Category: Word origin

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Let’s rock-and-roll

Q: On a recent trip to California, a motel desk clerk asked us: “Are we done here?”  When we replied, “Yes,” he said, “Let’s rock ’n’ roll.”  How did this phrase come to mean “Let’s get moving”? I’ve even heard it used as a statement of approval.

A: For more than 30 years, the verb “rock-and-roll” (also spelled “rock ’n’ roll”) has been used in the sense of “get moving” or “get started.”

So that desk clerk meant “Let’s get on with checking you out and preparing your bill” (or words to that effect).

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest published example for this use of the verb “rock-and-roll” (which it hyphenates) is from the April 2, 1980, issue of the Washington Post: “It’s time to rock and roll. The town is ours.”

A few years later, in 1984, this example appeared in the New York Times: “Mittleman looked down at his mended foot, slipped on a pair of shoes borrowed from Record and said, ‘I’m ready to rock and roll.’ ”

Later the phrase started showing up in books, as in these two OED citations:

“Looks like we’re on, lads. Be ready to rock and roll at eleven-thirty!” (From Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, 1997.)

“He uncapped a fountain pen, and took out a yellow legal pad. ‘Okay, Mrs. Chatterjee, let’s rock and roll.’ ” (From Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Desirable Daughters, 2002.)

The OED describes “rock-and-roll” here as a slang usage meaning “to get going, begin, esp. with vigour and energy.” The phrase occurs “chiefly” in the phrases “let’s rock and roll” and “ready to rock and roll,” Oxford adds.

As it happens, a shorter version, “rock”—also defined as “to get going, begin, esp. with vigour and energy”—was  recorded as early as the mid-’60s, the OED says.

This version also appears “chiefly” in the expressions “let’s rock” and “ready to rock,” according to the dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation for this use of “rock” is from a football story in the Oct. 17, 1966, issue of the Los Angeles Times: “All the Bruins, as a matter of fact, should be back and ready to rock with the Bears.”

This more recent example is from Wired magazine in 2000: “The infrastructure is still in place, future-proofed and ready to rock.”

The daddy of these usages, born in the USA in the 1950s, is the verb “rock-and-roll,” defined in the OED as “to dance to or play rock-and-roll music.”

And the granddaddy is the noun phrase “rock ’n’ roll” (as Oxford spells it), whose origins as a musical term aren’t so easy to pin down. In its earliest uses, it can probably be traced to black American music between World Wars I and II.

Here we need to back up a bit to point out that individually, the verbs “rock” and “roll” are extremely old.

The OED says “rock” (meaning “to move to and fro in a gentle and soothing manner”) was recorded in late Old English, and “roll” (“to move with a swaying motion”) in Middle English. So they’re pushing a thousand years old.

The expression “rock ’n’ roll,” the OED says, originated “probably with reference to the motion of the body when dancing.”

But it adds: “It is possible that there may originally also have been some allusion to uses of each verb as euphemisms for sexual intercourse.”

The journalist and rock historian Nick Tosches is more positive on this note, saying the two words have long had sexual connotations. In Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll (1977), Tosches writes:

“An early nineteenth-century sea chanty included the line, ‘Oh do, me Johnny Bowker, come rock ’n’ roll me over.’ A lyric found in the ceremonial Fire Dance of Florida’s obeah worshipers was ‘Bimini gal is a rocker and a roller.’ ”

In African-American blues recordings, “rock” and “roll” began to proliferate in the 1920s. Both Tosches and the OED cite a 1922 recording by the blues singer Trixie Smith of the song “My Daddy Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll).”

Similar usages, especially in African-American music, appeared in the later ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s.

“Rock” in this sense, the OED says, meant both “to have sexual intercourse with” and “to dance with.” 

The OED says the early use of “rock ’n’ roll,” in reference to the hot, rhythmic music of the prewar years, meant “a vigorous and compelling rhythm with a strong beat, as in jazz, swing, or rhythm and blues music; (also) music featuring such a rhythm; lively dance music.”

Its two earliest citations for this early sense of “rock ’n’ roll” are from 1938.

This one is from a song, “Rock It for Me,” written by the twin sisters Kay and Sue Werner, and recorded by Ella Fitzgerald:

“It’s true that once upon a time, / The op’ra was the thing, / But today the rage is rhythm and rhyme, / So won’t you satisfy my soul with a rock an’ roll.”

And this example is from a photo caption that appeared in the New York Times in 1938: “ ‘Rock-and-Roll’ men. Band leaders Benny Goodman (left) and Gene Krupa—Their likes are not to be heard abroad.”

Some time in the early 1950s, the OED says, the meaning of “rock ’n’ roll” shifted and came to mean a new kind of music.

The modern sense of the phrase, according to the OED, was “popularized by disc jockey Alan Freed, who broadcast rhythm and blues music to a multiracial audience from 1951, and later promoted various dances and concerts featuring rhythm and blues performers.”

As the OED explains, Freed’s “1953 ‘Biggest Rhythm and Blues Show’ tour is often regarded as the first major rock ’n’ roll tour, although many of the performers featured would now typically be classified as rhythm and blues vocalists. From this time, the term rock ’n’ roll became popular with white audiences, esp. teenagers.”

Here’s an OED citation from Billboard magazine in 1954: “Freed is now calling his program the ‘Rock and Roll Show.’ ”

Of course, both “rock and roll” and “rock” have taken on whole new meanings in recent generations.

As you mention, the adjective “rock and roll” is now used in the affirmative—it means “cool,” more or less, a usage the OED first records in 1976.

This is an example that Oxford quotes from Esquire magazine in 2008: “Tea is so rock’n’roll these days; according to one rumour, Led Zep’s rider for the O2 gig asked for nothing more than a decent brew of English Breakfast.”

And since the late 1960s, the OED says, to “rock” has meant “to be full of energy, life, and excitement; to be excellent.”

Oxford’s earliest citation is from an advertisement in a 1969 issue of the Times-Bulletin newspaper (Van Wert, Ohio): “Bored? Uptight? In a box? Weekend bowling really rocks!”

[Update, Nov. 11, 2013: A couple of readers pointed out that “let’s roll” is used in the same way as “let’s rock” (let’s get moving), and that the expression took on a special significance for Americans after Sept. 11, 2001. During the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, Todd Beamer and other passengers worked out a plan to overcome the hijackers and regain control of the plane. Beamer’s last words, overheard on an open phone line, were “Are you guys ready? OK, let’s roll.” The OED says the use of “roll” to mean get started, get moving, or take action dates back to 1931.]

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Here’s Johnny

Q: What do you call it when you add a name before a country of origin to make a sort of derisive term like “Jack Burma,” “Johnny Turk,” “Johnny Reb,” “Billy Yank,” and so on?

A: Terms like these have been referred to variously as “national personifications,” “collective pseudonyms,” or “collective nicknames.”

They were never the names of real people; they’re just symbols that collectively represent a nation or its citizens.

In military use, some names refer fondly to a country’s own forces, but some represent the enemy. 

During the American Civil War, for example, Northerners referred to Confederate soldiers as “Johnny Reb” (short for “rebel”), while Southerners called Union soldiers “Billy Yank” (for Yankee).

After the war, such terms lost their bitterness. The Oxford English Dictionary cites one such usage that appeared in a trade magazine, Realty & Building, in 1948:

“Colonel John was a Johnny Reb who delighted in telling of the exploits of the boys in gray.”

But the tradition of military or national nicknames goes much further back. 

In Britain, according to the OED, sailors have been familiarly called “Jack” since the 1600s and “Jack Tar” since the 1700s.

More recently, British soldiers have been called “Tommy”—short for “Thomas (or Tommy) Atkins”—since the 19th century. 

As the OED explains, “Thomas Atkins” wasn’t a real person’s name, but “a familiar name for the typical private soldier in the British Army; arising out of the casual use of this name in the specimen forms given in the official regulations from 1815 onward.”

Some of the documents used other names, the OED says, “but ‘Thomas Atkins’ being that used in all the forms for privates in the Cavalry or Infantry, is by far the most frequent, and thus became the most familiar.” The use of “Tommy” for an ordinary soldier first appeared in print in 1881.

We’ve written before on the blog about the use of “Johnny” or “John” as a generic term for a guy or a fellow.

Since the 18th century, the name “John Bull,” according to the OED, has personified “the English nation; Englishmen collectively; the typical Englishman.”

Early in the following century, the name “Johnny (or Jean) Crapaud” was first used to mean a Frenchman, Oxford says. (Crapaud is French for “toad.”)

Similarly, “Johnny Turk” originated in the World War I era as a name for “a Turkish soldier” or “any Turk,” the OED says.  

The Russian equivalent of “John” is “Ivan,” and the use of “Ivan” (or “Ivan Ivanovitch”) to mean a typical Russian soldier, Oxford says, dates from the 1890s.

As for German soldiers, we can trace to World War I the use of “Jerry” or “Fritz” to refer to them, whether individually or collectively. 

We’ll end with “Jack Burma,” a British term for the Burmese. A search of Google Books suggests that it originated in the 19th century during the British occupation of Burma.

In The Burman: His Life and Notions (1882), for example, Sir James George Scott describes how the Burmese travel in bullock carts that “are roomy, and allow ‘Jack Burma’ and his family to loll about as they please.”

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Everyday vs. every day

Q: This one riles me to no end. Even the most intelligent people use “everyday” for “every day.” I began to notice it a couple of years ago, as if it started with one person and caught on like wildfire. Please tell me I’m not mistaken: If you want an adjective, it’s one word. If you mean something occurs every day, it’s two words.

A: You’re not mistaken. Generally the single word is an adjective (“He’s wearing everyday clothes”) and the two-word phrase functions as either a noun (“Every day is an adventure”) or an adverb (“She gardens every day”).

However, the use of “everyday” for “every day” isn’t all that new. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has examples going back more than three decades.

Here’s one from the November 1980 issue of Vogue: “Everyday I see or read about women in similar roles.”

“This form may well get into dictionaries someday,” Merriam-Webster’s editors say, “but for now the two-word styling for the adverbial phrase is still more common.”

In her grammar and usage book Woe Is I, Pat gives these examples of “everyday” and “every day” at play: “I just love my everyday diamonds,” said Magda. “That’s why you wear them every day,” said Eva.

We should add here that the single word can also be used as a noun meaning a typical or ordinary day. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, gives these two examples of this less common usage:

“I wore this dress—I wear it for everyday” (Eudora Welty).

“The trite and feeble language of everyday” (Clyde S. Kilby, an American author and educator).

Interestingly, the adjective was actually two words connected with a hyphen when it showed up in English in the 1600s.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The City Madam, a comedy that the English dramatist Philip Massinger wrote sometime before 1640: “Few great Ladies going to a Masque … out-shine ours in their every-day habits.”

Charles Dickens was still hyphenating the adjective two centuries later. Here’s an example from The Old Curiosity Shop (1841): “Mr. Quilp invested himself in his every-day garments.”

The OED’s first example of the adjective written as a single word is from Edward Augustus Freeman’s The History of the Norman Conquest (1868): “Treason is spoken of as an everyday matter.”

Etymology aside, standard dictionaries now list the adjective as one word. And usage guides say the two-word phrase acts as a noun or an adverb.

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The winningest dog

Q: I’m trying to find out the history of the word “winningest.”  Merriam-Webster Online says the first known use of the word was 1972, but it doesn’t give any details. I have a hunch that it was first used to describe my boyhood hero, Richard Petty, the winningest stock car driver of all time. How can I find out if my hunch is correct?

A: The adjective “winningest” has been around for hundreds of years, a lot longer than Richard Petty, but it meant the most alluring or attractive when the word first showed up in the 1600s.

The earliest example we could find in Google Books is from The False One, a play about Caesar and Cleopatra, by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. The work is believed to have been written around 1620.

In Act III, Scene 2, Antony says Cleopatra has “eyes that are the winningest Orators” and “a tongue that can deliver The Oracles of Love.”

