Category: Writing

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

A richly woven tapestry

Q: The fabrics in our lives assume multiple meanings, as in, “I didn’t cotton to him because he tried to pull the wool over my eyes.” A topic for the blog?

A: Fabric and sewing terms are often used figuratively. To borrow a cliché of book reviewing, English is a richly woven tapestry.

We’ve written several posts about these terms, including one in 2008 about “cotton,” a word of Arabic origin that has been used figuratively since the 1600s to mean “get on together” or “suit each other.”

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an anonymous Elizabethan play about the life of the 16th-century English mercenary Thomas Stukley (also spelled “Stukeley,” “Stuckley,” and “Stucley”):

“John a Nokes and John a Style and I cannot cotton.”

(From The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, 1605. The play is in The School of Shakespeare, Richard Simpson’s 1878 collection of Shakespearian apocrypha and other works associated with Shakespeare.)

Here’s a later example from Lady Anna, an 1874 novel by Anthony Trollope: “You see, she had nobody else near her. A girl must cotton to somebody, and who was there?”

The OED says the source for this sense of “cotton” is uncertain, but it suggests that the usage may come from the original meaning of the verb when it showed up in the late 1400s: to “form a down or nap” on cloth.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the original meaning is from a 1488 entry in the accounts of  the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland: “viii elne of cotonyt quhit clath” (“eight ells of cottoned white cloth”). An “ell” was roughly four feet; if a fabric “cottoned” properly, it was successfully finished.

In commenting on the evolution of “cotton,” the dictionary points the reader to a 1608 example from The Family of Love, a play by Thomas Middleton. The citation uses the verb figuratively to mean “prosper” or “get on well,” and at the same time harkens back to its original sense: “It cottens well, it cannot choose but beare A prety napp.”

In the early 20th century, the verbal phrase “to cotton on to” came to mean “to form a liking for” or “to  get to know about,” according to Oxford citations.

Here’s an example for the liking sense from “Children of the Bush,” a 1907 short story by the Australian writer Henry Lawson: “I s’pose the fact of the matter was that she didn’t cotton on to me, and wanted to let me down easy.”

And this is an example for the understanding sense from See How They Run, a 1936 novel by the Irish writer Jerrard Tickell: “I don’t seem to cotton on to German somehow.”

As you’d imagine, the word “wool” in its original sense (the “fine soft curly hair” of sheep and similar animals) is very old, dating from Anglo-Saxon times. The earliest citation in the OED is from a glossary, dated around 725, that translates lana, Latin for “wool,” as uul in Old English.

In the 16th century, English speakers began using the noun figuratively in the expression “against the wool” (the wrong way).

The earliest OED citation is from The Exposition of the First Epistle of St. John (1531), by William Tyndale: “He wresteth all the Scriptures & setteth them clean agaynst the woll, to destroy this article.”

In the 19th century, the noun showed up in the expression to “pull (or ‘draw’ or ‘spread’) the wool over someone’s eyes.” The dictionary’s earliest example is from the April 24, 1839, issue of the Jamestown (NY) Journal: “That lawyer has been trying to spread the wool over your eyes.”

And here’s a “pull” example from the Sept. 29, 1842, issue of Spirit of the Times, a short-lived Philadelphia daily newspaper: “Look sharp, or they’ll pull wool over your eyes.”

In a recent post, we noted that the verb “sew” is often used figuratively, especially in the expression “all sewed (or sewn) up,” which showed up in the early 1900s to describe a situation that’s brought to a conclusion.

The first OED citation is from True Bills (1904), a collection of sketches by the American humorist George Ade: “The Man with the Megaphone Voice cut no Ice whatsoever, for they had him sewed up.” (The loudmouth was prevented from speaking at a formal dinner.)

We wrote a post in 2015 that discusses several other fabric or sewing terms, including “yarn,” “weave,” “thread,” and “knit,” and one in 2014 that considers the use of “thread” in the online sense.

The “yarn” one tells and the “yarn” one knits with may be related, but the evidence is uncertain. One theory is that the expression “spinning a yarn” comes from sailors’ telling stories while making rope—that is, twisting yarn.

The verb “weave” has been used metaphorically (as in “a richly woven tapestry”) since the 1300s, while the noun “thread” has referred to a narrative train of thought since the 1600s, and a series of messages or posts on the same subject since the 1980s. The adjective “knit” has been used metaphorically to mean joined since the 1300s, as in “a close-knit family” or a “well-knit” novel.

Here are the OED‘s earliest known examples of those and some other figurative uses of textile terms.

“chiffon” (light and delicate, like the diaphanous fabric): “Chiffon pumpkin pie.” (From Fashions in Foods, a 1929 cookbook published by the Beverly Hills Women’s Club.)

“embroider” (to embellish rhetorically, often with fictions or exaggerations): “The Græcian Historians and Poets, imbroder and intermixe the tales of auncient times, with a world of fictions.” (From The History of the World, 1614, by Sir Walter Raleigh.)

“fleece” (to swindle or overcharge): “The cardinall knowing he was well prouided of monie, sought occasion to fleece him of part thereof.” (From The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 1577-87, by Raphael Holinshed.)

“homespun” (homely and rustic, like the homemade yarn or cloth): “Lest my homespun verse obscure hir worth, sweet Spencer let me leaue this taske to thee.”  (From Thomas Watson’s Eglogue Vpon the Death of Walsingham, 1590.) “Eglogue” is an early spelling for “eclogue,” a short poem.

“knit” (joined, as in “a close-knit family”): “First body and saul togyder knyt.” (From the anonymous Middle English poem Pricke of Conscience, 1340.)

“plush” (luxurious, like the sumptuous fabric): “If one were to pass his life in moving in a palace car from one plush hotel to another.” (From the March 1890 issue of Harper’s Magazine.)

“tweedy” (casual, countrified, preppy): “Iris stood before them in tweedy brevity of skirt and pertness of tam-o-shanter.” (From Between Two Stools, a 1912 novel by Rhoda Broughton.)

“weave” (to create an intricate story or plan): “Wo! … seith the Lord, that ȝee [you] schulden do counseil, and not of me; and wefen [weave] a web, and not bi my spirit.” (From John Wycliffe’s 1382 translation of the Vulgate Latin Bible into Middle English.)

“yarn” (a story): “Yarning or spinning a yarn, signifying to relate their various adventures, exploits, and escapes to each other.” (From a glossary of criminal slang in The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux, 1819.) Despite this citation, the OED says the usage originated as nautical slang.

“thread” (a narrative train of thought): “If one read skippingly and by snatches, and not take the threed of the story along, it must needs puzzle and distract the memory.” (From James Howell’s Instructions for Forreine Travell, 1642.)

“thread” (a linked group of posts or messages): “When following subject threads, the next article with the same subject is located while the last page of the previous article is being read.” (From a May 30, 1984, post on a Usenet group, net.news.)

“wooly” or “woolly” (hazy and confused): “It [a scene in a picture] looks woolly, undecided in shapes.” (From an 1815 issue of The Sporting Magazine.)

“tapestry” (a colorful and intricate mixture of things): “Nature neuer set forth the earth in so rich tapistry, as diuers Poets haue done.” (From An Apologie for Poetrie, written sometime before 1586 by Philip Sidney.)

We’ll end with the word “fabric,” which meant a building when it showed up in English in the 1400s. It didn’t come to mean a textile until the late 1700s.

English borrowed the term from French, but the Latin source is fabrica, the trade of a faber, a worker in metal, stone, wood, and so on (a carpenter, for example), according to the OED.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the ultimate source is probably “a prehistoric Indo-European base meaning ‘fit things together.’ ”

The first example in the OED (as “an edifice, a building”) is from William Caxton’s 1483 translation from the Latin of Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), a collection of stories about medieval saints, by Jacobus de Voragine, the archbishop of Genoa: “He had neuer studye in newe fabrykes ne buyldynges.”

How did the English word for a “building” come to refer to cloth? As Ayto explains, “the underlying notion of ‘manufactured material’ gave rise to the word’s main present-day meaning ‘textile.’ ”

The first OED citation for this new sense is from An Historical Account of the British Trade Over the Caspian Sea (1753), by Jonas Hanway: “We are every day making new fabrics.… No nation can make such excellent cloth as this.” (We’ve expanded the citation to add the reference to “cloth.”)

The dictionary’s next example, which we’ve also expanded, is from An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India (1791), by William Robertson:

“There they observed the labours of the Silkworm, and became acquainted with the art of working up its productions into a variety of elegant fabrics.”

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It’s powwow time

Q: I assume “powwow” comes from a Native American language, but how did this word spread to all parts of the country when the indigenous peoples spoke so many different languages?

A: You’re right in thinking that “powwow” was an indigenous American word. You’re also right in suspecting that it wasn’t originally used throughout the continent, since Native American tribes did speak many different languages.

The word came into English in the early 17th century from Narragansett, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. This was one of the Eastern Algonquian languages spoken in the coastal Northeast.

To the Narragansetts, who were indigenous to what is now Rhode Island, the word “powwow” meant a priest—that is, a shaman or healer. The word was also known among the Massachusett Indians.

The meaning in reconstructed proto-Algonquian, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), was “one who has visions.”

Native American languages were not written until the advent of Europeans, so “powwow” was first recorded in the 1620s by English colonists who spelled it a variety of ways (“powah,” “powaw,” “pawawe,” etc.).

In the 1630s another meaning of the word was recorded in English, and it’s the principal meaning today. Here’s the OED’s definition: “A religious or magical ceremony (especially one with feasting),” as well as “a council or conference of North American Indians.”

This ceremonial sense of “powwow” apparently originated in English, not in Narragansett, which had other words for “meeting” (miâawene), “religious feast” (nákommit), “feast” or “dance” (nickómmo), and “solemn public meeting” (esaqúnnamun), according to colonial-era glossaries.

As American Heritage explains, the new usage evolved “because of the important role played by the healer or holy person in these events.”

“Today, when speaking in English, some Native American communities themselves use the word powwow to refer to meetings or gatherings held according to the traditional ways of their people,” the dictionary adds.

So how did “powwow” spread from New England to tribes across the continent? Our guess is that the Narragansetts themselves had something to do with it.

Notable as traders and importers of goods from other tribes, the Narragansetts were also trading with the British and Dutch at least as far back as 1623, according to Barry M. Pritzker, in A Native American Encyclopedia: History, Culture, and Peoples (2000).

The British recorded the word the following year, in 1624 (we’ll get to its use in English later). But it’s reasonable to assume that “powwow” spread first from the Narragansetts to neighboring tribes and later to distant ones.

As Pritzker notes, for most of the 17th century the Narragansetts were the dominant tribe in New England. In the mid-1670s, after what is known as King Philip’s War, many Narragansetts were dispersed among other tribes, and some ended up as far west as Wisconsin. No doubt they took their words along with them.

“By 1880, at least thirty tribes were organizing public-invited gatherings, increasingly referred to as ‘powwows,’ ” Craig Harris writes in Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow (2016), a book about American Indian music.

But it’s likely that European settlers and traders who had picked up the word also helped spread it as they traveled across the continent. OED citations show that the use of “powwow,” in both of its senses, was widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries.

One white settler in particular helped to popularize “powwow” and to preserve many other Narragansett words—Roger Williams, the founder of Providence Plantation, an English settlement that welcomed religious dissenters.

It was the Narragansetts, then a powerful and influential tribe, who sold land to Williams in 1636 for the settlement.

Williams was not only a clergyman and a statesman but also a language scholar, and he’s responsible for much of what we know of the Narragansett and other Algonquian languages in colonial times.

He said that his book A Key Into the Language of America (1643), a study of the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of the native people, was “framed chiefly after the Narrogánset Dialect, because most spoken in the Countrey.”

But even before Williams arrived on the scene, “powwow” had entered English.

When first recorded in English in the 1620s (spelled “powah”), the word meant “a priest, shaman, or healer,” according to the OED.  This is also what it meant to the Narragansetts. In his book, Williams spelled the word powwaw (plural powwaûog) and said that to native speakers it meant “priest.”

Here is Oxford’s earliest citation in English writing:

“The office and dutie of the Powah is to bee exercised principally in calling vpon the Divell, and curing diseases of the sicke or wounded.” (From Good Newes from New-England, 1624, by Edward Winslow, who acted as the Pilgrims’ primary negotiator with New England Algonquians, including the Wampanoag, Massachusett, and Narragansett tribes.)

In the following decade the ceremonial meaning of “powwow” came into English. The earliest example we’ve found is from “A Discourse About Civil Government,” a tract written sometime in 1638 or ’39 by the clergyman John Davenport:

“These very Indians that worship the Devil, will not be under the government of any Sagamores [chiefs] but such as join with them in the observance of their pawawes and idolatries.”

(The OED quotes part of this passage, but gives an imprecise date, 1663, and an incorrect author, John Cotton. In his 1702 biography of Davenport, Cotton Mather credits the tract to Davenport and says the name “Cotton” was substituted for “Davenport” on the printed tract “by a mistake.” An 1839 commentary by Leonard Bacon demonstrates convincingly that the tract was written “sometime between April 15th, 1638, and June 4th, 1639.” The tract was published in 1663, but the title page notes: “Written many Years since … And now Published.”)

The modern spelling of the word as “powwow” (often hyphenated, “pow-wow”) was recorded as early as 1634, according to OED citations, though the spelling fluctuated for a couple of centuries until that became the standard.

A third, and more general, meaning of the word emerged in the early 19th century, defined in the OED as “a meeting, a conference, esp. of powerful people; (also) bustle, activity.”

The dictionary describes this usage as “colloquial” and says it first appeared in the US: “The Warriors of the Democratic Tribe will hold a powow at Agawam on Tuesday.” (From the June 5, 1812, issue of the Salem Gazette in Massachusetts.)

We still use “powwow” this way, as in this more contemporary example from the OED: “A family pow-wow after lunch decided that the afternoon should be spent on a secluded beach.” (From a 1987 issue of the Sunday Express Magazine, London.)

Among Native Americans today, “powwow” usually means a festive get-together celebrating Indian culture, and less commonly a medicine man or woman. Pritzker’s Native American Encyclopedia defines it this way:

“Powwow: Commonly used to describe a gathering at which native people dance, sing, tell stories, and exchange goods, the term also refers (in a mainly Algonquian context) to a healer or a healing ceremony.”

Today the Narragansett language has died out, though revival efforts are under way. Meanwhile, “powwow” has lived on in other Native American languages as well as in English.

The Narragansetts have lived on too. Today, as Capers Jones writes in The History and Future of Narragansett Bay (2006), their yearly powwow is “perhaps the most long-lived Indian meeting on the North American continent.” The tribe’s 341st annual powwow was held in Charleston, RI, last August.

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Testing the waters

Q: Do you know when the phrase “to test the waters” came to mean “to float an idea”? I can’t help wondering if it once had something to do with “to take the waters,” as at a spa.

A: The expression “to test the waters” (or “water”) has been used literally since the 19th century in the sense of testing water for its purity, chemical content, and so on.

The earliest example we’ve found is from a report in the February 1881 issue of the Canada Medical Record about an outbreak of typhoid fever at Bishop’s College University (now Bishop’s University) in Lennoxville, Quebec:

“It appeared desirable to test the waters qualitatively as to their constitution, as to presence of ammonia or ammoniacal salts, chlorides, and organic matters, also for magnesia.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has a somewhat later citation from The Fatal Three, an 1888 novel by the English writer Mary Elizabeth Braddon: “I have tested the water in all the wells.”

In the 20th century, the expression “to test the waters” took on the figurative sense you’re asking about, which the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines as “to make a preliminary test or survey (as of reaction or interest) before embarking on a course of action.”

The earliest OED citation for this sense is from A Little Murder Music, a 1972 mystery by Diana Ramsay: “ ‘If you’re attempting to establish a motive—’ ‘I’m just testing the water,’ Meredith said.”

And here’s an example from Judith Krantz’s 1980 novel Princess Daisy: “ ‘I guess it’s just a lucky thing that Supracorp’s such a big business,’ Kiki said, testing the waters.”

The OED doesn’t have an example for the expression used in the literal sense of testing the temperature of water, such as before going in for a swim or giving a baby a bath.

But we’ve found many examples in database searches, including this one from Building the Baby (1929), by Carolyn Conant Van Blarcom: “Test the water with a thermometer or your elbow before putting the baby in.”

You asked if “to test the waters” once had something to do with “to take the waters,” a much older usage that the OED defines as “to drink or bathe in the waters from a mineral spring or spa for reasons of health or well-being.”

