Category: Word origin

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Let’s play ball

Q: Given the start of the baseball season, it occurs to me that “play ball” is a rather interesting expression. Your thoughts?

A: Now that you mention it, the expression “play ball” is interesting. The “ball” is what’s being batted around, and “ball” here also happens to be the clipped name of the game.

In the US, “play ball” generally means “play baseball,” though the usage is often heard in connection with football, basketball, and other sports.

In fact, the phrase or various versions of it had been around for hundreds of years before any American stepped on the mound and threw the ball toward home plate.

In the early days, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression simply referred to a game played with a ball.

But you asked about baseball, so let’s consult Paul Dickson, who (in the words of a Washington Times book review) “may be baseball’s answer to Noah Webster or, at the very least, William Safire.”

The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (3rd ed.) defines “play ball!” as “the command issued by the plate umpire to start a game or to resume action. It’s sometimes abbreviated to a simple order of ‘play!’ ”

Dickson quotes (from the Boston Globe on May 13, 1886) what may be the first use of the baseball phrase in newsprint:

“McKeever held a long discussion with Pitcher Harmon about signs. The crowd got impatient; one man yelled ‘Get a telephone!’ while the umpire ordered them to ‘play ball.’ ”

The phrase certainly caught on, showing up a few years later in James Maitland’s The American Slang Dictionary (1891): “Play ball (Am.), go on with what you are about.”

The expression appeared more colorfully in a poem, “The Umpire,” in the July 27, 1893, issue of the Atchison (Kan.) Daily Globe:

“With features rigid as a block of stone, / He cries, ‘Play ball!’ ”

But apart from its use by umpires, Dickson says, “play ball” has a special meaning to baseball fans. It’s the “emblematic phrase for the start of any baseball game, from Opening Day to the opener of the World Series.”

The dictionary credits the pitcher Cy Young with the first use of the term in this sense, in 1905. It adds this quotation by a former baseball commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, some 80 years later:

“The best words—the most fun words—in our language are ‘play ball.’ Those words conjure up home runs and strikeouts, extra innings and double plays. … ‘Play ball’ is what baseball is all about—its call to arms—and there isn’t a baseball fan … who isn’t a little excited over the beginning of a new season.” (From USA Today, 1986.)

The OED says the word “ball” in “play ball” is a noun meaning “a game played with a ball (esp. thrown or pitched with the hand).”

Today in the US, as we’ve said, the phrase refers to baseball, but it predates baseball by several centuries.

The expression was first recorded in the Middle Ages as “play at the ball,” which was later clipped to “play at ball” and finally to “play ball.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from a description of St. Cuthbert in a medieval manuscript (circa 1300):

“With younge children he pleide atthe bal.” (Here we’ve changed two Middle English characters to “y” and “th.”)

An abbreviated version of the phrase first appeared in Nicholas Breton’s poem A Floorish Upon Fancie (1577):

“And let him learne to daunce, to shoote, and play at ball, / And any other sporte, but put him to his booke withall.”

During the 17th century, both “play at the ball” and “play at ball” were used. The modern form, “play ball,” finally emerged in the mid-18th century.

The OED cites an example from John Brickell’s The Natural History of North Carolina (1737). In a passage describing Native American games, Brickell writes: “Their manner of playing Ball is after this manner.”

The expression “to play ball” acquired another meaning in the early 20th century—to act fairly or cooperate.

The OED’s first example is from a 1903 novel, Back to the Woods, by Hugh McHugh (pen name of George Hobart): “Well, if Bunch should refuse to play ball I could send the check back to Uncle Peter.”

But the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has a citation from a slightly earlier novel, Edward Waterman Townsend’s Chimmie Fadden & Mr. Paul (1902):

“He’ll give him de time of his life if he’ll sign up to play ball wit him whenever he’s wanted.”

Today, many of our most familiar expressions (or clichés, if you prefer), come from ball games of one kind or another. Here’s a sampling of figurative uses of sports terms, with their earliest recorded appearances, all from either the OED or Random House.

● “keep the ball rolling”—to maintain a momentum, 1770

● “keep (or have) one’s eye on the ball”—to be careful or alert, 1907

● “home run”—a great success, 1913

● “have something (or a lot) on the ball”—to be capable, 1936 (a reference to throwing a speedy or deceptive pitch, a sense first recorded in 1911)

● “carry the ball”—to assume responsibility, 1924

● “run with the ball” or “take the ball and run with it”—to take control, 1926

● “from out in left field”—from out of nowhere, 1930s (a subject we discuss on the blog)

● “on the ball”—accurate or alert, 1939

● “drop the ball”—to fail at something, 1940

● “curveball”—something tricky and unexpected, 1944

● “throw a curve”—to do something tricky and unexpected, 1953

● “that’s the way the ball bounces”—that’s life, 1952

● “ballpark”—approximate (adjective), 1957

● “there goes the ballgame”—it’s all over (1930)

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A chasm in pronunciation

Q: During Gwen Ifill’s interview with Sonia Sotomayor earlier this year, the Supreme Court justice pronounced “chasms” with the “ch” of “chat.” Has this pronunciation always been around and I’m just noticing it now?

A: In the Feb. 20, 2013, interview on PBS, Ifill asked about the associate justice’s comment in her memoir, My Beloved World, that she sees “bridges where other people see chasms.”

Sotomayor responded that one of “the lessons that I share in the book” is that you can accomplish more “if you build bridges and not chasms.”

In asking her question, Ifill pronounced “chasms” with the “ch” of “choir.” In answering her, Sotomayor pronounced it with the “ch” of “child.”

Who’s right? Well, the standard English pronunciation for “chasm” is KA-zum. The word starts with a hard “k” sound.

But the justice’s pronunciation may have been influenced by her Hispanic heritage. In Spanish, words beginning with ch are pronounced with a soft, sibilant sound, as in cheque, chico, and chocolate.

In English,  however, the consonant cluster “ch” is pronounced as a “k” in some words (like “chaos,” “Christ,” “school,” and “chemist”), and as a sibilant in others (“church,” “cheer,” “touch,” “chip”).

“Chasm” is in the first category—the “k” words. And despite the justice’s sibilant usage, the standard pronunciation hasn’t changed.

We’ve checked every source that’s available to us, from the Oxford English Dictionary  to a dozen or more standard British and American dictionaries, and the answer is always the same.

As the OED explains, English borrowed “chasm” in the 16th century from the Latin chasma, which in turn came from the Greek khasma (a yawning hollow).

In both Latin and Greek, the word starts with a “k” sound, and that pronunciation was preserved when the word was adopted into English.

Early on, the word was written in English as “chasma,” an exact reproduction of the Latin spelling. But by the 18th century, the spelling stabilized as “chasm.”

In its earliest uses, the word meant “a yawning or gaping, as of the sea, or of the earth in an earthquake,” the OED says.

Oxford’s earliest citation is from Charles Fitz-Geffrey’s biography Sir Francis Drake (1596): “Earth-gaping Chasma’s, that mishap aboades.”

By the early 1600s, the modern geological meaning had  become established. Here’s the OED’s definition:

“A large and deep rent, cleft, or fissure in the surface of the earth or other cosmical body. In later times extended to a fissure or gap, not referred to the earth as a whole, e.g. in a mountain, rock, glacier, between two precipices, etc.”

At about the same time, looser meanings were also being recorded, and a “chasm” could be a cleft in any structure (like a building).

Figurative uses also appeared in the 17th century, the OED says, so a “chasm” could mean “a break marking a divergence, or a wide and profound difference,” and in fact it could mean a breach or gap in almost anything.

In her interview on PBS NewsHour,  Sotomayor used the word figuratively when she talked about building “bridges and not chasms.” (In her book, we should note, she actually writes of “bridges” and “walls,” not “bridges” and “chasms.”)

In short, the various meanings of “chasm” are well established, and so is its pronunciation.

 

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Plenary session

Q: I’m puzzled by the use of “plenaried” in David Brooks’s column last month about little-known oil, gas, and farming capitalists who are transforming the world. Can you assist with a definition?

A: In his March 12, 2013, Op-Ed column in the New York Times, Brooks says the fashionable entrepreneurs who make fantastic presentations at conferences “have turned out to be marginal to history.”

On the other hand, he writes, “the people who are too boring and unfashionable to get invited to the conferences in the first place have actually changed the world under our noses.”

He says these “anonymous drudges” are responsible for a “revolution” in oil, gas, and agricultural production that has “transformed the global balance of power.”

Brooks ends his column with the sentence that puzzled you: “This revolution will not be plenaried.”

So what does “plenaried” mean here?

Well, you won’t find “plenaried” in your dictionary. It’s not in the nine standard American or British dictionaries we checked. It’s not even among the roughly quarter of a million words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

We thought at first that “plenaried” was a nonce word (one coined for a specific occasion), and that Brooks was using it here to mean “discussed at a plenary session.”

But a bit of googling indicates that the usage, though relatively new, has been a around for a while in one form or another.

For example, Michael Kinsley, writing in Slate on Jan. 31, 2002, uses the term to mean “attended a plenary session.”

In discussing a guide for newcomers to the annual World Economic Forum at Davos,  Switzerland, Kinsley refers to media fellows who “have plenaried their little hearts out year after year to improve the state of the world.”

The phrase “plenary session” refers to a conference attended by all the participants, rather than one broken up into small groups.

The adjective “plenary” is derived from plenarius, a post-classical Latin word that means fully attended. In classical Latin, plenus means full.

When “plenary” entered English in the early 1400s, according to the OED, it meant “full, complete, or perfect; not deficient in any element or respect; absolute.”

The first citation for “plenary session” in the dictionary is from an 1878 English translation of Johann Baptist Alzog’s Handbuch der Universal-Kirchengeschichte (1841), an exposition of Roman Catholic views:

“The subjects brought forward for deliberation … were first distributed to eight Committees and discussed in sixty Plenary Sessions.”

Now we wouldn’t be at all surprised if a few of the people who participated in those 60 plenary sessions felt a bit plenaried at the end.

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Plumb loco

Q: Am I right in believing that the phrase “plumb loco” is derived from the plumb used to determine the depth of water and a true vertical line? In other words, someone who’s plumb loco would be askew.

A: You’re right that the adverb “plumb” used in this sense is related to the lead plumb bob that’s hung from a line to determine water depth or verticality. But the relationship isn’t quite as straight as a plumb line.

English adopted the noun “plumb” in the 14th century from Anglo-Norman and Old French, but the word is ultimately derived from plumbum, the Latin term for lead, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Interestingly, the word “plumber” is a relative. It originally referred to a worker in lead, but came to mean someone who installs water pipes, which were once made of lead.

Getting back to your question, the Oxford English Dictionary says the adverb “plumb,” meaning vertically, first showed up in English in the early 15th century.

In the early 16th century, the adverb took on the sense of “exactly in a particular direction, position, or alignment; directly, precisely,” according to the OED.

By the end of the century, the adverb was being used in the sense you’re asking about—as an intensifier meaning completely, absolutely, and quite.

The OED’s earliest citation for this usage (with “plumb” spelled “plum”) is from The Misfortunes of Arthur, a 1588 play by Thomas Hughes based on the Arthurian legend:

“The mounting minde that climes the hauty cliftes … Intoxicats the braine with guiddy drifts, Then rowles, and reeles, and falles at length plum ripe.”

Here’s an example, with the modern spelling, from Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 novel Captains Courageous: “You’ve turned up, plain, plumb providential for all concerned.”

Although the OED has many British examples of “plumb” used as an intensifier well into the 20th century, the dictionary describes the usage as “Now chiefly N. Amer. colloq.”

Oxford doesn’t have an entry for “plumb loco,” but it includes the phrase in an 1887 citation for the adjective “loco,” from Outing, an American monthly magazine: “You won’t be able to do nuthin’ with ’em, sir; they’ll go plumb loco.”

The OED says English borrowed the adjective “loco” in the mid-19th century directly from Spanish. It means mad, insane, or crazy in both languages. The dictionary describes the term as “colloq. orig. U.S. regional (west.).”

Oxford traces the adjective to earlier nouns in Spanish and Portuguese meaning madness, but the editors say the etymology is “uncertain and disputed” beyond that.