We found thousands of other examples of “winningest” used this way over the centuries in books, plays, newspapers, magazines, and so on.

Our searches of Google databases indicate that the adjective “winningest” took on its sporting sense in the mid-20th century.

As owners of two Golden Retrievers who compete in obedience trials, we zeroed in on  this early example from a July 1955 issue of the American Kennel Gazette:

“At present the dog with the winningest way in our club is ‘Cindy,’ that beautiful Golden Retriever owned and shown by Greta Taft. Cindy finished her C.D. in three straight shows in June with enviable scores, and now Greta is keeping her in trim by showing her in Graduate Novice until she is ready for the Open class.”

(A dog that qualifies in three Novice obedience trials earns a “Companion Dog” title. One that qualifies in three Open trials earns a CDX, or Companion Dog Excellent, title.)

Cindy beat out Richard Petty by quite a few years. Petty began his racing career in 1958 and was the NASCAR rookie of the year in 1959. But he and the adjective “winningest” apparently didn’t come together until the 1970s.

The earliest example we’ve found is from an article by Robert F. Jones in the April 9, 1973, issue of Sports Illustrated:

“Of course, Richard is already the winningest driver in NASCAR history (in terms both of races and personality), and his 150 victories over 15 seasons amount to more than double those won by Pearson, his closest rival.” (The reference is to David Pearson.)

We posted a brief item on the blog back in 2007 when a reader complained about the use of “winningest.” Many people are bugged by the adjective and don’t think it’s a legitimate word.

However, you can find “winningest” in many standard dictionaries, including The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), though some describe the usage as informal.

And as we’ve said, the adjective “winningest” has been around for hundreds of years, first in the sense of most attractive and later in the sporting sense.

The word “winning” first showed up sometime before 1300 as a noun that referred to getting money or wealth, but that sense is now obsolete, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In the early 1300s, it took on the sense of victory in a game or contest.

When the adjective “winning” appeared in the early 1400s, it had the now-obsolete sense of gaining money or wealth.

In Elizabethan times, the adjective took on the sense of winning in a contest or competition. The earliest OED example of this new meaning is from Shakespeare’s 1599 play Romeo and Juliet: “Learne me how to loose a winning match.”

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The many ways to say nothing

Q: Do we know about when people started saying “oh” in place of “zero”? For example, “Back in oh-four, Bush was president.” I vaguely recall that at the turn of the previous century, “aught” was used in the same manner. Any idea?

A: The Oxford English Dictionary says that both the word “oh” and the letter “O” are nouns representing the figure zero, or “nought,” or “nothing.”

The single letter “O” (usually capitalized) was the first to be used with these meanings.

This use of the letter “O” dates back to the late 1500s, before the word “zero” actually came into English, and it may even go back to the early 1400s.

The OED defines the use of “O” this way as meaning “the figure or symbol zero, 0; nought; (hence) a cipher, a mere nothing.”

(The mathematical symbol 0 showed up in India at least as far back as 876, according to “All for Nought,” an essay by Bill Casselman, a mathematician at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.)

Oxford has one possible, though questionable, citation for the use of the letter “O” as zero from The Crafte of Nombrynge (1425), an early treatise on arithmetic.

The dictionary’s earliest definite example is from 1596, but we’ll skip ahead to this one in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608): “Thou art an O without a figure, I am better then thou art now, I am a foole, thou art nothing.”

The use of the longer “oh” for this purpose, which the OED calls a “variant” of the other usage, was a much later development. It didn’t appear in print until the early 20th century.

The OED’s earliest published citation is from a 1908 issue of an American magazine, the Railroad Telegrapher: “Wishing one and all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, hoping to see everyone out in nineteen oh nine.”

The OED’s definition notes that the use of “oh” to mean zero or “nought” usually appears “in combination with other numerals.”

The spelling of this “oh,” Oxford notes, is modeled after the spelling of the earlier interjection “oh!” 

And as it happens, the interjection written as “oh!” originated as a 16th-century variant of the Old English interjection written as one letter, “O.” The longer spelling, the OED says, was “probably intended to express a longer or stronger sound.”

But getting back to those little nothings, the word “zero” came into English in the early 17th century, either from the French word zéro or its source, the Italian zero, the OED says.

The Italian word is short for zefiro, which Oxford says came into that language from the Arabic word çifr (empty, nought, cipher).

According to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, the Arabic word came from Sanskrit, in which sunya meant “empty place, desert, naught, a cipher.”

You mentioned the use of “aught” in dates. In the sense of a noun for “zero,” the word is chiefly spelled “aught” in American English and “ought” in British English (as in “nineteen-ought-four”).

The OED says the use of the noun spelled “ought” or “aught” to mean “a nought, zero, cipher” dates from the early 1820s. The spellings are “probably” variants of “nought” and “naught,” the dictionary says. (As nouns, “nought” and “naught” mean a “zero”; as pronouns, they mean “nothing” and are negative forms of “aught,” which originally meant “anything.”)

This contemporary citation, from William Kennedy’s novel Ironweed (1979), uses the spelling preferred in Britain: “Strawberry Bill had played left field for Toronto in ought eight when Francis played third.”

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The secret life of sources

Q: On the news, I often hear a source quoted “on condition of anonymity” and several variants thereof. This usage sounds like journalese or legalese. Can you clarify the original and the subtleties of its forms?

A: The expression “on condition of anonymity” is associated with news reporting, but we see it in legal contexts as well. So you’d be justified in calling it both “journalese” and “legalese.”

On the legal front, someone might wish to give information without having it linked to his name. This might happen, for instance, in organized-crime or securities-fraud cases, as well as other kinds of law-enforcement investigations.

But anonymous sources are probably most common in journalism, and have been for quite some time. As a British weekly, the Publishers’ Circular, noted in an editorial in 1893, “Anonymity in the press is not a new subject of discussion.”

Someone who talks to a reporter “on condition of anonymity” is willing to give information—but only if he’s not named. He wants certain information to be made public, but he’s not willing to take responsibility for it.

In both the law and in journalism, such information carries a taint of suspicion, even when it’s perfectly legitimate. The informant could have an ulterior motive, since  anonymity allows him to smear another person’s name while remaining nameless himself.

But sometimes journalists and investigators can’t get certain information in any other way, so they promise to protect their source. And it could be that the informant’s reason for anonymity is simply to protect himself—he might face retaliation if identified.

As we said, the anonymous source—even the anonymous reporter—isn’t new. Periodicals of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries commonly featured articles written anonymously or under pen names.

In the 17th century, a satirical pamphlet entitled Whimsies caricatured the anonymous journalist as a weekly “newes-monger” whose “owne genius is his intelligencer” (in other words, his source is himself).

“No matter though more experienced judgements disprove him; hee is anonymos, and that wil secure him,” the pamphlet said. (Here we’ve expanded on a 1631 quotation that appears in the Oxford English Dictionary.)

In the early 18th century, the Spectator, founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, was notorious for its anonymous columns and for its “letters” (often fictional) from nameless or pseudonymous writers.

The OED quotes one letter-writer in 1712 as begging to be heard “amongst the crowd of other anonymous correspondents.”

And in 1820 Blackwood’s Magazine spoke of “the merit due to us, for being the first to carry on a periodical work, without that vile anonymous disguise, under which such unwarrantable liberties are frequently taken with You, my public.”

Oxford cites this 1882 quotation from the Times of London: “Academical dignitaries, writing … under a disguise of transparent anonymity.” Notice how the writer of that article recognized the evasive nature of the writings he was quoting.

The OED has no citations for the exact expression “on condition of anonymity,” and we can’t say for sure when it first appeared in print.

In 1925 E. M. Forster wrote in the Atlantic that “all literature tends toward a condition of anonymity.” But he used the expression in a different sense than the one we’re discussing here. Forster meant “condition” merely as a state, not as a requirement.

We find the “requirement” sense of the word in this 1925 quotation from the British Medical Journal:

“The Society had since received from the same generous and anonymous source a further munificent gift of something over £28,000, to be applied on the same terms and under the same condition of anonymity.”

And a 1949 article in the Proceedings of the American Association for Public Opinion Research referred to “the condition of anonymity” as “a condition which had for many years been resorted to on the assumption that servicemen would otherwise not give frank reports on the state of their morale.”

The expression as used by journalists quoting unnamed sources wasn’t common, as far as we can tell, until the latter half of the 20th century.

The first such use in the New York Times appears in a 1964 article: “But, though Kennedy himself kept his silence, some of his intimates, on condition of anonymity, did not.”

We’ve found 19th-century examples of the journalistic usage that come close, without using that exact wording.

This one, for example, is from a letter written by Jean Joseph Louis Blanc in 1863 and published in Letters on England (1876):

“Whence comes it that in such a country as England journalism is anonymous? Whence comes it that, generally speaking, anonymity is considered an indispensable condition of journalism? I confess that I am at a loss to explain it.”

And here’s an 1895 example from the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine:

“The first consideration should be, therefore, to create the condition most favorable for the critic to produce an unbiased opinion, and one of the elements of the condition is often anonymity, because it allows him to work impersonally.”

By now, the phrase “on condition of anonymity” is almost a journalistic cliché. 

Walter Shapiro wrote a humorous column on the subject in the Atlantic in 2005, entitled (naturally) “On Condition of Anonymity.”

And Matt Carlson wrote a book on the uses and abuses of anonymity, On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism (2011).

We can’t leave without giving you a little etymology.

The adjective “anonymous,” according to the OED, was first recorded in 1601 (an earlier form, “anonymal,” died out). It literally means “without  name.”

English owes the word “anonymous” to Latin (anonymus) and ultimately Greek (anonymos). But it’s not classical at heart.

Its root is the ancient Indo-European word nomen, the source of the word for “name” in the Germanic languages as well as Latin and Greek.

“Anonymous” is the source of the short-lived noun “anonymousness” (1802) and the more durable “anonymity” (1820).

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From minutia to minutiae

Q: I never hear people say “minutia” and mean “minutia” (i.e., a minor detail). They always use it to mean “minutiae” (minor details). And they pronounce it mi-NOO-shee-uh or mi-NOO-shuh, which is understandable considering how ungainly mi-NOO-shee-ee is. Are we witnessing the conflation of these singular and plural forms?

A: Standard dictionaries define “minutia” as a small or trivial detail, and “minutiae” as small or trivial details. Yet “minutia” is often used to mean “minutiae,” and “minutiae” is often pronounced like “minutia.”

This is nothing new, however. Both words have been used as singulars and plurals since they first showed up in English in the 18th century. And their pronunciations have been all over the place.

Confused? Well, don’t look to Latin for help.

In classical Latin, “minutia” didn’t even mean a small or minor detail, nor did “minutiae” mean small or minor details. Here are the details.

The source of these two words was minutus, which meant small in classical Latin. Minutia and minutiae were singular and plural nouns for smallness—the quality or state of being small.

In the late Latin of the 4th century, minutiae came to mean small or trivial details, but minutia continued to mean smallness.

It wasn’t until “minutia” showed up in English in the 18th century that it took on its small or trivial sense—in both singular and plural versions!

The first of these Latin words to enter English was “minutiae,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it initially as a plural meaning “precise details; small or trivial matters or points.”

The earliest example in the OED is from Samuel Richardson’s 1748 epistolary novel Clarissa: “I have always told you the consequence of attending to the minutiæ.”

However, the dictionary also has examples from the late 18th century to the year 2000 of “minutiae” used in the singular to mean “a precise detail; a small or trivial matter or point”—that is, “minutia.”

The first OED citation for “minutiae” used in the singular is from The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors, a 1797 novel by Anna Maria Bennett (she wrote as “Mrs. Bennett”): “Strict attention to every minutiæ of her domestic arrangement.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the singular “minutia” is from Elizabeth Blower’s 1782 novel George Bateman: “On the observance of some little minutias, no small share of the beauty … depended.”