As far as we can tell, the two expressions have nothing in common except the H2O, which they refer to either literally or figuratively.

The earliest OED citation for the older “take the waters”  is from The Yorkshire Spaw, a 1652 treatise by John French on four medicinal wells: “I approve not of taking the waters too fast.”

However, we found an example from the 1980s that uses “test the waters” in the sense of “take the waters” at a spa. In Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980), the biographer Ronald Steel writes:

“During the summer of 1898, when with his parents at the resort town of Saratoga Springs, where New Yorkers of all classes retired to test the waters and bet on the horses, he met his first authentic hero.” (The hero was Admiral George Dewey, whose squadron had just defeated the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila.)

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When “tract” is off track

Q: Several educated people I know use “tract” when they mean “track,” as in “The political science tract is one path to law school.” My desultory search of reference works finds nothing on this usage. Do you condone it?

A: No, “tract” and “track” are not synonyms. They mean different things and are not interchangeable.

As a general rule, the word for an extent or expanse of something (like a plot of land), or for a system of organs, is “tract.” The word for a trail, path, line, or course (academic or otherwise) is “track.”

However, people quite often confuse these words.

Sometimes they mistakenly use “track” in place of “tract,” as in this citation from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage: “SCAAP skirted those obstacles by buying tracks of undeveloped land.”

Or this Fox News headline from 2014: “Have digestive problems? Tips, tricks to get your digestive track in check.”

In both cases, the correct word is “tract,” meaning an area of land in the first example and a bodily system in the second.

Less often, people use “tract” where “track” is called for, as in this example from Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.): “to help you keep tract [read track] of where you are in the filing system.”

Or on the academic websites that offer “advance tract” or “college pre-med tract” or “pre-law tract” programs.

In those cases the correct word is “track.” In the Garner’s example, to “keep track of” means to mentally follow the course of something. In the school examples, it means a course of study.

Despite their similar sounds, “tract” and “track” come from different sources, “tract” from Latin and “track” from Germanic.

But as we’ll explain, both of these words, first recorded in English in the 15th century, ultimately have to do with pulling, dragging, or drawing out. So over the centuries they’ve occasionally overlapped.

We’ll start with the more limited word, “tract.”

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, it comes from the noun tractus, which in Latin means “a drawing, dragging, pulling, trailing,” derived from the verb trahĕre (to draw, drag).

The more distant ancestor is a prehistoric Indo-European root reconstructed as tragh– (pull, move, run), which is a “rhyming variant” of dhragh– (drag), according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

The first example in writing is far off the beaten path. In 1486, it appeared as an obscure term in heraldry for a longitudinal division of a field within a coat of arms.

The OED’s earliest example is from a Middle English work, The Book of St. Albans, which has a passage devoted to the subject: “Off tractys in armys” (“Of tracts in arms”). This sense of “tract” is now obsolete.

The principal meanings of “tract” all have to do with the extent or duration of something, senses that began showing up around 1500 in relation to time.

These senses of the word, and the dates when they first appeared, include a time delay or deferral (1503-04); a period of time, as in a “longe tracte of tyme” (sometime before 1513); a stretch of territory or an expanse of space, air, water, etc. (1533); an anatomical structure, usually extending lengthwise, in a plant or animal, such as the “alimentary tract” (1681); a bounded parcel of land, especially one slated for development (1912).

The OED notes, though, that over the years “tract” was sometimes used in the senses of “track” and “trace,” but later on, the words diverged again.

For instance, during the 16th to 19th centuries “tract” was sometimes used to mean a path, route, or course of action. This usage is now rare or obsolete, the OED says, and the meaning is “usually expressed by track.”

And during the same period “tract” was sometimes used to mean a mark left behind, like a footprint or trail. This usage, too, is now rare or obsolete, and Oxford says the usual word is “trace.”

Another, unrelated meaning of “tract” should be mentioned here. The noun for a piece of writing, as in a book or pamphlet, showed up in the 1400s, an apparent abbreviation of tractātus, a Latin noun meaning “a handling, treatment, discussion, treatise,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest examples, “tractes of God” and “a generalle tracte,” are from 15th-century documents that are perhaps as early as 1425 or as late as 1475.

When “track” entered English in the 1400s, it meant pretty much what it means today, if you add in the later figurative uses.

This is the OED’s earliest definition: “The mark, or series of marks, left by the passage of anything; a trail; a wheel-rut; the wake of a ship; a series of footprints; the scent followed by hounds.”

The dictionary’s first written example is dated 1470-85: “Myght I fynde the trak of his hors I shold not fayle to fynde that Knyghte” (from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur).

Unlike “tract,” as we mentioned earlier, the noun “track” did not come from Latin, according to etymologists.

“Track” entered English through Old French (trac), but language scholars generally think the French borrowed it from Germanic sources, the OED explains.

The dictionary says that it may have entered French by way of the Middle Low German and Middle Dutch noun trek (a pull or a haul). In both Germanic languages, the verb trekken means to draw, pull, tug, drag, or haul.

How did an English word derived from Germanic sources for dragging and pulling come to mean a trail?

The OED explains that “the original sense would appear to have been the line or mark made on the ground by anything hauled or dragged, whence also the mark made or path beaten by the feet of man or beast.”

Though etymologists don’t link “track” to ancient Indo-European, it seems likely that the Germanic trekken has prehistoric origins that would connect it to “tract.” But the evidence, if it exists, apparently hasn’t been found.

Some later senses of the word, and the dates when they were first recorded in writing, include a route of travel (1576); a course of action or conduct (1638); a path or rough road (1643); a railway line (1806); a race course (1836); a branch of athletics (1905); a set of grooves on a record album, hence a recorded piece of music (1904); an educational stream (1959).

The word has given us many catchphrases and figurative expressions, including to shoot someone “dead in his tracks” (1824); to “make tracks” (1835-40); to be on a “false track” (1871); “covering up his tracks” (1878); “to keep track of” (1873); “on the right track” (1886); “on a wrong track” (1889); “one loses all track of” (1894); “kept close track of” (1902); “from the wrong side of the railroad tracks” (1945, later with “railroad” omitted); “made me stop dead in my tracks” (1954); “keep us on track” (1978).

With that, we’ll stop in our tracks.

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Couples therapy

Q: I’m curious to hear your views about the correct use of the word “couple” when referring to therapy. Is it “couple therapy,” “couples therapy,” or “couple’s therapy”?

A: All three appear regularly in popular and scholarly publications. A fourth version, “couples’ therapy,” isn’t seen as much.

Which term should you use? Well, usage writers haven’t weighed in on the subject, but these are our thoughts.

If you’re writing for publication, use the one preferred by the publication. Otherwise, we’d recommend “couples therapy.” It showed up first in print, it’s the only one in standard dictionaries, and it appears more often than the others in medical dictionaries.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “couples therapy” as “any form of therapy aimed at relieving problems in a sexual or domestic partnership.”

The earliest written examples date from the mid-1960s, but the usage probably existed earlier, since experiments with this therapy began a decade earlier.

The earliest example that we’ve found in our database searches is from Family Therapy and Disturbed Families, a 1967 book edited by Gerald H. Zuk and Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy.

A chapter in the book, written by Carl A. Whitaker and John Warkentin, is entitled “The Secret Agenda of the Therapist Doing Couples Therapy.”

As we’ve said, earlier examples probably exist, since Whitaker began experimenting with couples therapy in the mid-1950s, according to Reshaping Family Relationships: The Symbolic Therapy of Carl Whitaker (1999).

The authors of the book, Gary Connell, Tammy Mitten, and William Bumberry, discuss Whitaker’s early work:

“While it was perfectly acceptable for both partners to be in their own individual therapy, the idea of exposing them to each other during a therapy hour was unorthodox. When the presenting complaint seemed relational, Carl began inviting both partners to attend.”

The OED also has a citation for “couples therapy” from the same year as the Whitaker/Warkentin example above:

“The reason you took up couples therapy is because you got bored with individuals.” (From an interview with Whitaker, recounted in Techniques of Family Therapy, 1967, by Jay Haley and Lynn Hoffman.)

The term has been used steadily ever since. Oxford has this more contemporary example, from the British magazine Diva (May 27, 2000): “We had spent a fortune on couples therapy and, believe me, we really worked hard when we were in that room.”

The singular form, “couple therapy,” which the OED defines as meaning the same as “couples therapy,” has been around since the 1970s.

The dictionary’s earliest example is the title of a 1970 article in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry: “Behavioral Approaches to Family and Couple Therapy.”

This later example is from a Texas newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News (Sept. 17, 2005): “The sex therapist may want to work with him alone at first, then eventually include couple therapy.”

The OED doesn’t have any citations for “couple’s therapy,” but we’ve found several dating from the 1970s.

The earliest is from a 1970 issue of Voices, a journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists: “The therapist is always involved during couple’s therapy with the struggle between the spouses.”

We’ve found entries for the therapy in only two standard dictionaries, Meriam-Webster Unabridged and the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Both entries are for “couples therapy,” which the Unabridged defines as “usually short-term counseling designed to help couples understand and resolve problems, dissatisfaction, and conflict in their relationship.”

It gives this example from the March 1990 issue of Vogue: “For wealthy addicts or poor ones, addiction is never an isolated problem, but often requires treatment for depression or anxiety, or couples therapy for the many addicts in dysfunctional relationships.”

We’ve found several medical dictionaries with entries for “couples therapy,” including the online Dorland and Merriam-Webster medical references. However, the entry in Mosby’s Medical Dictionary (9th ed.) is for “couples’ therapy.”

As for the various terms for the therapists themselves, the plural “couples therapist,” defined in the OED as “a practitioner of couples therapy,” is the oldest.

This is the OED’s first citation: “The sex therapist must be an extremely skilled psychotherapist and couples therapist if he is to be successful.” (From Helen Singer Kaplan’s The New Sex Therapy, 1974.)

And this is the dictionary’s earliest example for the singular form, “couple therapist,” defined as meaning the same as “couples therapist”:

“There may be a perception of one of the therapists in family therapy which is dominated by his role as an individual or couple therapist.” (From an article by Roger L. Shapiro and John Zinner, collected in Exploring Individual & Organizational Boundaries, edited by W. Gordon Lawrence, 1979.)

The OED doesn’t have a citation for “couple’s therapist.” The earliest we’ve found is from Soul Survivors: A New Beginning for Adults Abused As Children, a 1989 book by J. Patrick Gannon:

“If you select an experienced couple’s therapist, who is savvy in the issues that survivor relationships present, it may be well worth the time and the expense.”

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The roll of the dice

Q: When an indeterminate number of dice are rolled, does one say “die roll” or “dice roll”? I play a lot of tabletop role-playing games and some authors tend towards one usage, some the other. I would like to be correct in my own usage. (I favor “die roll.”)

A: Traditionally, the word “dice” refers to either a game played with dice, or to more than one of the cubes used in such a game.

While traditionalists still prefer “die” for just one of the cubes, many usage authorities now define “dice” as one or more.

If an indeterminate number of dice are to be rolled, you ask, is it a “die roll” or a “dice roll”? We would say “dice roll.”

In the phrase “dice roll,” the noun “dice” is being used attributively—that is, adjectivally—to modify the noun “roll.” We think the word “dice” in that phrase can be viewed two ways: either as a game played with dice or as one or more of the cubes used in the game.

The phrase “die roll,” in our opinion, is a legitimate but stuffy way of referring to the roll of a single cube.

However, the popular online dictionary Wiktionary notes that “die” is “predominant among tabletop gamers.” If the phrase “die roll” is part of the specialized language used by the gamers you play with, then feel free to use it yourself.

We haven’t used the singular “die” ourselves in this post because we use “dice” for both the singular and plural in the gaming sense. We’ll explain our thinking later, but let’s look first at the history of these words.

When the term showed up in early Middle English, the singular was “die” (originally spelled “dē” or “dee”), and the plural was “dice” (originally, “dēs” or “dees”), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The plural showed up first in writing. The earliest OED citation is from Robert Mannyng’s Middle English translation (circa 1330) of Roman de Brut, a verse history of Britain by the Norman poet Wace:

“Somme pleide wyþ des and tables” (“Some played with dice and tables”). Backgammon was once referred to as “tables.”

The dictionary’s first citation for the singular is from Confessio Amantis (circa 1393), a Middle English poem by John Gower: “The chaunce is cast upon a dee, / But yet full oft a man may see.”

However, the OED also has citations dating from the late 1300s for a Middle English version of “dice” used in the singular.

The first example, from a 1388 act of Parliament, uses the plural “dyces,” suggesting the existence of a singular “dyce.”

The next example, a Latin-English translation from around 1425, is clearer: “Hic talus, dyse.” (Talus means “ankle bone” as well as “dice.” The Romans made dice from the tali, or ankle bones, of animals.)

So is “die” or “dice” the singular today when used in the gaming sense? The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical principles, says “dice” is by far the dominant singular.

“The form dice (used as pl. and sing.) is of much more frequent occurrence in gaming and related senses than the singular die,” the dictionary says.

Oxford Dictionaries online, a standard (or general) dictionary, says this in a usage note:

“Historically, dice is the plural of die, but in modern standard English, dice is both the singular and the plural: throw the dice could mean a reference to two or more dice, or to just one. In fact, the singular die (rather than dice) is increasingly uncommon.”

However, other standard dictionaries are divided about the oneness of “dice” when the term is used in games. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, says “die” is the singular and “dice” the plural. But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says either “die” or “dice” can be singular.

Usage guides are also divided. Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.) rejects “dice” as “a false singular,” but Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) says: “The small cubes with faces bearing 1-6 spots used in games of chance are the dice (pl.); and one of them is called a dice.”

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language sides with Fowler’s: “Dice is etymologically the plural of die, but the latter is virtually no longer in use (outside the fixed phrase The die is cast), with dice reanalyzed as the lexical base: another dice ~ a pair of dice.”

We agree with the OED, Oxford Dictionaries, Fowler’s, and Cambridge that “dice” now is both singular and plural. However, we also believe that when at the gaming table, do as the gamers do.

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How “awk” lost its way

Q: In your post about “awkward,” you mention a Middle English adjective “awk,” but you don’t cite any instance of it. Did it ever occur in ME as a word in itself, disconnected from the suffix “-ward”? By the way “awk” has a cognate in modern Swedish: avig (the wrong way).

A: Yes, “awk” was a word in Middle English. In fact, it was a word in early Modern English too, though it’s now considered obsolete.

“Awk” was an adjective in Middle English, and an adjective, adverb, and noun in early Modern English. However, the latest citation for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the 1690s.

(Middle English was the language spoken from around 1150 to 1500, according to the OED, followed by early Modern English.)

The dictionary says “awk” probably came from Old Norse, where afug, öfug, or öfig meant “turned the wrong way, back foremost.” Like you, the dictionary notes that the modern Swedish cognate, or relative, has a similar sense.

Oxford says “awk” had cognates in Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Sanskrit. For example, the cognate in Old Sanskrit, apák or apáñch, meant “turned away.”

When “awk” showed up in Middle English, according to the OED, it had three meanings: (1) “Directed the other way or in the wrong direction, back-handed, from the left hand.” (2) “Untoward, froward, perverse, in nature or disposition.” (3) “Out-of-the-way, odd, strange.”

Here are the earliest examples for each sense, all dated from around 1440. The first two are from Promptorium Parvulorum (Storehouse for Children), an English-Latin dictionary; the third is from Morte Arthure, an anonymous poem based on the legend of King Arthur:

(1) “Awke or wronge, sinister.” (2): ”Awke or angry, contrarius, bilosus, perversus.” (3) “Off elders of alde tyme and of theire awke dedys [deeds].”

The adverb and noun appeared (and disappeared) in the 1600s, according to the OED citations.

The adverb was used in the phrases “to ring awk” (“the wrong way, backward”) and “to sing awk” (“in sinister or ill-omened wise”).

Here’s a sinister/ominous example from Philemon Holland’s 1600 translation of Livy’s history of Rome and the Roman people: “What if a bird sing auke or crowe crosse and contrarie?”

Finally, the noun meant “backhandedness, untowardness, awkwardness” when it showed up in the mid-1600s. Here’s an OED citation from a 1674 scientific treatise by the English physician Nathaniel Fairfax: “What we have hitherto spoken, will seem to have less of auk in it.”

In case you’re wondering, the noun “awk,” sometimes spelled “auk” or “auke,” isn’t related to the avian “auk,” a family of diving birds including the puffin and the extinct, flightless “great auk.”

The English name for the bird is derived from its name in Old Norse, álka, which gave Swedish alka and Danish alke.

