Category: Word origin

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English English language Etymology Usage Word origin

Predominately speaking

Q: I’m so tired of reading books that say something is “predominately” (followed by an adjective), when they mean “predominantly.” The writers seem to think “predominant” and “predominate” are synonyms, and both are adjectives that can be made into adverbs. Thank you!

A: We’re sorry to disappoint you, but the adjective “predominate” does indeed mean “predominant,” and the adverb “predominately” means “predominantly.”

The isn’t a new thing, either. The two adjectives and the two adverbs have had these meanings for hundreds of years, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

So why do we have this pair of similar-looking adverbs with the same meaning? Because English got one from Latin and the other from French, and kept them both.

The OED defines “predominantly” as “in a predominant manner; to a predominant degree; (in later use) esp. primarily, largely, chiefly, for the most part.”

The dictionary defines “predominately” with an equal sign and the word “predominantly.” In other words, the meanings of the two adverbs are identical.

In fact, “predominately” is the older of the adverbs; it first showed up in English in the late 1500s.

The OED’s earliest citation (spelled “predominatly”) is from The Examination of Mens Wits (1594), Richard Carew’s English translation of a treatise on physiology and psychology by the Spanish physician Juan Huarte:

“Likewise the womb in a woman cannot be predominatly hot.” (Carew was translating the Spanish a predominio.)

Oxford says “predominately” is derived from the adjective “predominate,” which showed up in English three years before the adverb.

The source of the adjective “predominate” (defined by the OED as “= predominant”) is the post-classical Latin praedominatus, which is the past participle of praedominari (to rule before).

The adverb “predominantly” appeared in the early 1600s. The first OED citation is from A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606), a defense of monarchism by the English writer Edward Forset:

“Where any affection predominantly reigneth, it draweth thither such humors of the bodie, as are likest and best consorteth to it selfe.” (We’ve gone to the original to expand the citation.)

The adverb is derived from the adjective “predominant” (1575), which comes directly from the Middle French predominant.

The OED defines the adjective as “having ascendancy, supremacy, or prevailing influence over others; superior, predominating.”

If you still have doubts, we should mention that we’ve found four standard dictionaries in the US and the UK with definitions of “predominately,” and all of them define it as “predominantly.”

In other words, lexicographers predominantly (or predominately) feel that the two adverbs mean the same thing.

A final note: we ran a post on the blog a couple of years ago on a related subject, the use of “predominantly” instead of “mainly” in business-speak.

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English English language Etymology Expression Usage Word origin

Is a clunker used or pre-owned?

Q: It seems to me that illiterate used-car salesmen have introduced the term “pre-owned” into the language to avoid advertising what they actually sell: USED CARS! This is driving me nuts. Please tell me that it’s incorrect and that you’ll help me stamp it out.

A: We don’t like this euphemism either, and we don’t use it ourselves, but the usage has been around for dozens of years and it’s in many standard dictionaries, including the two we consult the most.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines “preowned” (it doesn’t use the hyphen) as “previously owned or used; secondhand: a preowned car.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines the hyphenated version as “secondhand, used.”

All six American or British dictionaries we checked list the term, with or without the hyphen, as standard English.

The usage first showed up in the 1930s, according to published examples in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest OED citation is from a May 27, 1934, advertisement in the Syracuse (NY) Herald: “Factory branch close out sale—floor sample and pre-owned washers.”

We’re generally more amused than irritated by euphemisms. We’re sorry that this one is driving you nuts. We suspect, though, that it’s here to stay. All you can do to stamp out a usage that bugs you is avoid using it yourself.

If you’re bothered by a “pre-owned” car, you’ll probably be bothered even more by a similar usage— a “pre-need” funeral—that is, a prepaid one. We had a brief post about it a few years ago.

The first citation for this usage in the OED is from a March 5, 1945, ad in the Waterloo (Iowa) Daily Courier: “Who will pay the Funeral Bill? … Ask us today for details of our pre-need plan. No obligation.”

By the way, the term “euphemism,” which entered English in the mid-1600s, is derived from the Greek compound euphemismos (speaking with good words), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto says the term “originally denoted the avoidance of words of ill omen at religious ceremonies, but it was subsequently taken up by grammarians to signify the substitution of a less for a more offensive word.”

He notes that the opposite of a “euphemism” is a “dysphemism” (the use of a more offensive word), which he describes as a late 19th-century coinage based on the Greek prefix dus- (bad, difficult) instead of the Greek prefix eu- (good).

Although the term “dysphemism” is a relative latecomer, the usage itself has been around a lot longer.

Shakespeare, for example, uses it in All’s Well That Ends Well (circa 1605), when Mariana describes the advances of Count Rousillon as “engines of lust.”

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Architectural criticism

Q: Do you think it’s acceptable to use “architect” as a verb, as in “The administrator should architect the software with users in mind”? In his blog, the author Seth Godin feels that it’s a valid term.

A: Yes, “architect” is a legitimate verb, though it’s one that we consider somewhat clunky and that only a few standard dictionaries recognize.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says it’s a transitive verb (one that requires a direct object) and means “to plan, organize, and bring to fruition.”

American Heritage describes the usage as informal, which means it’s generally seen in conversation or casual writing. The dictionary gives this example: “architected a web-based application.”

Seth Godin, an author of many marketing books and a founder of the community-website platform Squidoo, has used “architect” as a verb and has defended the usage on his blog.

In a 2006 post entitled “Is architect a verb?” Godin writes that he prefers “architect” to “design” when he wants “to describe the intentional arrangement of design elements to get a certain result.”

“Architecture, for me anyway, involves intention, game theory, systems thinking and relentless testing and improvement,” he says.

For example, he writes, “you can architect a business model or a pricing structure to make it far more effective at generating the behavior you’re looking for.”

That may be what the verb “architect” means to him, but a lot of other people don’t use it in that exact way.

Isn’t the whole point of language to communicate? We’ll stick with “design” or “create” or “build” or “conceive” or “develop” or … well … you get the idea.

Over the years, readers of the blog have complained to us about uses of “architect” that they found objectionable, but we haven’t written about the subject until now. The complaints fall roughly into three categories:

(1) The word is sometimes used loosely to refer to somebody who’s responsible for something bad: “Goebbels was the architect of the Nazi propaganda machine.” (Architects have grumbled to us about  this, but they might as well get used to it.)

(2) It’s often used in confusing ways: “We agree that conceptual development is incomplete without skill development, and we architected this experience accordingly.” Huh?

(3) It’s used as a verb, as in “Let’s architect a plan and present it next week.” But as we said above, “architect” is a legitimate verb.

We should add that the use of “architect” as a verb isn’t a recent phenomenon. The Oxford English Dictionary has written examples going back to the early 1800s.

The earliest example in the OED is from a July 23, 1818, letter that the poet John Keats wrote to his brother Thomas after visiting Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland.

Here’s how a poem in the letter describes the cave and its distinctive basalt columns: “This was architected thus / By the great Oceanus.”

When Keats published the poem as “Staffa” sometime before 1821, he altered the spelling and punctuation: “This was architectur’d thus / By the great Oceanus!”

As you can imagine, the verb “architect” is derived from the noun, which ultimately comes from the Latin architectus and the Greek arkhitekton, classical terms for a principal builder or craftsman.

The Greek roots are arkhi (first or superior) + tekton (builder).

When the noun entered English in the mid-1500s, the OED says, it referred to “a skilled professor of the art of building, whose business it is to prepare the plans of edifices, and exercise a general superintendence over the course of their erection.”

By the end of the 1500s, the noun was being used loosely or figuratively for someone who plans or contrives or constructs something.

We’ll end with a figurative example in which the Moor in Shakespeare’s 1594 tragedy Titus Andronicus is referred to as “Chiefe architect and plotter of these woes.”

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How illegal is unlawful?

Q: In British law there seems to be a difference between “illegal” and “unlawful.” Is there the same distinction in the US, and if so, what is the difference for you?

A: Bryan A. Garner, a lexicographer, lawyer, and teacher, writes in A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (2nd ed.) that the two terms “are fundamentally synonymous.”

However, Black’s Law Dictionary (8th ed.), edited by Garner, has somewhat different definitions of “illegal” and “unlawful.”

The primary meanings of the two words are almost identical: “illegal” is defined as “forbidden by law; unlawful,” and “unlawful” is defined as “not authorized by law; illegal.”

But the “unlawful” entry in Black’s includes two additional senses: “criminally punishable” and “involving moral turpitude.”

Garner comments in A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage that the additional senses “so complicate matters in using this term that they lessen its utility.”

That sounds to us as if he’s suggesting that lawyers avoid “unlawful” and use “illegal” when referring to something that’s “forbidden by law” or “not authorized by law.”

The early editions of Black’s Law Dictionary, edited by Henry Campbell Black, made more of the distinction between “illegal” and “unlawful.” The 1910 second edition, for example, describes the two terms this way:

 “ ‘Unlawful’ and ‘illegal’ are frequently used as synonymous terms, but, in the proper sense of the word, ‘unlawful,’ as applied to promises, agreements, considerations, and the like, denotes that they are ineffectual in law because they involve acts which, although not illegal, i.e., positively forbidden, are disapproved of by the law, and are therefore not recognized as the ground of legal rights, either because they are immoral or because they are against public policy. It is on this ground that contracts in restraint of marriage or of trade are generally void.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has nearly identical definitions of the two terms: “illegal” is defined as “not legal or lawful; contrary to, or forbidden by, law,” and “unlawful” as “contrary to law; prohibited by law; illegal.”

OED citations indicate that the older term, “unlawful,” showed up in English sometime before 1300, while “illegal” appeared in the early 1600s.

Interestingly, “unlawful” arrived on the scene about a century before “lawful,” according to the dictionary’s citations. “Illegal” arrived a century after “legal.”

Oxford says “illegal” comes from the French illégal or the medieval Latin illegalis, while the three parts of “unlawful” are derived from Old English. 

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Much ado about texting

Q: How do you pronounce the past tense of “text” (a word, mind you, that is yet to be recognized by the Oxford Dictionary)? The two-syllable pronunciation, TEXT-ed, sounds too juvenile to me. I prefer one syllable, along the lines of “ask” and “asked.” Please advise.

A: The verb “text” does indeed appear in the Oxford English Dictionary as well as in the Oxford Dictionaries online.

It’s also in many standard dictionaries, including the two we consult the most: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Dictionaries don’t generally provide pronunciation guides for past tenses unless there’s something unusual about them.  However, the dictionaries sometimes use dots to show that a past tense is divided into separate syllables.

American Heritage, for example, lists the past tense of “text” as “text·ed,” indicating that the word has two syllables.

As for us, we pronounce “texted” as TEXT-ed, and we’ve never heard it pronounced otherwise.

The linguist Arnold Zwicky shed some light on “texted” in a blog post he wrote on the subject in 2008.

“The big point,” Zwicky says in his article, “is that novel verbs—verbed nouns in particular—are almost invariably entirely regular in their inflection.”

Thus a noun like “text,” when it becomes a verb, will ordinarily form its past tense and past participle with the addition of “-ed.”

He notes that a small number of very old, mostly monosyllabic verbs ending in “-t” and “-d” (like “hit” and “bid”) don’t add “-ed.” He calls these “bare past” verbs. And of course there are the well-known irregular verbs like “shrink,” “run,” “sing,” and so on.

“But, generally,” he says, “when a new verb enters English—by borrowing from another language, by verbing a noun or adjective, or whatever—it’s entirely regular.”

And that’s what would make a past-tense form like “text” unusual. “In the case of the verb text (in its recent, electronic, sense), the lexicographers and other authorities go for texted,” Zwicky says.

He notes, for example, that the linguist David Crystal’s book Txtng (2008) has “texted” as the past tense.