The first Oxford example that refers to just one “minutia” is from Washington Irving’s 1841 biography of the poet Margaret Miller Davidson:

“That holy patriotism which could toil and bleed, ere it would yield one single minutia of that independence bequeathed to them by the valour of their immortal sires.”

The earliest written example of “minutia” used in the plural is from Charles Burney’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio (1796): “Descending to the minutia of all the events and occasions which may be imagined.”

The OED offers the singular and plural versions of both “minutia” and “minutiae” with no warning labels—in other words, no indication that these usages are anything but standard English.

Only a handful of standard dictionaries in the US and the UK have entries for the singular “minutia,” perhaps because the word is used so rarely to mean a small or trivial detail. When we see “minutia” online, it’s almost always used as a plural.

In fact, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language dropped its entry for the singular “minutia” from the latest edition, the fifth.

Pronunciation guides in standard American dictionaries indicate that “minutia” is pronounced mi-NOO-shee-uh and “minutiae” is pronounced mi-NOO-shee-ee,  mi-NOO-shee-eye, mi-NOO-shee-uh, or mi-NOO-shuh. The NOO in both words can also be NYOO.

However, our experience is that many, if not most, Americans pronounce “minutiae” as mi-NOO-shuh. And few Americans use “minutia” to mean a small detail.

As for British pronunciations, the OED says “minutia” can be either my-NYOO-shee-uh or mi-NYOO-shee-uh while “minutiae” can my-NYOO-shee-eye, mi-NYOO-shee-eye, my-NYOO-shee-ee, or mi-NYOO-shee-ee.

In other words, you can probably defend just about any likely use of “minutia” and “minutiae.”

As for us, we pronounce “minutiae” as mi-NOO-shuh. And we don’t use “minutia.” If we did want to refer to a small or trivial detail, we suppose we’d call it something like a “trifle,” a “triviality,” or perhaps even a “trivial detail.”

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Hear Pat on Iowa Public Radio

She’s on Talk of Iowa today from 10 to 11 AM Central time (11 to 12 Eastern) to discuss the English language and take questions from callers.

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Running dogs of rhetoric

Q: In reading some of the old Cold War literature, I frequently come across the term “running dog” in reference to the Chinese disdain for America. What are its origins and implications?

A: The English term “running dog” has been around a lot longer than you might suspect—for hundreds of years before Mao Zedong was a gleam in his father’s eye.

When it first showed up in the early 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase referred to “an animal, esp. a dog: that is raised or kept for pursuing animals in the course of a hunt.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from A Helpe to Discourse (1619), a collection of miscellaneous writings of questionable authorship: “Miso, because I hunted in his grounds / Let lose his running dogges, and baukt my hounds.”

The dictionary notes that a similar term, “running hound,” showed up a couple of centuries earlier.

In The Master of Game (1425), a book on hunting, Edward, Duke of York, writes about “rennyng houndis hunten in diuers maners” on the moors.

In fact, the OED says the use of the term “running dog” by the Communists is derived from zougou, a Chinese term for a hunting dog (from zou, to run, and gou, dog).

The dictionary says the Chinese used the term figuratively in the “18th cent. or earlier in political contexts” to refer to a “servile follower, lackey.”

In the 20th century, according to Oxford, the Chinese Communists used the term for “a person who is subservient  to a foreign power, esp. to one that threatens revolutionary interests.” Later, the dictionary notes, the Communists used the term in a “generalized” sense.

Interestingly, the OED’s earliest written example of the term used in the political sense is from an American newspaper in which the Chinese are referred to as “running dogs” of the Russians.

Here’s the citation, from the June 8, 1925, issue of the Los Angeles Times: “The Communists cry ‘overthrow imperialism,’ but they themselves are the running dogs of red Russian imperialists.”

The next Oxford example is from China: A Nation in Evolution (1928), by Paul Monroe: “The intelligent Chinese … may believe that missionaries in general are but the ‘running dogs’ … of the imperialistic business and political interests.”

The earliest example citing a Chinese source is from Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Volume IV (1961):

“Without a revolutionary party … it is impossible to lead the working class and the broad masses of the people in defeating imperialism and its running dogs.”

We’ll end with an example from The Honourable Schoolboy, a 1977 novel by John le Carré:

“Czarist imperialist running dogs drank tasteless coffee with divisive, deviationist, chauvinist Stalinists.”

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English English language Etymology Grammar Usage Word origin

Drown, drowned, and drownded

Q: You’ve written an article about the clipped infinitive and past tenses for the verb “text.” What about the converse—the elongated past tense and past participle “drownded.”

A: We’ll get to “drownded” in a moment, but here’s an aside that illustrates another example of unnecessary elongation.

Pat recently opened a new package of socks that the manufacturer claimed were “pre-shrunked.” Ouch! Now, on to your question.

The familiar “drownded,” which many of us perpetrated in childhood, is another example of the tendency to add an extra “-ed” ending to a verb that doesn’t require one.

The past tense and past participle of the verb “drown” (which has been part of English since around 1300) is simply “drowned.”

So we say, “The victim drowned” and “The victim has drowned.” 

But little children, as well as adults who don’t know any better, sometimes use “drownded” as the past tense, past participle, and participial adjective. (A Google search produced 129,000 hits.)

This is a nonstandard usage, though the word “drownded” has shown up at times in the past, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED lists it as a past form of “drownd,” a variant of “drown” that came along in the 1500s and was “widely prevalent in dialectal and vulgar use.”

This variant verb “drownd” is described by the OED as “parallel in development to astound, bound, compound, sound, etc.”

The OED has several citations for this nonstandard verb. Here are two that use it in the present:

“Thy curate (that otherwise wold mumble in the mouth & drounde his wordes).” From Robert Crowley’s The Way to Wealth (1550).  

“He had a beautiful voice. He could drownd out the whole choir.” From Harper’s Magazine (1884). 

And here are several examples using the past tense “drownded”:

“God … drownded Pharaoh and his host in the read sea.” From William Prynne’s Vindic. Psalme  (1644).

“In my own Thames may I be drownded.” From a dialogue of Jonathan Swift (1727).

“They dy’d … in Seas of sorrow Drownded.” From The Roxburghe Ballads (circa 1679).

“ ‘Just fill that mug up with lukewarm water, William, will you?’… ‘Why, the milk will be drownded.’ ” From Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839).  

Still, as we’ve said, these examples of “drownded” are past tenses of a nonstandard verb “drownd.” In other words, they’ve been grounded.

In modern usage, the standard  verb is “drown” and the past tense or past participle is “drowned”—no extra “-ed” is needed.

Similarly, the participial adjective is now “drowned” and it’s been spelled that way since around 1500.

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Harebrained or hairbrained?

Q: Here’s a term I’ve seen used but I’m unsure of the origin or its precise intention. Is it “harebrained,” like a hare? Or “hairbrained,” like a brain stuffed with hair? If the former, how is a hare involved?

A: The short answer is “harebrained,” but the short answer doesn’t do justice to your question. Here’s the story.

Both the “hare” and “hair” versions showed up in the 1500s, though both of those usages referred to the animal of the genus Lepus rather than the stuff that grows from follicles.

It turns out that “hair” and “haire” were variant spellings of “hare” in the 1500s, especially in Scottish English.

The earliest example of the usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1548), a book by the English historian Edward Hall:

“My desire is that none of you be so unadvised or harebrained as to be the occasion that I in my defence shall colour and make red your tawny ground with the deaths of yourselves and the effusion of Christian blood.” (We’ve expanded the OED citation.)

The next example of the usage is from the English writer George Pettie’s 1581 translation of La civil conversazione, a work written in Italian by Stefano Guazzo: “If his sonne be haughtie, or haire brained, he termeth him courageous.”

The OED defines the term “hare-brained” (which it hyphenates) as “having or showing no more ‘brains’ or sense than a hare; heedless, reckless; rash, wild, mad. Of persons, their actions, etc.”

The “hair” version of the usage later inspired two alternative definitions: “having hair-sized brains” and “having brains stuffed with hair.” However, those are considered products of folk etymologies.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) notes that the “hair” spelling of “hare” was preserved in Scotland into the 1700s, making it impossible to tell exactly when “hairbrained” came to be associated with hair rather than hares.

Standard dictionaries now define “harebrained” as foolish, silly, or impractical. A few list “hairbrained” as a variant spelling, but “harebrained” is far more popular, with roughly twice as many hits on Google.

American Heritage, one of the dictionaries that include the “hair” version as a variant, says in a usage note: “While hairbrained continues to be used, the standard spelling of the word is harebrained.”

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), edited by R. W. Burchfield, describes the “hair” version as “an erroneous variant,” but Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage accepts it as an “established” though secondary usage.

What do we think? We’ll stick with “harebrained.” Our brains are a bit woolly at times, but not quite hirsute.

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Fain vs. feign

Q: Sandra Boynton has a cartoon mug collection. One of my favorites depicts a snail declaiming its love: “Oh, inch by inches / Doth my love grow; / I feign would call thee / ‘My Escargot.’ ” My question: ought this not be “fain” instead of “feign”?

A: Yes, it should read “fain,” not “feign.”

The word “fain” here is an archaic adverb that means gladly or happily. The word “feign,” on the other hand, is a verb meaning to present falsely, to fabricate, or to pretend.

We like the poem, though, and would fain see Sandra Boynton fix the wording.

How, you may be wondering, did two words that look so different come to sound the same?

Interestingly, the word “fain” had a “g” sound in Old English, where it was spelled fægen or fægn, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But the “g” was dropped during the Middle English period (from the late 12th to late 15th centuries).

In this OED example from the epic poem Beowulf, believed to date from the early 700s, Beowulf and his comrades happily carried Grendel’s head after killing the ogre:

Ferdon forth thonon fethelastum ferhthum fægne. Modern English: “They headed away along the footpaths happy at heart.” (We changed the Old English letters eth and thorn to “th.”)

As for “feign,” the verb didn’t have a “g” when it entered English in the late 1200s. Here’s a “g”-less example from a 1297 history of England by Robert Gloucester: “Somme feynede a delay.”

So how did the “g” get there? The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology explains: “The introduction of g into the spelling of Middle English feinen was an imitation of the original French.”

The English verb was derived from feign-, an Old French stem of a verb meaning to pretend or shirk. The French verb was derived in turn from the Latin fingere (to make or shape.)

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins points out that the “semantic progression from ‘make, shape’ to ‘reform or change fraudulently,’ and hence ‘pretend,’ had already begun in classical Latin times.”

The Latin verb fingere, Ayto says, has given English many other “pretend” words, including “effigy,” “fiction,” “figment,” and “feint.”

The Latin word also gave us the adjective, noun, and verb “faint.” When “faint” entered English sometime before 1300, it carried over the French meanings of pretended, simulated, lazy, shirking, and cowardly.

So in the 1300s  someone said to faint was lazy or cowardly and pretending to pass out in order to shirk responsibility.

This sense is now considered obsolete, Ayto notes, except in expressions like “faint hearted” and  “faint of heart.”

[Note: This post was updated on Feb. 5, 2023.]

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Counterintuitive: true or false?

Q: It bugs me to hear someone say something “seems” counterintuitive. “Counterintuitive” is one of those words suddenly everywhere (which might account for my annoyance). If inherent in the word’s meaning is the notion that something seems improbable, is it not then redundant to qualify it with words like “seems,” “sounds,” and “appears”? Would you like to comment? Or should I just ask Noam?

A: Is it redundant, you ask, to qualify an adjective that describes a qualified condition? Perhaps, though as we’ve written many times on our blog, not all apparent redundancies are redundant. In fact, our post yesterday says it’s not necessarily redundant to call a corpse a “dead body.”

In the case of “counterintuitive,” however, we’re not sure the adjective in question describes a qualified state.

Most of the standard dictionaries we’ve checked—two American and two British—define “counterintuitive” as contrary to what intuition or common sense would lead one to expect. Only one source qualifies it as seemingly contrary to common sense.

A more interesting question might be this: Why is “counterintuitive” sometimes qualified—that is, weakened with words like “seems,” “sounds,” and “appears”—and sometimes not?