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Are the Clintons a dynasty?

Q: For years, Bill & Hillary Clinton have been called a “dynasty” in the mainstream media. But “dynasty” properly refers to a ruling family that wields power over generations. A married couple does not constitute a dynasty. However, this improper usage is catching on. Do you have any idea where it comes from?

A: Yes, “dynasty” did have a generational sense when it showed up in English in the 15th century, and that sense is often lost when the word is used today. Is this newer usage legit? Here’s the story.

English borrowed “dynasty” from the French dynastie, but it’s ultimately derived from δυναστεία, or dunasteia, classical Greek for power, lordship, or domination.

When “dynasty” showed up in English writing, it meant a “succession of rulers of the same line or family,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest example in the OED is from John Capgrave’s Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, an abbreviated history that the dictionary dates from sometime before 1464, the year Capgrave died: “Than entered þat lond [Egypt] þei of Tebes tyl xxxvi Dynastines had regned.”

But in the 1800s, “dynasty” took on various figurative and other extended meanings, weakening its generational sense. An “Aristotelian dynasty,” for example, might refer to Aristotle and his followers.

The earliest figurative citation in the dictionary is from John Reeves’s On Psalms (1800): “The next dynasty of theologists, the schoolmen.”

And in the 20th century, according to the OED, “dynasty” took on a figurative sports sense: “A run of success (by a team or club) which lasts for several seasons; a team or club achieving such success.”

The dictionary’s first sports example is from the Aug. 20, 1925, issue of the Lowell (Mass.) Sun: “It may be that the present Athletics and Pirates, setting most of the pace in this year’s pennant battles, are about to create new dynasties.”

The word “dynasty,” as you’ve noticed, is often used loosely, from the  original TV Dynasty to the newer Duck Dynasty and the book Kardashian Dynasty. Is it now acceptable to refer to a “Clinton dynasty”?

Most of the standard dictionaries we regularly consult have expansive definitions for “dynasty” that would apply to the Clintons, especially if Mrs. Clinton is the next president.

For example, the definition of “dynasty” in Oxford Dictionaries online, a different entity from the OED, includes this sense: “A succession of people from the same family who play a prominent role in business, politics, or another field.”

And The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) includes this sense: “A succession of rulers from the same family or line.”

Cambridge Dictionaries online defines “dynasty” as “a series of rulers or leaders who are all from the same family,” while the Collins English Dictionary says it can refer to “any sequence of powerful leaders of the same family.”

Merriam-Webster Online defines it as, among other things, “a powerful group or family that maintains its position for a considerable time.”

And the Macmillan English Dictionary’s definition includes this sense: “a family whose members are very successful in business or politics for a long period of time.”

As we often remind our readers, especially the traditionalists among them, language changes. And the word “dynasty” has been changing since it showed up in English more than five centuries ago.

We think it’s legitimate to call the Clintons, like the Bushes and the Kennedys, a dynasty.

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Why the dead are “late”

Q: Why do people refer to a deceased person as “late”? I googled the question, but found no satisfactory answers.

A: To begin at the beginning, the adjective “late” meant “slow,” “sluggish,” “idle,” or “negligent” when it showed up in Old English and other Germanic languages, including Old Norse, Old Icelandic, and Old High German.

It ultimately comes from lad-, an ancient Indo-European base that gave Latin lassus (weary), source of the English words “lassitude” and “alas,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

The earliest example of “late” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Pastoral Care (circa 897), King Ælfred’s translation of a sixth-century Latin treatise by Pope Gregory I:

“Sie æghwelc mon suiðe hræd & suiðe geornful to gehieranne, & suiðe læt to sprecenne” (“Let every man be very ready and eager to hear, and very late [that is, “slow”] to speak.”

The OED’s first example for the usual modern sense of “late” (“that occurs, comes, or happens after the proper, right, or expected time”) is from the Catholic Homilies of the Benedictine monk and scholar Ælfric of Eynsham, probably written between 990 and 995:

“Hi behreowsodon þæt hi ele næfdon, ac heora behreowsung wæs to lætt” (“They repented that they had no oil, but their repentance was too late”).

Since then, the adjective “late” has taken on many other senses, as in “a late winning goal,” “the late Elizabethan era,” “my late profession,” “sorry to call so late,” “it comes late in Hamlet,” “a late flowering perennial,” and so on.

The sense you’re asking about (“designating a person recently deceased”) showed up in the early 15th century, according to the OED. The first known example in writing is from a petition dated sometime before 1422: “Elizabeth, ye Wyfe of ye seid late Erle.”

The dictionary’s next example is from William Caxton’s 1490 Middle English translation (by way of French) of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Her swete and late amyable husbonde.”

The OED says the “recently dead” sense of “late” was apparently influenced by the use of the adverb “late” to mean “not long ago (but not now); recently, but no longer.”

Here’s an adverbial example, from a 1435 will, that hints at the adjectival usage: “Thys is the will o Isabell Dove, lat [that is, “formerly”] the wyf of Thomas Dove.”

The adverb also apparently led to the use of the adjective “late” to mean “former,” as in “my late profession” or “his late residence.”

The OED’s earliest citation for this sense is from a 1446 document about the finances at the Cistercian abbey in Cupar-Angus, Scotland:

“Item the … altarage of the Kyrk of South Alveth to our laeyt tenand Johne Wil[ȝ]amson for all the dayis of hys lyfe.” (The term “altarage,” which is now historical, refers here to the former tenant’s income from the offerings at a church altar.)

We’ll end with the use of the expression “the late lamented” in reference to someone who has recently died. The first OED example is from Uncle Silas, an 1864 thriller by the Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Here’s an expanded version:

“I beg pardon, Miss Ruthyn; perhaps you would be so good as to show to which of the cabinets in this room your late lamented father pointed out as that to which this key belongs.”

Note: We wrote a post in 2012 on an unusual use of “late” for “deceased” in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels.

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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. Today’s topic: English words from Native American languages.

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Graphic language

Q: I had to unsubscribe to your emailed posts after receiving one at work that discussed certain masturbatory terminology. I strongly suggest that you stop emailing such unprofessional content or notify people signing up for email delivery that some content may not be appropriate for the workplace. Should you choose to keep PG-13 rated material on your website and only email G-rated material, I’d happy return as a subscriber.

A: We’re sorry to see you go, but we object to your description of our “Jerk, jerky, and jerking off” post as unprofessional. We work hard on our posts, and our readers generally appreciate them, judging from the many kind responses and donations we receive.

We write a language blog, and some language is labeled vulgar, offensive, or impolite by standard dictionaries. Nevertheless, those dictionaries discuss such terms, and so do we when asked about them.

We don’t go out of our way to write about language that some readers might find offensive, but we don’t shy away from it either.

We imagine that many of our readers get the blog at work by email or RSS feed. You’re the only one who has raised concerns about receiving the occasional discussion of a graphic term at work—a term that’s probably in your office dictionary.

You suggest that we should warn people as they sign up for email delivery that some posts may be inappropriate for the workplace. We think our readers would be offended by such a warning and its implication that there’s something wrong with a scholarly discussion of a vulgar term.

In fact, not all standard dictionaries consider the phrasal verb “jerk off” vulgar. Here’s what the Collins English Dictionary has to say in a usage note on the subject:

“The term jerk off was formerly considered to be taboo, and it was labelled as such in older editions of Collins English Dictionary. However, it has now become acceptable in speech, although some older or more conservative people may object to its use.”

We don’t necessarily agree with Collins. We would indeed describe “jerk off” as vulgar, as we would a couple of the terms that the linguist John McWhorter cites in a July 1, 2013, article on Slate about the evolution of profanity:

“Damn, hell, shit, and fuck are not what an anthropologist observing us would classify as ‘taboo.’ We all say them all the time. Those words are not profane in what our modern culture is—they are, rather, salty. That’s all. Anyone who objects would be surprised to go back 50 years and try to use those words as casually as we do now and ever be asked again to parties.”

The lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower says in that Slate article that words once considered taboo or offensive can over time become moderate oaths for various reasons.

“The entire category can change, so that, for example, words insulting one’s parentage, such as bastard or whoreson, are now relatively mild curses because we no longer place a particularly high value on such things.”

Sheidlower adds that the words “bastard” and “damn” were so offensive in the 18th century that “they would frequently be printed b–d or d—n.” But sensitivities change, he says. “Now, they are relatively mild oaths for most English speakers.”

In other words, language changes. And it’s the job of language writers to discuss its evolution.

Again, we’re sorry to see you go. If you don’t want to receive the blog by email at work, perhaps you can get it at home.

[Update: A few hours after this was posted, an I.T. person who reads the blog pointed out that it’s a “recipe for disaster” to get personal email at work, and that all email received at work is the property of the employer.]

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Relational therapy

Q: Could one use either “related” or “relayed” in the following sentence? “Scott had already related to Ivan what Russ had said in Baton Rouge about the gathering at Fred’s apartment.”

A: Yes, both verbs, “relate” and “relay,” can be used in that sentence, though “relay” is more precise.

“Relate” means, among other things, to tell something to someone, while “relay” here means to pass information from one person along to another.

These are the relevant definitions from Oxford Dictionaries online, one of the standard, or general, dictionaries we regularly consult:

Relate: “Give an account of (a sequence of events); narrate,” as in “various versions of the chilling story have been related by the locals.”

Relay: “Receive and pass on (information or a message),” as in “she intended to relay everything she had learned.”

In your sentence, Scott does both—he tells something to someone, as well as passing along something said by someone else. In other words, he “relates” something and “relays” it.

Either verb is correct, but “relay” would emphasize the “passing along” sense.

Both “relate” and “relay” showed up in the 15th century, but it took hundreds of years for “relay” to take on the sense we’re talking about, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a historical dictionary that traces the evolution of words.

The OED says “relate” is derived from the Middle French relater (to report or recount) and the classical Latin referre (to bring back, report, recall, and other senses). The Latin verb combines re- (back) and ferre (carry).

When “relate” showed up in English in the late 1400s it meant “to be brought or put between two things,” but that sense is now considered rare or obsolete, according to the OED.

The verb soon took on the sense we’re discussing: “to recount, narrate, give an account of (actions, events, facts, etc.”), Oxford says.

The earliest known citation, the OED says, is from John Palsgrave’s Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (1530), a French grammar for English speakers: “I wolde nat relate the mater otherwyse than I herde it for all the good in the worlde.”

The verb “relay” is an adaptation of the Middle French relayer, meaning to change hounds during a hunt. When it appeared in English in the early 15th century, the OED says, it meant to “release a set of hounds in a chase, esp. after a previous set has passed.”

The dictionary has several examples of this now-obsolete usage from Master of the Game (circa 1425), a book about hunting by Edward, Duke of York. All the citations refer to deer hunting, including this one: “Digby relaye his houndes vpon þe fues” (“Digby relayed his hounds upon the scent”).

The sense of “relay” that you’re asking about showed up in the mid-19th century.

The earliest example in the OED is from My Thirty Years Out of the Senate (1859), a collection of fictional letters written by Seba Smith, a New England newspaper publisher and political satirist: “A young boy stands by the table relaying a message to the man.”

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When chairmen carried chairs

Q: I came across an old penny dreadful online that refers to one of the bearers of a sedan chair as a “chairman.” Is that the original meaning of the term?

A: No, the word “chairman” meant pretty much what it means today when it showed up in the mid-1600s. However, the use of the term for one of the bearers of a sedan chair appeared a few decades later.

For readers who aren’t familiar with the term, a “sedan chair” was a fashionable form of transportation in Britain in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. The enclosed chair for one passenger was carried on poles by two bearers, one in front and one in back.

(Similar wheelless vehicles carried by humans have been used around the world since ancient times.)

When the word “chairman” showed up in the mid-17th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it referred to the “occupier of a chair of authority,” especially someone “chosen to preside over a meeting.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from a 1654 commentary on the Book of Job by John Trapp, a Church of England clergyman: “I sate chief, and was Chair-man.”

The dictionary’s next example (which we’ve expanded) is from a Jan. 22, 1661, entry in the Diary of Samuel Pepys:

“It pleased me much now to come in this condition to this place I was once a petitioner for my exhibition in Paul’s School; and where Sir G. Downing (my late master) was chaireman.”

Interestingly, the use of “chairwoman” for a “woman who occupies the chair of presidency at a meeting” is almost as old, though it wasn’t used much until the 19th century, according to the OED.

The dictionary’s first example for “chairwoman” is from the English poet Thomas Brown’s 1699 translation of seven colloquies of Erasmus: “We ought to have … four Chairwomen of our four Committees.”

The use of “chair” by itself for the occupant of the seat of authority dates from the mid-1600s. The earliest Oxford citation is a 1659 entry in the diary of Thomas Burton:

“The Chair behaves himself like a Busby amongst so many schoolboys … and takes a little too much on him.” (The word “Busby” is apparently being used here figuratively for a soldier who wears a busby, a tall fur hat.)

Now, the dictionary says, “chair” is used “an alternative for ‘chairman’ or ‘chairwoman,’ esp. deliberately so as not to imply a particular sex.”

The OED’s earliest citation for the gender-neutral “chairperson” is from the September 1971 issue of Science News: “A group of women psychologists thanked the board for using the word ‘chairperson’ rather than ‘chairman.’ ”

Getting back to “chairman,” in the 18th century the term took on the sense of a “member of a corporate body appointed or elected to preside at its meetings, and in general to exercise the chief authority in the conduct of its affairs; the president.”

The OED’s first citation is from Ephraim Chambers’s 1782 Cyclopædia: “The directors are twenty-four in number, including the chairman and deputy-chairman.”

Backing up a bit, the word “chairman” was first used in the late 17th century for someone “whose occupation it is to carry persons in chairs or chair-like conveyances; spec. the two men who carried a sedan-chair,” according to Oxford.

The first example given is from a 1682 issue of the London Gazette: “A tall Blackamore … in a Green Doublet and Breeches, with a large Chairmans Coat of the same colour.”

And here’s a 1703 example from the Gazette: “Twenty Chairmen, with Sedans.”

A “sedan chair” was originally called a “sedan” when the term appeared in the mid-17th century. The OED’s first citation is from The Sparagus Garden, a 1640 comedy by the English dramatist Richard Brome:

“Shee’s now gone forth in one o’ the new Hand-litters: what call yee it, a Sedan.”

The earliest OED example for the full term “sedan chair” is from a 1750 will cited in John Orlebar Payne’s Records of the English Catholics (1889): “My sedan chair.”

The dictionary says the belief that the usage was derived from “the name of Sedan, a town of NE. France, has nothing to support it, and seems unlikely.”

It notes a report that the original sedan chair was imported from Italy, adding that it’s “therefore natural to suppose that the word might be from some South Italian derivative of Italian sede (Latin sēdēs) seat, sedere to sit.”

However, the OED adds that “there seems to be no trustworthy evidence of the existence in Italian dialects of any form from which the English word could be derived. ”

In other words, origin unknown.

Today, the “sedan chair” is a footnote to history, and “sedan” has been used since the early 20th century, chiefly in North America, to mean a type of automobile.

Returning to your question, we should mention that the term “penny dreadful” refers to cheaply published sensational crime stories that were popular in the 19th century. Oxford Dictionaries online says they were “so named because the original cost was one penny.”

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When “my wife” is “the wife”

Q: Why does a husband refer to his spouse as “the wife,” not “my wife,” and a wife likewise to “the husband,” not “my husband”? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

A: English speakers have been using “the” in place of a possessive pronoun like “my” or “your” in reference to relatives (husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and so on) for at least two centuries.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the adjective “the” here is being used “colloquially with names of relatives, as the wife, the mother = my (your) wife, mother.”

The earliest written example in the OED is from an 1838 story in Historical, Traditionary and Imaginative Tales of the Borders, a series of books published from 1835 to ’40 by the Scottish writer John Mackay Wilson: “What shall I say to the wife?”

However, we found an earlier example in Old Mortality, an 1816 novel by Sir Walter Scott: “Cuddie soon returned assuring the stranger ‘that the gudewife should make a bed up for him.’ ”

We suspect that the usage may be of Scottish origin. The Scottish National Dictionary, in its entry for “the,” describes the usage as “Gen. Sc.” (General Scots), but notes that it’s also found in “in colloq. and dial. Eng.”

Here are some more examples from the OED for “the” used in place of a possessive pronoun:

“ ‘It’s a long while since the governor [that is, my father] was here,’ remarked Mr. Charles Larkyns, very unfilially.” (From The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an 1853 novel by Cuthbert M. Bede, a pseudonym for Edward Bradley, an English clergyman.)