Yet, as we said above, “texted” may not appear in a particular dictionary—at least not in an obvious way.

“As a general practice,” Zwicky says, “most dictionaries don’t list most inflected forms, because listing perfectly regular inflected forms would just be a waste of precious space. So absence of a listing is evidence of regularity.”

By the way, we see online that some people are still complaining about the use of “text” as a verb. They insist on “send a text message.”

We once felt the same way and wrote about it on the blog, but times change, and so does language.

Merriam-Webster’s, for instance, gives these three examples of how the verb “text” is used: “I texted her a little while ago” … “I texted a message to her” … “She just texted me back.”

A March 2004 draft edition to the online OED defines the verb “text” as “to send (a text message) to a person, mobile phone, etc.” and “to communicate by sending text messages.”

The earliest Oxford citation for the usage is in a March 14, 1998, message on the Usenet newsgroup alt.cellular.gsm: “We still keep in touch … ‘texting’ each other jokes, quotes, stories, questions, etc.”

However, the word “text” has been used as a verb since the late 1500s, according to written examples in the OED.

When the verb first appeared, it meant “to inscribe, write, or print in a text-hand or in capital or large letters,” but the dictionary describes that sense as obsolete.

Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing (1600): “Yea and text vnder-neath, here dwells Benedick the married man.”

The OED has citations from the 1500s and 1600s for another obsolete sense: “to cite a text at or against (a person).”

And it has citations up until the late 1800s for the verb used to mean “to write in text-hand.”

The dictionary’s latest citation for the verb is from the July 31, 2001, electronic edition of a British newspaper, the Leicester Mercury: “I texted my mother and my friends when I got my results.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Slang Usage Word origin

It’s a gas

Q: Does the expression “It’s a gas” (meaning “It’s a lot of fun”) come from the use of laughing gas?

A: It’s possible that the use of “a gas” to mean a lot of fun may somehow be connected with the common name for nitrous oxide, but we haven’t found any solid evidence to support this.

Eric Partridge, in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, speculates about such a connection, but he doesn’t come to any conclusion.

In writing about the Irish English use of “gas” to mean fun, Partridge adds this brief notation: “Ex ‘laughing gas’?”

The use of “gas” to mean a vapor was coined in the mid-1600s by the Flemish physician and chemist J. B. van Helmont, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the Dutch word used by van Helmont was probably an alteration of chaos, the ancient Greek word for empty space.

Chambers says the letter “g” in Dutch “represents a sound somewhat like the modern Greek sound transliterated as ch.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that van Helmont used a Dutch version of the Greek chaos “to denote an occult principle, supposedly an ultra-refined form of water, which he postulated as existing in all matter.” 

The first use of “gas” in English, according to OED citations, was in a 1662 translation of van Helmont’s 1648 work Ortus Medicinæ: “for want of a name, I have called that vapour, Gas, being not far severed from the Chaos of the Auntients.”

The word’s modern sense of a shapeless substance that “expands freely to fill the whole of a container” dates from the late 17th century, according to Oxford citations.

As for nitrous oxide, the gas was first synthesized by the English chemist Joseph Priestly in 1772, and first used to anesthetize a dental patient in 1844.

The OED’s earliest example of “laughing gas” used for nitrous oxide is from a June 23, 1819, issue of the Times of London that refers to the “chymical experiments on gas at 9, when the laughing gas will be exhibited.”

“Laughing gas is so called from the euphoric intoxication it causes when inhaled at low concentrations,” the OED says. “It has been used as a general anaesthetic in dentistry and surgery, and also illicitly as a recreational drug.”

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the word “gas” took on the sense of “enjoyment, amusement, fun” in Irish English.

The OED’s first citation for the usage is from Dubliners, James Joyce’s 1914 story collection. In “An Encounter,” a story about two boys who skip school, Mahony tells the narrator that he’s brought along a slingshot “to have some gas with the birds.”

However, the usage you’re asking about (the use of “it’s a gas” or variants to mean it’s a lot of fun) didn’t show up in print until the mid-20th century, according to written examples in the dictionary.

The earliest citation in the OED is from “Sonny’s Blues,” a 1957 short story by James Baldwin in The Partisan Review: “Brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.”

Here’s a more recent example from Paul Auster’s 1990 novel The Music of Chance: “ ‘I’m looking forward to it immensely.’ ‘Me too, Bill,’ Pozzi said. ‘It’s going to be a gas.’ ”

The OED doesn’t speculate about the origins of this sense of “gas,” but it points the reader to a related slang word, “gasser,” which it says originated as a jazz term. 

The earliest Oxford citation is from “The Hepsters Dictionary” (1944), a brief glossary by Cab Calloway: “When it comes to dancing, she’s a gasser.”

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang also links this use of “gas” to jazz. It cites several jazz examples, including one from Corner Boy, a 1957 novel by Herbert Simmons, in which a group of teen-agers discuss the jazz singer Nellie Lutcher:

“Man, don’t Nellie kill you?”

“She’s a gas, man, a natural petrol.”

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How cool is coolth?

Q: My late mother’s family lived in suburban Philadelphia long before air conditioning. She and her relatives had a word, “coolth,” to describe the opposite of “warmth.” Did they make this up or has it existed before?

A: No, your mother’s family didn’t make it up. The word “coolth” (meaning coolness) has been around since the 1500s. And the high point of its popularity, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, was in the mid-20th century.

Interestingly, it’s been having a bit of a revival lately, according to Google searches, often in a newer, colloquial sense of the word.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “coolth” was formed “chiefly after warmth,” which first showed up in the 1100s. The OED points out a similar word in Old Dutch, cuolitha.

The earliest Oxford citation for “coolth” is from a 1547 Welsh-English dictionary in which oerfel, Welsh for cold, is defined as “coulthe” in English.

The OED, which describes “coolth” as chiefly literary, archaic, or humorous now, has examples of the usage from the 16th to the 21st century, including citations from Rudyard Kipling, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ezra Pound, and Seamus Heaney.

Here’s a literary example from Heaney’s 2001 poetry collection Electric Light: “The older I get, the quicker and the closer I hear those labouring breaths and feel the coolth.”

In recent decades, “coolth” has taken on a colloquial sense that the OED defines as the “quality of being relaxed, assured, or sophisticated in demeanour or style.”

The earliest example of this newer usage, which the dictionary describes as chiefly humorous, is from the May 26, 1966, issue of the San Antonio (Texas) Express: “In this marathon role she has wit, poise, warmth and a very taking coolth.”

The most recent citation is from Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker (2003), James McManus’s book about the poker championship in Las Vegas:

“My albeit progressive-bifocal shades suggest not feeble nearsightedness but its opposite—penetrating 20/20 vision to go with impenetrable coolth.”

We’ve found “coolth” in only a few standard dictionaries, defined as a pleasantly cool temperature or the quality of being fashionable.

We couldn’t tell from the OED examples of “coolth” in the thermometer sense whether the writers were using the word humorously or seriously.

However, Philip Durkin, writing in The Oxford Guide to Etymology, feels that some of these citations “are self-consciously humorous, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards.”

Although “coolth” has been used since the 16th century, Durkin says, the record of the usage is “rather patchy” and may be the result of repeated inventions of the word.

“There is probably not a continuous history of the usage, but rather a succession of separate formations of the word,” he writes.

R. Harald Baayen, in his 2003 paper “Linguistic Approaches to Morphology,” discusses “coolth” in writing about whether the English word ending “-th” is alive, dead, or something in between as an affix to form new words.

Baayen, whose paper was published in the book Probabilistic Linguistics, writes that the use of the affix “-th” in “coolth” points out the difficulty in judging whether a word element is, in linguistic terminology, productive, nonproductive, or semiproductive.

He says “coolth,” a term that was “once a nonce word made on analogy with warmth,” is now alive and well in both jocular and literal senses, “even though -th is one of the well-worn examples of a supposedly completely unproductive suffix in English.”

And if you’d like to read about a popular cousin of “coolth,” check out our “Birth of the cool” posting from 2010.

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Just supposing …

Q: Where did “supposably” come from? It’s not in my dictionary and I find it annoying to hear. Am I wrong? Is it acceptable usage?

A: Most people assume that “supposably” is a mangled version of “supposedly.” And it almost always is, in our experience. 

But there’s more to the story.

Both “supposedly” and “supposably” are legitimate adverbs. Although they were used rather loosely in the past, they now have separate meanings.

Current dictionaries will tell you that “supposedly” is the adverbial counterpart of “supposed,” an adjective that can mean presumed, believed, understood, or imagined.

The less common “supposably” is the adverbial counterpart of “supposable,” an adjective that means conceivable—that is, capable of being supposed.

We’ll invent a couple of examples to illustrate the difference in accepted modern usage:

(1) “Supposedly he didn’t know the gun was loaded.” Here the adverb means “it is supposed (presumed, imagined) that he….” Note the skeptical overtone, because “supposedly” often implies an element of doubt.

(2) “Supposably he didn’t know the gun was loaded.” Here the adverb means “it is conceivable that he….” No skepticism is implied. Instead, the speaker seems to suggest,  “Let us imagine that he ….”

We’ve described these adverbs as they’re defined today in standard dictionaries, which assign them separate meanings. But as you’ve probably noticed, people who use “supposably” seldom mean it in the current dictionary sense. They almost always mean “supposedly.”

That’s reason enough to stay away from “supposably.” In the dictionary sense of the word, alternatives like “conceivably” do the job better, and no one will assume you made a mistake.   

But as we said, there’s more to the story.

A century or more ago, “supposably” was seen more often in respectable writing. And its meaning varied a lot, as we found in Google searches.

In this passage from Henry James’s novel The Tragic Muse (1890), “supposably” means something like “presumably”:

“If … Percy had an heir (others, moreover, would supposably come), Nick should have to regard himself as still more moneyless than before.”

Here it is again in William Dean Howells’s novel A Foregone Conclusion (1886): “But I’m not supposably the kind of priest you mean, and I don’t think just such a priest supposable.” The character seems to be saying, “You cannot suppose me to be … (etc.).”

And in this passage from Mark Twain’s novel Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), “supposably” is used in the sense of “supposedly”:

“Over in the vacant lots was Jasper … sitting on a wheelbarrow in the pelting sun—at work, supposably, whereas he was in fact only preparing for it by taking an hour’s rest before beginning.”

Twain used “supposably” in a similar way in his essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?” (1909). This passage comes after several paragraphs describing what historians “suppose” (the skeptical Twain uses quotation marks) about Shakespeare’s childhood:

“If he began to slaughter calves, and poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest likely moment—say at thirteen, when he was supposably wrenched from that school where he was supposably storing up Latin for future literary use—he had his youthful hands full, and much more than full.”

It can be difficult to tell what a writer of the past meant by “supposably.” This ambiguous example is from a paper by Karl P. Harrington, published in the Classical Journal in 1920:

“So far, indeed, as the recurrence of literary motifs is concerned, the apparent identity of ideas supposably far removed from each other in character and setting tempts the scoffer to give credence to Mark Twain’s famous remark, that, after all, there are but two extant jokes.”

In short, “supposably” has a history of ambiguity. And the Oxford English Dictionary still accepts this mixed usage without comment.

The OED currently says that  “supposably” means “as may be supposed; imaginably; presumably; supposedly.” But it notes that the word is now used “chiefly” in the United States.

The OED’s first citation for “supposably” is from 1739 (the older “supposedly” dates from 1597). And in the earlier quotations, the apparent meaning of “supposably” is “as may be supposed.”

But in contemporary usage, “supposably” isn’t seen much in good writing, except when used for effect.

For example, the OED’s most recent citation is this bit of dialogue from Sue Grafton’s novel L Is for Lawless (1995):

“ ‘Did they call the police?’ ‘Uhn-hun, and they’re on their way. Supposably,’ she added with disdain.”