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Cop talk

Q: In Lyndsay Faye’s novel The Gods of Gotham, the words “cop” and “copper” are said to be derived from copper stars worn by New York City policemen in the 1840s. I always thought “cop” comes from “constable on patrol.”

A: We haven’t read The Gods of Gotham, a historical thriller set in 1845—the year the New York City Police Department was founded. And we could find only snippets of it online.

So we can’t comment on what Faye has—or hasn’t—written about the etymology of “cop” and “copper.”

But we can say that the noun “cop,” for a police officer, isn’t an acronym. And it’s not about copper buttons or badges, either.

As we wrote on our blog back in 2006, “cop” is short for an earlier noun, “copper,” meaning a person who seizes or nabs.

Both this word “copper” and its predecessor, the verb “cop” (to nab or capture), are thought to be derived from an Old French verb, caper, from the Latin capere, meaning to seize or take.

We also wrote about “cop” in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths. Here’s an excerpt:

“The most popular myth about the word is that it comes from the copper buttons on police uniforms. Another is that it comes from the copper badges worn by New York City police in the nineteenth century. Yet another suggests that ‘cop’ is an acronym for ‘constable on patrol’ or ‘chief of police’ or ‘custodian of the peace’ or some such phrase.

“In fact, cops were walking beats long before any of those phony acronyms arrived on the scene. And ‘cop’ has nothing to do with any metals, copper or otherwise, whether in buttons or badges. Metal buttons on police uniforms have tended to be brass, and relatively few badges have been copper.

“The best evidence, according to word detectives who have worked the case, is that the noun ‘cop’ comes from the verb ‘cop,’ which has meant to seize or nab since at least 1704. The verb in turn may be a variation of an even earlier one, ‘cap,’ which meant to arrest as far back as 1589 (think of the word ‘capture’).

“Etymologists say the noun ‘cop’ is short for ‘copper’ (one who cops criminals), which first appeared in an 1846 British court document. The clipped version, ‘cop,’ appeared thirteen years later in an American book about underworld slang.”

In the transcript of a May 11, 1846, criminal trial at the Old Bailey in London, a police sergeant testifies that “a woman screamed very load, ‘Jim, Jim, here comes the b—coppers,’ and at that moment the money was thrown out—I have heard the police called coppers before.”

As it turns out, the slang word “copper” apparently didn’t cross the Atlantic and appear in print in the US until 1859, 14 years after the establishment of the NYPD.

The earliest citations for “copper” and “cop” in the Oxford English Dictionary are from George Washington Matsell’s 1859 slang dictionary Vocabulum, or, The Rogue’s Lexicon.

We looked through the dictionary in Google Books and didn’t find separate entries for either “cop” or “copper.” But the two words showed up many times in the entries for other words. Here’s a typical example:

“COPPED. Arrested. ‘The knuck was copped to rights, a skin full of honey was found in his kick’s poke by the copper when he frisked him,’ [meaning that] the pickpocket was arrested, and when searched by the officer, a purse was found in his pantaloons pocket full of money.”

By the way, we’ve noticed from reviews of The Gods of Gotham that members of the NYPD are repeatedly referred to as “copper stars”—a usage that apparently didn’t exist at the time the book was set.

In searches of Google Books and Google News, we couldn’t find any 19th-century examples of the term being used for police officers.

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On “i.e.” versus “viz.”

Q: I came across the following on your blog: “But they had one obvious difference, i.e., their ears.” In my opinion, “i.e.” is not correct here—it should be “viz.” They are, admittedly, close in meaning, but as Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) says, “Care should be taken to distinguish viz. from i.e.”

A: Here we must disagree with you and, to some extent, with R. W. Burchfield, author of the latest edition of Fowler’s.

These abbreviations may not be identical, but the difference between them is so slight that it nearly vanishes on close examination. And the use of “viz.” in nonscholarly writing would stop readers in their tracks.

In fact, better writers don’t use either of these scholarly abbreviations, though we’ve occasionally slipped up on our blog. We used “i.e.” in that posting to explain how it differs from “e.g.”

As we wrote, “i.e.” is an abbreviation of “id est” (in Latin id est means “that is”).

In English, the Oxford English Dictionary says, the term means “that is to say” or “that is,” and is “used to introduce an explanation of a word or phrase.”

In the sentence you mention—“But they had one obvious difference, i.e., their ears”—the abbreviation is correctly used, according to the OED definition. It introduces an explanation of a phrase, “one obvious difference.”

The two standard dictionaries we rely on the most—Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.)—say “i.e.” means simply “that is.”

That other scholarly abbreviation, “viz.,” is short for “videlicet” (in Latin videlicet means “it may be seen”).

The original Latin word is composed of the stem of videre (“see”), plus licet (“it is permissible”). In medieval Latin, “z” was the usual contraction for et or -et, which explains the presence of “z” in the abbreviation “viz.”

In English, the OED says, “videlicet” (and its abbreviation “viz.”) means “that is to say,” “namely,” or “to wit.”

The term is used, Oxford adds, “to introduce an amplification, or more precise or explicit explanation, of a previous statement or word.”

The standard dictionaries give similar definitions for “viz.” Merriam-Webster’s gives “that is to say” or “namely,” while American Heritage gives “that is” or “namely.”

It seems to us that the difference between “i.e.” and “viz.” is extremely small, if it exists at all.

Judging from the OED descriptions, it would appear that “i.e.” further explicates a preceding word or phrase, while “viz.” is broader in that it can also explicate a preceding statement.

As you say, Fowler’s advises that care should be taken in distinguishing between them.

But Fowler’s itself doesn’t clearly distinguish between them. And its explanations don’t agree with those in the OED. Here’s what Fowler’s has to say on the subject:

● “i.e. means ‘that is to say,’ and introduces another way (more comprehensible to the reader, driving home the reader’s point better, or otherwise preferable) of putting what has already been said.” [Burchfield no doubt meant “the writer’s point.”]

● “As is suggested by its usual spoken substitute namely, viz. introduces especially the items that compose what has been expressed as a whole (For three good reasons, viz. 1 …, 2 …, 3 …) or a more particular statement of what has been vaguely described (My only means of earning, viz. my fiddle).”

As we said before, these abbreviations aren’t seen in the best writing.

Often no such introduction is needed (beyond perhaps a simple colon), and “i.e.” or “viz.” would merely add hot air.

If an introduction is needed, why not use plain English: “namely,” “that is,” “in other words,” or whatever else makes sense?

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) lists both “i.e.” and “viz.” among abbreviations and symbols “that are normally confined to bibliographic references, glossaries, and other scholarly apparatus.”

It’s been our experience that “i.e.” is sometimes seen in ordinary text or what the Chicago Manual calls “running text.”

But “viz.” is very uncommon in ordinary text; it would certainly startle the general reader.

In fact, it’s not even listed in the most recent printing of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.).

Besides its scholarly applications, “viz.” is found in judicial writing. It’s used in legal pleadings to mean “namely,” “that is,” “as follows,” and “to wit,” according to the Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute.

As for general writing, here’s what Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) says about “viz.”:

“The English-language equivalents are namely and that is, either of which is preferable. … How does one pronounce viz.? Preferably by saying ‘namely.’ ”

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Hear Pat on Iowa Public Radio

She’ll be on Talk of Iowa today from 10 to 11 AM Central time (11 to 12 Eastern) to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. A University of Iowa professor will join Pat to discuss how Watergate changed our language and our culture.

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The silo syndrome

Q: A recent article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle mentioned Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s efforts to “break down the silos” that have led to abuses in the New York State government. How is “silos” being used here?

A: Everyone, it seems, is blaming silos for management screw-ups these days, and we don’t mean the silos found on farms. In this case, “silo” is a business term that refers to a blinkered kind of management style.

Managers who work in a “silo” (or a “siloed” environment) operate in isolation, focusing strictly on their own narrow concerns and not sharing ideas with their peers.

Not many standard dictionaries have caught up with this use of “silo.” One of the few is the Compact Oxford English Dictionary Online, which defines the noun “silo” this way:

“A system, process, department, etc. that operates in isolation from others.” The example given: “It’s vital that team members step out of their silos and start working together.”

The dictionary also describes the use of “silo” as a modifier, using this example: “We have made significant strides in breaking down that silo mentality.”

Two very different articles that appeared early last month are excellent illustrations of how “silo” is being used these days.

An article in Billboard magazine, “7 Ways to Leverage Facebook,” contained this advice from Geoffrey Colon of Ogilvy & Mather:

“Whenever you can, always try to cross over to the physical realm. … Don’t silo yourself into building content just for Facebook. Use Facebook as a springboard to drive business results in the real world.”

And an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education includes this quote by Emilie M. Townes, the new dean of Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School:

“At Yale, every professional school is in its own silo, but at Vanderbilt they’ve broken down the silos, and I have more conversation partners not only internal to the divinity school but throughout the university.”

As you might suspect, this is a relatively young usage. The earliest example we’ve been able to find in online databases was published 21 years ago.

Both the noun and the adjective appeared in a long article in the journal Training & Development on Aug. 1, 1992. A management consultant, Geary Rummler, is quoted as saying this:

“The classic way to picture an organization is to show many independent functions, usually a hierarchy of boxes or circles. … The problem is that with this view, management begins to evolve as a set of independent functions. … All that, of course, leads to the phenomenon that Douglas Aircraft company calls ‘functional silos.’”

Later, the piece refers to the “silo syndrome.” Rummler himself uses the words “turfdom” and “vertical mindset” to refer to this management style.

He adds that what Douglas Aircraft called “silos” are called “chimneys,” “towers,” or “foxholes” by some of his other client companies. As we know by now, “silos” is the term that’s survived.

We found a scattering of usages in 1994, then the term began appearing with greater frequency. By 2000 this use of “silo” had gone mainstream. An article in Time magazine in December of that year included this sentence:

“As a result, isolated in their intellectual silos, scientists and their technological sidekicks literally ‘reduced’ human knowledge to myriad, mutually incomprehensible pinpoints of niche expertise.”

Now it looks as if non-agricultural “silos” are here to stay.

Our noun “silo” (the farmyard kind) was first recorded in writing in 1835. It originally meant “a pit or underground chamber used for the storage of grain, roots, etc.,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Later in the 19th century, “silo” also became a verb meaning to store in a silo. And silos became the familiar cylindrical structures that are so much a part of rural landscapes.  Here are some illustrative OED citations:

1904: “The first silos were simply pits dug in the ground…. Since about 1875 silos of stone, brick and wood have come into use.” (From the Farmer’s Cyclopedia of  Agriculture by Earley V. Wilcox & Clarence B. Smith.)

1948: “The silos stood up tall and straight, grey against the dazzling sky. A line of wheat-laden vehicles moved slowly up towards the hopper.” (From the periodical Coast to Coast: Australian Stories.)

In the 1950s, “silo” acquired another (and less bucolic) meaning—the underground housing for a guided missile.

The OED’s earliest example is from a 1958 issue of the New York Times: “The system will be protected against neutralization in an enemy attack because the missiles will be installed in concrete-lined underground silos.”

English adopted “silo” from the Spanish silo in the 19th century. But there’s some disagreement about its earlier etymology.

The OED says the Spanish silo originally came from classical words meaning a pit for storing grain—sirus in Latin and siros in Greek.

But the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology doubts that origin, since “the change from r to l in Spanish is phonetically abnormal.”

Furthermore, Chambers says, the Greek siros was “a rare foreign term” peculiar to Asia Minor and “not likely to emerge in Castilian Spain.”

Instead, the dictionary says the Spanish silo is “probably of pre-Roman origin and from the same source as Basque zilo, zulo dugout, with the basic meaning of a cave or shelter for keeping grain.”

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Historic vs. historical: A history

Q: A headline on the CBC website: “23 historical black Canadians you should know.” Wouldn’t “historic” be more accurate?

A: We think that headline writer could justifiably have used either “historical” or “historic.”

The article on the CBCnews website referred to “23 black Canadians who made major contributions to Canada’s culture and legacy.”

As we’ve written before on our blog, “historical” is generally used to mean having to do with history or the past. And “historic” is generally used to mean important in history.