A bit of googling suggests that the adjective is usually qualified when it describes a situation that seems contrary to fact but really isn’t. It generally isn’t qualified when it describes something that actually is—or probably is—contrary to fact.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), quoting from Natalie Angier, a New York Times science writer, provides this qualified example of the word used to describe a factual situation:

“Scientists made clear what may at first seem counterintuitive, that the capacity to be pleasant toward a fellow creature is … hard work.”

And Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) provides another qualified example of the word used to describe something factual: “It may seem counterintuitive, but we do burn calories when we are sleeping.”

The online Collins English Dictionary, however, includes this unqualified example from the Globe and Mail in Toronto of “counterintuitive” used to describe a factually doubtful situation:

“Brother Jeff’s theories are counterintuitive at best, and have regularly baffled lawyers and judges.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, which includes both unqualified and qualified definitions of “counterintuitive,” has examples of both senses.

Here’s a 1974 example from the American Philosophical Quarterly in which “counterintuitive” describes a dubious situation: “The formulas offered by Day lead to results so counter-intuitive that they had best be called simply false.”

And here’s an example from the April 1979 issue of Scientific American that describes a factual situation: “At first the effect of the dimples seems counterintuitive because the dimpling surely also increases the skin-friction drag.”

The OED’s earliest example of the usage is from The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955) by Noam Chomsky:

“If we construct linguistic theory in such a way that the grammar can present a phrase structure for every sentence directly … then this counter-intuitive analysis of (25) as analogous to (26) will follow.”

We’ll leave it to you and the other readers of our blog to decide which way Chomsky is using “counterintuitive” here.

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Body English

Q: Why do people say “dead body” instead of just “body”? In a news story about a murder, one would assume that the body found in the woods or in the water was dead.

A: Yes, one would assume that a body found floating in the water was dead. And yes, in many cases it’s unnecessary or redundant to add the adjective “dead” to the noun “body.”

But we might want to add “dead” as an intensifier to emphasize the deadness of the body. And of course “body” doesn’t always refer to a corpse. In fact, the word was around for hundreds of years before it came to mean a dead body.

When the word first showed up in early Old English (spelled bodæi or bodeg), it referred to the “complete physical form of a person or animal,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation is from a translation of Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, a church history written in the 8th century by the English monk Bede.

That original sense of “body” is still one of the major meanings of the word. It wasn’t until the 13th century, according to Oxford, that “body” took on the meaning of a corpse.

In fact, the OED says the “corpse” sense of the word “perhaps originally” was “a euphemistic shortening of ‘dead body.’ ” And the dictionary has 115 written examples of the phrase “dead body” used over the last five centuries.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the early etymological history of the word “body” is surprisingly sketchy.

“For a word so central to people’s perception of themselves, body is remarkably isolated linguistically,” Atyo writes.

With the exception of a connection with an Old High German term, “it is without relatives in any other Indo-European language.”

“Attempts have been made, not altogether convincingly, to link it with words for ‘container’ or ‘barrel,’ ” he adds.

All this talk about bodies reminds us of these lines from Robert Burns’s poem “Comin Thro’ the Rye”:

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?

(“Gin” means “if” in Scots and dialectal English.)

And of course there’s J. D. Salinger’s version in Catcher in the Rye, where Phoebe corrects Holden for thinking it’s “catch a body.”

“It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said.

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What’s a female cuckold?

Q: Pat said on WNYC the other day that she didn’t know of a name for a female cuckold. Ooh, I know one! A Salon article refers to the “unsurprisingly underused Canterbury Tales-tastic term cuckquean.”

A. Ooh, you’re right! There is a term for a female cuckold, “cuckquean,” though it showed up a couple of hundred years after Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as an obsolete noun, which explains why we could find “cuckquean” in only one standard dictionary, Webster’s Third Unabridged.

The OED says “cuckquean” is derived from the stem of ”cuckold” and the noun “quean,” which meant simply a woman in Old English but later was a term of disparagement, like “hussy” or “prostitute.”

(Though “quean” and “queen” sound alike and have similar prehistoric roots, they’re separate words in English.)

Oxford’s earliest example of the usage (spelled “cookqueane”) is from a 1562 collection of proverbs and epigrams by the English writer John Heywood:

“And where reason and customs (they say) asoords, / Alwaie to let the loosers haue their woords, / Ye make hir a cookqueane, and consume hir good.”

The dictionary’s only modern example of the usage is from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922):

“A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning.”

(We’ve expanded on both of those OED citations to provide more context.)

If you’d like to read more, we discussed “cuckold” a few years ago in a post about whether the term “horny” is related to “horns of the cuckold.”

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Memento memorious

Q: Is “memorious” a word? I’ve heard it used a couple times on podcasts by educated speakers, but I can’t find it in my dictionary. Please give me any thoughts you have on it.

A: Yes, “memorious” is a word, but you won’t find it in a standard dictionary—or at least not in any of the 10 standard dictionaries we checked.

We did find an entry for it in the online collaborative reference Wiktionary, where it’s defined as “having an unusually good memory” or “easy to remember.”

More important, the Oxford English Dictionary has written examples for the use of the adjective “memorious” dating back to the early 1500s.

The OED defines it as “having a good memory” or “memorable; evocative of or rich in memories.” The dictionary describes a third meaning, “mindful of,” as obsolete.

Oxford’s earliest citation for the good-memory sense of the word is from The Lyfe of Saynt Radegunde, written by the English poet and Benedictine monk Henry Bradshaw sometime before his death in 1513:

“Of speciall frendes / honest and vertuous / Whiche lately requyred me full memorious / With synguler request / and humble instaunce / This lyfe to discrybe / with due circumstaunce.”

(We’ve gone to the original to expand on the OED citation.)

The memorable sense of the word first showed up in the late 19th century. The dictionary’s earliest citation is from The Human Inheritance, The New Hope, Motherhood and Other Poems (1882), by the Scottish writer William Sharp:

“So may have blown some wind of thought Memorious from a past forgot.”

Although we couldn’t find “memorious” in any standard dictionary, it’s alive and well online. A Google search got 48,000 hits, including references to Funes el Memorioso, a 1942  short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

In the story, which is usually translated into English as “Funes the Memorious,” a teenage boy named Ireneo Funes develops an astonishing memory after a fall from a horse.

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The right percent

Q: I’m a journalism student at Mizzou and recently disagreed with an editor about the word “percentage.” I thought it was interchangeable with “percent,” but she wasn’t so sure. We checked the AP stylebook, but it didn’t illuminate anything. What’s the verdict?

A: These words aren’t necessarily interchangeable. A “percent” is a hundredth part of something, but a “percentage” can mean any part of a whole. 

This is why “percent” is generally used with a number: “50 percent of the flour was ruined.”

And this is why “percentage” is not used with a number, just an ordinary adjective: “a large percentage of the flour was ruined.”

Still, “percent” is sometimes used in place of “percentage,” as in “What percent of the flour was ruined?”

This usage has been discouraged by some language authorities, but it’s recognized in most standard dictionaries and seems idiomatic to us.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, by Kenneth G. Wilson, has this to say about the subject:

“Percentage is the more widely accepted noun, especially in Edited English, but Informal use of percent (What percent of your time do you spend watching TV?) seems thoroughly established.”

So if that’s what you and the editor disagreed about, you can both relax. If you’re writing formal English, however, you might want to stick with “percentage.”

Now comes the sticky part.

“Percentage” is a noun. (The noun can also be used attributively as a modifier, as in “percentage point.”)

And “percent” is a noun when it means “percentage.” But there’s some disagreement about how to classify “percent” in other cases.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, classifies “per cent” (it’s two words in British English) as an adverb in almost all the other cases.

The dictionary describes “percent” as an adverb when it appears with a number to form a noun phrase that expresses a proportion in hundredths (for example, “10 percent of the students”).

That definition covers a lot of territory. Too much, in our opinion and in the opinion of some standard dictionaries.

Those dictionaries include The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, and the online Macmillan Dictionary in both its US and UK editions. 

All standard dictionaries, including those three, would agree with the OED that “percent” is an adverb when it modifies a verb or an adjective.

In this adverbial Oxford citation, for example, it modifies a verb: “The Funds rose 1 per cent. on the news” (1804).

However,  American Heritage, Webster’s Third, and Macmillan would disagree with the OED that “percent” is an adverb in these Oxford citations:

“The Blank Tickets bear seven per Cent. Interest” (1710); “At the rate of ten per cent. therefore …” (1776); “Ninety per cent of the cooks do their full share” (1904); “cut my social life by about 35 per cent” (1973).

The three standard dictionaries would consider “percent” an adjective or a noun in those citations. We’ll quote some of their own examples of “percent” used as an adjective, a noun, and an adverb.

Adjective : “a 0.75 percent increase in interest rates” … “harvested 50 percent more wheat” … “another 100 percent result” … “a 3½ percent government bond” … “a 2.25 percent checking account.”

Noun: “provided 40 percent of Europe’s requirements” … “42 percent of the alumni contributed” … “owns 20 percent of the business” … “represent 50 percent of the workforce.”

Adverb: “agreed with her suggestions a hundred percent” … “sales increased 30 percent” … “if he is even one percent responsible for the accident.”  

Why does the OED call “percent” an adverb in cases where some standard dictionaries do not? This probably has a lot to do with the fact that “percent” started out as an adverbial phrase. 

The OED says “per cent” (it uses the British form) was modeled on the Italian phrase per cento, which can be translated as “for (every) hundred.”

The dictionary says the phrase appeared in Italian in 1263 or earlier. (In the following century, incidentally, the Italians invented the % sign.)

“Per cent” was first recorded in English in 1568, but a slightly earlier form showed up in 1565—“per centum,” abbreviated as “per cent.” with a period.

As the OED explains, “per centum” was “the usual form in Acts of Parliament and most legal documents.”

This coinage too was modeled after the Italian per cento, though it was fashioned out of Latin elements (per plus centum). In fact, per centum did not exist in Latin.

The facts remain that in Britain the word is still mostly written as a phrase—“per cent”—and is still regarded as adverbial in some standard dictionaries.

The Cambridge Dictionaries Online, for instance, says it’s an adverb in the examples “You got 20 percent of the answers right” and “Only 40 percent of people bothered to vote.”

American dictionaries would generally regard “percent” as a noun in those examples, though perceptions about the linguistic function of “percent” aren’t unanimous even in the United States.

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), for example, sort of agrees with Cambridge and sort of doesn’t.

“Despite changing usage,” the manual says, “Chicago continues to regard percent as an adverb (‘per, or out of, each hundred,’ as in 10 percent of the class)—or, less commonly, an adjective (a 10 percent raise).”

And by the way, the manual, which is widely used in the publishing industry (that means in formal, edited English), also recommends “percentage as the noun form (a significant percentage of her income).”

While we’re on the subject, many people use “percent” and “percentage point” incorrectly—the terms are not interchangeable.

For instance, if a mortgage rate falls to 6 percent from 8 percent, that’s a decline of 2 percentage points, or 25 percent. 

So beware. There’s no percentage in getting things wrong.

By the way, an old friend of ours from the New York Times graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism. Good look with your career!

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An opinion on opinionated

Q: Are we seeing a shift in the meaning of “opinionated”? Merriam-Webster’s defines it as “unduly adhering to one’s own opinion or to preconceived notions,” but lately the meaning seems to have expanded to include the less negative denotation of having many firm opinions. I’m curious about what you think.

A: The adjective “opinionated” has indeed gained a new, less negative sense—at least in American English—though this meaning isn’t recognized by most standard dictionaries.

It first showed up in the US in the 1960s, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it represents somewhat of a return to the original neutral sense of the word.

We’ve found only one standard dictionary that includes both senses of the word, Merriam-Webster.com, the online version of the dictionary you mentioned.

Merriam-Webster online includes the definition you cited (“unduly adhering to one’s own opinion or to preconceived notions”) and a relatively neutral one (“expressing strong beliefs or judgments about something: having or showing strong opinions”).