“The Mater will do anything for me.” (From The Mystery of Mirbridge, an 1881 novel by the English writer John Payne.)

“The mother and sisters would like to call upon you.” (From The American Girl in London, an 1891 novel by the Canadian writer Sara Jeannette Duncan.)

“The pater will say I’m a fool, the mater’ll say the girl isn’t good enough for me.” (From Somerley, School-Boy and Undergraduate, a 1900 autobiographical novel by Gilbert Swift.)

“[I] sent off an express to Patty and the Mother last night.” (From Richard Carvell, a 1901 novel by the American writer Winston Churchill.)

Why did the usage develop? We don’t know, and we haven’t seen any theories about it.

The earliest citation above (“the gudewife”) uses the phrase affectionately. Perhaps the next citation (“the wife”) is a shortening of “the good wife.” Or perhaps not.

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What is a con-see-AIR?

Q: Your “prix fixe” post reminds me of encounters with people who try too hard to pronounce French-derived terms. For example, a hotel receptionist in Texas once invited me to use the services of the con-see-AIR. The latter threw me for a loop until I realized it was supposed to be “concierge.”

A: Some English speakers apparently mispronounce “concierge” in an attempt to sound sophisticated. They say con-see-AIR (sometimes even con-see-AY) because they think that’s the proper French pronunciation.

It’s not, of course. The French word concierge ends with a soft “g” sound, like “zh,” and the “g” in the English “concierge” sounds much the same way. To pronounce it otherwise would be a faux pas (also spoken in English à la française).

Thanks to the Internet, you can listen to the French and English pronunciations of concierge / “concierge.”

The proper English pronunciation has three sounds, con + see + AIRZH, but the last two sounds are blended into one syllable, so the word is spoken as con-SYAIRZH.

English adopted “concierge” from French in the mid-17th century, when it meant “the custodian of a house, castle, prison, etc.,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary’s earliest written example in English is from 1646: “He is knowne and re-known by the Conciergres [sic], by the Judges, by the greater part of the Senate.” (From George Buck’s History of the Life and Reigne of Richard the Third.)

“In France and other countries,” the OED says, the word was once “the title of a high official who had the custody of a royal palace, fortress, etc.”

In more recent times, Oxford says, “concierge” in England as well as in France came to mean “the person who has charge of the entrance of a building; a janitor, porter.”

This meaning was first recorded in English sometime before 1697: “The concierge that shewed the house would shut the door” (from a portrait of Sir Francis Bacon in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives).

However, the OED’s entry for “concierge” has not been updated since 1891, and does not include the modern sense of an employee who helps guests at a hotel.

Today, “concierge” has two meanings in standard dictionaries. Here, for example are the definitions given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.):

“1. A staff member of a hotel or apartment complex who assists guests or residents, as by handling the storage of luggage, taking and delivering messages, and making reservations for tours. 2. A person, especially in France, who lives in an apartment house, attends the entrance, and serves as a janitor.”

But “concierge” is now becoming a trendy word intended to add snob appeal to anyone paid to help you, at least here in the US, and standard dictionaries aren’t keeping up.

Besides the hotel “concierge” who gets you theater tickets and dinner reservations, there are “concierge” doctors (you pay a fee up front to get more of their time), and “concierge” shoppers (that is, personal shoppers), as well as “concierge” real estate brokers, dog groomers, personal trainers, car washes, travel agents, and dry cleaners.

And as we all know by now, front-desk people at restaurants, car rentals, salons, spas, and offices of all kinds are commonly called “concierges.” As far as we can tell, the “concierge” designation has no particular meaning except to add cachet.

As we said, English got “concierge” from French, but etymologists don’t know where the French word came from (“derivation unknown,” says the OED).

The word in Old French was spelled various ways: cumcerges, concerge, conciarge, consirge, consierge, and concherge.

The Old French term gave medieval Latin the word consergius, first recorded in writing in 1106, according to the OED.

French etymologists, in Le Trésor de la Langue Français Informatisé and elsewhere, suggest the Old French word may have its origin in the Vulgar Latin conservius (“fellow slave”).

If so, the posh English use of “concierge” may ultimately be derived from a colloquial Latin term for a fellow slave. Chic, n’est-ce pas?

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A stiff upper lip

Q: Why do the British use the expression “stiff upper lip” in reference to their fortitude? And when did they begin using it?

A: Although the expression is now a cliché for British determination in the face of adversity, it actually originated in the United States in the early 1800s.

Why “keep a stiff upper lip”? Well, the lips may respond to fear and other strong emotions by contracting, turning pale, trembling, and so on.

But we haven’t seen any research in physiology indicating that the upper lip is more responsive to emotion than the lower. Nor have we seen a convincing etymological explanation for why the expression refers to the upper lip in particular.

There’s no clue in the earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, from the June 14, 1815, issue of the Massachusetts Spy, a weekly newspaper: “I kept a stiff upper lip, and bought [a] license to sell my goods.”

The next example in the OED is from the writings of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a politician and author in what was then the British colony of Nova Scotia.

The 1836 citation is from Haliburton’s humorous series of sketches, originally published in a Halifax newspaper, about Sam Slick the Clockmaker, an opinionated Connecticut Yankee traveling in Nova Scotia:

“Its a proper pity sich a clever woman should carry such a stiff upper lip.” (The words are Sam Slick’s, suggesting that Haliburton may have considered “stiff upper lip” a Yankeeism.)

The next Oxford example is from the American novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), by Harriet Beecher Stowe: “ ‘Well, good-by, Uncle Tom; keep a stiff upper lip,’ said George.”

And here’s one (not in the OED) from another American novel, Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward (1890), by Horatio Alger: “ ‘Keep a stiff upper lip,’ said Dick.”

The earliest Oxford citation for the expression used in the British Isles is from the Sept. 17, 1887, issue of the Spectator: “The Financial Secretary, who, it is supposed, will have a stiff upper lip and tightly buttoned pockets.”

And this battle-hardened example is from Gallipoli Diary, a 1920 memoir by Gen. Sir Ian Hamilton, who commanded the British and allied forces against the Ottoman Empire at the start of the Battle of Gallipoli:

“I spoke to as many of them as I could, and although some were terribly mutilated and disfigured, and although a few others were clearly dying, one and all kept a stiff upper lip—one and all were, or managed to appear—more than content—happy!”

By the mid-20th century, the expression was often used to poke fun at British stoicism. This example is from a late novel of P. G. Wodehouse, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963):

“It’s pretty generally recognized at the Drones Club and elsewhere that Bertram Wooster is a man who knows how to keep the chin up and the upper lip stiff, no matter how rough the going may be.”

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Make no bones about it

Q: What is the origin of the expression “to make no bones about it,” and what are these “bones” supposed to be?

A: The expression evolved from a 15th-century saying, “to find no bones” (that is, difficulties) in one’s figurative soup. So in the 1400s, “to find no bones” in a situation meant to see no obstacles or problems.

Today, to “make no bones” about something means to speak clearly and unhesitatingly about it, no matter how awkward or distasteful the subject is.

Oxford Dictionaries online, a standard, or general, dictionary, has this example: “Definitely not for the squeamish, the article makes no bones about where the responsibility for the massacre lay.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, says “to make bones” means “to make objections or scruples about, find difficulty in, have hesitation in or about” something.

However, the OED says, the expression is generally used with a negative (“no,” “never,” “without,” and so on).

As the OED explains, “to make bones,” which first appeared in the mid-16th century, was originally “to find bones.”

The earlier, 15th-century expression referred figuratively “to the occurrence of bones in soup, etc., as an obstacle to its being easily swallowed.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from a letter written in 1459 to a Norfolk squire, John Paston I, by his chaplain, Friar John Brackley:

“And fond that tyme no bonys in the matere” (“And found that time no bones in the matter”).

The next citation uses the metaphor in the sense of having no complaints about a cup of ale:

“Supped it up at once; / She founde therein no bones.” (From John Skelton’s humorous poem The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, which some scholars date at about 1516.)

No long afterward, in the mid-1500s, the more familiar formula “make no bones” first appeared in English writing.

In the OED’s earliest example, from a 1548 English translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases (retellings of the Gospels), the expression conveys Abraham’s willingness to kill his son without hesitation:

“He made no manier bones ne stickyng, but went in hande to offer up his only son Isaac.” (“He made no sorts of bones at stabbing, but proceeded to offer up his only son Isaac.”)

While today the expression is followed by “about,” this wasn’t the case early on. For the first few centuries, people “made no bones at” (or of or in or to) before finally arriving in the late 19th century at “make no bones about.”

Here’s a selection of the OED’s other examples (note the various prepositions):

“As for mans hand, they make no bones at it.” (From a 1571 translation of John Calvin’s The Psalmes of Dauid and Others.)

“What matter soever is intreated of, they never make bones in it.” (From John Marbeck’s A Booke of Notes and Common Places, 1581.)

“Who make no bones of the Lords promises, but devoure them all.” (From Daniel Rogers’s Naaman the Syrian: His Disease and Cure, 1642.)

“The Pope makes no bones to break … the Decrees.” (From a 1670 translation of Gregorio Leti’s history Il Cardinalismo di Santa Chiesa.)

“Do you think that the Government or the Opposition would make any bones about accepting the seat if he offered it to them?” (From William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Pendennis, 1850.)

The first known example with the specific wording “make no bones about” is from a late Victorian novel, and here the phrase conveys the sense of speaking forthrightly:

“I didn’t quite like to draw out my money so long as Pilkington held on; but I shall make no bones about it with this fellow.” (From William Edward Norris’s Adrian Vidal, 1885.)

That is the sense the phrase usually has today, as in this mid-20th-century example from the OED:

“On the other hand, Dr. Libby makes no bones about the catastrophe of a nuclear war.” (From a 1955 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.)

Several other catch phrases involving bones are a familiar part of English, like “a bone to pick” and “bone of contention.” Both of these, as we’ve written before on the blog, date from the 16th century and are derived from the notion of dogs gnawing on bones.

Then there’s the 19th-century phrase, still sometimes heard today, “to make old bones,” meaning to live to a ripe old age.

The OED’s earliest citation for “make old bones” is from 1872, but we found an earlier one. It’s from the Jan. 3, 1863, issue of the journal Once a Week, in a serial installment of Mrs. Henry Wood’s novel Verner’s Pride:

“Barring getting shot, or run over by a railway train, you’ll make old bones, you will.”

The noun “bone” is Germanic in origin and, as you might suspect, it’s extremely old. The earliest known example is from the Erfurt Glossary, believed to have been written during the last quarter of the seventh century.

Here the manuscript translates the Latin word for “ivory” into Old English: “Ebor, elpendes ban [elephant’s bone].”

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The “potter” in “potter’s field”

Q: I’m an environmentalist doing research on Hart Island, the site of the potter’s field in NYC. How did a burial site for unclaimed bodies get this particular name?

A: An old sense of the word “potter” as a vagrant or an itinerant peddler led to the use of the term “potter’s field” as a burial ground for paupers, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

As far back as the early 1500s, the OED says, one meaning of “potter” was “a (typically itinerant) trader in earthenware items; a pedlar who sells pots, etc. Also: a tramp, a vagrant.”

This now rare sense of “potter” was first recorded sometime before 1525 in an early Robin Hood tale in which Robin impersonates an itinerant seller of pots in order to fool the Sheriff of Nottingham. Here’s the OED citation:

“ ‘Pottys, gret chepe!’ creyed Robyn … all that say hem sell Seyde he had be no potterlong.” (“ ‘Pots, great bargain!’ cried Robin … and all that saw him sell said he would not be a potter for long.”)

The Middle English tale, which some sources date circa 1500, was collected in 1888 in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, now commonly known as the Child Ballads after the editor, Francis J. Child.

This old sense of “potter” survived into the 19th century. William Wordsworth, for example, uses it in his poem The Female Vagrant (1798), in a reference to homeless tramps that are like “potters wandering on from door to door.”

The OED says the indigent sense of “potter” is responsible for the use of “potter’s field” as “a piece of ground used as a burial place for the poor and for strangers.”

The earliest written use of the phrase in this sense, Oxford says, is from a letter written by John Adams from Philadelphia in 1777: “I took a walk into the Potter’s Field, a burying ground between the new stone prison and the hospital.”

The OED also has these later citations:

1870: “For seven years the land had remained waste, a sort of Potter’s field, and a scandal to that part of the metropolis.” (From the journal Nature.)

1906: “When I wrote a letter … you did not put it in the respectable part of the magazine, but interred it in that ‘potter’s field,’ the Editor’s Drawer.” (A figurative use by Mark Twain in the Westminster Gazette.)

1993: “We had a potter’s field on the campus, where Papa used to bury all the colored people in the area whose folks had no money.” (From the memoir Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First Hundred Years, by Sarah Louise and Annie Elizabeth Delany. The African-American sisters grew up on the campus of St. Augustine’s School in Raleigh, NC, where their parents were educators.)

An early biblical example is included among these citations for “potter’s field,” but it’s enclosed within brackets as representing a different use of the term.

The passage comes from William Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the Bible into English from the New Testament Greek (Matthew 27:5 in the Tyndale Bible):

“They toke counsell, and bought with them [i.e., Judas’s 30 pieces of silver] a potters felde to bury strangers in.” (Tyndale’s phraseology was adopted by the King James Version of 1611, Matthew 27:7, almost word for word.)

That is the earliest known use of “potter’s field” in English, but it didn’t refer to a public burial ground for the indigent.

An earlier English bible, John Wycliffe’s 1382 translation from fifth-century Vulgate Latin into Middle English, has “a feeld of a potter, in to biryying of pilgryms.” (Here Wycliffe uses “pilgrims” in its original sense: travelers, itinerants, or strangers.)

Apparently both Tyndale’s “potters felde” and Wycliffe’s “feeld of a potter” are meant literally—a field belonging to a potter. So both accurately render the original wording in Matthew, which has “potter’s field” in Greek.

Now this requires a brief (we hope) detour, because religious scholars have long wrestled with the use of “potter’s field” in Matthew.

The first book of the New Testament, Matthew is believed to have been written in Greek in the latter part of the first century or the beginning of the second.

The “potter’s field” passage is part of what biblical commentators call a “fulfillment quotation,” one linking a New Testament event to an Old Testament prophecy.

The passage presents several problems. To begin with, the author of Matthew mistakenly attributes the Old Testament passage to Jeremiah, while it’s actually in Zechariah.

To complicate matters more, he took the Old Testament reference (to a parable in which money is given back) not from Hebrew but from a version in which the wording was distorted, according modern biblical scholarship.

The source for the reference in Matthew is believed to have been a revised version of the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was begun in the third century BC and completed in the following century.

The phrase “potter’s field” or “field of a potter” doesn’t appear in the Old Testament Hebrew parable, according to the biblical scholar Maarten J. J. Menken.

In fact, nowhere in the Hebrew Old Testament is there such a ”potter’s field,” as the bible scholars Thomas J. Dodd, C.C. Torrey, and others have written.

In the text of Zechariah that is pointed out in Matthew as prophetic, “field” was a Greek addition and “potter” was a slight misspelling of a Hebrew word for “treasury” or “furnace”—that is, a foundry for smelting coins.

Our sources for this include The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text, 2005, by the British theologian John Nolland, and “The Old Testament Quotation in Matthew 27,9-10: Textual Form and Context,” by Menken, published in the journal Biblica, 2002.

We won’t devote any more time to the biblical backstory, but we’d like to take a moment here to debunk two common myths about the term “potter’s field.”

There’s absolutely no evidence to support the fiction that this term for a burial ground was derived from either a man named “Potter” or a field where clay was dug to make pottery.

As for the original sense of “potter” to mean a maker of pots, it may have existed in writing in Old English in the 10th century. An OED citation from a document dated circa 1250 “is a late copy of a grant of land at Marchington, Staffordshire, made in 951,” the dictionary says.

That citation, an apparent reference to property boundaries, reads, “Of stenges heale, on potteres lege” (“from corner stakes, on potter’s land”).

The noun “pot,” the OED says, was first recorded in an Old English recipe: “þæt se pott beo full” (“that the pot be full”).

The word “pot” was “inherited from Germanic,” the OED says, but it also exists in in similar forms in the Romance languages. This seems to point to an earlier, prehistoric origin, Oxford suggests.

“The word in the Germanic and Romance languages and in post-classical Latin,” the editors write, “perhaps ultimately shows a loanword from a pre-Celtic language (perhaps Illyrian or perhaps a non-Indo-European substratal language), although a number of other etymologies have also been suggested.”