These black Canadians were all real people who lived in the past, so they can be called “historical” figures. They were also important in the past, so they were “historic” figures as well.

But even back in 2006, when we wrote that post, the two terms were often used interchangeably.

The then-current fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language accepted “historical” as a secondary meaning of “historic,” and the new fifth edition does too.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) agrees. Both dictionaries say that either “historic” or “historical” can be used to mean famous or important in history. So the headline writer could have meant “historical” in this sense.

In fact, the difference between these words isn’t nearly as pronounced as some people think. Here’s what Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has to say on the subject:

“Historic and historical are simply variants. Over the course of two or three hundred years of use, they have tended to diverge somewhat.”

Evidence in the Oxford English Dictionary supports this view.

The first on the scene was “historical.” In the mid-16th century, the OED says, it meant “belonging to, constituting, or of the nature of history; in accordance with history.”

The adjective “historic” showed up in writing a little later, in the late 16th century, when its meaning was much the same as “historical.”

The OED says it originally meant “relating to history; concerned with past events.” So the two words were more or less synonymous.

Then in the 18th century, both words took on an additional meaning—important or famous in history.

And ever since, according to OED citations, writers have used both “historic” and “historical” in two senses: relating to history and famous in history.

But, as the Merriam-Webster’s usage guide points out, preferences have emerged and the two words have “tended to diverge.” So how are these words used today?

“Historical is the usual choice for the broad and general uses relating to history,” the usage guide says. “Historic is most commonly used for something famous or important in history.”

Merriam-Webster‘s conclusion: “We would suggest that you go along with the general trend.”

Although a case can be made for using the two words interchangeably, we use them the way M-W suggests.

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Making sense

Q: Your posting about “make sure” has a raised a question in my mind. We seem to use “make” differently. We can say, “I made sure my students thought about that.” But we have to say, “I made my students think about that.” Why is it that we can use “thought” in the first example, but we have to use “think” in the second?

A: The verb “make” and the verbal phrase “make sure” illustrate two different grammatical constructions.

When used in this sense, “make sure” can be followed by verbs in any form, but “make” alone is always followed by a verb in the infinitive.

This explains why your second sentence has the past tense of “make” followed by an object (“my students”) plus an infinitive (“think”).

The Oxford English Dictionary says the verb “make” here means “to cause (a person or thing) to do something.”

This use of “make,” as the OED notes, is seen in such familiar constructions as “don’t make me laugh,” “to make (one’s) mouth water,” and “to make (one) think.”

When “make” is used this way, the second verb remains in the infinitive, even when “make” shifts from tense to tense: “we made them think” … “we will make them think” … “we would have made them think,” and so on.

That’s why you never see a construction like “we made them thought.” And that’s why this use of “make” is grammatically different from “make sure,” which doesn’t lock in the form or tense of the verb (or verbs) that follow.

In your first sentence, the verbal phrase “made sure” is followed by a clause: “my students thought about that.”

As the OED says, this sense of “make sure” means “to make something certain as a fact … to preclude risk of error; to ascertain,” and it can be followed either by a clause or by “of.”

But unlike the use of “make” we described above, “make sure” can be followed by verbs in any tense. The form isn’t set in stone.

There are many possible constructions: “I make sure my students think about that” … “I’ll make sure my students will think about that”… “I made sure my students would think about that” … and so on.

The verb “make,” meaning to construct something, first showed up in early Old English in the writings of Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons and Anglo-Saxons, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Although the OED has several Old English citations, John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says “make” wasn’t a particularly common verb in Anglo-Saxon times.

Ayto writes that gewyrcan, the Old English ancestor of the modern word “work,” was “the most usual way of expressing the notion ‘make.’ ”

It wasn’t until the Middle English period (from the late 12th to the late 15th centuries) that the use of “make” became common, according to the Dictionary of Word Origins.

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Contrite and sarcastic?

Q: I recently came across a complaint on the Web about a “contrite and sarcastic” worker at a pizza place. I don’t see how someone can be both contrite and sarcastic. Have you noticed this usage? Can you shed any light on it?

A: It’s difficult to imagine someone who’s both “contrite” and “sarcastic,” at least not at the same time, since those words describe conflicting attitudes.

Someone who’s “contrite” is sorry, and feels regret or sadness about an offense. But someone who’s “sarcastic” is expressing contempt or ridicule.

A Google search did turn up a handful of instances in which writers mistakenly combined “contrite” and “sarcastic.” All the examples seemed to come from blogs, discussion groups, or social networks.

For example, a contributor to a forum about video-game websites was described as “abusive, contrite, sarcastic and just plain mean.”

A contributor to a scuba-diving discussion group wrote, “So I hope you do not take my responses as contrite, sarcastic, flip or disrespectful.”

And a political tweet accused Hillary Clinton of offering “a contrite, sarcastic response” when asked why she didn’t make the rounds more on the Sunday talk shows.

Huh? The use of “sarcastic” is understandable, since these remarks were generally negative. But “contrite” is definitely out of place.

Perhaps these writers are confusing “contrite” with some other word, but what could it be? “Contemptuous” … “contentious” … “contrary”?

A more likely explanation is that they simply don’t know what “contrite” means, and are using it to mean something like rude or dismissive or blunt. Everyone who writes for public consumption should have access to a standard dictionary!

“Contrite,” as we indicated above, is far from rude. The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s been used by writers since the 14th century, when it had a religious flavor.

The original meaning was “crushed or broken in spirit by a sense of sin, and so brought to complete penitence.”

This was a figurative adaptation of the word’s Latin ancestor. As the OED explains, the Latin adjective contritus means bruised or crushed, and comes from the verb conterere (to rub or grind together).

In English, the word still means what it meant almost 700 years ago, though it has a secular sense as well. Here are some examples from famous sources, courtesy of the OED:

“Create and make in vs newe and contrite heartes.” (From The Book of Common Prayer, 1549.)

“Her contrite sighes vnto the clouds bequeathed / Her winged sprite.” (From Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece, 1594.)

“With our sighs … sent from hearts contrite, in sign / Of sorrow unfeign’d, and humiliation meek.” (From Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1667.)

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Are you a Japanophone? はい

Q: Is there an English word to describe a Japanese-speaker? Perhaps a something-phone, along the lines of “Anglophone” or “Francophone”?

A: We’ve seen the words “Japanophone” and “Nippophone” (either uppercase or lowercase) used on the Internet to describe a speaker of Japanese.

The preferred term, by a wide margin, appears to be “Japanophone.” The also-ran, “Nippophone,” shows up on French websites more than on English-language sites.

You won’t find either term in standard English dictionaries, however. We checked a half-dozen dictionaries in the US and the UK.

Some people obviously feel a need for such a word, so they’re creating one—or in this case two.

There are certainly precedents, as you’ve pointed out, for using the word element “-phone,” from the Greek term for “sound,” to create a noun referring to the speaker of a specific language.

The most familiar examples are “Anglophone” and “Francophone,” for speakers of English and French. (American dictionaries tend to capitalize the two words while British dictionaries tend to lowercase them.)

In the neologisms we’ve seen online, people are adding “-phone” to versions of “Japan” or “Nippon” to mean a speaker of Japanese.

Interestingly, both the English and Japanese names for the country are ultimately derived from an old Chinese phrase meaning “origin of the sun.” Why? Because the sun rose to the east of China, where Japan was located.

By the way, the terms “Anglophone” and “Francophone” are relatively new, first recorded in English in the early 20th century, according to their entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest examples of each are from the same book, The Races of Man (1900), by the anthropologist Joseph Deniker: “In Canada two-thirds of the white population are Anglophones, and the rest Francophones.”

Deniker’s book appeared in French and in an English translation the same year. The French nouns anglophone and francophone had appeared earlier, in 1894, and the French adjective francophone in 1880.

Here’s a more recent example using both words, from the Canadian magazine Saturday Night (1967):

“It is because our fizzy Canadian cocktail has intoxicating qualities, because a dazzling future lies in wait for francophones and anglophones … that we should hold together, along with the valuable New Canadians.”

Other “-phone” words used in this sense are much less common, and few are recognized in dictionaries. The OED does have an entry for the noun “Russophone” (which it capitalizes), from 1899, for a speaker of Russian.

Oxford also has an entry for an adjective, “lusophone,” meaning Portuguese-speaking, but not for a noun. The usage is dated from 1974. (The “luso-” part is from “Lusitania,” an old Latin name for Portugal.)

As for other such words, we’ve found examples of “hispanophone” and “italophone” in literary usage, but generally not as nouns. They’re usually adjectives referring to Spanish and Italian literature (as in “hispanophone proverbs,” “italophone writings,” etc.).

We’ve also found many examples—from books, newspapers, and the Internet—for the noun “slavophone” used in reference to Greeks or ethnic Greeks who speak a Slavic language. But the usage is controversial and caught up in Balkan politics.

It’s easy to invent these words, but some of them are bound to remain oddities, like “netherlandophone.” The simple phrase “Dutch speaker” does the job very well.

As for that Japanese word in our headline, it’s pronounced hai and it means yes.

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The earliest Johnny-come-lately

 

Q: Do you guys have any idea who the “Johnny” is in “Johnny-come-lately”?

A: The phrase “Johnny-come-lately” originated as a 19th-century American expression for a newcomer or a novice. It’s now also used for an upstart, a late adherent to a trend or cause, and someone who’s late for an event.

There’s no particular significance in the use of the name “Johnny” here.

Since the 17th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this familiar diminutive of “John” has been used “humorously or contemptuously” to mean “a fellow, chap.”

For example, the OED cites Allan Ramsay’s poem And I’ll Awa’ to Bonny Tweedside (1724), in which Edinburgh is described as a place “Where she that’s bonny / May catch a Johny.”

Over the years, both in the US and in the UK, people have used the name “Johnny” as a generic term for a guy. (We wrote blog postings in 2007 and 2009 about a similar usage, “Tom, Dick, and Harry.”)

This generic use of “Johnny” is found in many familiar phrases whose origins are explained in the OED.

For example, “Johnny Reb,” a Northern term for a Confederate soldier, emerged during the American Civil War.

And “Johnny-on-the-spot,” for someone who’s always ready and available when needed, was first recorded in an American novel, Artie (1896), by George Ade.

In Britain, “Johnny raw” and “Johnny Newcome” were early 19th-century phrases for a rookie, a newcomer, or a raw recruit. Those were at least the spiritual forerunners of the American phrase “Johnny-come-lately.”

OED citations indicate that “Johnny-come-lately” first appeared in The Adventures of Harry Franco (1839), a humorous novel by Charles Frederick Briggs, a journalist and former sailor.

Here’s the quotation from Briggs’s novel: “ ‘But it’s Johnny Comelately, aint it, you?’ said a young mizzen topman.”

(Briggs’s claim to fame is that he gave Edgar Allan Poe a job on his short-lived magazine, the Broadway Journal, in 1845.)

The phrase may have originated in America but it didn’t stay there.

One OED citation is from the Christchurch Press in New Zealand, which offered this definition for its readers in 1933: “Johnny-come-lately, nickname for a cowboy or any newly-joined hand or recent immigrant.”

Finally, this 1972 example is from the former BBC publication The Listener, in a reference to the state of Utah: “Here man himself is a Johnny-come-lately.”

[Update, Jan. 19, 2015. A reader asks how to form the plural of “Johnny-come-lately.” All the standard dictionaries we’ve checked say that both “Johnny-come-latelies” and “Johnnies-come-lately” are OK. We like “Johnny-come-latelies.”]

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Whether … or not?

Q: When you use “whether,” do you need “or not”? I find “whether” being used alone for “if,” and I wonder what is correct.

A: In the phrase “whether or not,” the “or not” is often optional. When the choice is up to you, you can generally use either “whether” or “if.”

But you definitely need “or not” when you mean “regardless of whether,” as in, “I’m out of here whether you like it or not!”