We took a look at Grafton’s novel. The second speaker, Babe, consistently uses uneducated English, like “the window was broke, all this glass laying on the steps.” So Grafton no doubt chose “supposably” as an example of poor usage.

As the OED says, “supposably” is now used chiefly in the US. With its history of ambiguity, perhaps Americans would be wise to drop it.

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In a pickle

Q: I was eating a half-sour the other day, which inspired this question: Where does the expression “in a pickle,” meaning in trouble, come from?

A: We’ll be in an etymological pickle if we try to explain the origin of “in a pickle” without first discussing the history of “pickle” itself. Here’s the story.

When it first showed up in English in the 1300s or 1400s, the noun “pickle” referred to a spicy sauce served with meat or fowl.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says English probably borrowed the word “pickle” from Middle Dutch, where pekel referred to brine.

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the ultimate source of pekel may have been the Germanic base of another Middle Dutch word, peken, meaning to prick or pierce.

With the -el suffix added, the OED says, the original sense of pekel was “something that pricks or is piquant.”

The English “pickle,” according to the OED and Chambers, was first recorded in the alliterative Morte Arthure, an anonymous Middle English poem that appeared in writing around 1440 but is thought by many scholars to date from the 1300s.

(The alliterative Morte Arthure, the stanzaic Morte Arthure, and several other Arthurian sources influenced the better-known Le Morte d’Arthure, 1470-85, attributed to Sir Thomas Mallory.)

The word “pickle” (pekill in Middle English) appears in the alliterative Morte Arthure in this gruesome description of a giant’s diet:

“He sowppes all this seson with seuen knaue childre, / Choppid in a chargour of chalke-whytt syluer, / With pekill and powdyre of precious spycez.” (He sups all this season on seven knavish children, chopped in a bowl of chalk-white silver, with pickle and powder of precious spices.)

Here “pickle” refers to a sauce, but by the early 1500s the word had taken on a new meaning: the brine, vinegar, or other solution in which food is preserved.

The earliest citation in the OED for this new sense is from an entry, written around 1503, in a chronicle of the London merchant Richard Arnold: “To make a pigell to kepe freshe sturgen in.”

By the late 1500s, “pickle” was being used in an extended figurative sense to mean a disagreeable or troubling condition—the sense found in the expression “in a pickle.”

The first two OED citations for this new usage are somewhat ambiguous, but here’s a clear 1585 example from the writings of the Protestant clergyman and historian John Foxe:

“In this pickle lyeth man by nature, that is, all wee that be Adams children.”

And here’s an example of the usage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (circa 1610-11).

Alonso: “How cam’st thou in this pickle?”
Trinculo: “I haue bin in such a pickle since I saw you last.”

Why is someone in a disagreeable predicament described as “in a pickle”? The OED and Chambers don’t explain, but it seems clear to us that the usage alludes to the sour state of being in a pickling solution.

And where does the expression come from? “The usage is common and natural enough to English to be formed therein,” Chambers says, “but may have been reinforced by Dutch.”

The dictionary cites two Dutch phrases: in de pekel zijn (to be in a pickle) and iemand in de pekel zijn laten, or zitten (to get someone in a pickle).

Chambers says both Dutch phrases were common in the 1500s when the troublesome sense of “pickle” was first recorded in English.

It wasn’t until the late 1600s that the word “pickle” was used to refer to “a whole vegetable, or a piece of one, that has been preserved in vinegar, brine, etc.,” according to citations in the OED.

Oxford describes the use of the term “pickle” for a pickled cucumber as chiefly North American.

In Britain, the usual term is a dill cucumber or a pickled cucumber, according to Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.

In a post on her blog Separated by a Common Language, Murphy says the British use “pickle” or “sweet pickle” for a condiment of chopped vegetables or fruit preserved in vinegar and a sweetener. Americans would refer to such a condiment as relish.

We’ll end with a half-sour comment from the Aug. 29, 2004, issue of the Montreal Gazette: “Today’s studs would sooner immerse themselves in a vat of pickles than spray themselves with Aqua Velva or Old Spice.”

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Is the present a gift?

Q: A friend posted this on Facebook: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a GIFT. That’s why they call it the present.” Is there a connection between “the present” and “a present”?

A: That saying, which is often mistakenly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, A. A. Milne, and others, is merely a play on words.

The “present” that means now and the “present” that means a gift are two separate nouns, though they have a common source.

Both of them originated in the notion of presence—of being at hand or on the spot. They can be traced to the Latin noun praesens (presence) and adjective praesentem (present or at hand, not absent).

In these Latin words we find the prefix prae- (before, in front of) and a participial form of the verb esse (be). So the original notion was of being before (in the presence of) a person or thing.

Derivatives of the Latin words came into English in the Middle Ages by way of Anglo-Norman and Old French.

And it was in Old French that the noun present first came to mean a gift, a sense that was passed along into English.

As John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “The use of the related word present for ‘gift’ originated in Old French in the concept of ‘bringing something into someone’s presence,’ and hence of giving it to them.”

The other sense of the noun “present”—the time at hand—was also influenced by French, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But it developed separately from the “gift” sense.

And the English adjective “present” is from French as well, in its usual senses related to place (here) and time (now).

It’s difficult to sort out which English words came first.

For example, the OED says the English adjective “present” was first recorded in writing in 1340, but that it may have influenced various noun usages, some of which were recorded more than a century earlier.

The etymology of these words helps explain why the English verb “present” has so many meanings.

The OED says that when first recorded, around 1300, to “present” meant “to bring or place (a person) before or into the presence of; to bring to the notice of another; to introduce, esp. formally or ceremonially; spec. to introduce at court or to society, or before a sovereign or other distinguished person.”

Today “present” can mean, among other things, to introduce someone or something (like a person, a product, a performer); to put before the public (a play, exhibition, etc.); to hold vertically in salute (as in the phrase “present arms”); or to lay before a court or other authority (as a lawyer offers documents to a judge).

That last meaning explains the use of the term “these presents” in legal language, a usage the OED says dates back to 1379. In the legal sense, “presents” means the  present documents, writings, words, or statements. (No, they’re not gift-wrapped.)

Here’s an example from the preamble to the Articles of Confederation (1781): “To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting.”

As you’ve probably gathered, the verb “present” is almost always transitive—that is, it has a direct object, the something that’s being presented.

But as we noted in a blog posting a few years ago, there’s an exception. In medicine, to “present” means to appear before a doctor. It’s one of the rare cases in which the verb is intransitive and doesn’t have an object.

The examples we used: “The patient presented in my office with symptoms of fibromyalgia” … “The head of the fetus is presenting.”

The OED has examples of this medical usage going back to 1719. So it may be odd, but it’s presentable.

As for that saying your friend posted on Facebook, it’s been cited in print in one form or another since at least the 1990s, and it may have originated in a Hallmark greeting card, according to the language sleuth Barry Popik.

In an entry on his Big Apple website, Popik traces the saying to an Aug. 31, 1994, installment of “The Family Circus,” a comic strip by Bill Keane: “Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a GIFT. That’s why it’s called the present.”

Popik, who had help on his posting from the lexicographer Jonathan Lighter, says an earlier version of the saying that doesn’t connect the two senses of “present” appeared in the July 11, 1967, issue of the Altoona (PA) Mirror:

“You must forget the past. Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery. Follow the AA philosophy of quitting one day at a time and seeking divine guidance.”

A partial version of the saying showed up in the Aug. 2, 1993, issue of the Galveston (TX) Daily News, in a typo-ridden ad that suggested a greeting-card connection:

“Today is a gift, thats why its called the present
“MAINLAND FLORAL, INC.
“Hallmark.”

A citation from The Ten Habits of Naturally Slim People, a 1998 book by by Jill H. Podjasek with Jennifer Carney, also suggests a greeting-card origin of the saying:

“I read the following wisdom in a greeting card years ago: ‘Yesterday is history; tomorrow is mystery; today is a gift; that is why they call it the present.’ ”

If any readers of the blog have one of the greeting cards up in the attic, please send us a photo of it!

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If we had our druthers

Q: What does “if I had my druthers” mean and from where did the phrase originate?

A: The expression “if I had my druthers” means “if I had a choice” or “if I had a preference.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) describes “druthers” here as an informal plural noun meaning a choice or a preference.

American Heritage gives this example from the columnist George Will: “Given their druthers, these hell-for-leather free marketeers might sell the post office.”

The noun “druthers” actually began life as a verb in 19th-century America. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a US dialectal alteration of the verb phrase “would rather.”

The OED’s only two examples of the verb are in the writings of Mark Twain. Here’s the earliest, from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876): “I’d druther they was devils a dern sight.”

The noun “druthers” showed up a couple of decades later. Oxford has this example from an 1895 issue of the American Dialect Society’s journal Dialect Notes:

“Bein’s I caint have my druthers an’ set still, I cal’late I’d better pearten up an’ go ‘long.”

The OED says the usage is also seen as “druther,” “ruther,” and “ruthers.” Here’s an example with “ruthers,” from William Alexander Percy’s 1941 autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee:

“ ‘Your ruthers is my ruthers’ (what you would rather is what I would rather). Certainly the most amiable and appeasing phrase in any language, the language used being not English but deep Southern.”

If we had our druther, ruther, druthers, or ruthers, we’d take a break now. And so we will. See you tomorrow.

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Is “refer back” redundant?

Q: I often hear folks (even on the news) “refer back” to something. Do they need to add “back” here? Is it not enough to “refer” to something?

A: You’re not alone in considering this usage redundant. Some usage writers have criticized the verb phrase “refer back” since at least as far back as the 1920s.

George Philip Krapp, for instance, condemned it in The English Language in America (1927) as “a crude pleonasm for refer.” (A pleonasm is a redundancy.)

We disagree with Krapp, and we’re not alone. Many other language writers have pooh-poohed the belief that it’s redundant to “refer back” to something.

Theodore M. Bernstein, for example, points out in Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins (1971) that the word “back” here “may in some instances be superfluous, but it is not normally redundant.”

“The notion of back is not at all prominent or even necessarily present in the word refer, which has as its primary reason to direct attention to,” Bernstein writes.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage agrees: “Back may seldom be necessary with refer, but the ‘backward’ connotations of refer are usually not strong, and back can be useful in reinforcing them.”

Merriam-Webster’s gives several examples of the usage by respectable writers, including this one from George Orwell’s 1946 book Politics and the English Language: “I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary.”

A usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says some people “consider the phrase refer back to be redundant, since refer contains the prefix re–, which was brought into English from Latin and originally meant ‘back.’ ”

“But such an argument is based on what linguists call the ‘etymological fallacy’—the assumption that the meaning of a word should always reflect the meanings of the words, roots, and affixes from which it was derived,” American Heritage says.

The dictionary adds that “most words change their meanings over time, often to the point where their historical roots are completely obscured. Such change is natural and usually goes unnoticed except by scholars.”

“We conduct inaugurations without consulting soothsayers (augurs), and we don’t necessarily share bread (panis in Latin) with our companions,” the usage note says.

As for “refer,” American Heritage says it’s “quite often used in contexts that don’t involve the meaning ‘back’ at all, as in The doctor referred her patient to a specialist or Please refer to this menu of our daily specials.”

The dictionary says the position of its Usage Panel on “refer back” has shifted dramatically over the years:

“In 1995, 65 percent of the Panel disapproved of this construction, but by 2011, 81 percent accepted it in the sentence To answer your question it is necessary to refer back to the minutes of the previous meeting.”

With a word like “refer,” AH says, “where the ‘back’ meaning of re– has largely disappeared, adding back can provide useful semantic information, indicating that the person or thing being referred to has been mentioned or consulted before.”

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A case in point

Q: I am gradually becoming obsessed with the phrase “a case in point.” Does anyone know its origin? It looks like a clumsy translation from another language (French, perhaps) but is it?