Good luck with your research on Hart’s Island, which has been used as a potter’s field by the City of New York since just after the Civil War.

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A note to our readers

We have substantially revised our recent post on the proper verb to use with constructions like “one of those who.” A new post has replaced the one that ran on Friday, Sept. 23, 2016.

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Is “one” the one?

Q: This grammar question was posed by a friend on Facebook: Which is correct? (1) “She is one of the few freshmen who understand” or (2) “She is one of the few freshmen who understands.” At first I thought #2 was the answer. Now I’m not sure.

A: We prefer the first example. We lean toward the traditional view, as we wrote back in 2007, that the verb in a relative clause (the part beginning with “who”) should agree with the preceding plural noun, “freshmen.”

But this is not a black-and-white issue, and we don’t think a singular verb should be considered wrong.

Many linguists and usage commentators now believe that that the verb can agree with either the plural (“freshmen” in this case) or the singular (“one”). In fact, the singular verb may be preferable at times.

What the question boils down to is whether the verb is more strongly attracted to the plural (“freshmen who understand”) or to the singular (“one … who understands”).

While logic and tradition call for the plural, respected writers have used both singular and plural constructions for centuries.

Let’s examine these two views a little more closely. First, the conventional explanation.

This sentence has two clauses: the main clause, whose subject is “she,” and a relative clause, whose subject is “who.” (A relative clause completes a sentence by modifying the preceding noun or pronoun in the main clause.)

In the first clause, “she” is the subject of the verb “is.” And this is the only verb for which “she” is the subject.

The verb in the relative clause is what concerns us. And the traditional view is that the verb in a relative clause agrees with the antecedent—the noun or pronoun immediately preceding the subject (“who”). Here the antecedent is “freshmen,” so the verb should be plural, “understand.”

Sometimes proponents of this view appeal to logic in explaining themselves. The subject of the main clause, “she,” is a member of a class—“freshmen who understand.” So the sentence could be recast as “Of the freshmen who understand, she is one.”

We can’t recast it as “Of the freshmen, she is one who understands,” because then we’re changing the nature of the class she belongs to. It would be all freshmen, not just freshmen who understand.

Many, perhaps most of the prominent grammarians and usage writers of the first half of the 20th century have adhered to the conventional view and recommended a plural verb.

They include Otto Jespersen (A Modern Grammar on Historical Principles, 1917), Henry Fowler (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1926), and George O. Curme (A Grammar of the English Language, 1931).

But both Jespersen and Curme acknowledged the lure of the singular. Jespersen says the verb is “attracted” to “one,” and Curme says that “one” is “erroneously felt as the antecedent.”

Curme explains further that “in loose colloquial speech, sometimes even in the literary language,” the verb in a relative clause “agrees incorrectly with some word closely connected with the antecedent instead of agreeing with the antecedent itself, since this word lies nearer the thought of the speaker or writer than the grammatical antecedent.”

In acknowledging the role of the “thought of the speaker or writer,” he puts his finger squarely on the problem. Sometimes another word (like “one”) is closer to the writer’s meaning than the grammatical antecedent.

Toward the middle of the 20th century, opinions started changing. Linguists and usage commentators began to suspect that the common practice of using a singular verb was not a mistake but a natural tendency and part of normal idiomatic English.

One of the first to doubt the conventional wisdom was the American linguist John S. Kenyon.

In “One of Those Who Is…,” an article published in the journal American Speech in October 1951, Kenyon argues that good writers have been using the singular construction since Old English.

He quotes a 10th-century example (modernizing the Old English): “Lazarus was one of those who was sitting with him.” The singular, he writes, “was evidently native English idiom, for the Latin original was different (‘one of those reclining with him’).”

“Similar examples are very common from the earliest Old English,” he continues, “sometimes with plural verb in the relative clause but very often with the verb in the singular.”

What seems to happen, Kenyon writes, is that “the writer or speaker is more immediately concerned with the one than with those, the whole group to which the one belongs. So he switches from the plural those to the single person or thing that he is most interested in.”

His article includes page after page of examples in which eminent writers, from Shakespeare onward, use singular verbs in “one of those who [or that]” constructions. Individual writers, in fact, sometimes choose the singular and sometimes the plural.

For example, he quotes Joseph Addison in the Spectator, 1711: “My worthy Friend Sir Roger is one of those who is not only at Peace within himself, but beloved and esteemed by all about him.” (Addison could have “those who are,” along with plural pronouns, but he didn’t.)

Then, later in 1711, here’s Addison again: “I am one of those People who by the general Opinion of the World are counted both Infamous and Unhappy.”

Different verbs, yet both sentences seem just right. And Addison, as Kenyon notes, was a “famous exemplar of excellent prose style.”

Kenyon acknowledges that “the plural verb agrees with logic and conventional grammar.” But if “our ideas of grammar” cannot accommodate a usage that’s “an established feature of English,” he writes, then our ideas need to change.

“The facts are clear and abundant,” he concludes, “and if there’s no ‘rule’ of grammar to allow for them, such rules should be made.”

The more thoughtful writers on grammar and usage have adopted Kenyon’s view. Good writers use both singular and plural verbs in these constructions, and both represent good usage.

Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans, in A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957), say that “the clause verb should, logically, be plural, as in one of the best books that have appeared.” But in fact, they write, “a singular is often used here, as in one of the best books that has appeared.” And the singular verb “does not offend anyone except grammarians.”

This thinking has been reinforced over the last 60 years, and today it’s fairly well established.

“The use of the singular verb in these constructions is common, even among the best writers,” says The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. “Perhaps the only workable solution to this problem lies in which word sounds most appropriate as the antecedent of the relative pronoun—one or the plural noun in the of phrase that follows it.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage takes the same position: “In this case, the mental process involves the pull of notional agreement.” (We’ve written before about notional agreement—that is, agreement based on meaning rather than on conventional grammar.)

As M-W says, “it is simply a matter of which is to be master—one or those.”

Sometimes the verb is made to agree with “one,” the usage guide says, presenting its own phalanx of examples.

For instance, it quotes Randolph Churchill (1945): “Waugh is not one of those who finds the modern world attractive.”

But, M-W continues, “do not think that one is always the master,” and goes on to cite authors who have matched the verb to “those.”

One is Mark Twain (1888): “Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly was one of those people who are infatuated with patent medicines.”

A good indicator of how opinion has evolved is Fowler’s Modern English Usage. As we said, the original 1926 edition, written by Henry Fowler himself, adhered to the traditional view and advocated a plural verb. So did the second edition of 1965, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers.

However, the third edition, revised and edited by R. W. Burchfield and first published in 1996, recommends the plural verb in “one of those who” constructions, but allows for the the singular:

“A plural verb in the subordinate clause is recommended unless particular attention is being drawn to the uniqueness, individuality, etc., of the one in the opening clause.”

Is there a general preference among English speakers? Merriam-Webster’s addresses this question:

“An article in The English Journal in October 1951 reported a citation count (from 1531-1951) showing five plural verbs to one singular. The actual preponderance in favor of the plural verb may not be so great—certainly it is not in our files. But it is plain that those is often the master.”

The usage guide concludes that the “choice of a singular or plural verb … is a matter of notional agreement. Is one or those to be the master?”

The M-W editors note, as did Kenyon, that Joseph Addison “was not troubled by using both constructions. You need not be more diffident than Addison.”

So in summary, you can’t go wrong with the plural. But go with a singular verb if the “one” is uppermost in your mind, and not the class to which the “one” belongs.

On another subject, constructions with “one of the” can also create verb agreement puzzles, as we wrote back in 2007.

And another common problem crops up when we use “one of the” and “if not the” in the same sentence.

Say you go to a fantastic pizzeria and conclude, “That was one of the best, if not the best  pizza I’ve ever had.” Then you wonder if the noun should have been plural, “pizzas.”

The trick here is to put “if not the” toward the end of the sentence, after the noun: “That was one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had, if not the best.”

Here’s how Pat explains it in her grammar and usage book Woe Is I (3rd ed.):

“ONE OF THE . . . IF NOT THE. Here’s another corner you can avoid backing yourself into: Jordan was one of the best, if not the best, player on the team. Oops! Can you hear what’s wrong? The sentence should read correctly even if the second half of the comparison (if not the best) is removed, but without it you’ve got: Jordan was one of the best player on the team. One of the best player? Better to put the second half of the comparison at the end of the sentence: Jordan was one of the best players on the team, if not the best.”

Finally (since we brought it up), “if not” in this case means “perhaps” or “maybe even.” That’s generally the case when used with superlatives like “best,” “fastest,” “oldest,” and so on.

But as we wrote in 2013, “if not” can also mean “but not,” as in “His language is colorful, if not grammatically correct.”

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To be or not to be a question

Q: Often, when I write emails to finalize appointments, I end as follows, “Could you please confirm that this appointment will work for you.” Although this would seem to be a question, I am not clear as to whether it really is one and needs a question mark.

A: No question mark is necessary.

Although that sentence is worded as a question, it’s not intended as one. It’s intended as a polite imperative—that is, a courteous command or directive. The speaker (or writer) softens the imperative by framing it as a question.

This is a very common way of expressing a command in a mannerly way.

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) calls sentences like this “requests as questions,” and says they don’t need question marks: “A request disguised as a question does not require a question mark.”

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls this form of expression an “indirect speech act,” one in which meaning is conveyed indirectly.

The authors, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, use as an example the sentence “Would you like to close the window.” As they explain:

“Syntactically, this is a closed interrogative, and in its literal interpretation it has the force of an inquiry (with Yes and No as answers).” But in practice, they say, it’s “most likely” a directive, a request to close the window.

“Indirect speech acts,” the authors write, “are particularly common in the case of directives: in many circumstances it is considered more polite to issue indirect directives than direct ones (such as imperative Close the window).”

Clearly, a sentence like yours—”Could you please confirm that this appointment will work for you”—is neither a question nor a demand. It lies somewhere in between, which is why a question mark (and certainly an exclamation point) might seem inappropriate.

Still, we would not call a question mark incorrect here—just unnecessary. The use of a question mark instead of a period would make the request sound even more tentative, an effect you might not want.

If you wanted to make the request firmer but still polite, you could use a straight imperative, refined with a “please,” as in “Please confirm that this appointment will work for you.”

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We can’t help but change

Q: It bothers me to hear actors or see writers (who should know better) say things like “I couldn’t help but cry over that.” I thought “help” should be followed by a gerund.  I can’t help wondering where those “professionals” learned English. If I’m wrong, would you be so kind as to straighten me out?

A: We used to regard “can’t help but” as a casual usage, not appropriate for formal occasions. But on closer examination, we can’t help but ask why we saw anything wrong with it at all.

The truth is that “cannot [or can’t] help but” has had a long life in literary and scholarly English as well as in common usage.

It’s a firmly established idiom, and we can’t see any reason to restrict a usage that’s at least 200 years old and is still found in every variety of educated writing.

Yet since the late 19th century, many language commentators have condemned the usage in a sentence like “I can’t help but ask.”

The correct phrases, or so the story goes, are “I can’t help asking” and two equivalent old-fashioned expressions—“I can but ask” and “I cannot but ask.” In those last two idioms, “can but” means “can only,” and “cannot but” means “cannot do otherwise than.”

Apparently nobody was bothered by the fact that “can but” and “cannot but”—complete opposites—were accepted as idioms with identical meanings.  Probably they sounded normal to 19th-century ears because they’d been in use steadily since the mid-1500s.

The “cannot help but” version was a relative newcomer; it did not become common until the early 1800s. Where did it come from?

We suspect that “cannot help but” emerged as a variant of an earlier and very popular idiom, “cannot choose but,” which had been in written use since the 1540s.

In fact, “cannot choose but” was once used in exactly the same way that “can’t help but” is used today.

So let’s start by looking into the history of “cannot choose but.”

Within its entries for the verb “choose” and the conjunction “but,” the Oxford English Dictionary has examples of “cannot choose but” spanning three centuries—the 1540s to the 1880s.

As the OED explains, an obsolete meaning of the verb phrase “cannot chose,” which dates from the 1300s, was “have no alternative, cannot do otherwise, cannot help.”

“But” was added to the construction in the mid-1500s to yield “cannot choose but,” a usage that the dictionary says is now archaic.

“I cannot choose but speak,” according to Oxford, means “I cannot help speaking.”

However, the construction “cannot help” plus a gerund, as in “cannot help speaking,” wasn’t common until the early 1700s, so a contemporary equivalent would be “cannot do otherwise than speak.”

Here are a three early examples from the OED:

“Suche … crueltee … as could not choose afterwarde but redound to his … confusion.” (From Nicolas Udall’s translation of the Apophthegmes of Erasmus, 1542.)

“He cannot chose but he must fall downe flat to the grounde.” (From Sir Thomas North’s 1557 translation of Antonio de Guevara’s The Diall of Princes.)

“He cannot choose but breake.” (From Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, 1600.)

By Elizabethan times, the usage had become extremely common. It was popular enough to be used in a comic play performed before Queen Elizabeth on Dec. 27, 1599.

Here are the lines:

“Whether is it more torment to loue a Lady and neuer enioy her, or alwaies to enioy a Lady, whome you cannot choose but hate?” (From The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus, by Thomas Dekker.)

From the early 1600s to the early 1900s, “cannot choose but” was ubiquitous in all kinds of writing, according to searches of Early English Books Online and other databases. It was used in ordinary English as well as in works by prominent dramatists, novelists, and poets.

But by the latter half of the 19th century, “cannot choose but” had fallen out of favor in ordinary, everyday English, though it survived well into the 20th century as a literary or poetic usage.

Meanwhile, as “cannot choose but” fell out use in everyday English, “cannot help but” took its place.

In searches of various databases, the earliest definite example of “cannot help but” that we’ve found is from 1809.

(Three earlier findings—from 1646, 1650, and 1776—are too ambiguous to count. The first two, “The hands of men cannot help but hinder this Work” and “Nature and art … cannot help but hinder one another,” could be interpreted in two different ways. The third, “They cannot help but feel the responsibilities,” is from a letter written from France dated 1776, but it’s unclear whether it was originally written in English or French.)

The first clear example is from an anonymous letter to the editor dated Oct. 23, 1809, published in an English newspaper, the Chester Courant:

“When I reflect on the local advantages this city possesses, and look at the flourishing towns of Liverpool and Manchester … I cannot help but fix upon the shackles of the select junta as the cause that this ancient city is less prosperous.”

The expression quickly gained ground in the 1820s and ’30s. These lines by an anonymous poet appeared in the Oriental Herald, published in London, February 1825:

“In truth, she cannot help but think / That bolder hearts than hers would pause.”

This comes from another British source, an 1829 issue of the Odd Fellows’ Magazine, Manchester chapter: “Sympathy is an impulse which we cannot help but experience for one another, it is a feeling that is interwoven in our very nature.”

The earliest American example we’ve found is from a poem by Henry Mason, delivered before the Franklin Debating Society in Boston in January 1830:

“Blame not the heart that cannot help but feel / Its pulses quicken at the soft appeal.” (The poem was published by the society in March 1830.)

Americans seem to have liked the construction. Here’s an example from Pelayo (1838), an adventure tale by the Southern novelist William Gilmore Simms: “We cannot help but weep when we survey it.”

Yet another American example is this one from the January 1840 issue of the New Genesee Farmer, published in Rochester, NY:

“The  immense number and beauty of the articles there exhibited, are truly surprising, and cannot help but excite a spirit of improvement in the mind of every farmer, who views them.”

By the 1840s, “can’t help but” had become firmly entrenched in both common and literary British and American usage.

Here, for instance, is a cluster of sightings from a book published in London in 1841: “they cannot help but be uncharitable” … “he cannot help but see” … “we cannot help but love it.” (From Christianity Triumphant, attributed to Joseph Barker.)

And this flurry of examples is from sermons preached during a Christian convention in Chicago in 1883 by the evangelist D. L. Moody: “God cannot help but trust” … “we cannot help but blame” … “I cannot help but think” … “we cannot help but remember” … “you cannot help but love” … “you cannot help but preach” … “he cannot help but work” … and (five times) “I cannot help but believe.” We might have missed a couple.

Even in the most formal academic writing, authors have used “can’t help but” over the years as if it were irreproachable English. Today it’s found in scholarly writing of all kinds, in fiction, in journalism, and in ordinary, everyday English, both written and spoken.

Examples are so plentiful that it seems superfluous to cite any. But take a look at this one, from Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (2012), by Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell:

“Moreover, in so packaging the past through our choice of periodization points and rubrics, we cannot help but draw deep lines of inclusion and exclusion, of identity and difference.”