Pat discusses this in her grammar and usage book Woe Is I. Here’s the passage:

“When you’re talking about a choice between alternatives, use whether: Richie didn’t know whether he should wear the blue suit or the green one. The giveaway is the presence of or between the alternatives. But when there’s a whether or not choice (Richie wondered whether or not he should wear his green checked suit), you can usually drop the or not and use either whether or if: Richie wondered if [or whether] he should wear his green checked suit. You’ll need or not, however, if your meaning is ‘regardless of whether’: Richie wanted to wear the green one, whether it had a gravy stain or not. (Or, if you prefer, whether or not it had a gravy stain.)”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has some very good advice: “Of course, the simplest way to determine whether the or not can be omitted is to see if the sentence still makes sense without it.”

In case you’re interested, our word “whether” developed from the Old English term hwæther, meaning which of the two. (We’ve used “th” here to represent the letter thorn.)

The Old English term was derived from two prehistoric Germanic roots: khwa- or khwe- (source of such English words as “what” and “who”) and –theraz (a source of “other”), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.  

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Noun entities

Q: One of my pet peeves is the use of a verb in place of a noun, a practice I often see in the NY Times. Examples: a letter to the editor refers to somebody’s “physical or mental dissolve” … a book review speaks of “a good read” … a secret revelation in a movie is called “the reveal.” You’ll probably tell me that this use of “reveal” dates back to the Elizabethan era. If so, I’ll take your word for it, but it still sounds illiterate to me.

A: The use of “dissolve” to mean a mental or physical decline is a new one on us. But as you probably know, the use of “dissolve” as a noun is common in cinematography. In show biz, a “dissolve” is a sequence in which one scene fades out as the next fades in.

The noun “dissolve” in the motion picture sense, first recorded in 1918, was adapted from a similar use of the verb in 1912. The original verb, from the Latin dissolvere, first appeared in the 14th century.

We’ve found only isolated examples of the noun “dissolve” used as in that letter to the editor. But it’s not an inappropriate metaphor—aging as the Great Dissolve. (It seems better than “dissolution,” which implies a moral disintegration as well.)

At any rate, this practice of adapting verbs for use as nouns is nothing new. For example, we wrote blog entries last year on the nouns “remit” and “hit,” both derived from the earlier verbs.

We’ve also written a more general blog entry on the process, known as “conversion,” whereby one part of speech begins functioning as another:

In that post, we gave several examples of nouns adapted from earlier verbs, as in “a winning run,” “a long walk,” “a constant worry,” “take a call,” “a vicious attack.”

We might have added “a good read,” a usage you ask about. This is an example of a noun that was adapted from the verb a very long time ago, subsequently fell out of use, and finally was reinvented centuries later.

Let’s start with the verb. As we’ve said before on our blog, to “read” once meant more than to peruse written words.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary and other sources, the Old English verb rædan originally meant many other things besides “to scan or study writing.”

It also meant to consider, interpret, discern, guess, discover, expound the meaning (of a riddle, say, or an omen), and so on.

The noun “read,” derived from the verb, also dates back to Old English (ræde). In its earliest uses, the OED says, it meant “an act of reading aloud” or “a lesson,” a usage that survived into the 1300s and then became obsolete.

Half a millennium later, in the 19th century, another noun “read” came into being: “an act of reading or perusing written matter; a spell of reading,” in the words of the OED.

Oxford’s earliest example is from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond (1838): “When I arrived and took … my first read of the newspaper.”

Charles Darwin used the same noun in a letter written in 1862: “I have just finished, after several reads, your paper.”

Such usages led to a similar sense of the word, described in the OED as “something for reading (usually with modifying word, as good, bad, etc., indicating its value as a source of entertainment or information).”

The word was used this way in a British literary magazine, John o’ London’s Weekly, in 1961: “My Friend Sandy can be hugely recommended … as a pleasantly light, bright sophisticated read.”

Another example the OED cites is also from the British press. It appeared in The Independent on Sunday in 2002: “This is an authentic, funny, edgy read.”

So “read” was used in that Times book review in a familiar and well-established sense. It’s recognized in standard dictionaries as well as the OED.

You also mention the noun “reveal,” which does indeed date from the Elizabethan era. When first recorded in the late 1500s, it meant “an act of revealing something; a revelation; a disclosure; an unveiling,” the OED says.

This meaning is still seen today. For example, the OED cites this passage from an essay William Goldman wrote in 1997 about his screenplay for the movie Maverick:

“This is how the concluding moments read in rehearsal, starting with the reveal of the spade ace as the next card.” (We’ve expanded the citation to provide more context.)

But the sense of “reveal” that you’re talking about is somewhat different. The OED describes this noun as a term in broadcasting and advertising to mean “a final revelation of something previously kept from an audience, a participant in a programme, etc.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from Allen Funt’s book Eavesdropper at Large (1952): “This is the process we call ‘the reveal’—the point, toward the end of each candid portrait, where we reveal to the subject what we’ve been doing.”

Funt was the creator of TV’s Candid Camera, which he originated on radio in the 1940s as Candid Microphone. This 1975 OED citation, from the New York Times, is another reference to him:

“But now the final coup, Allen’s trademark—the ‘reveal.’ ‘Madame, did you know that at this moment you are on nationwide TV?’ ”

We’ll give one more example, from Gwendolyn A. Foster’s Class-passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture (2005):

“After a barrage of commercials, we are presented with what the show describes as ‘the reveal,’ the first view of her face.”

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: inspired by a puff of white smoke from the Vatican, Pat will discuss communicating through smoke signals. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.

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A blizzard of etymology

Q: I read the other day that the term “blizzard” was first used in Estherville, Iowa. I grew up in northern Iowa, not far from Estherville, and experienced my share of blizzards, but I’d never heard this. Is it true?

A: Several towns in the upper Midwest—Marshall, Minnesota; Sturgis and Vermillion, South Dakota; and Spencer and Estherville, Iowa—have been mentioned over the years as the source of the word “blizzard.”

As a Midwesterner who’s experienced stormy winters, you won’t be surprised to hear this. But did the word really originate in your neck of the woods?

Well, Estherville can indeed take credit for the first use of “blizzard” in reference to a severe snowstorm, but the term had been around for dozens of years in another sense.

Allen Walker Read, a Columbia University etymologist and lexicographer who died in 2002, wrote two papers in the journal American Speech about his efforts to track down the roots of the word “blizzard.”

In an article published in February 1928, Read says the earliest example of the usage he found was from the April 23, 1870, issue of the Northern Vindicator, a newspaper in Estherville serving Emmet County in northwest Iowa. (Someone should write an article about the names of small-town newspapers.)

That issue of the Vindicator debunked a “glowing account” in another newspaper, the Algona Upper Des Moines, that an Emmet County resident was endangered by a severe storm that had struck the Midwest on March 14-16, 1870:

“Campbell has had too much experience with northwestern ‘blizards’ to be caught in such a trap, in order to make sensational paragraphs for the Upper Des Moines.”

A week later, on April 30, 1870, the Vindicator spelled “blizzard” with a double “z.” Under the headline “Man Frozen at Okoboji, Iowa,” an article says:

“Dr. Ballard who has just returned from a visit to the unfortunate victim of the March ‘blizzard’ reports that his patient is rapidly improving.”

In both of these articles, the word is enclosed in quotation marks, suggesting that the usage was relatively new or considered colloquial.

A couple of weeks later, in its May 14, 1870, issue, the newspaper endorsed a proposal to rename a local baseball team as “the Northern Blizzards”:

“We confess to a certain liking for it, because it is at once startling, curious and peculiarly suggestive of the furious and all victorious tempests which are experienced in this northwestern clime.”

Read notes in American Speech that O. C. Bates, the editor of the Northern Vindicator in 1870, had a fondness for coining new words, including “weatherist,” “baseballism,” and “lollygagging.”

Did he coin “blizzard”? From the available evidence, it’s likely that he either coined it or popularized it.

Read cites several 19th-century reports that suggest the term may have been in use in Estherville before the Northern Vindicator published it.

One account, for example, says the term “blizzard” was coined by a local character in Estherville who was known as Lightning Ellis and “was given to drollery and quaint expressions.”

In a February 1930 article in American Speech, Read discounts reports that the term originated elsewhere in the Midwest or even in Texas. He cites the reports as examples of “what legendary material can … grow up around a word.”

As for the earlier incarnation of “blizzard,” the term showed up for the first time in the Virginia Literary Museum, a weekly journal published at the University of Virginia.

Robley Dunglison, a co-editor of the journal, included it in a list of Americanisms published in 1829: “Blizzard, a violent blow, perhaps from blitz (German: lightning).”

Davy Crockett, in his 1834 memoir, An Account of Colonel Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East, used the term figuratively to mean a burst of speech:

“A gentleman at dinner asked me for a toast; and supposing he meant to have some fun at my expense, I concluded to go ahead, and give him and his likes a blizzard.”

Is the English word derived from the German blitz, as Dunglison and others have suggested?

The Oxford English Dictionary apparently thinks not. It doesn’t mention blitz and debunks speculation that the French blesser (to wound) may be the source.

The OED suggests instead that “blizzard” is “probably more or less onomatopoeic; suggestive words are blow, blast, blister, bluster.”

Oxford defines the term in its original sense as “a sharp blow or knock; a shot. Also fig. U.S.”

In his February 1930 article, Read notes the appearance of the word “blizz” in a weather sense in a May 31, 1770, entry in the diary of Col. Landon Carter: “At last a mighty blizz of rain.” He cites this usage as a “semantic shift in the very process of making.”

In the same article Read notes examples of the surname “Blizzard” (or “Blizard”) dating back to the mid-17th century. In 1658, one citation reports, “a Capt. Charles Blizard left this country for Antigua.”

However, Read seems skeptical about the relevance of the surname “to the semantics of the content word blizzard.”

Did the original sense of “blizzard” as a sharp blow or a shot lead to the use of the word to mean a severe storm?

The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word History notes the early evolution of the term and concludes:

“From a shotgun blast to a verbal blast to a wintry blast would seem to be a reasonable enough development, but we cannot demonstrate it.”

We can’t prove it either, but we think that’s a reasonable explanation.

And while we’re on the subject of extreme-weather terms coined in Iowa, here’s another one: “derecho.”

As we wrote on our blog last August, it was created by a University of Iowa professor in the late 19th century to describe a variety of severe thunderstorm.

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“Inalienable” or “unalienable”?

Q: When President Obama quoted from the Declaration of Independence in his Inaugural Address, he used the word “unalienable.” But I’ve also seen the word as “inalienable.” Which is correct English? Which is actually in the Declaration?

A: Both “inalienable” and “unalienable” are legitimate English words, and they have identical meanings.

The word in the final version of the Declaration of Independence is “unalienable,” though it’s “inalienable” in earlier versions of the document. Here’s the word in context:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

You can see an image of the final version on the National Archives page for the Declaration. Click “read transcript” to see a copy in ordinary print.

President Obama has used both words over the years. In his Inaugural Address on Jan 21, 2013, he referred to “unalienable rights,” but in remarks about gun violence on Jan 16, 2013, he used the phrase “inalienable rights.”

Although both words are correct, the one we see most often now is “inalienable.” And that’s the word some dictionaries seem to prefer.

For example, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has an entry for “inalienable” (defined as “incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred”). But under “unalienable,” the dictionary simply says it means “inalienable.” 

Many other Americans have puzzled over the years about which word is “correct” and which one actually appears in the Declaration. The nonprofit Independence Hall Association, based in Philadelphia, has a page devoted to this question on its website.

As you’ll see, the site has photocopies of the various drafts of the Declaration, some with “inalienable” (in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting) and some with “unalienable” (in John Adams’s).

The website quotes a footnote from Carl Lotus Becker’s The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922):

“The Rough Draft reads ‘[inherent &] inalienable.’ There is no indication that Congress changed ‘inalienable’ to ‘unalienable’; but the latter form appears in the text in the rough Journal, in the corrected Journal, and in the parchment copy. John Adams, in making his copy of the Rough Draft, wrote ‘unalienable.’ Adams was one of the committee which supervised the printing of the text adopted by Congress, and it may have been at his suggestion that the change was made in printing. ‘Unalienable’ may have been the more customary form in the eighteenth century.”

As we said, both words are legitimate. They’ve been part of the language since the early 17th century.

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You better believe it

Q: I’m Australian, and an American friend often says things like “I better not forget it” instead of “I’d better not forget it.” Is this correct? Is it a case of US usage differing from UK/Australian usage?