The first definition is from M-W’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and the second is from M-W’s Learner’s Dictionary, which is intended for students of English as a second language.

Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at the Merriam-Webster company, explained in an email to us that the Learner’s reference is M-W’s most recent dictionary and “its definitions sometimes do reflect new subtleties and changes.”

When the adjective “opinionated” entered English in the late 1500s, it meant simply “having a (specified) opinion” or “of the opinion (that),” but the OED describes this sense of the word as obsolete.

The dictionary’s first citation is from Robert Dallington’s 1592 translation of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a romance by Francesco Colonna written in Latinate Italian:

“Being perswaded and firmly opinionated, that this sight was a traunce in loue.”

The OED says the negative sense of the word (“thinking too highly of, or holding obstinately to, one’s own opinion; conceited; dogmatic”) showed up in the early 1600s.

The first citation is from Joseph Taylor’s Life and Death of the Virgin Mary (1630):

“Though hee be but a Botcher, or a Button-maker, and at the most a lumpe of opinionated ignorance, yet he will seeme to wring the Scriptures to his opinions.”

In the mid-20th century, according to Oxford, a more or less neutral sense of the word showed up in the US: “Holding firm views or opinions.”

However, the dictionary notes that it’s often difficult to tell whether writers are using the term to describe people with firm opinions or with obstinate ones.

The OED’s first example of this new usage is from Woman of Valor, Irving Fineman’s 1961 biography of the American Zionist Henrietta Szold:

“How to handle a young man as high-spirited and opinionated as herself.”

The dictionary’s most recent example of the usage is from the Nov. 8, 2002, issue of the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, IN:

“I mean, being opinionated and pushing the envelope is all fine and good, as long as you show a little self-respect.”

A bit of googling suggests to us that many people who appear to be using the new sense are actually using the old one in a humorously hyperbolic way, especially to refer to themselves.

The word pops up a lot in the titles of blogs or posts. Here’s a sample: “Opinionated About Dining” … “Opinionated Democrat” … “Opinionated Catholic” … “Opinionated Geek” … “Opinionated Palate” … “Ms. Opinionated” … “Little Miss Opinionated.”

We think the word “opinionated” in those titles, which refer to the authors’ own blogs or posts, is being used in the traditional, negative sense, though with tongue in cheek.

Perhaps the prevalence of this ironic or facetious usage accounts for the OED’s difficulty in telling whether the old or new sense of the word is being used.

Does the new sense of “opinionated” have legs? We’re not sure, and lexicographers apparently aren’t either.

We checked nine standard dictionaries in the US and the UK, and only Merriam-Webster.com (as we’ve said) has both the old and new senses.

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“Good-paying” or “well-paying”?

Q: Wish you would address “good-paying job” versus “well-paying job.”

A: We’re taught that “good” is an adjective, not an adverb, so it shouldn’t be used to modify a verb or another adjective.

That, in a nutshell, is why many people regard “good-paying job” as inferior to “well-paying job.”

They think a verb form like the participle “paying” should be modified by “well,” an adverb, not “good,” an adjective.

However, language authorities say “good” has been used as an adverb or a quasi-adverb since the Middle Ages, and this adverbial usage wasn’t criticized until the latter half of the 19th century.

In fact, the phrase “good-paying job” doesn’t strike us as bad English—informal, perhaps, but not incorrect.

It seems more natural and idiomatic than the stiffer, consciously correct “well-paying job,” especially in speech and casual writing.

Although many people consider “good-paying job” an acceptable idiom, “well-paying job” is more popular in edited writing, according to a search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books. [Note: Updated Nov. 16, 2020.]

We believe that in “good-paying job,” the word “good” is being used idiomatically as an adverb to modify the present participle “paying.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage agrees, noting that “good” has been used as an adverb since the 13th century, and that this adverbial use wasn’t criticized until the 19th.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t go that far, but it describes a category of usages in which the adjective “good” is used “in quasi-adverbial combination” with present participles.

Such a combination, the OED says, is “used adjectivally”—that is, the combined phrase modifies a noun (like “job”).

While the OED says that “in none of these instances is good adverbial in origin,” it nevertheless sometimes functions as an adverb.

There are other common usages in which “good” plays an adverbial role, though in most of them the OED stops short of classifying the word as an adverb:

● The adverbial phrase “as good as.” This modifies a verb or an adjective and means the same as an adverb like “practically.” Examples: “He as good as confessed” … “The victim was as good as dead.”

● Phrases like  “a good long time,” “a good sharp knife,” “a good many people,” and so on. Here, “good” acts as an adverb like “very” or “properly.” It modifies the adjective and serves as an intensifier.

● The phrase “good and.” This colloquial expression is an adverbial phrase that intensifies, as in “his hair was good and red” … “until we’re good and ready.”

● The phrases “for good” (as in “he left for good”) and “but good” (“you socked him but good”). These adverbial idioms can be compared to “finally” and “well.”

Merriam-Webster’s, which calls “good” an adverb when it functions as one, says English speakers of all educational levels use “good” adverbially. 

“Our evidence shows that adverbial good is common in the speech of the less educated, but is also known and used by the better educated,” M-W’s editors write.

Ironically, they add, “The schoolmasterly insistence on well for the adverb may have contributed to the thriving condition of adverbial good.”

We can imagine a couple of reasons why “good-paying job,” in particular, seems natural to many.

(1) “Good” has other forms—“better” and “best.” There’s nothing at all wrong with “better-paying job” or “best-paying job.” So why not “good-paying job”?

A critic might argue that “better” and “best” are adverbs—forms of “well”—when used with participles like “paying.” (In fact, the OED does categorize them as adverbs when so used.)

But isn’t this a circular argument?

If one calls “good” a misused adjective in “good-paying job,” then why aren’t “better” and “best” adjectives when used in the same expression?

We could just as easily call all three—“good,” “better,” “best”—adjectives being used informally in an adverbial way to modify the participle “paying.”

(2) We use the adjective “good” in phrases like “good-looking boy” and “good-tasting pie,” so why not in  “good-paying job”?

A critic might answer that “look” and “taste” are grammatically different from most verbs. They’re known as linking verbs, which are modified by adjectives like “good” instead of adverbs like “well.” (We’ve written about linking verbs before, including posts in 2012 and 2010.)

Here we would respond that when “good” modifies the participle of a linking verb (as in “good-looking,” “good-tasting”), it’s clearly an adjective—not an adverb.

But when it modifies the participle of a non-linking verb (“good-paying”), then it’s being used informally as an adverb.

We admit that “good-paying” is informal English. So do the editors at Merriam-Webster’s, who suggest that “adverbial good is still primarily a speech form.”

“Our evidence,” they write, “is mostly from reported or fictional speech, letters, and similar breezy and familiar contexts. It is not likely to be needed in a book review or a doctoral dissertation.”

We’ll end with an example of the usage from a 1936 letter by Archibald MacLeish, the poet and Librarian of Congress: “It pays good and keeps the boys in school.”

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“I” strain

Q: I hear more and more people substitute “I’s” for “my” or “mine.” For example, “My friends had a wonderful time at Jason and I’s party.” Ouch! That hurts my ears! Is this something that will fade away, or will it eventually become accepted?

A: You’re right. A lot of people are using “I’s” as a possessive of “I,” though mostly in place of “my,” not “mine.”

We got millions of hits when we googled “John and I’s,” “Bob and I’s,” and so on. Here are a few examples:

● “You really captured the spirit of John and I’s relationship and I absolutely cannot wait to see more of the shots!”

● “Thank you for supporting Jason and I’s celebration.”

 ● “Bob and I’s story is short, pathetic and kind of sweet!”

 ● “Tomorrow is Sam and I’s 2nd wedding anniversary.”

This usage seems to be relatively new. The earliest examples we could find were from 2004. Here’s an early one from the film producer Harvey Weinstein about the Weinstein brothers’ rocky relationship with Disney.

“They get to see my books all the time, so there’s no hiding what we do. On the flip side, Bob and I’s pay is determined by accounting from Disney. I don’t get to see everything unless I ask for an audit.”

Getting back to your question, what should be used in place of “Jason and I’s party”?

Well, “Jason’s and my party” would be correct, but that’s not the most felicitous phrasing. We’d prefer something like “our party” or, if you need to mention Jason, “our party, Jason’s and mine.”

Is this “I’s” business something that will fade away? Probably, but only time will tell.

In looking into your question, we came across a paper by Karen Milligan, a linguist at Wayne State University, about the grammar of joint possession.

In “Expressing Joint Possession: Or, Why me and Mary’s paper wasn’t accepted (but Bob and I’s was),” she suggests that the natural way of expressing joint possession (she calls it “the default construction”), is “me and Sean’s.”

She says this is “syntactically the most economical choice and the one utilized by children first. It is also the one adults revert to subconsciously—when under stress or in unguarded speech.”

Ms. Milligan writes that the early usage “declines with age, leading to eventual abandonment” as the “over-extension or misappropriation of prescriptive rules results in constructions that are semantically altered and/or unpredicted by the grammar of English.”

In other words, she seems to be arguing, we got it right as toddlers and we can blame English teachers for our difficulties in expressing joint possession as adults.

Well, that’s enlightening. But since you’re a grownup who expresses joint possession in an adult (albeit syntactically uneconomical) way, you might be interested in a brief post we wrote a few years ago on the subject.

[Update, Oct. 5, 2013. A reader had this interesting comment: “I think that you may find a commonality among most uses of ‘X and I’s’—it is predominantly used when the speaker thinks of the pair of people as a single entity. So couples (or a pair of siblings) will use it when they are talking about themselves as a unit. The possessive gets applied to the noun phrase ‘John and I.’

“This structure would be much less likely to occur with temporary or less significant pairs. If I were to team up with a colleague at work to solve a problem, I would never refer to ‘Trevor and I’s plan.’ However, it would not be uncomfortable to make reference to ‘Heather and I’s wedding anniversary.’ ”]

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In-laws and other impediments

Q: I wonder why English has only one term, “brother-in-law,” for three different kinds of relatives: your spouse’s brother, your sibling’s husband, and your spouse’s sibling’s husband.

A: You might also ask why something similar can be said of “sister-in-law,” which refers to three different relatives too.

This is probably because “brother-in-law” and “sister-in-law” originally referred not only to the various relatives involved but also to a prohibited relationship shared by them.

When  “brother-in-law” entered English around 1300 and “sister-law” about 1440, the phrase “in-law” meant “in canon law,” as opposed to “in blood” or “by nature,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says the phrase was appended to names of relationship to indicate “the degrees of affinity within which marriage is prohibited; a brother-in-law or sister-in-law being, as regards intermarriage, treated ‘in law’ as a brother or sister.”

The word “affinity” here, Oxford says, refers to “relationship by marriage (as distinguished from relationship by blood).”

We won’t discuss the ins and outs of affinity in canon law, the ecclesiastical rules of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches. Let’s just say that different churches have different rules for which relationships are impediments to marriage.

In an earlier post, we noted that the term “in-law” was once used in English to describe relationships that are now referred to with the term “step.” So, the expression “sister-in-law” once also meant stepsister.

Another old term, “inlaw,” used to mean the opposite of “outlaw” or, as the OED puts it, “one who is within the domain and protection of the law.”

Finally, in case you’re wondering, the use of the term “in-law” as a colloquial noun for any relative showed up first in the late 1800s. The earliest example in the OED is from the Jan. 24, 1894, issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine:

“The position of the ‘in-laws’ (a happy phrase which is attributed with we know not what reason to her Majesty, than whom no one can be better acquainted with the article) is often not very apt to promote happiness.”

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A jitney lunch

[NOTE: This post was updated on July 3, 2016.]

Q: My wife went to a country schoolhouse that was being swallowed up as Omaha grew. Unlike the modern schools in town, hers had no facilities for a hot lunch. But once a month the school system would deliver a hot lunch (usually hot dogs) called a “jitney lunch.” What does “jitney” mean and where does it come from?