A: You’re onto something. The phrase at the heart of your obsession, “in point,” does indeed come from French—or, rather, Anglo-Norman, a dialect of Old French used by England’s Norman conquerors.

In the Anglo-Norman phrase en point, the word point refers to a state or condition, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says the word “point” showed up in English in the early 1200s with the sense of a condition, state, situation, or plight, though that meaning is now considered historic.

In the early 1600s, according to Oxford, “point” took on another sense—appropriate or pertinent—a sense that’s now chiefly seen in the expression “case in point,” meaning an example that illustrates the point.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the expression is from Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875) by William Stanley Jevons:

“The wampumpeag of the North American Indians is a case in point, as it certainly served as jewellery.”

The most recent citation is from the January 1996 issue of Scientific American:

“Much of the ecological evidence about sex is open to sharply differing interpretations. A case in point concerns the ‘haplodipoid’ sex-determining system of ants, bees and wasps.”

And with that, we’ll buzz off.

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In pretty good company

Q: Whence comes “pretty,” the spoken dialectal equivalent to “rather,” as in, “We made it pretty far before we turned back”? Do you know if it’s common in a specific region? I live in Southern California, and I use it pretty often. I frequently hear it from others, too.

A: You’ll be surprised by our answer. The word “pretty” used in this sense isn’t dialectal, regional, or confined to speech. It’s been standard English since the 1500s.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this adverbial use of “pretty” as “to a considerable extent; fairly, moderately; rather, quite. In later use also: very.”

The earliest citation for the usage in the OED is from Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae (1565): “Audaculus, a pretie hardie felow: vsed in derision.”
(Shakespeare is believed to have used Cooper’s work as a reference.)

Oxford says the Cooper citation may have represented an adjectival use, but it has no doubts about its next example, from The Workes of a Young Wyt (1577), a collection of poetry by Nicholas Breton:

“Berlady tis prety good meate.” (“Berlady,” an oath or expletive, is a contraction of “by our Lady.”)

Here’s one more 16th-century example, from A Worlde of Wordes (1598), an Italian-English dictionary by John Florio: “Boccace is prettie hard, yet understood: Petrarche harder but explaned.”

The OED says the expression “pretty much” dates from 1682, and means “almost, very nearly; more or less; (also, in early use) very much, considerably.”

You didn’t ask, but the adjective “pretty” has been around since Anglo-Saxon times (spelled pæti, pætig, or prættig). In Old English, according to Oxford, it meant cunning or crafty at first, then clever, skillful, or able.

The adjective didn’t come to mean attractive until the 1400s. Here’s an example from Sir Walter Scott’s 1821 novel Kenilworth: “Having a cellar of sound liquor, a ready wit, and a pretty daughter.”

Getting back to your question, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) notes that some usage guides “complain that pretty is overworked” as an adverb and recommend restricting the usage “to informal or colloquial contexts.”

However, Merriam-Webster’s says in its usage note that “pretty” in this sense “is in wide use across the whole spectrum of English.”

“It is common in informal speech and writing,” the dictionary says, “but is neither rare nor wrong in serious discourse.”

M-W includes examples from George Bernard Shaw (“he may, if he be pretty well off or clever, qualify himself as a doctor”), Henry Steele Commager (“a return to those traditions of American foreign policy which worked pretty well for over a century”), and the Times Literary Supplement (“the arguments for buying expensive books have to be pretty cogent”).

So you’re in pretty good company.

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Rental telepathy

Q: I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and listen to Pat on WNYC, but I couldn’t get through on the phone to ask her this question: What do you call someone who subleases an apartment FROM somebody, and someone who subleases an apartment TO somebody? I’ve seen so many variations that I’m going mental.

A: It’s not surprising that you’ve noticed some confusion in these terms, since your neighborhood is a hot spot in a fevered urban real estate market.

To begin with, let’s imagine the classic rental relationship—landlord and tenant. The “lessor” is the one who grants the lease (the landlord). The “lessee” is the one who’s granted the lease (the tenant).

Now if this primary tenant (or “lessee”) then subleases his apartment to someone else, he becomes a “sublessor.” And the person who’s granted the sublease is the “sublessee” (also called a subtenant).

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “sublease” as “a lease granted by a person who is himself or herself a lessee of the property in question.”

A “sublessor,” in the OED’s definition, is “a person who grants a sublease,” and a “sublessee” is “a person to whom a sublease is granted.”

An all-purpose term, “subletter,” can refer to either a “sublessor” or a “sublessee,” according to the OED, but you won’t find it in most standard dictionaries, so we’d be hesitant to recommend it. (Besides, it’s ambiguous.)

By the way, the terms “sublease” and “sublet” (both as nouns and as verbs) mean the same thing and can be used interchangeably.

All these terms naturally feel very contemporary. But in fact they’ve been around for quite a while.

“Lease,” in the sense we’re talking about, first appeared in writing as a noun in 1483 and as a verb in 1570.

Both came into English from Anglo-Norman and are traceable to an Old French verb, lesser or laissier, meaning “to let, let go.” (The modern French equivalent is laisser.) 

The ultimate source, however, is Latin—the verb laxare (to loosen), derived  from the adjective laxus (loose).

Here are some related terms, along with the dates they first appeared in writing, according to OED citations:

“Lessor” 1487; “lessee” 1495; “sublease” 1758 (noun), 1824 (verb); “let” 909 (verb meaning to rent); “sublet” 1766 (verb), 1834 (noun); “sublessee” 1651; “sublessor” 1813; “subletter” 1825.

One final note. Like “rent,” the verbs “lease,” “sublease,” and “sublet” work both ways—they can mean either to grant a rental contract or to assume one.

In other words, you can lease or sublease or sublet property to someone or from someone. 

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Is it “is”? Or is it “are”?

Q: I recently wrote this sentence: “Is celebrities sending prayers newsworthy?” I went back and forth between “is” and “are.” Neither sounded totally right, nor totally wrong. What do you think?

A: Your choice was correct: “Is celebrities’ sending prayers newsworthy?” Note that we’ve added a possessive apostrophe to “celebrities.”

The noun “celebrity” has an interesting history, which we’ll get to later, but let’s first look at the sentence you’ve asked about.

In this sentence, “celebrities’ sending prayers” is a noun phrase. “Sending” is a gerund here—a verb form that functions as a noun—so the possessive apostrophe is called for.

“Sending” (not “celebrities”) is the subject of the verb, which should be “is.” In fact, “celebrities’” functions as a modifier; drop it and you have “Is sending prayers newsworthy?”

A parallel case would be “Is mom’s cooking newsworthy?” The gerund “cooking” is the subject of the verb. Drop the modifier (the possessive adjective “mom’s”) and you have “Is cooking newsworthy?”

Still, correct or not, the phraseology of that “celebrities” sentence is awkward enough to deserve a rewrite: “Is it newsworthy that celebrities send prayers?”

If you’d like to read more about gerunds, we’ve discussed them several times on our blog, including posts in 2011 and 2012: 

Now, let’s look at the word “celebrity,” which meant fame or notoriety when it entered English sometime before 1600. By the early 1600s, it could also refer to a solemn rite, a ceremony, or a celebration.

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that “celebrity” took on the sense used in your question: a celebrated person or public figure.

The earliest example of the usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Ogilvies, an 1849 novel by the English writer Dinah Maria Mulock Craik: “Did you see any of those ‘celebrities,’ as you call them?”

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Are cowpokes poky?

Q: In your write-up on “slowpoke,” you suggest that the “poke” part is derived from an old verb meaning to potter about or dawdle. I think working cowpokes might bristle at that suggestion.

A: Yes, we speculated in that post that the “poke” in “slowpoke” may be derived from the adjective “poky,” which can mean slow, and the verb “poke,” which can mean to dawdle.

And, as you may recall, the singing cowboy Jimmy Wakely does indeed suggest pokiness in the 1948 movie Range Renegades when he sings, “I’m an old cowpoke just a-pokin’ along.”

But cowpokes don’t usually dawdle. The “poke” in “cowpoke”—an early 20th-century American word for a cowboy—is probably a “poke” of a different color.

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests two possible origins of this “poke.” It may be the name for a native plant used as a smoking material (the same one mentioned in our earlier post). Or it may be from the verb “poke,” meaning to jab or prod.

Since cowboys poke cattle (literally or figuratively) to move them along, that last explanation seems convincing.

There’s been a bit of confusion about the age of the term “cowpoke” because of some mistaken research years ago.

The OED says the earliest written use of “cowpoke” is an 1881 citation in Harold Wentworth’s American Dialect Dictionary, which was published in 1944. But that 19th-century citation was wrong.

Jonathan Lighter, in his Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, says that Wentworth, “and hence all other standard sources, erroneously cites Croffutt Grip-Sack Guide to Colorado (1881); the word cowpoke is not found in that work.”

Lighter’s oldest examples of “cowpoke” are from the 1920s. Although we’ve found earlier ones for “cow poke” or “cow-poke, they referred to agricultural devices, not to cowboys. 

A Google search turns up many patent applications, dating back to the 1870s, for devices described as “animal pokes” or “cow-pokes.”

These “pokes” are yoke-like contraptions for securing and controlling an animal’s head, for example when it’s grazing.

A 1907 issue of the Farm Implement News Buyer’s Guide lists an enterprise called Wichita Cow Poke Manufacturing Company, a Kansas firm whose business is making “cow pokes.” Among other businesses making “animal pokes,” the buyer’s guide lists the American Animal Poke Company, of Kansas City, Mo.

The use of “poke” in this sense reflects a broader meaning—“a thing that pokes,” in the words of the OED.

Oxford says this use of the word dates from early America, where a “poke” was “a yoke or collar (often with a pole attached, which projects forward and downward) put round the neck of an animal to prevent it from breaking through or jumping over fences.”

The earliest example in writing for this “poke” dates from 1809. The first example that mentions a cow is from Josiah G. Holland’s Gold Foil Hammered from Popular Proverbs (1859): “We put a poke upon a vicious cow.”

There are even older examples of a verb “poke,” meaning to put a poke on an animal. It was first recorded in the 1780s and is now obsolete.

The OED doesn’t make any direct connection between these livestock uses of “poke” and the cowboy term “cowpoke.” 

But we do know that the livestock meanings of “poke” (both noun and verb) derive from the sense of something that pokes. Perhaps the cowboy term does too, and is a reference to poking or prodding cattle.

The OED has a tantalizing citation from a 1928 issue of Lariat Magazine, a journal that published poetry and stories of the Old West: “I camped there once, and a cowpoke told me why they were named that.”

Unfortunately, that’s all there is to the citation! And we couldn’t find a digitized version of the Lariat issue online. If you happen to own a tattered copy of the January 1928 issue, let us know.

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Mistresses and other women

Q: I’m surprised that the term “mistress” is still used in the New York Times, as in this recent example: “Jimmy Goldsmith was an inveterate keeper of mistresses.” It’s a very antiquated notion. Care to weigh in?

A: You’re right that the word “mistress” shows up a lot in the Times. A search of the newspaper’s archive turns up nearly 70,000 examples since 1851, including almost 1,500 over the last 12 months.

Many of the older examples refer to a woman who has power, authority, or ownership (a schoolmistress, postmistress, pet’s mistress, mistress of a household, and so on).

However, nearly all the newer examples refer to the sense you’re asking about—a woman who has a sexual relationship with a married man who’s not her husband, often involving material support.

When “mistress” entered English around 1330, derived from words in Anglo-Norman and Middle French, it referred to a governess, but that sense is now obsolete.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “mistress” soon came to mean either “the female head of a family, household, or other establishment” or “a woman holding such a position in conjunction with a male counterpart.”

By the end of the 1300s, according to OED citations, the term could also refer to “a woman who employs others in her service” or “a woman who has authority over servants, attendants, or slaves.”