A: The idiomatic phrase “had better” (as in “I had better study” or “We’d better go”) is a venerable usage with roots far back in Old English.

The shortened form “better” (as in “I better study” or “We better go”) dates from the 1830s and is used informally in both British and American English.

In fact, Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) says it’s not unheard of in your neck of the woods: “In practice this use of an unsupported better is much more common in North America, Australia, and NZ than in Britain.”

Using “better” by itself is fine except in formal English. “In a wide range of informal circumstances (but never in formal contexts) the had or ’d can be dispensed with,” Fowler’s says.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage calls “had better” a standard English idiom and agrees with Fowler’s that “better,” when used alone in this sense, “is not found in very formal surroundings.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for the construction without “had” is from a pseudonymous letter to a newspaper by “Major Jack Downing”:

“My clothes had got so shabby, I thought I better hire out a few days and get slicked up a little.” (The letter was published in a book in 1834 but was written in 1831.)

The OED says the abbreviated usage originated in the US, and labels it a colloquialism. But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) lists it without reservations.

The Merriam-Webster’s editors give the example “you better hurry,” and says “better” in this sense is a “verbal auxiliary.”

It should be noted that even the full phrase, “had better,” was criticized by some in the 19th century on the ground that it was illogical and couldn’t be parsed.

An 1897 issue of the Ohio Educational Monthly says many teachers found “had better” and other idioms “very difficult to dispose of grammatically.”

“Because some teachers do not understand how to dispose of them, they teach that they are incorrect,” the monthly adds. “They insist upon changing ‘had better’ to ‘would better.’ ”

In other words, the schoolmasters condemned what they couldn’t understand, and offered a replacement that was even harder to justify.

Even the poet Robert Browning disgraced himself here. In early editions of his dramatic poem Pippa Passes, first published in 1841, the final scene has the line “I had better not.” In later editions, Browning changed the line to “I would better not.”

According to William J. Rolfe and Heloise E. Hersey, who edited an 1886 edition of Select Poems of Robert Browning, the poet took a dislike to “the good old English form ‘had better.’ ”

Why? Because he mistook the “I’d” in “I’d better” as a contraction of “I would” instead of “I had.”

Browning once explained in a letter that he was repudiating “the slovenly I had for I’d, instead of the proper I would,” on the advice of his friend Walter Savage Landor, who hotly criticized many well-known English idioms.

As Rolfe and Hersey write in a footnote: “This is essentially the familiar grammar-monger’s objection to had better, had rather, had as lief, etc., that they ‘cannot be parsed’—which is true of many another well-established idiom, and merely shows that the ‘parsers’ have something yet to learn.”

A look at the history of “had better” helps to illuminate its meaning.

The idiom was first recorded in writing in the 10th century, according to the OED.

The original form was “were better,” and it was used with object (or, more properly at that time, dative) pronouns: “him,” “me,” “us,” and so on.

As the OED explains, the phrase me were betere meant “it would be more advantageous for me,” and him wære betere meant “it would be better for him.”

The OED’s earliest example in writing is from a collection known as the Blickling Homilies (971): “Him wære betere thæt he næfre geboren nære.” (“Better it were for him never to have been born.”)

During the Middle English period, the pronouns began changing into the nominative (“he were better,” “I were better,” etc).

And finally, beginning in the 16th century, “were better” gave way to the modern “had better.” As the OED says, “I had better = I should have or hold it better, to do, etc.”

Oxford’s earliest example is from Nicholas Udall’s Thersytes, a farce that some scholars date to 1537: “They had better haue sette me an errande at Rome.”

The OED also cites this line from a letter written by Sir John Harington in the early 1600s: “Who livethe for ease had better live awaie [from Court].”

Historical note: Harington was a courtier to Elizabeth I, and one of his claims to fame is that he designed Britain’s first flushable toilet, which he installed in his manor house in Somerset. He included an image in a work he wrote on the subject.

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Invasion of the brainworms

Q: During the college football bowls, an advertiser proclaimed that “by the end of this game, you or your company can have its own [x].” That sentence is now a worm in my brain. Should “its” have been “your”? Help!

A: When a compound subject is joined by “or” or “nor,” the verb agrees with the part that’s closer (“Cookies or cake is fine” … “Cake or cookies are fine”).

The same is true of any accompanying possessive pronoun (“Cookies or cake has its uses” … “Cake or cookies have their uses”). Take your cue from the part of the subject that’s nearer the verb.

But correct or not, this rule of subject-verb agreement can lead to extremely awkward sentences.

If the problem is that one part of the subject is singular and the other plural (as in the examples above), it often pays to put the plural part last: “Cake or cookies have their uses.”

This solution won’t give anybody a brainworm, because despite the “or” there’s a notion of plurality in that kind of sentence.

To use another example, it may be correct to write, “Neither they nor she has paid her tab.” But it sounds better to turn the subject around: “Neither she nor they have paid their tab.”

The problem isn’t as easy to fix when a compound consists of a “you” and an “it.” Technically, that advertiser was correct: “By the end of this game, you or your company can have its own [x].” But ouch!

And turning the subject around doesn’t help: “your company or you can have your own [x].” Ouch again!

Any sentence that leaves a worm in your brain should be recast, even if it’s written by the rules. There’s always a better way.

For example, the advertiser could have said, “ By the end of this game, you or your company can have an all new, one-of-a kind [x].”

Speaking of brainworms, you don’t hear the usage much nowadays, except in zoology, where the term “brainworm” refers to a parasitic roundworm that infects the brains of deer, moose, and other large hoofed animals.

However, the term has been used figuratively since the early 1600s to describe an imaginative worm infecting the brain, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s an example from Antiquity Revived, a 1693 religious tract: “Which undutiful and turbulent Allegation has not seldom created such a restless Brain-worm in the noddles of the multitude.”

The latest OED citation for the figurative use is from Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, a 2007 book in which Oliver Sacks discusses the earworms set off by movie, TV, and advertising music:

“This is not coincidental, for such music is designed, in the terms of the music industry, to ‘hook’ the listener, to be ‘catchy’ or ‘sticky,’ to bore its way, like an earwig, into the ear or mind; hence the term ‘earworms’—though one might be inclined to call them ‘brainworms’ instead.”

We hope this helps you get rid of that brainworm of yours.

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Why “won’t” isn’t “willn’t”

Q: I was having a conversation with one of my co-workers about “won’t” and grabbed my office copy of Woe Is I to resolve the issue, only to find (or fail to find) that the use of this word is not explained in the book. Can you render an opinion as to its acceptability?

A: “Won’t” is a perfectly acceptable contraction of “will” and “not.” However, it’s an odd bird that’s been condemned at times for not looking quite like other contractions.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage describes it as “one of the most irregular looking of the negative contractions that came into popular use during the 17th century.” Others include “don’t,” “han’t,” “shan’t,” and “an’t” (an early form of “ain’t”).

Why, you may ask, do we contract “will” and “not” as “won’t” instead of “willn’t”? Here’s Merriam-Webster’s explanation:

“Won’t was shortened from early wonnot, which in turn was formed from woll (or wol), a variant form of will, and not.”

The M-W editors give early examples of “won’t” from several Restoration comedies, beginning with Thomas Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers (1668): “No, no, that won’t do.” 

By the way, the verb “will” has been spelled all sorts of ways since first showing up as wyllan around 1,000 in Aelfric’s Grammar, an Old English introduction to Latin grammar.

The Oxford English Dictionary has many Middle English examples of the wole or wol spelling dating back to the 1200s.

So etymologically, there’s a case to be made for contracting “will” and “not” as “won’t.” Nevertheless, some language commentators have grumbled about the usage.

Joseph Addison, for example, complained in a 1711 issue of the Spectator that “won’t” and other contractions had “untuned our language, and clogged it with consonants.”

“Won’t,” in particular, “seems to have been under something of a cloud, as far as the right-thinkers were concerned, for more than a century afterward,” Merriam-Webster’s says.

“This did not, of course, interfere with its employment,” the usage guide adds.

It was popular enough, M-W says, “to enjoy the distinction of being damned in the same breadth as ain’t in an address delivered before Newburyport (Mass.) Female High School in December 1846.”

Both “won’t” and “ain’t” were condemned by the Newburyport speaker as “absolutely vulgar.”

“How won’t eventually escaped the odium that still clings to ain’t is a mystery,” M-W Usage says, “but today it is entirely acceptable.”

Of course a few sticklers still feel that all contractions aren’t quite quite. Well, we beg to differ. As we’ve written on the blog, contractions are impeccably good English.

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Zero-sum games

Q: I see references to both “zero-sum games” and “zero-sum gains” on the Internet. Which is correct?

A: The term “zero sum” is widely misunderstood as meaning that nobody wins—or perhaps that nobody loses. In fact it means quite the opposite.

In any competitive situation, one side can’t win unless the other loses. “Zero-sum” means that when the losses are subtracted from the gains, the sum is zero.

The adjective “zero-sum” originated in the field of game theory in the mid-1940s, and it’s still commonly used to modify the word “game.” But “zero-sum” is also used to modify all kinds of nouns and to describe a wide variety of situations.

It would be inappropriate, however, to use it in the phrase “zero-sum gain.” That’s because “zero-sum” implies an equal balance between gain and loss.

We suspect that people are simply misunderstanding the phrase and hearing “gain” instead of “game.”

You’re right, though, that there’s a lot of zero-sum gaining on the Web. We got nearly 200,000 hits when we googled “zero-sum gain.” But we had nearly ten times as many hits for “zero-sum game.”

In game theory, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the adjective “zero-sum” is “applied to a game in which the sum of the winnings of all the players is always zero.”

In other words, the losses offset the gains, and the sum of losses and gains is zero.

But “zero-sum” is also used, the OED explains, to denote “any situation in which advantage to one participant necessarily leads to disadvantage to one or more of the others.”

So, for example, in “zero-sum diplomacy,” both sides can’t be winners.

The adjective was first used, according to OED citations, in John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944):

“An important viewpoint in classifying games is this: Is the sum of all payments received by all players (at the end of the game) always zero; or is this not the case? … We shall call games of the first mentioned type zero-sum games.”

Here are a few more of the quotations cited in the OED:

“Perhaps the contestants in most important games nowadays (from labour disputes … to international diplomacy) too readily regard their games as zero-sum.” (From Stafford Beer’s book Decision and Control, 1966.)

“Everybody can win. Manufacturing is not a zero-sum game.” (A quote by L. B. Archer, from Gordon Wills and Ronald Yearsley’s Handbook of Management Technology, 1967.)

“C. Wright Mills … used a zero-sum conception of power (i.e., the more one person had the less was available to others).” (From the Times Literary Supplement, 1971.)

“We live in a zero-sum world.” (From the former BBC magazine The Listener, 1983.)

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A noun for being upside down

Q: Why is there no word that describes the state of being upside down?

A: There’s a hyphenated word that may be what you’re looking for. It’s a noun, “upside-downism” (what else?), and the Oxford English Dictionary has exactly one citation for its use.

The word appeared in a book called The Oxonian in Iceland (1861), a travel book by Frederick Metcalfe about a trip taken in the summer of 1860.

We’ll expand the OED citation to provide some context. Here’s Metcalfe, describing a horseback ride through a volcanic region known as a “hraun” (Icelandic for “lava”):

“It was a ruin indeed, the abomination of desolation; as if the elements of some earlier world had melted with fervent heat; and as they cooled had burst asunder and been hurled by the Demons of Misrule and Upside-downism into a disjointed maze of confusion worse confounded.”

(Makes the eruption sound like a moral failing on the part of the volcano, doesn’t it?)

The OED doesn’t define “upside-downism,” but it describes it as a derivative of “upside down,” which has had an appropriately topsy-turvy history since it entered English in the 1300s.

For many centuries, “upside down” was exclusively an adverb (as in “turned upside down”). The adjective, usually hyphenated (as in “upside-down cake”), came along in the
mid-19th century.

When originally recorded, the Middle English adverb was up so doun (or up swa doun in northern dialects), and it apparently meant something like “up as if down.”