And this one, from The African Stakes of the Congo War (2002), by John F. Clark:

“As ordinary observers of human frailties, cruelties, and heroism, we cannot help but be fascinated by Congo and its travails; as moral beings, we cannot help but be gravely concerned with the unspeakable human suffering that has resulted….”

The point here is not that scholarly writing is the norm. The point is that “can’t help but” is considered respectable even in the most formal (we might even say stuffiest) writing.

So what do the critics of “can’t help but” find wrong with it? Some have objected without giving a reason, but others have complained on these grounds:

(1) “help” is unnecessary, since we already have “cannot but”;

(2) “cannot + help + but” has too many negative elements, since “help” is used in the sense of “prevent” or “avoid.”

(3) “cannot help but” is the result of confusing “cannot but” with “cannot help” plus a gerund. (As we’ve explained, we think it developed otherwise—as a variant of  “cannot choose but.”)

As far as we know, the earliest critic was Adams Sherman Hill, a Harvard professor of rhetoric and oratory. In The Foundations of Rhetoric (1892), Hill objected for reason #1:

“ ‘He could not but speak’ is equivalet to ‘He could not help speaking.’ Help in ‘He could not help but speak’ is tautological.”

Another critic was an English professor at Columbia University, George Philip Krapp, who wrote this in A Comprehensive Guide to Good English (1927):

“The construction I can not help but think, believe, etc., is crude and unidiomatic English for I can not help thinking, believing, etc.” No explanation was offered. (It should be noted that Krapp also promoted the spelling “Shakspere.”)

Various other commentators have chimed in over the years, like Wilson Follett in his Modern American Usage (1966), who called the usage “grammarless” for reason #3 above.

The first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Fowler, has no mention of “help but.” However, the revised second edition (1965), edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, condemns it for reason #3.

The two of us, former editors at the New York Times, remember “help but” as one of the paper’s no-nos. Here’s The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (revised ed., 2013), under an entry for the verb “help”:

“Use the construction help wondering, as in He cannot help wondering. Not He cannot help but wonder.”

We even promoted this view ourselves in the past (but no longer). Pat’s book Woe Is (3rd ed.), last updated in 2010, has this advice:

“In formal writing, avoid using help but, as in: Huck can’t help but look silly in those pants. Unless you’re speaking or writing casually, drop the but and use the ing form: Huck can’t help looking silly in those pants.”

[UPDATE, Feb. 2, 2019: The fourth edition of Woe Is I, published in February 2019, treats “can’t help but” as standard idiomatic English.]

On reflection, we wonder whether the Times’s prohibition prejudiced us against a usage that has nothing wrong with it. Yes, even in formal English.

The fact is that the feeling against “help but” was never unanimous.

In 1954 the grammarian Otto Jespersen commented on “cannot help but” and seemed to have no reservations about it:

“A frequent combination,” he wrote, “is cannot choose but with a bare infinitive.” And he added: “In the same sense, we have cannot help but with infinitive,” a usage that he said “is not confined to U.S., but is also found in British writers.”

He went on to quote some 20th-century British novelists who have used the phrase.

Theodore Bernstein, writing about “can’t help but” in The Careful Writer (1965), argued against grammarians who “contend that it is ‘crude and unidiomatic English.’ ” He called it “usual and acceptable.”

So did Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans in A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957): “Grammatically, the construction is as irreproachable as I cannot choose but think.”

Today, the more thoughtful usage guides have no problem with “can’t help but.”

Merriam-Webster’s Guide to English Usage regards “can’t help but” as standard English (“logic cannot measure idioms,” it says), and so does The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Both guides say the only consideration as to formality is whether you use the phrase with “cannot” or “can’t.”

Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.) rates the idiom as “fully accepted” and says it “should no longer be stigmatized on either side of the Atlantic.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has little to say about the “help but” construction one way or another.

In fact, the editors use it themselves. In explaining the use of “have” to mean “must,” the OED says that in statements like “I have to say, you have to admit, it has to be said, etc.,” the meaning is “I cannot help but say, etc.”

The OED’s entry for “help” includes a section on the use of the verb with “can” or “cannot” to mean “to prevent oneself from, avoid, refrain from, forbear; to do otherwise than.” Two of the later examples are of the “help but” variety:

“She could not help but plague the lad.” (From Hall Caine’s novel Manxman, 1894.)

“If clairvoyants are to be attached to police stations they can hardly help but become officials.” (From the Manchester Guardian Weekly, 1928.)

Those examples are cited without remark—that is, with no hint that “help but” is anything less than acceptable English.

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Follows the subject

Q: While I was watching TV with my wife, a commercial came on for the movie When Calls the Heart. It reminded me of another corny title, Comes a Horseman. What makes an author choose this syntax?

A: Authors use unusual wording because it’s often more effective and attention-getting than the routine syntax one would expect.

The wording “when calls the heart,” with its poetic and archaic flavor, stands out more than “when the heart calls.”

And “comes a horseman” is more noticeable than “a horseman comes” or “a horseman is coming.”

But a usage that some readers find catchy may seem corny or pretentious to others.

What’s attention-getting about these constructions is the word order—verb before subject instead of the other way around.

In some English sentences, a verb-before-subject arrangement is so common that we don’t even notice it. For instance, verbs routinely come first in questions, in statements starting with “here” or “there,” and in others that we’ll mention later.

But in more straightforward declarative sentences, we expect to find the subject before the verb. Reversing them can make a sentence sound literary, even stirring (or pretentious if overdone).

For effectiveness, you can’t beat the verb-before-subject placement in these examples:

“Male and female created he them” (King James Bible) … “So have I a noble father lost” (Shakespeare) … “Into the Valley of Death / Rode the six hundred” (Tennyson) … “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore’ ” (Poe).

Today we associate subject-verb inversions with poetry and with the writings of an older time, though even now we may find them used for effect: “What care I for fame and fortune?” … “Then sings my soul” … “In a hollow lived three little pigs” … “Come Sunday, you’ll be a married man.”

But as we said before, inverted word order goes unremarked in some kinds of sentences, like these (again, we’ll underline verb and subject).

● Sentences starting with “there,” “here,” and “then”: “There comes a time when one must face facts” … “Here lurked the answer we’d been waiting for” …“Then came the startling news.”

● Questions: “Am I right?” … “When is the party?” … “Finished, are you?” … “How goes it?” … “Where were you?” … “Pretty, aren’t they?”

● Questions with auxiliary verbs only: “May I?” “Do you?” “Shall we?” (We aren’t including sentences in which the subject follows the auxiliary but comes before the main verb, as in “Never have I seen such a day,”  “Had I known … ” and so on.)

● With “neither” and “nor”: “We aren’t going, nor is Sally” … “He isn’t upset and neither am I.”

● With “say” and other quoting verbs: “ ‘Holy cow!’ said Pete” … “ ‘The butler didn’t do it,’ concluded the detective” … “ ‘Call me Ishmael,’ wrote Melville.”

● With “do” as an auxiliary: “We own a dog, as do our neighbors” … “He went to the movie, as did Mom.”

● With “so”: “And so say all of us” … “She has seen Venice and so have you.”

● In lists of subjects headed by one verb (common in news reporting): “Injured were the bus driver, eight passengers, and the driver of the car” … “In the lineup were eight felons, none of whom were identified as the perpetrator.”

● After adverbs or adverbial phrases: “Steadily onward plodded the wagon train” … “Just inside the door stood a hat-rack.”

● After adjectives or adjectival phrases: “Happy was the man who won her hand” … “Great was his respect for my father” … “Gone forever was the day” … “Many were the times ….”

● After a participial phrase: “Taking home the trophy in the pie-baking contest was a seven-year-old boy” … “Lying in a pool of blood was Colonel Mustard.”

● After a prepositional phrase: “In the threatened wetland are three species of rare orchid” … “Through the mist shone an eerie light.”

Saving the subject for last can almost make it a punch line. But sometimes it’s placed at the end because it’s less urgent. This is a common practice in sports broadcasting, as we wrote on our blog a couple of years ago.

The linguist Georgia M. Green discusses this kind of inversion in her paper “Some Wherefores of English Inversions.”

“Perhaps the most striking demonstration of this pragmatic exploitation of syntax,” she writes, “is the use of inversions in the play-by-play broadcast of sports events.” (From the journal Language, September 1980.)

Some of her examples, taken from TV and radio: “Underneath the basket is Barbian” … “High in the air to get the ball was Jim Brady” … “Now way out front with the ball is Brenner” … “At the line will be Skowronski” … “Stealing it and then losing it was Dave Bonko” … “Coming back into the game for New Trier West will be Kevin Jones.”

As she notes, inversion lets the speaker mention the action first, followed by the player’s name.

Finally, a historical note about why subject-verb inversions like “comes a horseman” carry a whiff of antiquity.

The regular word order in a typical declarative sentence today is subject-verb-object, as in “I lost it.”

Old English had both patterns—verb first as well as verb second. However, verb-before-subject constructions were more common in Old English than they are today.

Placement of the object, as well as the subject and verb, added to the complexity of Old English.

“Old English had many SVO [subject-verb-object] word orders like those in Modern English, but at least as many SOV word orders, or orders that seem to be a mix” of those, according to The Syntax of Early English (2000).

The authors—Olga Fischer, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman, and Wim van der Wurff—note that a number of changes in word order came about over the course of the Middle English period (about 1150-1500).

That was when the relative position of the verb and the direct object shifted in English.

More relevant to our discussion, the use of verbs before subjects in declarative clauses “rapidly declined in the course of the last part of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century, and saw a revival in the literary language in the sixteenth century,” write the authors.

[Update, May 9, 2016: Several readers have pointed out that odd syntax is what  makes Yoda’s speech so odd. The great Jedi master of the Star Wars series favors such constructions as “Do it you must.” The linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum wrote about Yoda talk on the Language Log in 2005.]

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The truth about truism

Q: Vivian Gornick wrote this in the NY Times Book Review: “It is a truism that every great book survives the literary and cultural conventions of its time and place because the emotional intelligence in it speaks to a reader a hundred years down the road.” My dictionary says a truism is something too obvious to mention, but I found Gornick’s statement very much worth mentioning. Your thoughts?

A: We agree with you that Vivian Gornick’s comment in the Feb. 14, 2016, issue of the Times Book Review was well worth making. We’ll go further and say that it was indispensable to her essay—complete with the word “truism.”

On a literal level, a “truism” is an obvious or self-evident truth, and many standard dictionaries give that definition first. But they usually add that it “especially” means a statement so obvious as to be  unimportant.  Some other dictionaries, in fact, give that as the only definition, but we think that’s too narrow a view.

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition: “A self-evident truth, esp. one of minor importance; a statement so obviously true as not to require or deserve discussion. Also: a proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied in any of its terms.”

We think that in her “Critic’s Take” column, Gornick used “truism” in the sense of a statement that’s self-evident: A book survives the limits of its own time because it has meaning to a later time.

Such a statement is certainly obvious, but it has a special significance in Gornick’s essay, which takes a fresh look at the novel Howards End in light of what we now know of E. M. Forster.

We know that when his novel appeared in 1910, Forster, then  31, “was a closeted homosexual and a virgin who knew nothing of how erotic relations worked—with any combination of partners,” Gornick writes. His time and place “terrorized him into picking up a pen forever dipped in code.”

“It was this sense of frozen solitariness, I now realized, that had colored all of Forster’s thought and feeling, and in time supplied him his signature concern: ‘Only connect!’ Rereading Howards End, it was now easy to see that it is the writer’s own arrested development that haunts Forster’s work, and that makes it moving.”

So a truism that’s obvious may help us understand a truth that isn’t so obvious.

But let’s get back to “truism” and its origins. As the OED explains, the word was “formed within English, by derivation” from the adjective “true,” which is Germanic in origin.

The earliest written use recorded in Oxford is dated 1714: “I abhor Tyranny … and upon this Subject could vent as many Truisms as Mr. St— —le  hath done upon Liberty.” (From an anonymous political pamphlet, “Hannibal Not at Our Gates.”)

And here’s the OED’s most recent example: “It is a television truism that, when we wish to celebrate a national event, we loyally turn to the BBC.” (From the British magazine Private Eye, 2012.)

Separately, Oxford lists another use of “truism”: as a mass noun (rather than a specific example).

The dictionary’s earliest citation for this sense of the word is from sometime before 1770: “Nonsense, truism, falsehood, and absurdity, are so curiously blended in every part of the pamphlet.” (From an essay on ruptures and trusses by Timothy Sheldrake.)

And here’s a modern example: “Rather than playing down the melodrama … it heightens it, with words that hover dangerously close to truism.” (From a British newspaper, the Independent, 2009.)

We’ll conclude with the definition of “truism” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.): “An undoubted or self-evident truth; especially: one too obvious or unimportant for mention.”

Especially, but not always. Even truths that are self-evident are sometimes worth stating.

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A progressive future

Q: I’m an American living in London. When I take the tube and approach a station closed for repairs, a message over the PA says: “This train will not be stopping at the next station.” It makes me wince. Is this passive usage British?

A: The usage you’ve noticed is common to both British and American English. It’s quite ordinary, not remarkable at all.

Here the speaker uses the future progressive tense, “will not be stopping,” instead of the simple future tense, “will not stop.” And it’s not a passive construction, as we’ll explain later.

The progressive tenses emphasize that an action is, was, or will be continuous and ongoing for a period of time in the present, past, or future.

The usage in that announcement in London refers to an action (in this case, a nonaction) that will be taking place during a period of time in the future.

The future progressive is often heard in travel announcements. Airplane pilots, for example, may say, “We will be landing at …” instead of “We will land at ….”

And we can recall hearing this tense routinely in the New York City subway system: “This train will be making all express stops” … “This train will not be stopping at 14th Street.”

The progressive tenses all include a form of the verb “be” plus (in the active voice) a present participle. Here are the progressive tenses in the active voice (we’ll put the negative in brackets):

present progressive: “This train is [not] stopping.”

past progressive: “This train was [not] stopping.”

future progressive: “This train will [not] be stopping.”

present perfect progressive: “The train has [not] been stopping.”

past perfect progressive: “The train had [not] been stopping.”

future perfect progressive: “The train will [not] have been stopping.”

As we’ve mentioned, none of those are passive constructions. Here, finally, are some passive examples (which use the past participle):

simple future: “This train will not be stopped.”

present progressive: “This train is not being stopped.”

past progressive: “This train was not being stopped.”

There’s no idiomatic way of using the future progressive, the tense that made you wince, in the passive voice.

The result would be a train wreck: “This train will not be being stopped at the next station.”

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Baby, it’s cold outside

Q: Greg Easterbrook recently complained in the NYT about “freezing temperatures.” In his words, “Temperature is a mathematical measure:  Numbers don’t freeze.  Temperatures can be high or low; air is what’s hot or cold.” Greg’s a smart guy, but is he right?

A: No, Greg is wrong. Sometimes people of a literal bent go to ridiculous extremes, throwing common sense out the window. Our advice to Greg: Chill out.

Writers, including scientists, have been using “freezing temperature” or “freezing temperatures” for hundreds of years to mean the degree of coldness at which something freezes.

What’s not to understand here? In weather parlance, this generally means a temperature at which water is converted to ice.

Oxford Dictionaries online defines “temperature” as the “degree or intensity of heat present in a substance or object, especially as expressed according to a comparative scale and shown by a thermometer or perceived by touch.”

In medicine, according to Oxford, the term refers to the “degree of internal heat of a person’s body,” and, informally, to a “body temperature above the normal; fever.”

The dictionary says “temperature” can also mean the “degree of excitement or tension in a discussion or confrontation.”

Oxford gives these numberless examples: “strong winds and freezing temperatures” … “I’ll take her temperature” … “he was running a temperature” … “the temperature of the debate was lower than before.”

Although “temperature” is often expressed numerically, a number isn’t necessary. One can say, “My temperature is normal” or “My temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit” … “The temperature outside is freezing” or “The temperature is 0° Celsius.”

In its entry for “freezing,” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged online says the adjective means “being at or below freezing point,” and it gives this example: “the temperature is freezing.”

In fact, Merriam-Webster’s offers a second definition in which “freezing” is used loosely to mean merely “very cold,” a usage that we found in four other standard dictionaries.

So lexicographers don’t seem to mind referring to “temperatures” as “freezing.” And they don’t have a mental picture of numbers turning to ice.