We’ll skip the many other senses of “mistress” and get to the one that strikes you as antiquated.

When “mistress” took a disreputable turn in the 1400s, it initially referred to “a woman notorious for some act,” but the OED describes this sense of the word as obsolete.

By the 1600s, according to the dictionary, it was being used to mean “a woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship.”

Here’s an early example from a sermon (written sometime before 1631) by John Donne: “Those women, whom the Kings were to take for their Wives, and not for Mistresses, (which is but a later name for Concubines).”

Getting back to your question, we don’t find “mistress” a particularly “antiquated notion.” Yes, the word has been around for quite a while, but so have mistresses.

Is there a better term for them? We can’t think of one. “Girlfriend”? “Concubine”? “Paramour”? “”Other woman”? “Fancy woman”? We’ll stick with “mistress.”

A more interesting subject may be the disparity in the number of pejorative sexual words for women and men.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language discusses this subject in a  usage note in its fourth edition (the usage note doesn’t appear to the fifth edition).

“English has no shortage of terms for women whose behavior is viewed as licentious,” the dictionary says, “but it is difficult to come up with a list of comparable terms used of men.”

AH notes that Julia Penelope, a language researcher, “stopped counting after she reached 220 such labels for women, both current and historical, but managed to locate only 20 names for promiscuous men.”

Another researcher, Murial R. Schultz, “found more than 500 slang terms for prostitute but could find just 65 for the male terms whoremonger and pimp,” the dictionary adds.

“A further imbalance appears in the connotations of many of these terms,” AH says. “While the terms generally applying only to women, like tramp and slut, are almost always strongly negative, corresponding terms used for men, such as stud and Casanova, often carry positive associations.”

The usage note points out that “many of the negative terms used for women derive from words that once had neutral or even positive associations.”

“For instance, the word mistress, now mainly used to refer to a woman who is involved in an extramarital sexual relationship, originally served simply as a neutral counterpart to mister or master,” AH says. “The term madam, while still a respectful form of address, has had sexual connotations since the early 1700s and has been used to refer to the owner of a brothel since the early 1900s.”

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Bilingual education

Q: My Danish stepmother is completely bilingual, with one exception: she uses the phrase “not that I know to” instead of “not that I know of” when speaking English. It would be interesting to understand where this usage comes from.

A: There’s a verbal phrase in Danish, kende til, that means to “know about.”

But someone attempting a literal translation into English might render kende til as “know to.” That’s because the Danish verb kende means to “know” and the preposition til frequently means “to.”

Louise Møhl, a cultural officer with the Danish Consulate in New York, provided us with a couple of Danish-to-English examples of these terms used in the first-person singular:

Jeg kender ham fra mit arbejde. = “I know him from work.”

Det kender jeg ikke noget til. = “I don’t know anything about that.”

As for til, Ms. Møhl said, it “has many meanings in Danish depending on the situation.”

When it’s not part of the expression kende til, the preposition til can mean “to” (perhaps its most frequent sense), “of,” “for,” “about,” “toward,” “from,” or “at.”

Incidentally, the Danish til has a similar-sounding cousin in English, “till.” The Old Norse preposition til (“to”) is the ancestor of both the Danish til and the English prepositions “till” and “to.”

We’ve written on our blog about the English words “till” and “until” (you may be surprised to learn which came first).

Sorry that we can’t be more definite about why your Danish stepmother says “know to” instead of “know of,” but here’s a suggestion: ask her why she does it.

You might as well get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Or, as a Dane would put it, lige fra hestens mund.

Why a horse’s mouth? We had a brief posting back in 2006 that says there are two theories about the origin of the English expression, one involving horse racing and the other horse trading.

The most likely explanation is that it originated in the early 20th century in reference to inside information from a racing tipster that was supposedly as good as if it came straight from the horse itself.

We’ll end with an example from “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald,” a 1928 short story by one of our favorite writers, P. G. Wodehouse. The wooer (and eavesdropper) here is Archibald Mulliner:

“It might be an ignoble thing to eavesdrop, but it was apparent that Aurelia Cammarleigh was about to reveal her candid opinion of him: and the prospect of getting the true facts—straight, as it were, from the horse’s mouth—held him so fascinated that he could not move.”

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In a jiffy

Q: I was packing my latest manuscript in a Jiffy bag when I thought of a question for my go-to word guys. What is a jiffy?

A: It’s an instant or a moment, which doesn’t describe the amount of time we’ve taken to get to your question. Sorry, but our in-box has been overflowing lately.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “jiffy” as a colloquial noun of “origin unascertained,” and defines it as “a very short space of time.”

The OED says the word is seen “only in such phrases as in a jiffy,” but it later notes the use of “jiffy” in the names of padded bags and other products.

The first Oxford citation is from Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785), by Rudolf Erich Raspe: “In six jiffies I found myself and all my retinue … at the rock of Gibralter.”

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology speculates that the word might have been “spontaneously coined” by Raspe, a German librarian, writer, and scientist.

The full phrase “in a jiffy” was first recorded (with the spelling jeffy) in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796): “It will be done in a jeffy: it will be done in a short space of time, in an instant.”

In the 1950s, “Jiffy” showed up in trademarked names for a padded envelope, a book bag, and a peat pot for sowing seeds. The first Jiffy Lube opened in Ogden, Utah, in the 1970s, and franchises followed … in a jiffy.

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“Other” wise

Q: A colleague and I are arguing over this quote: “An 88-year-old man was killed and three others injured.” I say “others,” as a pronoun, must refer to 88-year-old men in this construction. My colleague says it effectively means three other people. The injured were not all 88-year-old men. Which of us is right?

A: Your colleague is right. In cases like this, “others” doesn’t mirror its exact antecedent (“88-year-old men”). Here the plural pronoun simply means additional people.

Among its various functions, the word “other” can be an adjective. Examples: “other charges” … “other drivers” … “other 88-year-old men.” As an adjective, “other” modifies the noun that follows.

But “other” can also be a pronoun, in which case it stands alone instead of modifying a noun. Examples: “Who is the other?” (singular) … “Let’s wait for the others” (plural) … “Others were injured” (plural).

The Oxford English Dictionary says that as a pronoun, “other” (or “others” in the plural) can mean “another person, someone else, anyone else” as well as another person “of a kind specified or understood contextually.”

In the example you mention (“An 88-year-old man was killed and three others injured”), the writer is obviously using “others” in the looser sense of other people.

The OED has written examples of this usage going back to early Old English, but here are a few more recent ones:

“Others indeed may talk.” (From the philosopher George Berkeley’s Alciphron, 1732.)

“If one has too much in consequence of others being wronged, it seems to me that the divine voice which tells us to set that wrong right, must be obeyed.” (From George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, 1872.)

“He had always worked in places where others had established the English corner before he came.” (From Graham Greene’s novel England Made Me, 1935.)

Your question points up a possible usage problem. If “others” can refer to people in general as well as people of a specific kind, it can sometimes be misunderstood.

If all the victims in your example are indeed 88 years old, the writer should be more precise in the wording: “Four 88-year-old men were victims—one was killed and the others were injured.”

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A loaded question

Q: I recently came across this quote from the Mormon lawman Porter Rockwell: “I never shot at anybody, if I shoot they get shot! He’s still alive, ain’t he?” That got me to thinking. You shoot an arrow, not the bow, but you shoot a gun, not the bullet. A friend of mine says he shoots targets. I’m confused.

A: The verb “shoot” has a lot of flexibility. It can be used intransitively—that is, without a direct object. Example: “He likes to go into the woods and shoot.”

But “shoot” can also be used transitively—with a direct object. When we’re talking about weapons, the transitive verb “shoot” can mean to discharge, to let fly, or to hit.

Consequently, it can have a variety of objects. You can “shoot” (that is, discharge) a gun, bow, slingshot, or catapult. You can “shoot” (let fly) a bullet, arrow, spear, javelin, or similar projectile. And finally, you can “shoot” a target.

All of these senses of the verb are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary and have been around for hundreds of years.

By the way, that last sense of the word—to “shoot” a target—implies that the target was hit. But “shoot at” means only to fire in a particular direction.

We’ll have something to say later about Orrin Porter Rockwell, a colorful and controversial Mormon figure from the Wild West.

But first let’s look at the life of “shoot,” a verb with an interesting history, and not just in weaponry.

Its ancestors were old Germanic words that meant to go swiftly or suddenly, to rush or fly—yes, like an arrow from a bow.

It was first recorded in Old English in the ninth century in reference to the shooting of arrows, according to citations in the OED.

But other Old English examples use the term in a wider sense that reflects its earlier Germanic roots—to dart swiftly from one place to another.

So at the root of the word is the sense of moving quickly, and this ancestry explains the many ways in which “shoot” is used today.

For example, meteors “shoot” across the night sky, rafters “shoot” the rapids, and a toboggan “shoots” down a slope. A racehorse “shoots” from the gate, then “shoots” ahead of the pack.

A golfer “shoots” a birdie,” while a basketball player “shoots” a basket. Grownups “shoot” pool or dice, and children “shoot” marbles. If the kids are growing fast, they’re said to “shoot” up.

Plants in spring send out new “shoots” (a noun usage). Rays of the sun “shoot” through the clouds, and on a more prosaic note, product sales “shoot” up.

An indiscreet person “shoots off” his mouth or “shoots” himself in the foot, while an ambitious colleague “shoots” for success.

To lock a door a night, we “shoot” a bolt into its fastening. And if we don’t look where we’re going, our feet “shoot” out from under us (after which we experience “shooting” pains).

With that, we’ve “shot our bolt.” In case you’re curious (even if you’re not), the “bolt” in this old proverb is a thousand-year-old word for a short, blunt arrow fired from a cross-bow.

In olden days, there was a similar expression, “a fool’s bolt is soon shot.” The lesson: conserve your ammunition.

In case any readers are wondering about that quote you mention, Porter Rockwell was, among other things, a gunfighter, a deputy US marshal, and a bodyguard to the Mormon leader Joseph Smith Jr.

Rockwell was arrested in St. Louis in March of 1843 in connection with an attempt to kill Lilburn Boggs, a former governor of Missouri, the year before. (In 1838, as governor, Boggs issued an executive order evicting Mormons from the state.)

A grand jury found that there wasn’t enough evidence for an indictment on the charge of attempted murder, but Rockwell was tried in December of 1843 for trying to escape.

He supposedly made his comments at that trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to five minutes in jail, according to Enemy of the Saints, a biography of Boggs by Robert Nelson.

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Earth angles

Q: I love your blog, but I just want to point out an easily fixed typo in your posting about why English is a Germanic language. In the seventh paragraph of your answer, you refer to “the earth’s population.” The word “Earth” requires capitalization.

A: We’re glad you like the blog, but this isn’t a mistake. We properly used “earth” as a common noun.

As The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) says, “In nontechnical contexts the word earth, in the sense of our planet, is usually lowercased when preceded by the or in such idioms as ‘down to earth’ or ‘move heaven or earth.’ ”

“When used as the proper name of our planet, especially in context with other planets,” the Chicago Manual adds, “it is capitalized and the is usually omitted.”  

Other standard references agree.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, says the word is often capitalized when it stands alone and refers to “the third planet from the sun.” Otherwise, it’s lowercased.

So unless you’re using it in a strictly astronomical sense (as in “the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth”), the word is lowercased. In fact, it’s sometimes lowercased even when used in reference to the planet.

As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, “The names of planets other than our own are invariably capitalized, but earth is more often than not lowercased.”

The usage guide goes on to say that the name is more likely to be capitalized when it appears with the names of the other planets, as in “the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Earth.”

Another guide, Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) says, “In reference to the planet we live on, earth is usually preceded by the and is not capitalized. The sun and the moon are treated the same way.”