It first appeared in writing around 1340 in a Northumbrian religious poem, The Pricke of Conscience, which the OED attributes to the Oxford-educated mystic and hermit Richard Rolle:

“Tharfor it es ryght and resoune, / That they be turned up-swa-doune.” (We’ve converted the letter thorn to “th” throughout.)

The term appeared in another 14th-century poem, a verse rendition of The Seven Sages of Rome, an ancient Eastern collection of tales found in many languages and probably about 2,500 years old.

Here’s the couplet: “The cradel and the child thai found / Up so doun upon the ground.”

As the OED says, “The use of so is peculiar, the only appropriate sense being that of ‘as if.’ ”

At any rate, the “so” eventually disappeared. The OED explains that the compound was “frequently reduced to upsa-, upse-, and subsequently altered to upset and upside down, in the endeavour to make the phrase more intelligible.”

During the 15th and 16th centuries there were many versions of the term, including “opsadoun,” “upsedoun,” “up set doune,” “upset downe,” “upsydowne,” “vpsyde downe,” and others.

By the early 17th century, the modern spelling “upside down” had become established.

You didn’t ask, but the playful interjection “upsy-daisy,” which we’ve written about on our blog, is no relation—apart from the presence of “up.”

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“Like” minded

Q: During the apocalyptic talk about the Mayan calendar, I wrote, “Planet Earth will not blow up like Krypton or be smashed by Planet X.” Is “like” OK here? (Krypton, the home planet of Superman, blew up just after little Kal-el left.)

A: The passage you wrote is fine as it is. In the sentence “Planet Earth will not blow up like Krypton or be smashed by Planet X,” the words “like” and “by” are prepositions. The underlined parts, “like Krypton” and “by Planet X,” are prepositional phrases.

This represents the traditionally correct use of “like”—as a preposition. The problem you’re thinking of is the use of “like” as a conjunction, a usage many sticklers frown on.

“Like” is used as a conjunction when it introduces a clause, as in “like Krypton did.” (A clause, you probably know, contains a verb and its subject.) A stickler would insist on “as” instead: “as Krypton did” (or “as did Krypton”).

However, the English in your original example is impeccable, even if you regard the verb “did” as implied but not expressed.

But what if you had included the verb (“like Krypton did”)? Here we part company with the sticklers, because even then we’d give you a passing grade.

You’re not writing elevated, formal prose. And as we’ve said before on our blog, the use of “like” as a conjunction is no crime in less than formal writing.

In fact, it represents a return to the past, before the 19th-century prohibition against the conjunctive “like” came along. And you don’t have to take our word for it.

Here’s what Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has to say in a usage note:

“Like has been used as a conjunction since the 14th century. In the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries it was used in serious literature, but not often; in the 17th and 18th centuries it grew more frequent but less literary. It became markedly more frequent in literary use again in the 19th century.”

It wasn’t until the mid-19th century, according to Merriam-Webster’s, that the usage came under fire. The dictionary’s conclusion:

“There is no doubt that, after 600 years of use, conjunctive like is firmly established. It has been used by many prestigious literary figures of the past, though perhaps not in their most elevated works; in modern use it may be found in literature, journalism, and scholarly writing. While the present objection to it is perhaps more heated than rational, someone writing in a formal prose style may well prefer to use as, as if, such as, or an entirely different construction instead.”

By the way, you might like to see a posting of ours about the use of “like” for “such as.” (Yes, it’s OK.)

And if you’re still “like”-minded, you might look at an article that Pat wrote for the New York Times Magazine about the use of “like” to quote or paraphrase people, as in “She’s like, what unusual taste you have.”

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Lex appeal: Does size matter?

Q: How many words do most native English speakers know? Do Brits know more than Americans? How many do language mavens know? How about Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, etc.? And what about age or educational level?

A: We’re afraid this will disappoint you. Many of your questions are impossible to answer. And even if we could contrive numbers for you, they wouldn’t be very meaningful.

We had a post on our blog a few years ago about the difficulty of counting words and comparing the lexicons of different languages.

The linguists Robert P. Stockwell and Donka Minkova, who discuss this in their book English Words: History and Structure (2001), write:

“A question which everyone wonders about, and often asks of instructors, is ‘How many words does English have?’ And even more commonly, ‘How many words does the typical educated person know, approximately?’ There are no verifiable answers to these questions.”

They do say that Shakespeare is known to have used about 30,000 different words in his plays, and that “a really well-educated adult” may have a vocabulary of up to 100,000 words—“but this is a wildly unverifiable estimate.”

As for the size of the lexicon, they conclude: “Nobody knows how many words English has.”

The linguist David Crystal said more or less the same thing in a 1987 article in the journal English Today:

 “How many words are there in English? And how many of these words does a native speaker know? These apparently simple little questions turn out to be surprisingly complicated. In answer to the first, estimates have been given ranging from half a million to over 2 million. In answer to the second, the estimates have been as low as 10,000 and over ten times that number.”

We can tell you that the biggest English dictionaries have about half a million words, but that’s no help because dictionaries are selective.

The editors at Oxford Dictionaries Online and Merriam-Webster’s Online discuss the difficulties of counting the number of words in English.

The principal problem in coming up with a number is which words to count. Are “do” and “does” two separate words? How about “doing,” “doer,” “don’t,” and “undo”? What about “cat” and “cats,” not to mention “catlike,” “catty,” and “anti-cat”?

That 30,000-word estimate for Shakespeare, as Stockwell and Minkova say, would drop to “about 21,000 if you count play, plays, playing, played as a single word,” and do the same in similar cases.

Do features like prefixes (“anti-,” “re-,” “un-,” etc.) and suffixes (“-ly,” “-er,” “-ing”) swell the number of possible words we count? Is a word with two meanings (say, “cleave”) counted as one word or two? Should we count symbols, acronyms, initialisms, spelled-out numbers? The questions go on and on.

We’ve also found varying statements about the number of words the average person knows or uses.

In their book Theory of Language (1999), the linguists Steven Weisler and Slavoljub P. Milekic estimate that “an average-educated English-speaking adult knows more than 50,000 words.”

But they say a person’s “lexical capacity” is larger. As current events and new technology create the need for new language, the authors write, “English-speakers are free to make up new words and to create new uses of existing words at the spur of the moment.”

You ask about age and educational level and how they affect vocabulary. Here’s what the British language writer Michael Quinion says on his website World Wide Words:

“It’s common to see figures for vocabulary quoted such as 10,000-12,000 words for a 16-year-old, and 20,000-25,000 for a college graduate. These seem not to have much research to back them up.”

So much for vocabulary size. But how many of those tens of thousands of words do we actually use? According to the Collins Corpus, an analytical database of English, “around 90% of English speech and writing is made up of approximately 3,500 words.”

That doesn’t sound like a lot, but let’s call it a day. We’ve run out of our daily quota of words.

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Gramm-ology: “Sequester”

Q: My friend and I are having difficulty figuring out how the government selected the word “sequester” for the current fiscal crisis. Any ideas on this?

A: Let’s begin with a little history.

When the verb “sequester” showed up in English in the late 14th century, it meant to set aside or separate, and it still has that meaning.

The word, which first appeared in the Wycliffe Bible, was adapted from the Late Latin term sequestrare (to place in safekeeping), according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The noun “sequester” also showed up in the late 14th century and the noun “sequestration” followed in the mid-15th century.

Over the years, the verb (as well as the nouns) has taken on many different senses related to setting aside or separating: to excommunicate or isolate someone, to confiscate something, to seize the possessions of a debtor, to set apart property in dispute, to isolate a jury, and so on.

In the sense you’re asking about, the term refers to budget sequestration, a process for controlling the size of the federal budget by setting spending limits and enforcing them with automatic cuts.

The term “budget sequestration” was first used in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act of 1985. Senators Phil Gramm, Warren Rudman, and Ernest Hollings were the main sponsors.

The measure provided for “sequesters” (automatic spending cuts) if the federal deficit exceeded targets.

The term was later used in the Budget Control Act of 2011 and in the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012.

How, you ask, did the word “sequester” come to be used in this sense?

Tracey Samuelson, a reporter on public radio, quotes former Senator Gramm, one of the sponsors of the 1985 legislation, as saying, “To me, sequester conjured up taking something off the table, withholding something.”

Gramm, a Texas Republican, said Congress had also considered the word “impoundment” before settling on “sequester,” according to Samuelson’s American Public Media report.

“It’s always helpful if when you invent a term, if it already conjures up what you’re trying to say,” he said, adding, “If a sequester is what you got to do to get people’s attention, I would do it.”

So, did Gramm coin the usage? Not exactly, according to Samuelson’s report. Gramm said the former House majority leader Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat, had suggested this use of the term “sequester” to him.  

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An arm and a leg

Q: I just caught up with your Thanksgiving post on the names for turkey parts. How about something on the names for people parts? I was recently surprised to learn that the meanings of “arm” and “leg” in anatomy differ from common usage.

A: This was news to us too, but then we skipped anatomy class. You’re right, though. “Arm” and “leg” have special meanings in medicine.

In standard anatomical terminology, the word “arm” means what most of us think of as the upper arm—the part between the shoulder and the elbow.

And the word “leg” in anatomy means what most of us think of as the lower leg—between the knee and the ankle.

The limbs as a whole are called the “upper limb” and the “lower limb.”

We quizzed our own doctor about this as she was giving us our annual physicals the other day. She said physicians call the upper arm the “arm” or the “brachium”; the part below the elbow is the “forearm” or the “antebrachium.”

Why? Because a doctor is generally concerned with one part of a limb, not the limb as a whole. And the parts are distinct—different bones, different muscles, and so on.

Hence, different terminology. The words “arm” and “leg” as used in the general sense would be too broad for medical purposes.

Kenneth Saladin’s book Human Anatomy (2007) has this explanation:

“The upper limb is divided into brachium (arm proper), antebrachium (forearm), carpus (wrist), manus (hand), and digits (fingers); the lower limb is divided into thigh, crus (leg proper), tarsus (ankle), pes (foot), and digits (toes).”

Elsewhere, Saladin explains that the term “arm proper” means the upper arm, which “extends from shoulder to elbow,” while the “leg proper” is “below the knee.”

Another medical textbook, Grant’s Dissector (2012), by Patrick W. Tank, says, “The upper limb is divided into four regions: shoulder, arm (brachium), forearm (antebrachium), and hand (manus).”

Earlier, Tank writes: “The lower limb is divided into four parts: hip, thigh, leg, and foot. It is worth noting that the term leg refers only to the portion of the lower limb between the knee and the ankle, not to the entire lower limb.”

Tank is right—this IS worth noting, since in ordinary language the words “arm” and “leg” are interpreted less narrowly.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “arm” (the body part, that is) only in the usual sense: “The upper limb of the human body, from the shoulder to the hand.”

There’s no mention in the OED of a medical definition of “arm” that would differ from that one.

Oxford adds that “the part from the elbow to the hand” is known as “the fore-arm.” Elsewhere, it defines the “forearm” as “the part of the arm between the elbow and the wrist; sometimes the whole arm below the elbow.”

On the other hand (if that’s the appropriate expression), the OED’s definition of a person’s “leg” includes the ordinary sense of the word as well as a more restrictive sense.

Here’s the definition: “one of the two lower limbs of the human body; in narrower sense, the part of the limb between the knee and foot.”

It’s interesting to note that while people have “forearms,” they don’t have “forelegs,” a term used only of animals. The OED says a “foreleg” is “one of the front legs of a quadruped.”

We can’t end this without mentioning “an arm and a leg,” which Oxford describes as a colloquial expression meaning “an enormous amount of money, an exorbitant price; freq. in to cost an arm and a leg.”

The OED’s first citation is from Lady Sings the Blues, the 1956 autobiography of one of our favorite singers, Billie Holliday, written with William Dufty: “Finally she found someone who sold her some stuff for an arm and a leg.”

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Is “to” part of the infinitive?

Q: In your recent article for Smithsonian magazine, you defend the split infinitive by saying “to” isn’t actually part of the infinitive. Huh? Says who? Not any standard – or even nonstandard – grammar book or authority I’ve ever seen, heard of, or read. Here’s the standard definition of an infinitive, from Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition: “An infinitive is a verbal consisting of to followed by the verb.”