A: You’d be surprised at how much time and effort language scholars have spent trying to find out where the word “jitney” comes from.

In Studies in Etymology and Etiology (2009), for example, David L. Gold explores possible French, Russian, Spanish, British, Yiddish, and other sources. His conclusion: origin unknown.

All the other references we’ve checked, including the Oxford English Dictionary and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, agree: origin unknown.

But in 2016, the language scholar Stephen Goranson of the Duke University Libraries managed to confirm what had previously been only conjecture: The source of “jitney” was jetnée, an African-American word, via the French or Creole spoken in Louisiana, for jeton, French for “token.”

Goranson cites a ditty described in a 1915 issue of the Literary Digest as “a little catch popular with the Louisianian French-Speaking Negro”:

“Mettons jetnée danz il trou / Et parcourons sur la rue—  / Mettons jetnée—si non vous / Vous promenez à pied nou! This may be freely translated: Put a jitney in the slot / And over the street you ride; / Put a jitney—for if not / You’ll foot it on your hide.”

The 1915 article suggests that jetnée/“jitney” was coined by Southern blacks to mean a nickel, and was influenced by French jeton or jetton.

Now for the news. As Goranson says, “The following newly reported discovery appears to confirm such an origin by giving—in an African-American newspaper in 1898—a transitional form.”

Here he cites an article, published in January 1898 in the Illinois Record, headlined “Spingfield South-End Happenings”:

“What little jetney coachman on S. 6th street has such a big head he cant put on the coachman’s hat he only wears the coat with brass buttons?”

Goranson adds: “Note association with coach as well as (presumably) coin (or token), of little worth.”

Once established, the term for a bus or coach token spread quickly. As linguists have previously reported, the word showed up the following year, spelled “jitney,” in the Dec. 16, 1899, issue of the Morning Herald in Lexington, KY:

“ ‘Can’t spare de change. Me granmaw died in Sout’ Afriky an’ I need dis to float me over ter de fun’ral.’  ‘Quit yer kiddin’ an’ let me have a jitney.’ ”

Slang dictionaries say that at the turn of the century, “jitney” (sometimes spelled “gitney”) meant either five cents or a nickel, the fare to ride minibuses at the time. 

But by the early 20th century, the term was being used adjectivally to refer to the minibuses themselves. The OED’s earliest example is in a Nov. 28, 1914, letter from Los Angeles published in the Jan. 14, 1915, issue of the Nation:

“This autumn automobiles, mostly of the Ford variety, have begun in competition with the street cars in this city. The newspapers call them ‘Jitney buses.’ ”

Soon the word was being used by itself as a noun for the minibuses. Here’s an OED example from the April 16, 1915, issue of the New York Evening Post: “The jitney wears out the streets and should contribute to their repair.”

You’ll be especially interested in the next step in the evolution of “jitney”—as a noun used attributively (that is, adjectivally) to mean cheap or shoddy or inferior. Here’s how Oxford explains the new usage:

“So, on account of the low fare or the poor quality of these buses, used attrib. to denote anything cheap, improvised, or ramshackle.”  

The earliest published reference in the OED for this new usage is from Somewhere in Red Gap (1916), Harry Leon Wilson’s sequel to his better-known novel Ruggles of Red Gap (1915):

“It would be an ideal position for him. Instead of which he runs this here music store, sells these jitney pianos and phonographs and truck like that.”

As for those hot dogs served at your wife’s country school once a month, we imagine the meal was referred to as a “jitney lunch” either because it was cheap or uninspiring or because it was delivered by a jitney.

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Title tracking

Q: Is there a term for a song that has the same title as the album it’s on? Is it called the “titular track”?

A: Although the phrase “titular track” is sometimes used for such a tune, the most common terms are “title song” and “title track.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says that when the word “title” is used as an adjective it can mean “having the same title as or providing the title for the collection or production of which it forms a part.” It gives this example: “the title song.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “title song” as “the song or track giving its name to a long-playing record.”

The OED’s earliest example is from the Jan. 6, 1961, issue of the British weekly magazine New Musical Express: “Am I that easy to forget … is the title song of a soft-sung album by Debbie Reynolds.”

Oxford defines “title track” (it hyphenates the term) simply as “title song.” The first citation in the dictionary is from the Feb. 21, 1970, issue of Melody Maker, a British weekly that merged with New Musical Express in 2000:

“It’s hard to believe that the same man who could write and play the extraordinary title track could also be responsible for ‘Spirits’ and ‘Search.’ ”

We’ve written a couple of posts about a related term, “eponymous,” which has traditionally referred to the person something is named for, as in “Hamlet is the eponymous hero of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.”

Modern dictionaries say the term can now refer to the named as well as the namer, as in “Hamlet is the eponymous title of Shakespeare’s play about Hamlet.”

Getting back to your question about a song with the same title as its album, here are the results of a few Google searches: “title song,” 14.1 million hits; “title track,” 10.3 million; “titular track,” 126,000; “titular song,” 22,400.

In case you’re wondering, the word “title” is quite old, dating back to Anglo-Saxon days. The OED says it was spelled titul in Old English and probably pronounced with a short “i” (as in “little”), similar to the short “i” in its Latin source, titulus (an inscription or a title).

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Myself and other selfies

[Note: An updated post about “myself” and other “-self” words appeared on Aug. 27, 2018.]

Q: Every time I hear someone say “I myself,” it makes me pause. I can never figure out why someone would use such a redundancy. It seems more prevalent on the East Coast than on the West Coast. Is this regional? Is it correct?

A: There’s nothing wrong with using both a pronoun and its reflexive (“she herself,” “you yourself,” “I myself,” “me myself,” etc.), or a name plus a reflexive (“Herman himself,” “from Vivian herself”) for purposes of emphasizing the subject or object.

What some have criticized is the use of a reflexive in place of the pronoun or name, as in “John and myself went to the movies,” or “that’s between him and myself.” (Though those uses of reflexives aren’t considered grammatically incorrect today, a traditionalist would prefer “I” in the first example, and “me” in the second.)

But for more than a thousand years, people have used reflexive pronouns for emphasis by placing them in apposition to (that is, as the equivalent of) the subject or object.

As far as we can tell, the usage is common wherever English is spoken: in the US, the UK, and elsewhere.

Within its entry for “myself,” for example, the Oxford English Dictionary says that in “emphatic uses,” the reflexive pronoun appears “in apposition to” an accompanying subject or object pronoun (“I” or “me”).

The OED has examples dating from before the year 1000 for “I myself,” when it was written ic me sylf in Old English. And it has examples of “me myself” dating from around 1300.

In these usages, Oxford says, the reflexive pronoun is used “in apposition to” an accompanying subject or object pronoun. As the OED explains, when used in apposition to “I,” the meaning of the reflexive is “in my own person; for my part; personally, as far as I am concerned.”

In the simplest emphatic use, the OED says, “myself is generally placed immediately after I.”

But when it appears elsewhere, as in “I will go to him myself” or “I’ve never been there myself,” the emphasis takes on another character. As the OED says, “in other positions there is often an explicit or implicit contrast with the idea of any other person performing the action.”

And the emphasis is strongest of all, Oxford adds, when the reflexive comes first. An example: “Myself, I wouldn’t think of it.”

The emphatic reflexive is not only legitimate, but it’s found in English literature from the earliest times. You may have heard this line from A. E. Housman’s poem A Shropshire Lad (1896): “Then the world seemed none so bad, / And I myself a sterling lad.”

Of course Housman may have used the construction purely for reasons of meter (though we think it serves an emphatic purpose as well). But even in prose, the usage is common in cases where the lone pronoun or name just wouldn’t be enough.

Just for fun we looked into a few Shakespeare concordances, and we found scores of examples from the plays and sonnets of the sterling lad himself.

Shakespeare used “I myself” at least 38 times, as in this line from King Henry IV, Part I: “For I myself must hunt this deer to death.”

He used “you yourself” at least 18 times, as in this line from Twelfth Night: “It is perchance that you yourself were saved.”

He also used “he himself” 12 times, “she herself” seven times, “they themselves” six times, and “we ourselves” five times.

Many people think a word is incorrect if it’s not absolutely necessary. Not so. An extra word or two is often justified. We’ve written often on the blog about emphatic redundancy, including posts in 2012, 2008, and 2007.

As for the noun “selfie” in the title of this post, its use in the sense of an uploadable smartphone photo taken of oneself has been traced back to 2002.

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Are there fangs in newfangled?

Q: The adjective “newfangled” suggests there must have been a not-so-new version, “fangled.” And if there was a “fangled,” surely there must have been an even older noun or verb, “fangle.” Is there also lurking in the etymological past a pair of fangs?

A: Yes, there are sharp teeth associated with “newfangled,” but the history of the word is more complicated than that, so let’s forget the fangs for the time being. We’ll get back to them later.

This adjective is probably a lot older than you think. “Newfangled” has been around since the late 1400s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It developed from an even earlier adjective, “newfangle,” which may have been recorded as early as 1250.

Originally, both “newfangle” and “newfangled” referred to people who were eager for novelty, though later both could refer to new and novel things.

 The OED says “newfangled” originally meant “very (esp. excessively or immoderately) fond of novelty or new things; keen to take up new fashions or ideas; easily carried away by whatever is new.”

It was first recorded in about 1496 in a book of sermons by Bishop John Alcock: “Boyes of fyfty yere of age are as newe fangled as ony yonge men be.”

The OED says this use of “newfangled” to describe novelty-loving people is “now rare.” The dictionary’s most recent citation is from Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel Clouds of Witness (1926):

“All these new-fangled doctors went out of their way to invent subconsciousness and kleptomania, and complexes and other fancy descriptions to explain away when people had done naughty things.”

In the mid- to late 1500s, the OED says, people began using “newfangled” to describe things, not people: something “newly or recently invented or existent,” as well as something “gratuitously or objectionably modern or different from what one is used to.”

It’s still used in those senses today.

Where did “newfangle” and the later “newfangled” come from? The source, according to Oxford, is an archaic Old English verb, “fang,” which was recorded as long ago as the year 855 and is still alive in some dialects of English.

Originally, to “fang” meant to grasp, seize, take, catch, attack, embrace, or simply to commence. But over the centuries it has had many associated meanings: to obtain, collect, get at, receive, earn, welcome, and others.

So etymologically, “newfangled” might be described as newly seized, newly begun, and so forth.

So where do the sharp teeth come in?

The verb “fang” gave rise to a noun, first recorded in 1016, meaning the thing caught or taken—the prey or the plunder. And it soon came to mean a capture or a catch, the OED says, and “also a tight grasp, a grip.”

The noun “fang” acquired another meaning in the mid-1500s: “a canine tooth; a tusk.” And the plural “fangs” was used generally to mean “the teeth of dogs, wolves, or other animals remarkable for strength of jaw.”

The connection is easy to imagine—from the verb that means to seize to the noun for prey and finally to the “fang” that means the predator’s tooth.

“Although the broad semantic connection between ‘seizing’ and ‘sharp canine teeth’ is clear,” John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “the precise mechanism behind the development is not known.”

At any rate, “newfangled” was in use well before “fang” meant an animal’s tooth, so there’s no direct line of descent though there is a connection.

But wait a minute. We haven’t discussed the word “fangled,” which you suspect must be in there somewhere.

Well, there was such an adjective. It was first recorded in 1587 and meant “characterized by crotchets or fopperies” (a “crotchet” is a whimsical notion).

But “fangled” came about in error, the OED says, through “a mistaken analysis of newfangled.” Writers in the 16th century erroneously assumed the existence of “fangle” as a noun and a verb, and consequently as an adjective, “fangled.”

The assumption was wrong of course, because “newfangled” is derived from the ancient verb “fang,” not from “fangle” and “fangled.”

The OED says “fangled” is obsolete now. It’s immortal, though, thanks to Shakespeare, one of those confused writers we mentioned.

We know he was familiar with “newfangled” because he used it three times in his plays and sonnets. And in Cymbeline, first produced in 1611, he too assumed there was a shorter adjective: “Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment / Nobler than that it covers.”