Garner’s gives this example: “a full moon occurs when the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the earth.”

But “when Earth is referred to as a proper noun,” the usage guide says, “it is capitalized and usually stands alone.”

Garner’s gives this example from an article about the dwarf planet Quaoar: “It’s about one-tenth the size of Earth and orbits the sun every 288 years.”

The Old English word eorthe, which first showed up in in Beowulf around 725, could refer to the ground, the soil, or the earth, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. The modern spelling appeared in the last half of the 1500s.

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A matter of course

Q: In texting me, my daughter used the phrase “of course” (spelling it “of coarse,” naturally), which got me to thinking. How is it that we use “course” to refer to something in a positive manner (as in “of course”) as well as to a path, a route, or a plan—from a “concourse” to an “obstacle course” to a “course of study”?

A: The phrase “of course” means something akin to “naturally” or “it goes without saying.” When we say something occurred “of course,” we mean it was only to be expected, or that it was in the normal course of events.

And that last phrase, “in the normal course of events,” is a clue to the etymology of the phrase “of course.”

Our word “course” came into English in the late 13th century, and for several hundred years it was spelled without an “e” at the end, like the French word it came from (cours).

The French got it from Latin, in which cursus means a race, a journey, a march, or a direction. The Latin noun comes from the verb currere, to run.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that a wide range of English words is derived from currere, including “current,” “courier,” and “occur.”

In English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “course” originally meant an onward movement in a particular path, or the action of running or moving onward.

Consequently, “course” has long been used to mean a customary or habitual succession of things, or a part of such a series.

It has also been used for hundreds of years to mean the place or time where the series has its “run,” as well as the natural order or the ordinary manner of proceeding.

This notion—of a habitual path or a prescribed series of things—explains a great many uses of “course” in English.

To mention a few, it explains why the parts of a meal are “courses,” why a flowing stream is a “watercourse,” why a normal event happens “in due course,” why an orderly ship maintains a certain “course,” why we let nature or the law “take its course,” and why colleges offer “courses” of study and doctors prescribe “courses” of treatment.

It also explains how “racecourse” and “golf course” got their names. And it explains why women in the 16th through the 19th centuries called their menstrual periods their “courses.”

The phrase we’re getting to, “of course,” came along in the mid-16th century, according to citations in the OED.

In the early 1540s it was used both as an adjective to mean “natural” or  “to be expected” (as in the phrase “a matter of course”) and as an adverb to mean “ordinarily” or “as an everyday occurrence” (as in “the cake was of course homemade”).

By the early 19th century, “of course” was being used to qualify entire sentences or clauses, according to OED citations.  And that’s how we generally use it today.

Oxford’s earliest example of this usage is from John Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America (1823):

“She made some very particular inquiries about my people, which, of course, I was unable to answer.”

This later example is from a bit of dialogue in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1838): “ ‘You will tell her I am here?’ … ‘Of course.’ ”

We now take the phrase “of course” for granted, but it had some competition over the centuries.

It’s proved more durable than several variants with the same meaning—“upon course,” which was first recorded in this sense in 1619, “on course” (1677), and “in course” (1722).

In other words, its survival was not necessarily a matter of course.

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Program notes

Q: Why do fund raisers on public radio ask for help with the “programming,” rather than the “programs”? I’ve always thought of broadcast programming as the act of scheduling or arranging programs. What are your thoughts?

A: We checked a half-dozen British and American dictionaries about the use of the word “programming” in its broadcasting sense. The results? The trend seems to be toward using “programming” broadly to mean the programs as well as the arranging of the programs.

For example, the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines “programming” in the broadcast sense as the “designing, scheduling, or planning of a program, as in broadcasting.”

But the new fifth edition of American Heritage adds another sense: “Broadcast programs considered as a group: the network’s Thursday night programming.”

The other American dictionary we consult the most, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), has this definition: “the planning, scheduling, or performing of a program.”

Among British references, the Collins English Dictionary has only one definition—the one you’re peeved about: “television programmes collectively.”

But another British source, the Macmillan English Dictionary, defines it more broadly as both “the planning and development of television or radio programmes” as well as “the programmes that a particular television or radio station broadcasts.”

What do we think? We feel it’s OK to use either “programming” or “programs” to refer collectively to shows on radio or TV.

The use of the word “programming” in the broadcast sense first showed up in the mid-1920s, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, the term has been used since the 1890s for the writing of program notes and the scheduling of programs for events or performances.

You may be surprised that the noun “program” has been around since the 1600s, according to written examples in the OED.

At first, it meant a notice displayed in public, then a written preface or commentary, and later a planned series of activities or events.

The OED’s first example of “program” used in the sense of a broadcast presentation is from the March 10, 1922, issue of Variety:

“Among the theatres which will provide acts exclusively for the ‘Star’s’ radio programs are the Shubert, Orpheum … Royal and 12th streets.”

English adopted the word from programma, late Latin for a proclamation or edict, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, but the ultimate source is the classical Greek word for a written public notice.

Why is the word spelled “program” in the US and “programme” in the UK? You can blame the French—or, rather Francophile Brits—for the UK spelling.

The word used to be spelled “program” on both sides of the Atlantic, according to the OED, but in Britain the “influence of French programme led to the predominance of this spelling in the 19th cent.”

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Is “go viral” going viral?

Q: Why are so many things going viral? Pictures of cute puppies or kittens or kids may be widely seen on YouTube, but “viral”? An ugly image, and it’s wildly overused. Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. And now you can move on to your next complainer.

A: The verbal phrase “go viral” may be going viral these days, but we kind of like the imagery: the rapid spread of a YouTube video likened to a virus running amok.

The noun “virus” has been around in one sense or another since the 1300s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It comes from a classical Latin term for a poisonous secretion, a malignant quality, and animal semen, among other things.

When it entered English sometime before 1398, the OED says, the noun referred to either semen or pus, but it later came to mean any infectious substance in the body.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century, though, that the term was used in its modern medical sense, which Oxford defines this way:

“An infectious, often pathogenic agent or biological entity which is typically smaller than a bacterium, which is able to function only within the living cells of a host animal, plant, or microorganism, and which consists of a nucleic acid molecule (either DNA or RNA) surrounded by a protein coat, often with an outer lipid membrane.”

In the 1970s, according to published references in the OED, the word “virus” took on its familiar figurative sense in computing:

“A program or piece of code which when executed causes itself to be copied into other locations, and which is therefore capable of propagating itself within the memory of a computer or across a network, usually with deleterious results.”

OED citations indicate that the adjective “viral” first showed up in the late 1940s and the verbal phrase “go viral” in the late 1980s.

The adjective was used at first in the medical sense. A 1948 citation from a medical work, for example, refers to “viral agents.”

By the late 1980s, the OED says, the adjective was being used in the marketing sense to describe the “rapid spread of information (esp. about a product or service) amongst customers by word of mouth, e-mail, etc.”

A Sept. 31,1989, article in PC User, for example, describes the “viral marketing” of Macintosh computers.

The OED’s earliest citation for “go viral,” the usage you’ve asked about, is from How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office (2004), a collection of accounts by young people who influenced elections:

“Their petition also went viral, gathering half a million signatures in a few weeks.”

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Yeah, no

Q: We North Queenslanders are considered rednecks even by Australian standards. I thought I’d pass on an example of English usage in this part of the world: Yeah, no, as in “Yeah, no, they should’ve won in the last quarter.”

A: We’ve written on the blog about “yeah,” but we haven’t looked into “yeah, no” until now.

Others, however, have studied this conversational response, which is used by both Americans and Australians.

In fact, Australians may use it, more—at least there’s been more written about “yeah, no” by language scholars in Australia.

A 2004 article in The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, quoted the Australian linguist Kate Burridge as saying, “It’s not going to disappear. It’s always hard to predict with language change, but it looks like its use is on the increase.”

The author of the Melbourne article, Bridie Smith, pointed out that English speakers aren’t alone in this usage, since “Germans use a similar ‘ja nein’ and the South Africans ‘ya nay.’ ”

“In Australia,” Smith wrote in 2004, “where the phrase has become entrenched in the past six years, ‘yeah no’ can mean anything from ‘yes, I see that, but can we go back to the earlier topic’ to an enthusiastic ‘yes, I can’t reinforce that point enough.’ ”

The meaning of “yeah, no” depends on its context, Smith says. She quotes Dr. Burridge, the linguist, as saying: “It can emphasise agreement, it can downplay disagreement or compliments, and it can soften refusals.”

Burridge and a colleague, Margaret Florey, published a paper in the Australian Journal of Linguistics in 2002 entitled “ ‘Yeah-no He’s a Good Kid’: A Discourse Analysis of Yeah-no in Australian English.”

An abstract of the paper said that as of 2002, “Yeah, no” was relatively new in Australian English and served many functions. It kept a conversation rolling, helped with “hedging and face-saving,” and indicated agreement or disagreement.

Since then, American linguists and language watchers have taken note of “yeah, no” in the US.

Linguists have discussed it on the American Dialect Society’s mailing list. And articles have been written by Stephen Dodson for Language Hat, by Mark Liberman for the Language Log, and by Ben Yagoda for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Even presidents of the United States aren’t immune. When a radio interviewer in 2011 asked Bill Clinton how he felt about being spoofed on TV comedy shows, Yagoda writes, “The former president replied, ‘Oh yeah, no I thought a lot of the Saturday Night Live guys were great.’ ” 

Liberman surveyed the speech databases in the Linguistic Data Consortium, and found that “in all the cases that I looked at, the yeah and the no seem be independently appropriate in the context of use, even if the sequence seems surprising when viewed in merely semantic terms.”

In one comment on the ADS list, the lexicographer Jonathan Lighter quoted a former New York City police detective as saying on CNN: “Yeah, no, you’re right!”

Lighter added: “There it seems to mean, ‘Yes indeed, and no, I wouldn’t think of contradicting you.’ ” 

But it can also mean disagreement, as in this tweet a few months ago about horror movies: “yeah no i hate blood and guns and stuff like that.”

PS: Readers of the blog have reported sightings (or, rather, hearings) of the usage in New Zealand, in South African English as well as Afrikaans, and in Danish.

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Let’s rustle up an answer

Q: The other day, I asked my office manager  to order me new business cards. Her answer: “Sure, I’ll rustle up some for you.” So where in the world does “rustle up” come from?

A: The verb “rustle” dates back at least as far as the 14th century, and it may have its roots in the early days of Old English.

It originally meant—and still means—to move about with a rustling sound, or as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “to make a soft, muffled crackling sound when moving.”

The OED says the origin of the word is uncertain, but it’s probably imitative—that is, “rustle” probably imitates the sound it describes.

The dictionary suggests that it may possibly be related to a “small group of very poorly attested Old English words” that refer to making noises: hristan, for example, meant to make a noise, and hrisian meant to shake or rattle.

Over the years, the verb “rustle” took on many different meanings in connection with making noises while moving around. People as well as things noisily rustled “about,” “in,” “through,” “to,” “up,” and so on.

In the 19th century, however, “rustle” took on several colloquial senses in the United States, including the one you’re asking about. Here are the new meanings and their first citations in the OED:

● to stir or rouse oneself into action: “Get up, rouse and rustle about, and get away from these scores” (1835, The Partisan, a novel by William Gilmore Simms).

● to search for food, forage: “Cattle and horses rustled in the neighbouring cane-brake” (1835, The Rambler in North America, a travel book by Charles Joseph Latrobe).

● to acquire, gather, provide something: “He nailed my thumb in his jaws, and rostled up a handful of dirt & throwed it in my eyes” (1844, Spirit of the Times, a weekly newspaper in New York City).

● to move quickly: “ ‘Rustle the things off that table,’ means clear the table in a hurry” (1882, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine).