A: Sorry, but you’ve been misled, and the late John Warriner, a teacher and textbook author, was misinformed, as we’ll explain. His is absolutely NOT the “standard” definition of an infinitive.

The infinitive is the uninflected or basic form of a verb, and “to” is not part of it. When “to” appears with an infinitive, it is generally referred to as an “infinitive marker” or “infinitive particle”; it is not part of the verb and is not always used.

“To” is not there, for example, when the infinitive is used with modal verbs (sometimes called modal auxiliaries or secondary auxiliaries). The modal verbs are “can,” “could,” “may,” “might,” “shall,” “should,” “will,” “would,” and “must.”

Examples, “I must go,” “he should read,” “they can eat,” and so on. In modal constructions, infinitives (”go,” “read,” and “eat” in the examples) do not require “to.”

You don’t have to take our word for this. We can cite a great many authorities. Here are only a few.

(1) Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), edited by the language scholar and lexicographer R. W. Burchfield, likewise describes two uses of the infinitive: (a) “the to-infinitive,” in which “to” is described as a “particle,” and (b) “the bare or simple or plain infinitive.”

The bare infinitive, Fowler’s says, “is often optionally used after the verbs dare, help, and need.” (Examples of infinitives used this way would be, “Does he dare go?” “We helped them move,” “You need not come.” Here, “go,” “move,” and “come” are infinitives.)

Fowler’s adds: “But its use after modal verbs (can, may, must, shall, etc.) and after comparatives and superlatives (better, had better, best, had best, rather than, etc.) is much more significant.” (For example, in constructions like “we had better eat,” and “rather than eat later,” the verb “eat” is an infinitive.)

Fowler’s also mentions these other common uses of the bare infinitive:

(a) At the head of a clause, as in “Try as I might, I couldn’t … etc.” Here, “try” is an infinitive.

(b) After “let” plus its object, as in “Let him enjoy his ignorance.” Here, “enjoy” is an infinitive.

(c) After “is” and “was,” as in “All they want to do is hide in the kitchen.” Here, “hide” is an infinitive.

(d) After “why” and “why not,” as in “Why not ask Robert?” Here, “ask” is an infinitive.

Some other sources:

(2) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says the infinitive (as well as the imperative and the subjunctive) “consists simply of the lexical base, the plain base without any suffix or other modification.” (Examples of imperative and subjunctive forms of “run,” respectively would be: “Run as fast as you can!” and “I suggest you run.”)

The Cambridge Grammar, written by the linguists Geoffrey Pullum and Rodney Huddleston, goes on to explain that the marker “to” is “not part of the verb.”

 “The traditional practice for citation of verbs is to cite them with the infinitival marker to, as in ‘to be,’ ‘to take,’ and so on,” Cambridge continues. “That is an unsatisfactory convention, because the to is not part of the verb itself.”

The word “to” here “is not a (morphological) prefix but a quite separate (syntactic) word,” Pullum and Huddleston say, adding:

“This is evident from the fact that it can stand alone in elliptical constructions (as in I haven’t read it yet, but I hope to shortly), need not be repeated in coordination (as seen in I want to go out and get some exercise), and can be separated from the verb by an adverb, as seen in the so-called ‘split infinitive construction,’ I’m trying to gradually improve my game.”

(3) The Oxford English Grammar, written by the linguist Sidney Greenbaum, says the infinitive “has two major uses: (a) bare infinitive (without to) follows a modal auxiliary, [as in] ‘I must write that message’; (b) to-infinitive is the main verb in infinitive clauses [as in] ‘I’d like to write something on process theology.’ ”

Even dictionaries don’t use Warriner’s definition. Witness:

(4) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), definition of “infinitive”: “A verb form that functions as a substantive while retaining certain verbal characteristics, such as modification by adverbs, and that in English may be preceded by to, as in To go willingly is to show strength or We want him to work harder, or may also occur without to, as in She had them read the letter or We may finish today.”

(5) Merriam-Webster’s International, Unabridged Third Edition, definition of “infinitive”: “an infinite verb form normally identical in English with the first person singular that performs certain functions of a noun and at the same time displays certain characteristics (as association with objects and adverbial modifiers) of a verb and is used with to (as in ‘to err is human’; ‘I asked him to go’) except with auxiliary and certain other verbs (as in ‘he can see’; ‘let me go’; ‘no one saw him leave’).

(6 ) The Oxford English Dictionary has an extensive discussion of the historical development of “to” with the infinitive in Old and Middle English. Later it has this: “The simple infinitive, without to, remains: 1. after the auxiliaries of tense, mood, periphrasis, shall, will; may, can; do; and the quasi-auxiliaries, must, (and sometimes) need, dare: 2. after some vbs. of causing, etc.; make, bid, let, have, in sense B. 15a; 3. after some vbs. of perception, see, hear, feel, and some tenses of know, observe, notice, perceive, etc., in sense B. 15b; 4. after had liefer, rather, better, sooner, as lief, as soon, as good, as well, etc.: see have v. 21, rather adv. 8d, and the other words.

“The infinitive with to may be dependent on an adj., a n., or a vb., or it may stand independently. To an adj. it stands in adverbial relation: ready to fight = ready for fighting; to a n. it stands in adjectival or sometimes adverbial relation: a day to remember = a memorable day; to a vb. it may stand in an adverbial or substantival relation: to proceed to work = to proceed to working; to like to work = to like working.”

When this preposition was first used in English as an infinitive marker (tó in Old English), it did have a prepositional flavor. “I prepared to eat” sounded to the medieval ear something like “I prepared for eating”; “he fails to think” sounded something like “he fails in thinking”; “we strive to please” sounded something like “we strive toward pleasing.” As the OED says, “it expressed motion, direction, inclination, purpose, etc., toward the act or condition expressed by the infinitive; as in ‘he came to help (i.e. to the help of) his friends,’ … ‘he prepared to depart (i.e. for departure).’ ”

There once was a sense of motion, of moving toward accomplishing something (represented by the infinitive), if that makes any sense.

But as the OED says: “in process of time this obvious sense of the prep. became weakened and generalized, so that tó became at last the ordinary link expressing any prepositional relation in which an infinitive stands to a preceding verb, adjective, or substantive.” [Here the italicized tó represents the Old English word.]

As we’ve written on our blog, a great many people misunderstand infinitives because they aren’t familiar with their many uses.

In that post, we cite the clause “I saw her fall,” with the verb “fall” in the infinitive. In English, this is a very common pattern: one verb followed by a second in the infinitive. It’s often the case when the first verb is one involving sensory perception (“see,” “feel,” “hear”).

Here are a few examples of the kinds of verbs that are often paired with infinitives (the infinitives are underlined):

“I helped her walk” … “They saw us go” … “We felt it move” … “He heard her cry” … “You need not worry” … “Dare we ask?” … “I would rather die” … “We will let it rest” … “Let there be light.”

In addition, the auxiliary “do” is often used with an infinitive to form a question: “Do you smoke?” … “Did they drive?”

And as we’ve said, the modal auxiliary verbs (“can,” “may,” “must,” etc.) take infinitives as their complements: “She may smoke” [or “May she smoke?”] … “We must leave” [or “Must we leave?”].

In all of these cases, the second verb is in the infinitive. But many people don’t recognize these verb forms as infinitives because they expect infinitives to be preceded by “to.” As you can see, that’s often not the case.

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Meteoric language

Q: I’m putting together a planetarium exhibition on meteorites. My background documents often say pieces of a meteorite were “recovered” after falling to earth. Can we “recover” something we never had? I’d appreciate your help.

A: We checked all the many meanings of “recover” in the Oxford English Dictionary, and when used in reference to physical objects, it generally means to regain or reacquire something lost.

An old meaning of the verb “cover,” now obsolete, was to get or acquire. And the original, 14th-century meaning of “recover” (literally, “cover again”) was to win back ground lost in battle.

But etymology aside, astronomers and geologists use the word in a different sense. They quite routinely use “recover,” “recovered,” and “recovery” in writing about meteorite fragments found on earth, even though nobody had physical possession of them beforehand.

Though this use of “recover” might seem questionable, at least in the strictly literal sense of the word, we think it’s perfectly reasonable in a scientific context, like an exhibition at a planetarium.

As it happens, the OED does recognize “recover” as a technical term in astronomy. But it has a more celestial meaning than the earthbound one we’re talking about. It refers only to the observation of objects in space.

The OED defines this “recover” as meaning “to observe (an astronomical object, esp. a periodic comet) following an extended period during which it has not been visible or observed.”

The OED’s first citation for this sense of the word is from a 1901 issue of a scientific journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: “Professor Howe … recovered the comet on May 27, after its perihelion passage.”

This more recent citation is from a 2006 issue of the Guardian: “The dim comet was lost again until … it was recovered tracing a 5.4 year orbit about the Sun.”

But we think you’re safe using “recover” in reference to meteorites that have fallen to earth. Though the OED hasn’t yet recorded this sense of the word, scientists routinely use it that way, which is a pretty good argument in its favor.

For example, we found this example in a 1977 issue of the British magazine New Scientist:

“Analysis of the photographs suggested the fall of several kilogrammes of meteorites at a point some 150 km east of Edmonton. … A 2.1-kg freshly fallen meteorite was recovered only 500 metres from the predicted impact point.”

Scientists use “recover” even when the meteorites weren’t seen falling beforehand. That’s the case in this passage from Paul W. Hodge’s book Meteorite Craters and Impact Structures of the Earth (1994):

“The Haviland crater itself was not discovered until about 1925, when H. H. Nininger visited the Kimberley farm to recover the meteorites.”

Finally, Robert T. Dodd’s book Meteorites: A Petrologic-chemical Synthesis (1981) has this note about the naming of meteorites:

“A newly fallen or newly discovered meteorite is named for a locality or permanent geographic feature that is near its point of recovery. … The many meteorites recovered from Antarctica raise a serious problem of terminology.”

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Closeted language

Q: I was speaking to my grandmother about getting less-than-desirable presents for Christmas and she said, “We used to put them in the chifen robe.” When I asked about the term, she said it referred to a closet where her mother stored unwanted gifts to be regifted. I’m not sure of the spelling, but I’d appreciate any information you can provide.

A: The term your grandmother used is usually spelled “chifforobe.” It combines two different terms—“chiffonier” and “wardrobe.”

Words like this are sometimes called portmanteau words, which we’ve written about before on our blog. They get their name from their resemblance to a portmanteau, a case that has two hinged compartments.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “chifforobe” originated in the US and means “a piece of furniture incorporating a wardrobe and a chest of drawers.”

It was first recorded, according to OED citations, in a 1908 Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog that carried this entry: “The chifforobes as illustrated on this page are a modern invention, having been in use only a short time.”

The word is sometimes rendered as “chiffing robe,” and your grandma’s version, “chifen robe,” isn’t unusual either.

The OED cites this example from Carson McCullers’s novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1953): “The room was furnished with a large ‘chiffen robe.’ ”

Like chifforobes, both chiffoniers and wardrobes are free-standings cupboards devoted to storage, much like large dressers but with extras.

Now that homes have built-in closets, we see less of words like “chiffonier” and “wardrobe,” which were once common household terms.

The OED defines a “chiffonier” as “a piece of furniture, consisting of a small cupboard with the top made so as to form a sideboard.”

The word comes from French, in which chiffonnier or chiffonnière originally meant a “rag-gatherer,” the OED says. (In French, chiffon means rag.)

By transference, chiffonnier was later used in French to mean “a piece of furniture with drawers in which women put away their needlework, cuttings of cloth, etc.,” says the OED, quoting the French lexicographer Émile Littré.

The use of “chiffonier” in English, the OED says, was first recorded in 1806 in reference to the furniture.

In the 1850s, in conscious imitation of the French, it was also used in English to mean a rag-picker.

The word was sometimes spelled “sheffonier,” which the OED says “represents the common pronunciation.”

The other half of your grandmother’s word—“wardrobe’’—is much older than “chiffonier” and may date from the 1300s.

It comes from the Old French word warderobe, a variant of garderobe, a locked room for safeguarding clothing, armor, and other valuables.