So if Shakespeare and his contemporaries could make that mistaken leap, perhaps it’s not surprising that you did too.

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Can kids see fun?

Q: I am working on a workbook for a children’s book, but I am stumped by this question: “What did Little Cub see on his adventure?” One choice is “Lots of Fun!” Can a person see fun? I am not sure how to word this and would appreciate your help.

A: A child (or a little cub) would not literally “see” fun. It’s something one has or experiences or encounters.

Although the verb “see” does have many nonliteral senses, its use with “lots of fun” wouldn’t be idiomatic.

You might use “discover” instead of “see” as your verb (“What did Little Cub discover on his adventure?”). Or is that too big a word for this age group?

 If you want to keep “see” as the verb, you might change the item to something like “Kids [or whatever] having fun.”

The word “see” has generally meant to perceive with the eyes since it first showed up in Anglo-Saxon times (spelled seon in Old English).

Here’s an example from the epic poem Beowulf, which is believed to date from the early 700s. (We’ve expanded on the OED citation, and changed the runic letters thorn and eth to “th.”)

Thær mæg nihta gehwæm nithwundor seon, fyr on flode. Modern English: “There each night may be seen a fearful wonder, fire on the flood.”

But “see” has taken quite a few other meanings over the years: see (that is, imagine) things, circa 1200; see to (take care of) something, before 1300;  see (realize) something, 1390; see someone in gambling, 1599; see someone home or to the door, early 1600s; see good in someone (1831), and so on.

And now we’ll see to our next question.

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The house of delegates

Q: I’m having a discussion with a fellow professor over what it means when a government agency delegates a task to a private organization. Does the verb “delegate” mean to devolve ultimate authority? Or can it be used in the sense of handing over a task that the delegator is ultimately responsible for?

A: We don’t see any evidence that the verb “delegate” has ever meant to transfer ultimate authority for something.

When the verb entered English in the early 1500s, it meant—and it still means—to give a deputy or representative the authority to act on one’s behalf.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from John Palsgrave’s Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (1530), a French grammar for the English: “I delegate myne auctorite, je delegue.”

This is how the OED defines the original sense of the word: “To entrust, commit or deliver (authority, a function, etc.) to another as an agent or deputy.”

There’s no suggestion here that the person doing the delegating is giving up ultimate authority for the task that’s being delegated.

In fact, we’ve found quite a few instances in which officials overruled their delegates or withdrew the authority that they delegated.

William K. Reilly, head of the Environmental Protection Agency in the first Bush administration, discusses the issue in an oral-history interview.

“I believe in delegation—really believe in it,” he says. “I think that people ought to be allowed to make mistakes and if they’re good, they’ll learn from them.”

He adds that he delegated authority to his regional administrators and generally didn’t interfere with their decisions, but he notes:

“There were exceptions to that. I reversed my Regional Administrator on the Two Forks Dam. I also withdrew authority from my Regional Administrator in Chicago to oversee wetlands implementation in the state of Michigan.”

In the early 1600s, according to Oxford, the meaning of the verb “delegate” widened somewhat: “To send or commission (a person) as a deputy or representative, with power to transact business for another; to depute or appoint to act.”

The earliest example of the newer usage is from Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie; or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words (1623): “Delegate, to assigne, to send in commission.”

Again, someone is delegating a subordinate to act in one’s stead, not giving up ultimate authority for the action.

The primary meaning of the verb “delegate” hasn’t changed much over the years. Here’s how The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines it:

“1. To authorize and send (another person) as one’s representative.

“2. To commit or entrust to another: delegate a task to a subordinate.”

In addition to those senses, the OED says, “delegate” took on a specialized legal meaning two hundred years ago: “To assign (one who is debtor to oneself) to a creditor as debtor in one’s place.”

As for its etymology, the English word comes from delegare, Latin for to send, dispatch, assign, or commit, but its ultimate source is leg-, an Indo-European root that’s given us such words as “legal,” “legislator,” “legitimate,” “colleague,” “legate,” and “college.”

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Texicography

Q: Your July 9 blog about how to pronounce “texted” inspires me to write about a ubiquitous and annoying pronunciation of the past tense of “text” here in Cincinnati. Young people almost exclusively pronounce the present as “tex” and the past as “text.” Maybe the past would be spelled “texed,” but that doesn’t change the pronunciation. Have you heard this in your area?

A: No, we weren’t aware of the usage until you mentioned it.

But on looking into this we find that quite a few people consider to “tex” the infinitive, with “tex” or “texes” the present, and “text” the past.

Others consider “tex” or “texes” the present, and “texed” (pronounced TEXT) the past tense. And still others use “text” or “texts” for the present and “text” for the past.

Interestingly, these usages aren’t confined to speech. We got more than half a million hits in Google searches for “tex” and “texed” used in place of “text” and “texted.”

And the linguist Arnold Zwicky, in searches for past tenses and past participles, found roughly one example of “text” for every five of “texted.”

This isn’t an overnight phenomenon, either, and it’s not limited to Cincinnati.

A July 25, 2005, article in the Modesto Bee, for example, reported that a friend sent this text message to the cell phone of a California teenager killed in a car crash:

“Tex me when u get to heaven.”

(Family members found the message on 16-year-old Stephanie Blevins’s phone.)

In standard English, as you know, the infinitive or root verb is “text,” the present tense is “text” or “texts,” and the past tense (as well as the past participle) is “texted.”

Why all the variants? We think pronunciation has a lot to do with this.

Some people hear the verb “text” as if it were spelled “texed,” and assume it’s a past tense. Naturally, the present tense would be “tex” or “texes.” (Think of “fax,” “faxes,” and “faxed.”)

The phonetician John Wells notes on his blog that the confusion here apparently lies with the consonant cluster at the end of “text.”

“The final cluster [kst] is highly susceptible to losing its final consonant, particularly when followed by a consonant sound,” Wells writes.

In words with similar-sounding endings (like “next,” “boxed,” and “mixed”), he says, “it’s usual for the final [t] to be elided (lost) except in very careful (over-enunciated) speech.”

The linguist David Crystal, however, finds “nothing intrinsically difficult about the consonant cluster at the end of text.”

“But adding an -ed ending alters the pronunciation dynamic,” he writes on his blog. “We now have two /t/ sounds in a rapid sequence, as we had in broadcasted.”

Although it’s “very unusual to find a new irregular past tense form in standard English,” Crystal says, it “does happen, as we see with the preference for shorter broadcast.”

He predicts that lexicographers will one day recognize “texed” as a legitimate past tense. We’re not so sure, but we’ll let Crystal have the last word.

“Whatever the reasons, we do now find forms such as texed and tex’d being used with increasing frequency,” he writes. “I think it’s only a matter of time before we find it being treated like broadcast in dictionaries, and given two forms.”

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Chili, chile, or chilli?

Q: Can “chile” describe a pepper, or is “chili” the correct spelling? My company has taken over the Golden Chile Award, which has been spelled that way for years. I would like not to correct it, but I also don’t want to misspell the award.

A: There are three spellings for this hot pepper from several varieties of the genus Capsicum: “chili,” “chile,” and “chilli.”

Which is correct? It depends on where you live.

The usual spelling in American English is “chili,” but “chile” is an acceptable variant. The usual spelling in British English is “chilli.” 

(The plurals are “chilies” or “chiles” in the US, and “chillies” in the UK.)

Should you change the spelling of the pepper in the name of the award? We don’t think so.

Although we spell the word “chili,” there’s a good case to be made for sticking with the existing name of the award, which is given for sauces, relishes, and other fiery foods, as we’ve learned online.

The award is American, and the two US dictionaries we consult the most list “chile” as a legitimate variant of the more common spelling “chili.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says such a variant spelling is “acceptable in any context,” while Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says the choice here is a matter of “personal inclination.”

And, as you undoubtedly know, the Spanish word is spelled chile in Latin America, the  birthplace of the hot pepper. And that’s the way the word is spelled in “chiles rellenos,” the stuffed peppers that originated in Mexico.

However, the name of the plant was chilli in 16th-century transcriptions of Nahuatl, the indigenous language that gave Spanish the word.

The plant was spelled “chille” when it showed up in English in the 17th century. The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Indian Nectar, a 1662 treatise on chocolate: “Some Pepper called Chille … was put in.”

However, the spelling is “chile” in the next OED example, from Vinetum Britannicum, a 1678 book by John Worlidge about cider: “Two Cods, or Pods, of Chile.”

Interestingly, the earliest citation for the usual American spelling, “chili,” is from a British novel, Vanity Fair (1848), by William Makepeace Thackeray:

“ ‘Try a chili with it, Miss Sharp,’ said Joseph, really interested. ‘A chili,’ said Rebecca, gasping. ‘Oh yes!’ She thought a chili was something cool, as its name imported.”

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The prince of shorthand

Q: Prince (the musical artist) popularized the modern practice of using shortened spellings of common words, sometimes using only one letter or number in place of a word. For example, the title “I Would Die 4 U.” But I’m wondering if there are popular examples of this in older English.

A: Prince apparently began using letters or numbers for sound-alike words as far back as 1981. His album Controversy, released that year, includes the song “Jack U Off.”

By the time he released his album Purple Rain (1984), Prince was further into this kind of abbreviating, liberally using the letter “u” (for “you”) and the numbers “2” (“to”) and “4” (“for”).

Cuts from that album include “Take Me With U” and “I Would Die 4 U,” which includes the lines “I would die 4 u, yeah / Darling if u want me 2” and “No need 2 worry / No need 2 cry.”

Prince has been in this shorthand mode ever since, writing lyrics like “4 all time I am with U / U are with me” (from his song “Adore”), and titles like “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore,” “Nothin Compares 2 U,” and “The One U Wanna C.”

As you note, the trend has caught fire in the rest of the pop music industry.

In a 2002 article on the website MTV.com, the writer Corey Moss discusses the popularity of abbreviations and misspellings, suggesting that they make song titles and lyrics “stand out from the pack.”

Obviously, texting wasn’t around when Prince started using this type of shorthand. Brian Morton’s biography Prince: A Thief in the Temple (2007), suggests that Prince’s abbreviations were influenced by graffiti.

But almost certainly the development of email, instant messaging, and now texting has reinforced the use of such shorthand by other pop artists.

This brings us to your question—were such clipped usages around in days gone by? Well, not much, as far as we can tell, at least not until the early 20th century.

Although medieval scribes used dozens and dozens of abbreviations (we’ve written about their use of “X” for “Christ” in “Xmas”), we couldn’t find many early examples of letters or numbers used in place of words that they sound like.

For older examples, we checked the Oxford English Dictionary. But the OED records only a couple of historical instances, many centuries old, of “u” intended to represent “you.” (The OED doesn’t record any of the other Prince-style usages.)

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, which was probably written in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare constructs an elaborate pun in which “u” is a play on “you.”

And another comedy, Westward Hoe (c. 1604), by Thomas Dekker and John Webster, includes a scene in which naughty puns are played on letters of the alphabet—the fifth vowel being “u”/”you.”

But both of these are complicated plays on words rather than the kind of simple abbreviations we’re talking about.

The OED does have citations indicating that the letter combination “I.O.U” has been used since the 1700s as an abbreviation for “I owe you.”

But as we said, it would appear that the kind of abbreviating you mean—substituting a single letter or number for a word or part of one—didn’t really begin until a little over a century ago.

In 1923 the language scholar Louise Pound wrote about similar usages, which she had noticed a decade earlier but had since become more common.

“The tendency toward novelty of spelling has gained momentum in the last few years,” she wrote. “It is now a stock recourse in the coinage of trade names and in popular advertising.” 

Her article, “Spelling Manipulation and Present-Day Advertising” (1923), appeared in the journal Dialect Notes, a publication of the American Dialect Society.

As early leaders in the abbreviation trend, she mentioned the products Uneeda Biscuits and E. Z. Walker shoes, both of which got their names around the turn of the century.