● to gather people or animals: “I just told Billy … that it wasn’t any use for me to take her through … and he could rustle up some one to finish my drive” (1883, Our Deseret Home, by W. M. Eagan).

● to round up and steal cattle, horses, etc.: “He and Turner … went to Coppinger’s pasture, intending to kill the negro Frank, and ‘rustle’ six head of fat cattle, then in Coppinger’s pasture” (1886, Texas Court of Appeals Reports).

The sense that you’ve asked about (to acquire, gather, provide something) is defined more fully in the OED:

“To acquire or gather, typically as a result of searching or employing effort or initiative, and in response to a particular need; to provide (a person) with something urgently required; to hunt out; (freq. in later use) to put together (a dish or meal). Now usu. with up.”

Now, it’s time for us to take a break and rustle up some grub!

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Problems, problems

Q: Many people use “problematic” to mean “posing a problem,” as Frank Luntz did when he told a group of college students that Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio were “problematic” for the Republican Party. Isn’t this usage problematic?

A: Luntz, a Republican political consultant and pollster, made his comment on April 22, 2013, to students at the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater.

He said Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and other conservative radio personalities were “problematic” for Republicans and “destroying” their ability to connect with more voters.

Is this usage problematic—that is, questionable? We don’t think so.

Luntz was using “problematic” as an adjective meaning “presenting a problem or difficulty,” a usage that’s been around since the early 1600s.

In addition, “problematic” (or “problematics”) has been used as a noun since the late 1800s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s how the OED defines the adjective: “Of the nature of a problem; constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty; difficult to resolve; doubtful, uncertain, questionable.”

And this is how the dictionary defines the noun: “A thing that constitutes a problem or an area of difficulty, esp. in a particular field of study.”

English adopted the adjective “problematic” from the French problématique, which was derived via Latin from the Greek problematikos (pertaining to a problem).

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that problema, the Greek word for “problem,” combines the prefix pro, or forward, with the verb ballein, or throw (source of the English word “ballistic”).

“Things that are ‘thrown out’ project and can get in the way and hinder one,” Ayto says, “and so problema came to be used for an ‘obstacle’ or ‘problem’—senses carried through into the English problem.”

If you’d like to read more, we discussed “problematic” and the older adjective “problematical” in a posting five years ago.

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Is “offshore of” off-putting?

Q: Several times recently I’ve come across the usage “offshore of” in copy I’m editing. It sounds dead wrong to my ears, but I’m having difficulty explaining why to my client. Can you clarify?

A: You’re right in thinking that the “of” is unnecessary in a phrase like “offshore of Cuba.”

But we don’t think this redundancy is a hanging offense, since the use of “offshore” as a preposition is relatively new, and many people seem to be uncomfortable with it.

When “offshore” is used as a preposition, it means “off the shore or coast of,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. So the “of” is already built in.

As we’ve written before on our blog, “offshore” has been used as both an adverb and an adjective since the great seafaring days of the 18th century.

The use of the word as a preposition, however, dates from only the 1960s, according to published examples in the OED.

Here are Oxford’s citations, and note that “offshore” is not accompanied by “of” in any of them.

1967: “Atlantic refining and Phillips Petroleum have announced the first discovery of natural gas in the Gulf of Sirte offshore Libya.” (From the journal Ocean Industry.)

1988: “This year’s Fireball Nationals … were held offshore Durban over Easter.” (From a South African journal, Sailing Inland & Offshore.)

1995: “A ground ice ridge or stamukha off-shore Sakhalin Island.” (From the Lamp, a magazine for Exxon shareholders.)

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says the first known use of the preposition is from 1965, but it doesn’t give the source. M-W similarly defines the preposition “offshore” as meaning “off the shore of.”

Although “of” is unnecessary with the preposition “offshore,” many people prefer to tack it on anyway.

A Google search turned up hundreds of thousands of such usages—“offshore of San Diego,” “offshore of Nome,” “offshore of Captiva Island,” “offshore of Plymouth, MA.,” “offshore of the Bahamas,” and so on.

This isn’t surprising. To many ears, the use of “offshore” as a freestanding preposition— “The plane crashed offshore Nantucket”—may seem uncomfortably abrupt.

English speakers are more used to a construction like “off the coast of Nantucket” or “off the shore of Nantucket.”

Perhaps that’s why “offshore of Nantucket” feels more natural to many speakers.

Update [May 22, 2013]: After we posted this entry, the linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer reported several earlier uses of “offshore” as a preposition, including one that beats the OED and Merriam-Webster’s sightings by a decade.

Writing on the American Dialect Society’s discussion list, Zimmer reported this finding, from the December 1955 issue of Gas Age:   “… the company has filed an application with the FPC for a certificate of necessity to build a submarine gas pipe line offshore the Coast of Louisiana from the Sabine River to the coast of  the state of Mississippi.”

Then another contributor to the ADS list, Garson O’Toole, unearthed this World War II usage from a June 1942 issue of the State Times in Baton Rouge, La: “Lt. (j. g.) Robert Connel Taylor son of Mr. and Mrs. D. H. Taylor of this city, is recuperating at the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor from wounds received during the bombing of Midway preceding the great air-naval battle offshore the island, a letter received by his parents today disclosed.”

Thanks, Ben and Garson!

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Why “stereo” in “stereotypical”?

Q: Can you tell me what’s “stereo” about the adjective “stereotypical”?

A: The combining form “stereo-” that shows up in such words as “stereotype” and “stereophonic” is derived from stereos, a classical Greek word meaning solid.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the first English compound noun formed from this word element, “stereometry,” showed up in the 16th century as a mathematical term for the measurement of solid or three-dimensional objects.

English borrowed “stereotype” in the late 18th century from French, where it was an adjective that meant printed by means of a solid plate of type.

In English, the word began life as a noun for a method of printing in which a solid plate (originally of metal and later of paper or plastic) is formed from a mold of composed type, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

In the mid-19th century, “stereotype” took on the figurative sense of something fixed or perpetuated without change.

And in the early 20th century, the word took on the familiar, modern sense of a preconceived and oversimplified idea of someone or something.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary of this usage is from a 1922 essay by Walter Lippmann in the journal Public Opinion:

“A stereotype may be so consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from parent to child that it seems almost like a biological fact.”

Interestingly, the adjective you’ve asked about, “stereotypical,” didn’t show up until the mid-20th century, according to published references in the OED.

The earliest citation is from the July 1949 issue of Commentary: “The stereotypical Negro, the unstinting giver.”

But Oxford has entries for two earlier adjectives: “stereotypic,” which first showed up in print in 1801, and “stereotyped,” which appeared in 1849. These two words initially referred to the printing process, but later took on figurative meanings.

You didn’t ask, but we’ll tell you what “stereo-” is doing in “stereophonic,” an adjective that appeared in the 1920s.

Remember, the combining form originally meant solid or three-dimensional when it showed up in the 16th century.

In “stereophonic,” it refers to the lifelike or three-dimensional sound created by having two or more speakers.

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The “poke” in “slowpoke”

Q:  In Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance, a father tells his son that “slow coaches” get left behind. He uses “slow coach” the way I’d use “slowpoke.” Which term is more popular? And where does “slowpoke” come from?

A: Both terms refer to a slow or idle person, and both showed up in the 19th century—“slow coach” first in the UK and “slowpoke” soon after in the US.

So it’s not surprising to find “slow coach” used in Mistry’s novel about four people thrust together in a cramped apartment in India. The author himself was born and brought up in India, where English is of the British variety.

Which term is more popular? “Slowpoke” (or “slow poke”) by far, with 2.2 million hits on Google compared with 443,000 for “slowcoach” (or “slow coach”).

But a lot depends on where you live. “Slowcoach” shows up more often in the UK and Commonwealth countries. “Slowpoke” is seen more often in the US. (Most of the standard dictionaries we’ve checked prefer the single-word versions of these terms.)

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “slowpoke” as “colloq., chiefly U.S.” However, most of the OED’s citations for the term are from British writers.

The earliest Oxford citation for “slowpoke” is from John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1848): “ ‘What a slow poke you are!’ A woman’s word.”

But the next citation is from an 1877 British glossary of words used in East Yorkshire: “Slaw-pooak … a dunce; a driveller.” (In Old English, slaw means obtuse or dull.)

The most recent OED example is from Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children: “Come on, slowpoke, you don’t want to be late.”

The OED’s earliest citation for “slowcoach” is from Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837):

“What does this allusion to the slow coach mean? … It may be a reference to Pickwick himself, who has … been a criminally slow coach during the whole of this transaction.”

The term “slowcoach” is clearly a figurative use of a literal phrase for a slow-moving vehicle. So where does “slowpoke” come from?

The OED raises the possibility that the second half of the compound may be derived from apooke, a Virginia Algonquian term for tobacco that literally means “thing for smoking.”

The dictionary says the English word “poke” used in this sense referred to “a plant (of uncertain identity) used by North American Indians for smoking; the dried leaves of this plant.”

“Plants with which poke has been identified,” Oxford adds, “include a lobelia (Lobelia inflata), pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea), and wild tobacco (Nicotiana rustica), all also called Indian tobacco.”

The dictionary, in its “slowpoke” entry, points the reader to its entry for the tobacco sense of “poke,” but it doesn’t speculate about any connection between the two words.

If there is a connection, perhaps the term for a slow-burning or slow-igniting wild tobacco may have been used figuratively to mean a slow-moving person.

A more likely etymology, we think, is that “poke” here is derived from “poky” and “poking,” adjectives meaning, among other things, slow or dawdling.

Those two adjectives are derived in turn from the verb “poke,” which can mean to potter about or dawdle away.

The OED’s first citation for “poke” used in this sense is from one of our favorite books, Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility (1811): “Lord bless me! how do you think I can live poking by myself?”

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Alternating currents

Q: I’m an Australian television producer. I keep seeing “alternate” used instead of “alternative,” as in, “If you would like to choose an alternate date and time, please contact our office.” Is the battle lost? Is “alternate” now an alternative for “alternative”?

A: American dictionaries now consider the adjective “alternate” an acceptable substitute for “alternative.” So in the US it’s not incorrect to speak of an “alternate date and time.”

But British dictionaries generally observe the traditional distinction between these two words. We’ve checked four British dictionaries and only one (Collins) lists “alternative” without qualification among the definitions of “alternate.”

In the US, “alternate” has increasingly taken over territory once reserved for “alternative.” If you’ve noticed this in Australia too, it could mean that the tendency is drifting to other English-speaking countries as well.

The history of these two words, however, isn’t as clear-cut as some people think.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for the adjective “alternative,” dating from 1540, uses the term to mean “alternate.” And the OED’s entry for the adjective “alternate” has citations going back to 1776 for the word used to mean “alternative.”

Oxford describes this “alternative” sense of “alternate” as “Chiefly N. Amer.” However, the dictionary’s three earliest citations are from British sources.

Despite the fuzzy origins of these two words, usage guides in both the US and the UK traditionally have recommended separate meanings for “alternate” and “alternative”—both as nouns and as adjectives.

Typically, “alternate” has been used to mean one after the other (or by turns), while “alternative” has been used to mean one instead of the other.

In her grammar and usage book Woe Is I, Pat illustrates this with a couple of sentences: “Walking requires alternate use of the left foot and the right. The alternative is to take a taxi.”

And of course people in the US as well as the UK still commonly use “alternate” and “alternative” in those senses.

But some broader uses developed in the US during the 20th century, and they’re accepted today in American English.

A good example is the use of “alternate” as an adjective to mean something like “substitute,” as in “We took an alternate route to Plainfield.”

In discussing this use “of alternate where alternative might be expected,” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage cites examples going back to the 1930s, and says the citations “begin to show up in some numbers in the 1940s and 1950s.”

In fact the Book-of-the-Month Club, with its “alternate selections,” has been routinely using the adjective this way for more than half a century.