We use “boiling” in the same way: “The water in the teapot often reaches boiling temperature within five minutes.” Here the adjective “boiling” means sufficient to make something boil.

People commonly use “-ing” participles adjectivally. Every day we use perfectly normal English constructions like “frying pan,” “playing field,” “walking pace,” “crying shame,” and so on.

We don’t mean that the pan is frying, that the field is playing, that the pace is walking, or that the shame is crying.

In searches of online databases, we’ve found many examples for “freezing temperature” or “freezing temperatures” in scientific and other writing dating back to the 18th century. Here are a few early examples:

“When the air was at or near the freezing temperature, the logarithmic differences gave the real height,” from Observations Made in Savoy (1777), a treatise by Sir George Shuckburgh on measuring the height of mountains.

“When salt-water ice floats in the sea at a freezing temperature, the proportion above to that below the surface, is as 1 to 4 nearly,” from the April 11, 1818, issue of the Literary Gazette in London.

“We also know that eggs from perfectly healthy worms, if they be kept at one time in a warm place, and at another in a very cold place, sometimes in warm stove rooms, then in cold, freezing temperatures … will be very certain to produce worms subject to the yellows,” from an 1839 issue of the Journal of the American Silk Society.

By the way, the noun “temperature” had nothing to do with heat or cold, whether expressed numerically or not, when it showed up in English in the mid-1500s.

English adopted the word from Latin, where temperāre meant to moderate or mix, and temperātūra referred to moderation or a proper mixture.

That sense of moderation in temperāre and temperātūra has given English the words “temperance” and “temperate,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

In English, “temperature” initially referred to mixing and moderating, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but that sense of the word is now considered obsolete.

The sense you’re asking about (which the OED defines as the “state of a substance or body with regard to sensible warmth or coldness”) didn’t show up until the late 17th century.

The dictionary’s earliest example is from the title of a 1670 tract by the chemist and physicist Robert Boyle: Of the Temperature of the Submarine Regions as to Heat and Cold.

The use of “temperature” for a “degree of excitement or tension” showed up in this example from Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church (1863): “The temperature of the zeal of the different portions of the nation.”

And the use of the word for a fever appeared in Percy White’s 1898 novel A Millionaire’s Daughter : “Do you think I have a temperature?”

The adjective “freezing,” which ultimately comes from the Old English verb fréosan (to freeze), showed up in Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline (which the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare says was produced as early as 1611):

When we are old as you? when we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December, how,
In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse
The freezing hours away?

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A risky preposition

Q: I see both “risk of” and “risk for” regularly, particularly in the health context. “Risk for cancer,” “risk of dying prematurely,” etc. How do you know when to use “of” or “for”? Are both acceptable?

A: There’s no clear answer here. Both “risk of” and “risk for” are used by educated writers, and many of them—medical writers in particular—seem to use the two interchangeably.

In searches of scholarly databases, we found scores of books and articles in which both “risk of” and “risk for”—or “at risk of” and “at risk for”—appear in otherwise identical phrases.

Some examples: “assessing risk of violence” and “assessing risk for violence” (2010) … “at high risk of death” and “at high risk for death” (2001) … “risk for dementia” and “risk of dementia” (1999) … “at risk of falling” and “at risk for falling” (1998) … “at risk for school failure” and “at risk of school failure” (1989) … “the risk of reinfection” and “the risk for reinfection” (1986).

We have the impression that in some cases the writer (or editor) alternated the pattern merely for the sake of variety.

Scholarly usage aside, people in general tend to prefer “risk of” to “risk for,” whether or not the phrase is preceded by “at.” Google hits for “at risk of” outnumber “at risk for” by almost two to one.

If there’s a pattern here, it may have to do with the noun or noun phrase that follows “of” or “for” and whether it represents the danger itself or whatever is in danger.

We’ve concluded that both “risk of” and “risk for” are common when the object of the preposition is the noun or noun phrase for the danger—the disease or other misfortune.

But “risk of” is more popular, especially when the object is a gerund (an “-ing” word), as in “Climbers run the risk of falling” … “He spoke up at the risk of sounding foolish.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “risk” has many citations, from the 1660s to the present, in which “risk of” precedes the noun or noun phrase for the hazard or misfortune.

A sampling: “an heavy Risk of wickedness” (1660) … “the Risque of being hang’d” (1697) … “the Risque of an Insult” (1740) … “the risk of flooding” (1934) … “great risk of wildfire” (2003).

In fact, within its “risk” entry the OED has no citations at all for “risk for.” However, elsewhere in the dictionary are numerous examples of “risk for,” all from the 20th century or later and almost all from medical writing.

So it would appear that “risk for” is a relatively recent usage, at least in the sense that we’re discussing. (We’re ruling out constructions like “he ran a risk for her sake” or “he put his life at risk for his country.”)

On the other hand, when the “risk” phrase precedes the thing at risk, not the hazard or misfortune, we generally find “risk to” (sometimes “risk for”), as in “Strong chemicals are a risk to (or for) nail salon workers” … “Pollution poses risks to (or for) the environment.”

Oxford has many examples in which “risk to” precedes what’s in danger: “at great risk to himself” (1805) … “at risk to their lives” (1905) … “a risk to others” (1979) … “at grave risk to his career” (2002) … “a risk to himself and others” (2002).

In 2011 the linguist Mark Liberman wrote an article on the Language Log in rebuttal to a reader who insisted that “at risk for cancer” is grammatically incorrect.

In his article, which he filed under “Prescriptivist Poppycock,” Liberman suggested the reader’s peeve was an “individual quirk.”

A couple of comments suggested that “at risk for” became established largely because of its use in epidemiology. Another noted, “Once ‘at risk’ becomes an expression that stands on its own, it becomes quite natural to use ‘for’ to specify what they are at risk for (eh, of).”

The noun “risk” first appeared in written English in the 17th century, according to OED citations.

Its ancestors were recorded in medieval Italian (rischio) and post-classical Latin (resicum, risicum, etc.), but can’t be traced back further than the mid-1100s (as Oxford puts it, “further etymology uncertain and disputed”).

The noun came into Middle French in the 16th century as risque, meaning “danger or inconvenience, predictable or otherwise,” the OED says. And English speakers borrowed the word from French in the following century.

The first known example in writing is from The Wise Vieillard, or Old Man, an anonymous 1621 translation of a work by the French theologian Simon Goulard:

“The couetous [covetous] Marchant to runne vpon all hazards and risques for a handfull of yellow earth.”

The OED notes that the noun appears “freq. with of.” The earliest such example is from John Sadler’s mock-utopian work Olbia (1660), in a reference to “an heavy Risk of wickedness.”

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When “less” is “minus”

Q: Is it OK to use the phrase “less than” when teaching numeracy in elementary school? Example: “What is one less than five?” I suspect that many children confuse “less than” (meaning “smaller than”) with “less” (meaning “minus”).

A: We’ve written several times on the blog about “less” vs. “fewer,” including posts in 2014 and 2010, but there’s more to be said about “less.”

The word “less” has had many meanings since it showed up in Old English in the ninth century, and one of the oldest, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, involves its use as “minus” in subtraction.

However, an even older meaning—the oldest example for “less” in the Oxford English Dictionary—is “fewer,” a usage that was acceptable for hundreds of years but is frowned on today.

The “fewer” sense of “less,” which the OED observes is “freq. found but generally regarded as incorrect,” first showed up in writing in King Ælfred’s Old English translation (circa 888) of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae:

“Swa mid læs worda swa mid ma, swæðer we hit gereccan magon” (“So we may prove it with less words as with more, whichever of the two”).

Over the years, as we’ve said, “less” took on other senses, including “to a smaller extent” (c. 900), as in “none the less”; “inferior” (c. 950), as in “no less a person”; “not so great an extent” (c. 1000), as in “less time to eat”;  and “a smaller amount” (c. 1330), as in “less money.”

The use of “less” to mean “minus,” the OED explains, indicates “that the number or quantity indicated is to be subtracted from a larger one mentioned or implied.”

This sense of “less” first showed up in writing in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an Old English work believed to have been updated regularly from the late 9th to the mid-12th centuries.

Here’s the citation, which the OED says was written sometime before 1160: “He rixode twa læs .xxx. geara” (“He ruled for 30 years less two”).

In early writing, “less” followed the number being subtracted (as in “twa læs” above), but it now precedes the number (as in “less two”), according to the OED.

All the modern examples in the dictionary show the unsubtracted quantity (the “minuend”) followed by “less” and then the amount to be subtracted (the “subtrahend”).

This modern example is from the March 25, 1930, issue of the Times (London): “A full year’s dividend on the Preference Shares, less tax, absorbing £16,800.”

The latest OED example of the usage is from  the Sept. 2, 1972, issue of the Times (London): “Cost of paint … Less VAT input tax … £500.”

We also checked six standard dictionaries and all their examples show “less” by itself following the minuend and preceding the subtrahend. Here’s an example from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.): “Five less two is three.”

Getting back to your question, is it OK for a teacher in primary school to ask pupils, “What is one less than five?”

When we were learning subtraction in elementary school many moons ago, our teachers would have said “What is five less one?” (or “five minus one” or perhaps even “five take way one”).

We think “five less one” or “five minus one” is the simplest and clearest way of expressing “5 – 1” in words, because the words follow the order of the numerals and the minus sign. And the use of “less than” here might lead to confusion between the minus sign (–) and the “less than” sign (<).

A perfect example of such confusion can be seen in an Aug. 19, 2001, question to the Math Forum, a website sponsored by Drexel University in Philadelphia:

“Why is this expression driving me crazy when at first it seems so simple: ‘three less than a number’? I believe it is x – 3 but I am being challenged that it is 3 – x.”

The response by the Math Forum’s staff includes this comment: “Many people get confused by this sort of expression, because they expect to translate directly from English to Mathish, word for word. Then ‘three (3) less than (–) a number (x)’ would seem to be ‘3 – x.’ But it isn’t. What’s even more confusing is that ‘3 less a number’ does mean ‘3 – x’ because ‘less’ as a preposition means the same as ‘minus.’ ”

We’d be wary of using “less than” in teaching subtraction to young children. But our online searches suggest that elementary school teachers generally distinguish between the use of “less” and “less than.”

From looking at educational websites that discuss basic subtraction, our sense is that the traditional wording (“five minus one” or “five less one”) is used in speaking about actual subtraction. The “less than” wording is used to compare two numbers, rather than to subtract one from the other (“four is one less than five” or “one less than five is four”).

Despite the possible confusion between “less” and “less than” in teaching subtraction, educators have been using “less than” for comparisons for nearly two centuries, according to our searches of online databases.

Here’s an example from A Manual of Instruction for Infants’ Schools, an 1829 book by William Wilson, the vicar of Walthamstow in northeast London: “Four are one less than five; four are two less than six; four are three less than seven, &c.”

And this example is from A Manual of Elementary Instruction for Schools and Normal Classes (1862), by Edward Austin Sheldon, M. E. M. Jones, and Hermann Krüsi: “The class may repeat, ‘Five is one more than four; four is one less than five.’ ”

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Apostrophic illnesses

Q: I’m a physician who’s irritated by the increasing tendency for writers to omit the apostrophe in a disease named for a person, as in “Parkinson disease.” I resist this, and write “Parkinson’s disease,” which I think is correct.

A: You’re in an unfortunate position here. As a doctor, you’re caught between the recommended usage in the medical profession and standard usage everywhere else.

The AMA Manual of Style (10th ed.), for example, recommends dropping the ’s in such diseases, as does the 27th edition of Stedman’s Medical Dictionary.

Although Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary (30th ed.) says the ’s “is becoming increasingly less common,” it includes some diseases with the ending and some without to “reflect this ongoing change in usage.”

However, Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary, which is intended for a broader audience, generally considers the ’s versions the usual forms, though it sometimes includes the stripped-down forms as acceptable variants.

As for common usage, the six standard dictionaries we’ve checked usually list only the ’s versions for these terms, though bare versions are sometimes given as acceptable or equal variants.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), for example, lists only “Parkinson’s” while The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) gives “Parkinson’s” as more common, but includes “Parkinson” as an acceptable variant.

The American Medical Association’s style guide acknowledges that the issue is still somewhat controversial, but says that the use of the ’s in medical eponyms, the technical term for things named after people, is a thing of the past.

“There is some continuing debate over the use of the possessive form for eponyms, but a transition toward the nonpossessive form has taken place,” the AMA guide says.

The AMA editors recommend dropping the ’s to represent “the adjectival and descriptive, rather than possessive, sense of eponyms” and to “promote clarity and consistence in scientific writing.”

We take issue here with the AMA editors. Technically, the ’s here is not possessive but genitive. As we’ve written before on our blog, genitives show associations and relationships much broader than ownership.

In a genitive construction like “last night’s mashed potatoes,” we’re not talking about ownership. The ’s here means “associated with” or “related to,” not “possessed by.”

Nevertheless, the misconception persists. The National Down Syndrome Society, in its Preferred Language Guide, gives this explanation for opposing the ’s:

“Down syndrome is named for the English physician John Langdon Down, who characterized the condition, but did not have it. An ‘apostrophe s’ connotes ownership or possession.”

In fact, the AMA stylebook cites the Down Syndrome Society’s language guide in support of its belief that a transition toward non-genitive eponyms has taken place:

“A major step toward preference for the nonpossessive form occurred when the National Down Syndrome Society advocated the use of Down syndrome, rather than Down’s syndrome, arguing that the syndrome does not actually belong to anyone.”

Other critics argue against medical eponyms whether they have apostrophes or not, saying the names may credit the wrong people or are out of date.

Victor A. McKusick, for example, says in Mendelian Inheritance in Man (11th ed.) that “often the person whose name is used was not the first to describe the condition … or did not describe the full syndrome as it has subsequently become known.”

Although “Down syndrome” is now more common than “Down’s syndrome” and standard dictionaries prefer the shorter form, most other medical eponyms still have the ’s in dictionary entries.

Of the 11 eponyms we’ve checked, “Alzheimer’s,” “Addison’s,” “Parkinson’s,” “Bright’s,” “Crohn’s,” “Hansen’s,” “Hodgkin’s,” and “Raynaud’s” diseases usually have the ’s. Only “Down,” “Munchhausen,” and “Tourette” syndromes are usually bare.

In fact, searches with Google’s Ngram viewer indicate that medical eponyms with ’s are overwhelmingly more popular in books than the stripped-down versions.

However, medical toponyms (diseases named after a place) don’t have apostrophes. For example, “Rocky Mountain spotted fever” or “Lyme disease” (named for Lyme, CT).

Note that the capitalized name in a medical eponym or toponym is traditionally followed by a lowercase generic term, as in “Lou Gehrig’s disease” or “West Nile virus.”

The old tradition of naming diseases or parts of the body for their discoverers dates back to the use of Latin medical terms.

An example is tuba Fallopii for the structures first described by the 16th-century anatomist Gabriele Falloppio, also known by his Latin name, Fallopius. Today we say “fallopian tubes,” which many standard dictionaries give with a lowercase “f.”

Since you are a physician, you may be interested in an excellent article we came across on the history of medical eponyms.

John H. Dirckx, a doctor who has written frequently about the language of medicine, says such terms “are cherished by most physicians who have a sense of history.”

Besides, he writes in a 2001 issue of the journal Panace@, they “are often embraced as a pleasant relief from polysyllabic terms derived from classical languages.”

They also have a “value as euphemisms,” he adds. A term like “Hansen’s disease,” for example, is a welcome replacement for “leprosy” and all that it conveys.

As for the ’s, he writes, “Some of the arguments offered by editors and others to justify exclusion of the genitive from eponyms are simply ludicrous.” (He mentions the objections we noted above, that the person didn’t have the disease or possess it.)

Such critics, Dr. Dirckx writes, “display ignorance of linguistics, a superficial and mechanistic view of language, disdain for tradition, and, sometimes, the arrogance of authority.”

He concludes, probably with tongue in cheek: “Will even the homely lay term Adam’s apple (nuez, prominentia laryngea) eventually come under the universal ban?”

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¿Why isn’t English like Spanish?

Q: Why does the question mark and exclamation point appear at the end of a sentence in English? To my mind, it would make more sense if they were at the beginning. Or at the beginning and end, as in Spanish, though I’ve read that this convention is falling out of favour, no doubt under the influence of that mongrel language from perfidious Albion.

A: Your question requires a brief look back at medieval English, where the earliest punctuation marks were intended as verbal cues for one reading to an audience.

In the medieval church, reading was something done aloud, and punctuation showed the lector where to pause for breath and how to modulate his voice to convey the meaning of the words.