She went on to discuss successor products like Fits-U Eyeglasses and U-Rub-It-In ointment, as well as sales pitches such as “Oysters R now in Season” and “R U interested in a Rummage Sale?”

A few years later, Donald M. Alexander of Ohio Wesleyan University defended the use of “u” for “you.”

In a 1929 article in the journal American Speech—entitled “Why Not ‘U’ for ‘You’?”—he drew attention to the ubiquitous “While U Wait” signs in shoe-shine parlors, repair stores, and such.

Other service providers, he said, were using expressions like “U Drive It” and “I. C. U. R. ready for our real estate.”

He also cited trade names including U Put It On Weather Strip, U-Do-It Graining Compound, Wear U Well Clothes, Wear U Well Shoes, U-Bet-U It’s Good Candy, and several others.

“Likewise,” he wrote, “the Wayne County Highway Commissioners (Detroit) have erected large roadside maps at important crossings throughout the county which indicate the tourists’ whereabouts by means of an arrow which points to the particular crossing saying ‘U R Here.” And should you travel into Northern Michigan with Petoskey for your destination you will be informed as you cross this particular county line that ‘U R now in Emmet County.’ ”

[After this item was posted, a reader (@4thEstateX) tweeted to remind us of “Toys ’R’ Us” (1957). The company refers to itself as “Toys’R’Us,” though its logo is “ToysЯUs.”]

Perhaps the most analyzed early 20th-century example of the usage is in the postcard that Denis Breen receives in James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was serialized from 1918-1920.

Denis’s wife, Josie, meets Bloom on the street, takes the postcard out of her handbag, and hands it to him:

“ ‘Read that,’ she said. ‘He got it this morning.’

“ ‘What is it?’ Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. ‘U.P.?’

“ ‘U.P.: up,’ she said. ‘Someone taking a rise out of him. It’s a great shame for them whoever  he is.’

“ ‘Indeed it is,’ Mr Bloom said.”

The phrase “U.P.: up” here, with its suggestion of urination and erection, has been the source of much speculation among Joyceans. We side with those who believe it simply stands for “You pee up.”

Getting back to Prince, by the time he came along, as u can c, the pattern was well established.

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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. Today’s topic: New words and back-to-school words. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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A bordello on the waterfront

Q: On a visit to a Canadian lake, I saw bord de l’eau signs along the edge of the water. The French looked to me a lot like “bordello.” Is there a connection? Bordellos were frequently near the waterfront since sailors were good customers.

A: No, there’s no connection between bord de l’eau and “bordello”—at least no direct connection—though the two usages may have had an ancestor in common back in ancient times.

English adopted “bordello” in the late 16th century from Italian, in which bordello means a brothel, an uproar, or a mess.

The earliest citation for “bordello” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Every Man in His Humor, a 1598 play by Ben Jonson: “From the Burdello, it might come as well.”

In the early 1300s, however, English borrowed “bordel,” a now obsolete word for a house of prostitution, from Old French, where bordel meant a cabin, hut, or brothel, according to the OED.

Both the Italian and Old French words are derived from borda, the medieval Latin term for a hut. So a bordello was originally a little hut for prostitution.

The OED says the etymology here “is still wanting,” but it speculates that borda may have once meant a “thing of boards.” In Old English, bord meant, among other things, a board or plank.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the Old English word, as well as similar ones in other Germanic languages, may have come from—or been influenced by—two different prehistoric Germanic roots:

“Some evidence suggests that the Germanic word was a fusion of two different but related words: one that had senses related to ‘plank, table, shield’; the other with senses related to ‘border, rim, side of a ship.’ ”

So the “bord-” in “bordello” may come from the “plank” sense in prehistoric German, while the bord in bord de l’eau (like the “board” in “seaboard”) may come from the “edge” sense. (We had a post a while back that discussed “seaboard.”)

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Can the White House talk?

Q: Quick question. What is the term for a statement like “the White House replied” or “the Mayor’s office said” or “the record company claimed”? In other words, what is it called when inanimate objects make statements?

A: It’s amazing how many of the quick questions that pop up in our inbox aren’t so quick to answer.

There are several terms for giving inanimate objects human attributes. But do the phrases “White House,” “mayor’s office,” and “record company” refer strictly to inanimate objects?

We don’t think so, and many dictionaries agree with us.

Let’s look at “White House” first. Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines it: “The popular name for the official residence of the President of the United States at Washington; hence, the President or his office.”

So the term “White House,” according to the OED, can refer to the president’s residence, the president himself, or the presidency.

We’d expand on that, as the online Macmillan Dictionary does, to include “the people who work at the White House, including the President.”

Many standard dictionaries also offer expansive definitions of the term “office.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, says it can refer to “the administrative personnel, executives, or staff working in such a place.”

The online Collins English Dictionary says it can mean “the group of persons working in an office” while Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.) says it can mean “all the people working in such a place.”

The word “company” has been people oriented since it first showed up (spelled compainie) around 1250, according to the OED.

It originally meant companionship, and etymologically refers to people sharing bread. In Latin, com- means “with” and panis means “bread.”

In modern English, the word “company” still has that sense of companionship, as in having “company” over for dinner or keeping “company” with someone.

In the commercial sense, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), it refers to “an association of persons for carrying on a commercial or industrial enterprise.”

What, you ask, is the technical term for the phenomenon that occurs when a building or an office or a company issues statements?

Well, one possibility is “personification,” a figure of speech in which inanimate objects are given human qualities. For instance, “The house welcomed us back after our long vacation.”

Another possibility is “metonymy,” which refers to substituting a word or phrase for a related one. For example, the use of “Hollywood” to stand for the American film industry, including the people in it.

Still another possibility is “pathetic fallacy,” a literary term for giving human feelings to a natural phenomenon, like “somber clouds” or “nasty wind.”

The 19th-century British critic John Ruskin coined the term “pathetic fallacy” in attacking sentimentality in poetry.

No matter what you call it, we suspect that the usage originated as newspaper shorthand. Why waste all that ink and paper on “Whosis Q. Whatsis, a spokesman for the president,” when “the White House” gets the point across?

The earliest examples we could find were in newspaper articles from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Here’s a “company” example from a March 3, 1888, article in the New York Times about  a strike against the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad: “Local freights, the company says, are being moved in Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.”

And here’s one from an Aug 6, 1889, article in the Deseret News in Salt Lake City about a dispute between the postmaster general and Western Union about telegraph rates:

“The company says the Postmaster-general has thus been able to occupy and use streets in large cities regardless of local authority, and almost regardless of the public opinion.”

A Nov. 23, 1912, article in the Boston Transcript has 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue mum about an offer by Andrew Carnegie to provide pensions for American presidents:

“The White House is silent, for obvious reasons, but close friends of the President are confident that Mr. Taft would not accept a pension from this source.”

An Oct. 9, 1913, article in the New York Times about a confrontation between the White House and the Senate notes that “what the White House said appeared to mollify those senators who had let their angry passions rise.”

As for “office,” here’s an example from an Oct. 30, 1938, article in the Pittsburgh Press about a proposed agreement to end a strike by retail clerks against 35 department stores:

“The Mayor’s office said that the pact was a ‘tentative agreement’ which must obtain approval of both the union and the retailers’ council.”

If you’d like to read more about personification, we had a post on the blog some time ago about referring to countries and ships as “she.”

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Fraudsters and other swindlers

Q: I’m editing a bunch of fraud-management documents created by colleagues in Europe, and I’ve been changing “fraudster” to “fraud perpetrator” for American audiences. Do you think my instinct is right, or is “fraudster” acceptable in American English?

A: We’ve found “fraudster” in only one standard American dictionary—the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged—and it says the word is chiefly British.

Not surprisingly, “fraudster” is in the four British dictionaries we’ve checked, defined variously as a swindler, someone who gets money by deceiving people, or a person who commits fraud, especially in business dealings.

Is “fraudster” acceptable in US English?

Well, it depends on the audience. It would be perfectly understandable to an American, and the primary goal of writing is communicating. But it sounds somewhat slangy to American ears—at least to our four American ears.

We like the term, however, and we wouldn’t hesitate using it in casual speech or informal writing. In fact, “fraudster” is a lot easier to find in US publications than in US dictionaries.

A Nov. 11, 1995, article in the New York Times, for example, describes “the victims of an opportunistic credit-card fraudster who also happened to be their waiter.”

And a Jan. 5, 2011, article in The Wall Street Journal begins: “Fraudster Bernard Madoff’s sister-in-law Marion, whose husband, Peter, was the former chief compliance officer at his brother’s firm, is asking $6.5 million for her Palm Beach, Fla., home.”

[After this item was posted, the writer Ben Yagoda pointed out that an article in the Aug. 26, 2013, issue of the New Yorker quotes an art historian comparing the art forger Mark A. Landis to “identity fraudsters.” Another reader had this comment: “I would add that the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners regularly uses the word ‘fraudster’ in its publication.  The word is widely accepted in the United States amongst those who seek to prevent, detect and prosecute fraud.”]

If the documents you’re editing are intended for professionals trying to prevent or control fraud, and if you think it might be a familiar term to them, “fraudster” is fine.  It won’t sound slangy or informal to such readers.

In our opinion, a general audience might find “fraud perpetrator” a bit clunky. For alternatives, consider a term that’s in American dictionaries, “defrauder.” And if your readers would accept a bit of informality, you might occasionally stick in a “deceiver” or a “swindler” (even a “fraudster” or two).

The term “fraudster,” by the way, is relatively new. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1975 issue of the Financial Times, though Merriam-Webster Unabridged dates the first known use of the term to 1960.

The OED notes that the word combines the noun “fraud” with the old suffix “-ster,” which dates back to Anglo-Saxon days.

The Old English version of “-ster” was used to form feminine nouns while the Old English version of the suffix “-er” was used to form masculine nouns, according to Oxford.

In the 15th century, the “-ster” suffix gradually began losing its feminine identity, but a new suffix, “-ess,” showed up to replace it.

The old words “seamster” and “songster,” for example, became “seamstress” and “songstress.” An exception to this etymological evolution is “spinster,” which kept its old suffix.

From the 16th century on, the OED says, writers began using “-ess” to create new words, such as “actress,” “authoress,” “priestess,” and so on.

But the dictionary notes “the tendency of mod. usage” to treat nouns “indicating profession or occupation, as of common gender, unless there be some special reason to the contrary.”

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Stroke treatment

Q: Your recent article about stroking and stoking egos has inspired this question. How did the verb “stroke” come to mean caress while the noun “stroke” came to mean hitting? 

A: The word “stroke” has followed a long, twisted, and (as you’ve noticed) contradictory path since it evolved from its prehistoric Germanic roots.

Language scholars have reconstructed the ultimate source of “stroke” as strik- or straik-, an ancient Germanic base meaning to touch lightly.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says this prehistoric root also gave English the word “strike,” which is a clue to the evolution of “stroke.”

“The verb has stayed very close semantically to its source,” Ayto writes, “whereas the noun has followed the same path as its corresponding verb strike.”

As we noted in our earlier post, when the verb “stroke” entered Old English in the ninth century, it meant to run a hand softly over the head, body, or hair of a person or an animal. The verb has generally meant to caress—figuratively or literally—since then.

But when the noun “stroke” showed up (probably sometime before 1300, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology), it referred to the act of striking.

Over, the years, the noun has had many meanings, some that suggest striking and some caressing. Here’s a selection from the Oxford English Dictionary:

a blow with an ax (circa 1400), the striking of a clock (1436), a linear mark (1567), a pull of the oar (1583), a seizure (1599), a caress (1631), a movement of a pen (1683), a calamitous event (1686), the hitting of a ball (1744), a swimming movement (circa 1800), a stroke of luck (1853).

It’s time for us to break for lunch, so we’ll end with this example from one of our favorite novels, Doctor Thorne (1858), by Anthony Trollope: “He dressed himself hurriedly, for the dinner-bell was almost on the stroke as he entered the house.

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