And as a noun, too, “alternate” is commonly used in the US to mean a substitute, as in “He’s an alternate on the jury,” or “Rogers was sent into the game as an alternate,” or “The commission has five regular members and three alternates.”

“Alternative” has taken on some new roles too. As an adjective, for example, it’s often used to mean antiestablishment or out of the mainstream, as in “alternative school,” “alternative medicine,” “alternative newspaper,” and so on.

One meaning of “alternative,” however, hasn’t changed—the noun that means “other choice.” Think of sentences like “You leave me no alternative” (or Pat’s example, “The alternative is to take a taxi”).

Getting back to your original question, it appears that Americans are increasingly using “alternate” when they want an adjective and “alternative” when they want a noun.

As the Merriam-Webster’s usage guide explains, “alternative is becoming more and more a noun, and the adjective appears to be in the process of being replaced (at least in American English) by alternate.”

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), edited by R. W. Burchfield, makes a similar observation.

In American English during the 20th century, Burchfield notes, the adjective “alternate” has “usurped some of the territory of alternative in its ordinary sense” of one instead of another.

So, Burchfield says, “A route, a material, a lyric, etc., can be described as ‘alternate’ rather than (as in the UK) ‘alternative.’”

The usage you mention—“an alternate date and time”—is further evidence of the same trend.

But try not to think of this as a battle lost! Think of it as another step in the evolution of English usage. After all “usage” means exactly that—the way words are used.

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On the lam

Q: Some time ago I wrote you to recommend an essential book for someone in your trade: How the Irish Invented Slang, by Daniel Cassidy. There you will find, among many hundred entries, his view of the derivation of “lam” from the Irish word leim. Alas, Danny has since died, and his extraordinary achievement has not been properly recognized. I feel sure that if you look through his book you will be inspired to extend at least his scholarly life.

A: You won’t like what we have to say. This book sounds like a lot of fun, but perhaps there’s more fun in it than truth.

Cassidy’s book, which won an American Book Award for nonfiction in 2007, maintains that American slang is teeming with words of Irish origin—“jazz,” “spiel,” “baloney,” “nincompoop,” “babe,” and “bunkum,” to mention only a few.

But many of his claims have been disputed by linguists and lexicographers because they’re based merely on phonetic similarities.

The critics include Grant Barrett, a lexicographer and dictionary editor who specializes in slang, and Mark Liberman, a linguist who has called Cassidy’s book an “exercise in creative etymology.”

Cassidy himself has acknowledged that he based his etymologies on phonetic similarities. A New York Times interviewer wrote in 2007 about the inspiration that led to the book:

 “Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having ‘unknown origin.’ ”

 The article continues: “He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word ‘gimmick’ seemed to come from ‘camag,’ meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick.”

 “Buddy,” as Cassidy told the interviewer, sounded like bodach (Irish for a strong, lusty youth); “geezer” resembled gaosmhar (wise person); “dude” was like duid (foolish-looking fellow), and so on. He thus compiled lists of American slang words that sounded as if they came from Irish, and based his book on them.

But in doing serious etymology, one has to do more than show that words in one language sound or look like those in another. A superficial resemblance might provide a starting point, but it shouldn’t be the conclusion.

A more authoritative approach would be to apply the academic standards that a lexicographer or a comparative linguist would use, supporting one’s case with documented evidence from written records. 

Let’s focus on the phrase you mention—“on the lam.”

Cassidy suggests an etymology of “lam” in a passage about an Irish-American gambler named Benny Binion: “Benny went on the lam (leim, jump), scramming to Vegas with two million dollars in the trunk of his maroon Cadillac.”

So Cassidy is proposing that “lam” in this sense is derived from the Irish leim. But other than that parenthetical note, he offers no evidence for the suggested etymology.

It’s true that leim (pronounced LAY-im) is Irish Gaelic for “jump” or “leap.” It’s similar to nouns with the same meaning in other Celtic languages (llam in Welsh, lam in Breton and Cornish, lheim in Manx Gaelic, leum in Scottish Gaelic), and it shows up in many Irish place names.

But we haven’t found a single other source that connects the Irish leim with the American slang term “lam,” meaning to run away. Not one.

If there were any truth in Cassidy’s assertion, etymologists and lexicographers would have picked up on it by now. 

Slang scholars still describe the origin of the “lam” in “on the lam” as unknown, and they would be only too happy to discover it.

Several theories have been proposed over the years: (1) that “lam” is short for “slam”; (2) that it’s from “lammas,” a mid-19th century British slang word meaning to run off; and (3) that it’s from the verb “lam” (to beat), used like “beat” in the older phrase “beat it.”

The last theory is the most commonly proposed—that the slang “lam” comes from the verb meaning to beat.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “lam” has had this meaning (to “beat soundly” or “thrash”) since Shakespeare’s day. The earliest citations in writing come from the 1590s.

In the late 19th century, the OED says, this verb “lam” acquired a new meaning in American slang—“to run off, to escape, to ‘beat it.’ ”

Oxford’s earliest citation for the slang verb is from Allan Pinkerton’s book Thirty Years a Detective (1886), in a reference to a pickpocket:

“After he has secured the wallet he will … utter the word ‘lam!’ This means to let the man go, and to get out of the way as soon as possible.”

The following year, the OED says, the word started appearing as a noun to mean “escape” or “flight.” Oxford’s earliest example here is from an 1897 issue of Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly: “To do a lam, meaning to run.”

Over the next few decades, according to slang dictionaries, to run or escape was to “lam,” “do a lam,” “make a lam,” “lam it,” “go on the lam,” “take a lam,” “take it on the lam,” and “be on the lam.”

Similarly, the OED says, a fugitive or somebody on the run was called a “lamster” (1904; also spelled “lamaster” and “lammister”).

It’s not hard to see how the “lam” that means to beat it might have descended from the “lam” that means to beat.

Since Old English, as the OED says, to “beat” has been “said of the action of the feet upon the ground in walking or running.”

This use of “beat,” according to Oxford, has given us phrases like “beat the streets,” “beat a path,” “beat a track,” and so on. In the 17th century, to “beat the hoof,” or “beat it on the hoof,” was to go on foot. 

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says the phrase “beat it” (to clear out, go in a hurry), was first recorded in 1878, when it appeared in A. F. Mulford’s Fighting Indians in the 7th United States Cavalry:

“The Gatling guns sang rapidly for a few seconds, and how those reds, so boastful at their war dance the night before, did ‘beat it!’ ”

So the slang use of “beat it” was around before “lam” (to beat) acquired its extended slang meaning (to run or beat it).

But we haven’t discussed where the earlier “lam” came from. Etymologists believe it’s derived from the Old Norse lemja (to flog or to cripple by beating). However, an even earlier source has been suggested, one that’s older than writing.

The linguist Calvert Watkins, writing in The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, identifies the source of “lam” and “lame” (both verb and adjective) as an Indo-European root that’s been reconstructed as lem-, meaning “to break in pieces, broken, soft, with derivatives meaning ‘crippled.’ ”

This Indo-European root developed into prehistoric Proto-Germanic words that have been reconstructed as lamon (weak limbed, lame) and lamjan (to flog, beat, cripple), according to Watkins and to the lexicographer John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

Other authorities, including the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, say the Indo-European lem– also has descendants outside the Germanic languages, including an adjective in Old Irish and Middle Irish, lem (“foolish, insipid”).

The modern Irish equivalent, leamh, is similarly defined (“foolish, insipid, importunate”) in An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, by Alexander McBain. 

This is a different word entirely from the Irish leim (jump), which McBain says was leimm in Old Irish.

We mentioned above that leim can be found in many Irish place names.

To mention just a few, there are Limavady (the Irish name is Leim an Mhadaidh, or “leap of the dog”); Lemnaroy (Leim an Eich Ruaidh, “leap of the reddish horse”); and Leixlip (Leim an Bhradain, “leap of the salmon”).

This last one is an interesting case. Leixlip is on the river Liffey, which is rich in salmon. The town’s original name came from Old Norse, lax hlaup (“salmon leap”).

In the 1890s, when Leixlip adopted an Irish name, it chose Leim an Bhradain (“leap of the salmon”), a direct translation of the Old Norse. Of course, the Vikings who settled there in the Dark Ages may have used a Norse translation from Irish. Who knows?

Some etymological questions may never be settled for sure. That doesn’t mean scholarly methods can’t be used to make an educated guess. Still, uneducated guesses are made all the time because people are so eager to know.

Woody Allen once satirized this desperate need to know. In a humorous essay called “Slang Origins,” from his book Without Feathers (1972), he wrote:

“How many of you have ever wondered where certain slang expressions come from? Like ‘She’s the cat’s pajamas,’ or to ‘take it on the lam.’ Neither have I. And yet for those who are interested in this sort of thing I have provided a brief guide to a few of the more interesting origins. …

“ ‘Take it on the lam’ is English in origin. Years ago, in England, ‘lamming’ was a game played with dice and a large tube of ointment. Each player in turn threw dice and then skipped around the room until he hemorrhaged. If a person threw seven or under he would say the word ‘quintz’ and proceed to twirl in a frenzy. If he threw over seven, he was forced to give every player a portion of his feathers and was given a good ‘lamming.’ Three ‘lammings’ and a player was ‘kwirled’ or declared a moral bankrupt. Gradually any game with feathers was called ‘lamming’ and feathers became ‘lams.’ To ‘take it on the lam’ meant to put on feathers and later, to escape, although the transition is unclear.

“Incidentally, if two of the players disagreed on the rules, we might say they ‘got into a beef.’ This term goes back to the Renaissance when a man would court a woman by stroking the side of her head with a slab of meat. If she pulled away, it meant she was spoken for. If, however, she assisted by clamping the meat to her face and pushing it all over her head, it meant she would marry him. The meat was kept by the bride’s parents and worn as a hat on special occasions. If, however, the husband took another lover, the wife could end the marriage by running with the meat to the town square and yelling, ‘With thine own beef, I do reject thee. Aroo! Aroo!’ If a couple ‘took to the beef’ or ‘had a beef’ it meant they were quarreling.”

We think there’s a lesson here—and some lessons come with a laugh. The human mind abhors a vacuum. When the most advanced methods of scholarship can’t (or haven’t yet) come up with definitive answers, then answers will be invented. 

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Are the cohorts in cahoots?

Q: Can one use the word “cohorts” to describe the individuals in a “cohort”?

A: The noun “cohort” can refer either to a group or to an individual within the group, as we wrote on our blog back in 2007.

So “the gang leader and his cohorts” would be a correct usage.

As we noted in that post, the English noun “cohort” originally meant a band of soldiers. It has a long etymological history as a military term dating back to Roman times.

In Caesar’s day, a “century” (centuria in Latin) was a unit of 100 Roman soldiers, commanded by a “centurion.”

Six centuries, or 600 soldiers (the exact numbers varied at different times in antiquity), constituted a “cohort” (cohors in Latin).

And 100 cohorts, or 6,000 men, made up a “legion” (from the Latin verb legere, to gather).

So “century,” “cohort,” and “legion” corresponded roughly to our modern “company,” “battalion,” and “regiment” (our regiments are not so large).

But in English, “cohort” has pretty much lost its military meaning and gone civilian. It’s used loosely to mean either a group or an individual.

Some sticklers still insist, though, that “cohort” should refer only to a group because of the word’s classical origins.

However, a usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says “the use of cohort in reference to individuals has become so common, especially in the plural, as to overshadow the use in the singular to refer to a group.”

More than two-thirds of the dictionary’s usage panel accept this sentence: “The cashiered dictator and his cohorts have all written their memoirs.”

In a post a couple of years ago, we discussed a theory (though an unlikely one) that “cohort” is the source of the word “cahoots,”  as in “the thieves were in cahoots.”

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