wasn’t intended to mean countering with another, different question in an ironic way.

What it does mean in the traditional sense is engaging in a logical fallacy, namely, basing your argument on an assumption that itself is in need of proof. The example Bryan A. Garner gives in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage is a good illustration: “Life begins at conception, which is defined as the beginning of life.”

Hope this helps. In my opinion, the expression is now so commonly used in so many different ways that today it doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s best avoided.

Q: Where does the expression “tongue and cheek” come from?

A: The theory, though there’s not much evidence to support it, is that the phrase “tongue in cheek” comes from the practice of sticking your tongue in your cheek (thus making a bulge in your cheek) to keep from laughing. It originated in the 18th century and now is used to refer to something said facetiously or ironically. Example: “Ralph offhandedly stuck his arm in the garbage disposal,” said Tom, tongue in cheek.

Note that it’s not “tongue AND cheek.”

Q: I keep hearing “went missing.” Does that phrase make sense?

A: The Oxford English Dictionary describes “go missing” (and its forms “went missing” and “gone missing”) as part of a large group of expressions used with the verb “go” to mean “to pass into a certain condition.” Similar forms would be expressions like “go native,” “go public,” “go ape,” “go [fill in adjective] on someone” (as in “will he go serious on us?”), and the like.

The term “went missing” was originally used to describe lost aircraft, and was first recorded in a book published in Australia in 1944, according to the OED. It’s been a common idiomatic expression in British Commonwealth countries for the last 60 years or so (“The dog has gone missing,” “Three days ago she went missing”).

Perhaps because of its British flavor, “gone missing” may have gained some cachet here. It may be an Anglophile affectation, but it’s not incorrect.

Q: When I went to school (I am 61 and actually learned how to diagram sentences), I learned the past tense of the verb “to light” was “lighted,” not “lit” and the past tense of “dive” was “dived,” not “dove.” Am I not correct and have not these two wrong conjugations become an integral part of the English language in America?

A: Both “lighted” and “lit” are standard past-tense and past-participle forms of the verb “light.” There’s nothing grammatically wrong with a sentence like “I lit the fire.” This has been the case for a couple of hundred years.

Although “dived” is the traditional past tense and past participle of the verb “dive,” American dictionaries now also accept “dove” as standard. (British dictionaries prefer “dived.”)

In the US, “dove” has become acceptable in the irregular conjugation, along the lines of “drive/drove,” “speak/spoke,” “fling/flung,” and similar verbs (sometimes called “strong” verbs) from Old English.

In this respect, “dove” is an unusual development in English. Usually verb tenses tend to simplify and take on “-ed” endings over time (as in “dance/danced”), instead of going the other way and taking on old Anglo-Saxon endings.

The “dove” past tense first appeared in the mid-19th century. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855):

“Straight into the river Kwasind / Plunged as if he were an otter, / Dove as if he were a beaver.”

(Note: This post was updated on April 14, 2023.)

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