When “wardrobe” came into our language during the Middle English period, it originally meant a separate room for storing clothing and armor—similar to a dressing room.

As far as we can tell, the word didn’t mean a movable cupboard until the late 1700s.

The term “wardrobe” is used this way twice on the title page of The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterers Guide (1788), a book of furniture designs by George Hepplewhite. The term is also used this way in four of the engravings, printed in 1787.

(The book was written by Hepplewhite’s widow, Alice, who ran the enterprise as A. Hepplewhite & Company after his death in 1786.)

Each wardrobe in the engravings is described as about four feet wide and seven feet tall, shaped more or less like a refrigerator.

Each has tall doors on top and three to four drawers on the bottom. Behind the doors are five slide-out shelves for folded clothes.

Finally, in case you’re interested, we once wrote a posting on the blog about the verbs “gift” and “regift”:

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Indian territory

Q: I came across a website that says the use of the word “Indian” for a Native American is derived from the Spanish phrase Gente de Dios. Whaddya think?

A: Didn’t your mother tell you not to believe everything you see on the Web?

The website of La Prensa, a weekly newspaper for Latinos in the Midwest, does indeed say the term “Indian” is derived from that Spanish phrase for People of God.

A “Latino History” page on the site says Gente de Dios was later shorted to en Dios, then endios, and finally “Indian.”

“Yes, ‘Indian’—they were called Indians,” La Prensa adds, “not because they were thought to live in India but because they were children of God.”

As you suspect, that etymology is nonsense—or as one would say in Spanish, una tontería.

The truth, as you were undoubtedly taught in school, is that Christopher Columbus did indeed think he’d reached India when he landed in the Americas and that he referred to the natives as “Indians” in Spanish.

In the diary of his first voyage to the Americas, which Columbus wrote in 15th-century Spanish, he repeatedly referred to the indigenous population as indios and yndios.

Here’s a modern Spanish version of the diary in which he describes the islands he visited in the region as estas islas de India (these islands of India).

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the use of the term “Indian” for the indigenous people of the Americas is the result of “Columbus’s assumption that, on reaching America, he had reached the east coast of India.”

The word “Indian” in this sense first showed up in English, according to OED citations, in the mid-16th century.

The earliest reference in the OED is from A Treatyse of the Newe India With Other New Founde Landes and Islandes (1553).

Here’s the citation from Richard Eden’s translation of a work by the German cartographer Sebastian Münster: “They saw certayn Indians gatheringe shel fyshes by the sea bankes.”

Not surprisingly, the adjective “Indian” in reference to the people of India entered English a lot earlier—in the late 1300s, and the noun “Indian” in that sense first showed up around 1400, according to OED citations.

Although English adapted the adjective and noun “Indian” from the Anglo-Norman and Middle French indien, the dictionary notes, the geographic name “India” is a direct borrowing from Latin and showed up centuries earlier.

The OED has two Early Old English citations from History Against the Pagans, a work by Paulus Orosius, a church historian who lived in the late 4th and early 5th centuries.

We won’t go through La Prensa’s “Latin History” page point by point, but we should note one other questionable statement: “Christopher Columbus, by the way, was not his real name—it was Cristóbal Colón.”

Columbus, who made four voyages to the New World under the auspices of the Spanish Crown, was born Cristoforo Colombo on Oct. 31, 1451, in the Republic of Genoa, now part of modern Italy.

“Christopher Columbus” is an Anglicized version of his name in Latin, Christophorus Columbus. Cristóbal Colón is the Spanish version of his name and Cristóvão Colombo is the Portuguese version.

Columbus was a man of the world who spoke all those languages. We imagine that he referred to himself by the name used in whichever language he was speaking.

In his diary, for example, Columbus writes his name in the Spanish of his time: almirante don x’val Colón (almirante is Spanish for “admiral” and “x” is short for Cristo, or “Christ”).

Columbus, by the way, didn’t invent the use of “x” as an abbreviation for “Christ.” This convention is more than a thousand years old, as we’ve written on our blog.

In a posting six years ago, we noted that the practice grew out of Greek, in which “Christ” begins with the letter “chi,” or “X.” In Greek letters it’s spelled ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ.

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Our how many-eth beer?

Q: How come we don’t say “many-eth” in English? Example: “This is the how many-eth beer we’ve had?”

A: That’s the kind of question we ask ourselves after having a few too many Becks. And if we don’t know how many we’ve had, we’ve probably had too many.

In sober—that is, standard—English, we’d say something like “How much beer have we had” or “How many beers have we had?” Yet for some reason we don’t use “many-eth” to ask questions like this.

The “-th” suffix is used in its numerical sense with ordinal numbers, like “fifth,” “eleventh,” and “thirty-fourth,” as well as looser ordinals like “nth,” “zillionth,” “umpteenth,” and so on.

When an ordinal number is derived from a cardinal number ending in “y,” the “y” becomes “i” and the “-th” ending becomes “-eth.” For example, “twenty” becomes “twentieth,” and “fifty” becomes “fiftieth.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says the “-th” ending has been used this way since Anglo-Saxon days. The “th” sound was represented then by the Old English letters thorn or eth.

The OED says the “-th” suffix is ultimately derived from –tos, an ancient Indo-European superlative ending.

The “-th” ending is also used to form nouns from verbs (“growth,” “stealth,” and so on) and from adjectives (“health,” “truth,” etc.).

In addition, the “-eth” ending was used to form many third person singular verbs that are now considered archaic: “goeth,” “sendeth,” and so on. But as the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology notes, this ending is still used as a literary device: The Iceman Cometh.

Like “umpteen,” the adjective “many” refers to a large but indefinite number.  We say “umpteenth,” so why then don’t we say “many-eth”? Well, for whatever reason, it’s not considered idiomatic English.

Despite that, we’ve found lots of examples of the usage on the Web, including many from writers whose English is otherwise beyond reproach.

Here’s an example from a review of a concert in which Joshua Bell is the soloist in a performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto: “Here he was, playing it for the … how many-eth time?”

Does “many-eth” have a future? Who knows? If enough people use it for enough time, “many-eth” may become standard English some day. Not yet, though.

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The full story

Q: Your piece on the use of “full” in reference to eating mentioned in passing the use of “full” to describe, among other things, a sail filled with wind. This got me thinking about the link between “full” and “fill.” Would you comment on it?

A: The words “full” and “fill” have an ancestral connection that not only predates English but is older than written language.

Far back in prehistory, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the ancestor of “fill” was derived from the ancestor of “full.” So etymologically, to “fill” is to “make full.”

As John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins explains, a prehistoric Germanic adjective that linguists have reconstructed as fullaz (full) was the source of a corresponding verb, fulljan (fill).

These words eventually developed into the English “full” and “fill” along with their equivalents in German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and Norwegian.

But the story goes back even beyond the early Germanic languages, which are only one branch of the Indo-European family tree.

The ultimate source, as Ayto notes, is an Indo-European root reconstructed as ple-.

This root, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, by Calvert Watkins, has given us “derivatives referring to abundance and multitude.”

The ple- root has descendants not only in the Germanic languages—in which the “p” sound became “f”—but also in Latin and Greek.

English inherited words having to do with abundance and multitude from both directions.

From the Germanic direction, in addition to “full” and “fill,” English has the word “folk” (people), from the prehistoric Germanic word folkam.

On the classical side, the ple- root is the source of the Latin words plenus (full), plere (to fill) and plus (more), as well as the Greek polus (many), pleres (full), plethein (to be full), and pleon (more).

And from this direction, according to Watkins, English acquired “plenary,” “plenitude,” “plenty,” “replenish,” “plural,” “plus,” “nonplus,” “pluperfect,” “surplus,” “hoi polloi,” “plebian,” “plethora,” “accomplish,” “complement,” “complete,” “compliment,” “comply, “deplete,” “expletive,” “implement,” “replete,” “supply,” and the prefix “poly-,” among others.

In case you’re curious about “fulfill,” etymologically it means to “fill full” though that sense of the word is now defunct.

The OED says that when “fulfill” entered Old English as fullfyllan more than a thousand years ago, it meant “to fill to the full, fill up, make full.”

In case you haven’t had your fill yet, we had a brief post back in 2007 about whether to use the word element “full” or “ful” as a prefix or a suffix.

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“Want” adds

Q: Why do we say or write things like “I want to thank you for your wonderful lecture the other night” or “I wanted to let you know that the blouse you like is in stock again”? I find myself doing it when I’m in a business situation. What’s with this “want” business?

A: In our opinion, starting a statement like that with “I want to …” (or the even more deferential “I just want to …”) is an example of tentativeness or excessive politeness.

We’ve written on our blog about a similar mannerism, the use of “I would like …” (or “I’d like …”) instead of “I want ….”

As we said in that May 18, 2009, post, people tell a waiter “I would like the braised sirloin tips with artichoke hearts” because it sounds more indirect, hence more polite and less demanding, than “I want the braised sirloin tips with artichoke hearts.”

Some grammarians use the term “tentative volition” to describe this less demanding way of demanding something.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language discusses the use of “would” in a sentence like “I would like to see him tomorrow” (vs. “I want to see him tomorrow”).

The authors, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, say that “would” often “introduces a rather vague element of tentativeness, diffidence, extra politeness, or the like.”

Huddleston and Pullum go on to describe “would like” as “more or less a fixed phrase, contrasting as a whole with want.”

We think people insert things like “I wanted to …” and “I’d like to …” in sentences when they’re nervous, overly deferential, addressing someone of importance (such as a valued customer), or unsure of their own authority.

There’s nothing grammatically wrong in all this. It’s more of a psycholinguistic issue.

Etymologically, to “want” something is to lack it, the meaning of the word when it entered English in the early 1200s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The sense of desiring something “is a secondary extension” of the original meaning, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

English adapted “want” from the Old Norse vanta (to be lacking), but Ayto says the ultimate source is the prehistoric Germanic root wan- (lacking), which is also the source of the English word “wane.”

The adjective “wanton” is another relative. As Ayto explains: “Someone who is wanton is etymologically ‘lacking in proper upbringing or discipline.’ ”

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Where is “put” in “stay put”?

Q: My daughter was in the Northeast during the recent snowstorm and I asked her if she was planning to stay put. That got me to thinking: where is put?

A: The Oxford English Dictionary describes “stay put” as a colloquialism that originated in the US in the mid-19th century.

The OED defines the verbal phrase as meaning “to remain where or as placed; to remain fixed or steady; also fig. (of persons, etc.).”

The earliest published reference in the dictionary is from the Sept. 23, 1843, issue of the New Mirror, a weekly journal in New York: “And now we have put her in black and white, where she will ‘stay put.’ ”

The usage apparently raised eyebrows in its early days. John Russell Bartlett, in his Dictionary of Americanisms (1848), describes it as a “vulgar expression”—that is, a common one.

In Haunted Hearts, an 1864 novel by Maria Susanna Cummins, the expression refers to a thing: “This curl sticks right out straight; couldn’t you put this pin in for me, so that it would stay put?”

James Russell Lowell, uses it to refer to a person in his 1871 essay collection My Study Windows: “He has a prodigious talent, to use our Yankee phrase, of staying put.”

Where, you ask, is put?

The OED doesn’t explain the origin of the usage, and we couldn’t find an explanation in any of our usual language references.

But there may be a clue in Oxford’s definition of the phrase: “to remain where or as placed.”

If we had to guess, we’d say the verbal phrase originally meant something like “to stay where someone or something is put,” or “to stay where one puts oneself.”

However, an idiomatic expression like “stay put” doesn’t necessarily have to make sense, as we’ve mentioned several times on the blog, including in a posting a couple of years ago. In other words, there may be no “where” there.

The word “put,” by the way, is one of the commonest English verbs, but its source is uncertain, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto says it goes back to an Old English word, putian, “never actually recorded but inferred from the verbal noun putung ‘instigation,’ but where that comes from is not known.”

He speculates that putung “was presumably related to Old English potian ‘push, thrust,’ whose Middle English descendant pote formed the basis of Modern English potter.” (Think of that, next time you find yourself pottering in the garden.)

In case you’re curious, the golfing term “putt” as well as the track-and-field term “shot put” are descended from that same uncertain source.

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