The first marks seen in English writing indicated pauses in a sentence: brief pauses in mid-sentence (voiced with a rising intonation), versus a longer, final pause at the end (a falling intonation).

In Beowulf, an Old English poem written as early as 725, the basic mark of punctuation is a simple point, according to A Critical Companion to Beowulf (2003), by Andy Orchard, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

The English marks identifying a sentence as a question or an exclamation developed later, the linguist David Crystal writes in Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation (2015).

The interrogative mark, according to Crystal, was recorded in Old English around the year 1000, and the mark of exclamation or admiration appeared in the 1500s in early Modern English. (Versions of both were recorded earlier in medieval Latin.)

The early interrogative and exclamation marks in English were the precursors of our modern question mark and exclamation point, though they looked nothing like today’s versions and didn’t get their modern names until centuries later.

From the beginning, however, they were always found at the end of an English sentence. Yes, they offered vocal cues (if a bit late in the sentence). But like the period, they  showed stopping points—almost as if they were variations on the period.

In fact, during the late 19th and early 20th century, these marks were sometimes called “question stop” and “exclamation stop,” just as today the British call the period a “full stop.”

In his book, Crystal says that “the question mark, like the exclamation mark and the period, acts unambiguously as a sign of separation—to show where one sentence ends and the next begins. That’s why a period was included within the symbol (and reflected in the term question-stop).”

In Spanish, too, the question mark and exclamation point originally came at the end of a sentence, not the beginning.

It wasn’t until the mid-1700s that the Spanish Academy suggested adding them, upside down, at the front too, as in ¿Quien sabe? (“Who knows?”).

As the Academy explains in a treatise published in 1754, “one can use the same sign of interrogation, inverting it before the word that has the first interrogative intonation, in addition to using the regular question mark to signal the end of the clause.” The exclamation mark was treated the same way.

Why the change? Because, as you suggest, placing a mark at the beginning is a cue to the reader that a question or exclamation is coming.

To some Spaniards, a solitary mark at the end “was felt to be inadequate for the requirements of Spanish pronunciation,” Alexander and Nicholas Humez write in their book On the Dot: The Speck That Changed the World (2008).

“It did not provide a reader with enough information to enable him to express adequately the full significance of a question in long sentences,” they add.

“Following its own prescription,” the Humez brothers write, “the Adademia put this into practice in the books published under its auspices, and other publishers eventually followed suit.”

Interestingly, the 16th-century English educator John Hart suggested in An Orthographie (1569) that the interrogation mark (he called it “the asker”) and the exclamation mark (“the wonderer”) should be used at the beginning and end of a sentence.

And at least one 18th-century commentator made a similar suggestion. In a letter to Noah Webster, dated Dec. 26, 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote:

“We are sensible that when a question is met with in reading, there is a proper variation to be used in the management of the voice. We have therefore a point called an interrogation, affixed to the question in order to distinguish it. But this is absurdly placed at its end; so that the reader does not discover it, till he finds he has wrongly modulated his voice, and is therefore obliged to begin again the sentence. To prevent this the Spanish printers, more sensibly, place an interrogation at the beginning as well as at the end of a question.” (From The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1809.)

The practice never took hold in English. And as you’ve noted, some Spanish-language writers (notably the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda) have abandoned such marks. However, we doubt that Neruda, an ardent Communist, was influenced much by perfidious Albion.

Why did the inverted question mark catch on in Spanish but not in English?

Questions in both languages often begin with interrogative function words like Cómo (“How”), Dónde (“Where”), and Quién (“Who”).

But the wording of Spanish statements and questions are often identical: Tienes hambre (“You’re hungry”) versus ¿Tienes hambre? (“Are you hungry?”).

In addition to having interrogative function words, English questions tend to begin with auxiliaries (“Do you like me?”) or have different word order (“Are you tired?”).

Despite the benefits of inverted question marks in Spanish, some people drop them on social media, as in these comments on Twitter: Por qué las personas te decepcionan? (“Why do people let you down?”) and por q te llama a vos y no a mi? (“Why does he call you and not me?”]

[Note: This post was updated on Feb. 8, 2022.]

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Does that bikini still fit?

Q: Is there a term for the overly familiar and presumptuous use of “that” and “those” in advertising? For example, “Organize that messy closet” or “Get rid of those unsightly stains in your sink.” It’s as if the ad writers have peered into our homes.

A: You’ve raised an interesting question, one that highlights something most of us are all too aware of: Advertisers use language in ways that ordinary people don’t.

“That” and “those” are good examples.

In your examples, “that” and its plural, “those,” are demonstrative adjectives (some prefer the term “demonstrative determiners”). They modify a  noun, in effect pointing at it, demonstrating which one (or ones) the speaker is referring to.

In ordinary sentences like “Sam misses that dog” and “Those sneakers belong to Janet,” the demonstrative adjectives point to the nouns, as if to demonstrate which dog Sam misses, which sneakers belong to Janet.

But in the ad slogans you mention, “that” and “those” aren’t used as in ordinary English.

Normally, “that” and “those” (like “this” and “these”) refer to nouns that actually exist—“that dog,” “those sneakers.” Their existence is a fact, something the speaker and the audience take for granted.

But an anonymous, impersonal voice telling you to “organize that messy closet” or “get rid of those unsightly stains” isn’t pointing to an actual condition in your house.

Instead, the speaker is presupposing its existence and treating it as a fact. So the slogans are examples of what a linguist would call “presupposition.”

As The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says, “The information contained in a presupposition is backgrounded, taken for granted, presented as something that is not currently at issue.”

In these ad slogans, the presupposed information is that you have a messy closet and a sink with unsightly stains.

In a study entitled “Presupposition, Persuasion and Mag Food Advertising” (2012), Tamara Bouso uses the example “Do you expect to fit into that beach bikini in the New Year?”

This sales pitch presupposes not only that the consumer has such a bikini but that she’s probably too fat to wear it.

Another author, Judy Delin, says presupposition “plays an important role in the construction of advertising messages in general” (The Language of Everyday Life, 2000). The use of demonstrative adjectives, she says, is one form of presupposition.

You ask whether there’s a name for demonstrative adjectives used in this presumptuous way. As a matter of fact, a couple of names have been proposed.

In a 2006 paper, “That’s That: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Demonstrative Noun Phrases,” the linguist Lynsey Kay Wolter calls such terms “emotive demonstratives.”

Why “emotive?” Because, Wolter writes, such terms convey a sense that both speaker and listener “share some relevant knowledge or emotion about the referent of the demonstrative”—that is, the noun it points to.

And writing on the Language Log in 2008, the linguist Mark Liberman calls these words “affective demonstratives.” Like “emotive,” the term “affective” implies an emotional element—in this case familiarity or shared experience.

“Affective demonstratives,” Liberman says, “invite the audience onto a common ground of shared knowledge (or perhaps I should say, ‘that common ground of shared knowledge’).”

In response, one Language Log contributor writes, “I’ve noticed this type of device in advertising a lot,” and provides this example:

“By earning more income through our work-at-home program, you’ll be able to afford that new car, to finally take that vacation you’ve been dreaming of!”

It’s no mystery why advertisers are so fond of demonstrative adjectives. Like the definite article “the,” these words presuppose that the accompanying nouns actually exist.

So they hint that the speaker knows you: “that messy closet” points at your closet. In this way, demonstrative adjectives can create a false sense of familiarity, of intimacy with the consumer.

It’s interesting to note that in the neutral examples we mentioned earlier (“Sam misses that dog” and “Those sneakers belong to Janet”), you could say the same thing less demonstratively by substituting “the” for “that” or “those”:

“Sam misses the dog” and “The sneakers belong to Janet.”

But “the” works only when the audience knows which dog or sneakers are referred to. “The” wouldn’t work in the advertising examples, unless the nouns had been mentioned before.

The ad writers would have to use an indefinite article (“organize a messy closet”) or nothing at all (“get rid of unsightly stains”). But then, of course, they’d lose the familiar tone they’re trying to cultivate.

This forced intimacy can strike listeners as intrusive or annoying, especially those with tidy closets and spotless sinks. A presupposition that’s wrong can backfire.

As Lynsey Wolter says in her paper, “Consider a situation in which the speaker assumes that an emotion is shared, but the addressee resists this assumption. In these circumstances an emotive demonstrative … feels intrusive or patronizing.”

As we said above, demonstrative adjectives point to things. And this isn’t always appropriate. After all, weren’t we taught that it’s not polite to point?

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One mustache or two?

Q: In John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, a colonel appears, “his waxed mustaches bristling with fury.” I often see “mustaches” in old books, but not in newer ones. Was the plural standard at one point? If so, when did the singular come along?

A: When the term showed up in English in the 1500s, both “mustache” and “mustaches” could mean the growth of hair above a man’s upper lip.

English borrowed the term from French, where moustache and moustaches were used in the same way, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The French got the word from mustaccio, Naples dialect for the Italian mostaccio, but the evolutionary trail takes us back to mystax, Doric Greek for the upper lip or mustache, and menth-, a reconstructed Indo-European root for “chew.”

We should mention here that the term is usually spelled “mustache” in the US and “moustache” in the UK, though dictionaries on both sides of the Atlantic once preferred “mustache.”

As the OED explains, “earlier British dictionaries (Johnson, Walker, Smart) and most American dictionaries prefer the semi-anglicized form mustache.” (The references are to the lexicographers Samuel Johnson, John Walker, and Benjamin H. Smart.)

We haven’t found any authoritative explanation why a man’s “mustache” is often referred to as his “mustaches” in old books.

We’re only speculating here, but a mustache with long bristles is often brushed from the middle to each side to keep the hair above the mouth and out of the gumbo. That may account for the sense of duality.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the word “moustache” (it uses the British spelling) has two meanings:

(1) “A (cultivated) growth of hair above (and sometimes extending to either side of) a man’s upper lip.”

(2) “Either half of such a growth of hair. Freq. in pl. (esp. in pair of moustaches): = sense 1.” In other words, the plural can mean the same as the singular.

Although the use of “mustaches” for a “mustache” is more common in older writing, it’s not unknown today.

A photo caption in the Dec. 20, 2013, issue of Newsweek, for example, refers to a demonstrator in Kiev with “his mustaches painted in yellow-and-blue Ukrainian national flag colors.”

As for Dos Passos, we’ve found examples in the U.S.A. trilogy, published in the 1930s, for “mustache” and  “moustache,” as well as “mustaches” and “moustaches,” in reference to one man’s facial growth.

This lack of consistency is actually consistent with the way the word has been used since it showed up in English in the 16th century, according to citations in the OED.

The earliest two examples in the dictionary, from Thomas Washington’s 1585 translation of a book by the French geographer Nicolas de Nicolay, use both “mustaches” and “moustaches” in reference to multiple facial growths.

“[They] let their mustaches grow very long.”

“[They] suffered no haire to grow, but only the moustaches betwixt the nose & the mouth.”

The OED’s next citation, from a 1587 grammar book by the Scottish scholar James Carmichael, translates the singular Greek mystax as “moustaches” in English.

An Oxford citation from Honours Conquest, Henry Roberts’s 1598 biography of Edward of Lancaster, uses the singular “mustache”:

“For the Page they ordained Turkish attire, and him furnished very orderly, with a counterfeit mustache.”

And an example from Seeing Is Believing, an 1860 collection of essays by Charles Allston Collins, uses the singular “moustache”: “He was a little, middle-aged gentleman … with … a dyed moustache.”

The use of “mustaches” for “mustache” was common in literary writing well into the 20th century.

Here’s an example from Stamboul Train, a 1932 novel by Graham Greene: “The old fellow with the moustaches—he was ill all the time.”

And here’s one from World Enough and Time, a 1950 novel by Robert Penn Warren: “Crawford stood at the foot of the ladder, more gaunt than ever, his mustaches more frazzled and stained, his respectable black coat more threadbare.”

Although English borrowed “mustache” from French, it got “mustachio” from Italian and Spanish, according to the OED.

Interestingly, “mustachio” showed up in English a few decades earlier than “mustache.” The first citation in the OED is from William Thomas’s 1551 translation of Travels to Tana and Persia, a book by the Venetian explorer Giosafat Barbaro:

“They suffer their mostacchi to growe a quarter of a yarde longer than their beardes.” A margin note adds: “Mostacchi is the berde of the vpper lyppe.”

The first example for the word spelled the usual way is from a 1603 pamphlet written by the Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Dekker: “The Souldier … had brisseld vp the quills of his stiffe Porcupine mustachio.”

The noun “mustachio,” like “mustache,” has often been used in the plural for the hair above one man’s upper lip. When used in the plural today, according to Oxford Dictionaries online, the two words refer to a large or elaborate mustache.

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As the passive progressed

Q: I’ve recently noticed a construction in Emma that doesn’t occur in modern English. When Frank Churchill and Emma entered Ford’s, “the sleek, well-tied parcels of ‘Men’s Beavers’ and ‘York Tan’ were bringing down and displaying on the counter.” Is this a common usage from Jane Austen’s era?

A: You’ve stumbled across a very interesting old usage, from a time when houses were “building” instead of “being built,” portraits were “painting” instead of “being painted,” and boots were “mending” instead of “being mended.”

People used this now-archaic construction, which grammarians call the passival, because the passive progressive tense—“was being built,” “is being painted,” and so on—hadn’t yet come into English.

Although a few examples of the passive progressive were recorded in Jane Austen’s day, the usage was rare at the time.

Austen  wrote that the gloves “were bringing down and displaying” instead of “were being brought down and displayed” because the latter construction was probably unknown to her.

Emma was published in late 1815, when only one form of the verb “be” was commonly used as an auxiliary in standard English.

It wasn’t until later in the 19th century that people began regularly combining two forms of the verb “be” (as in “is being,” “was being,” “were being”) to form the passive progressive tense.

In searches of literary databases, we’ve found many illustrations of the older construction, which uses the active voice to describe what is passive in meaning.

Austen uses it in this Feb. 8, 1807, letter to her sister Cassandra: “Our garden is putting in order, by a Man who bears a remarkably good Character, has a very fine complexion & asks something less than the first.”

She also uses it in Northanger Abbey, which was written in the late 1700s, revised several times in the early 1800s, and published after Austen’s death in 1817:

“The bustle of going was not pleasant. The clock struck ten while the trunks were carrying down, and the general had fixed to be out of Milsom Street by that hour.”

We’ve found many other examples of the usage. In this one, hymns are “singing” instead of “being sung”:

“He saw the [them] al kneele down, and whilest each Gloria Patri, &c. was singing, they al fell prostrat on their faces.” (From An Admirable Method to Love, Serve, and Honour the B. Virgin Mary, written in Italian by Alexis de Salo and published in English in 1639.)

In this humbler example, a “house of office” (that is, a privy) is “emptying” instead of “being emptied”:

“So from thence home, where my house of office was emptying, and I find they will do it with much more cleanness than I expected.” (From a July 28, 1663, entry in Samuel Pepys’s Diary.)

In this passage, ships are “mending” instead of “being mended”:

“Here we found Ruy Freira with part of his Ships, of which some were mending.” (From The Travels of Sig. Pietro della Valle, a Noble Roman, Into East-India and Arabia Deserta, published in English in 1665.)

And here we find a bridge that’s “finishing” instead of “being finished”:

“For whilst the Bridge was finishing with incredible Expedition, some Soldiers for Spyes swam over to the other side.”  (From The History of the Turks, by Sir Paul Rycaut, 1700.)

In an account of a trial for seditious libel, the sentence is “reading” instead of “being read”:

“Whilst his sentence was reading he appeared sometimes to mutter against it.” (From The History of the Reformation and Other Ecclesiastical Transactions in and About the Low Countries, originally written in Low Dutch in 1703 and published in English in 1722.)

Finally, in a usage found often in 17th- and 18th-century writing, tea is “preparing” instead of “being prepared”:

“Tea was preparing. Sir Charles took his own seat next Lord L. whom he set into talk of Scotland.” (From Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, 1753.)

This use of “preparing” survived until well into the 19th century: “They were seated in the coolest seats on the piazza, and melons and other fruit brought while tea was preparing.” (From an unsigned story in the January 1836 issue of a New York monthly, the Ladies Companion.)

Jane Austen was among the last generation of writers to use the old verb form without the passive “being.” Later writers made greater use of “being” as they shifted to the new passive progressive tense (or “aspect,” a term many linguists prefer).

But the transition wasn’t a smooth one. As the OED notes, early 19th-century grammarians condemned the new usage.

Oxford cites criticism from David Booth’s An Analytical Dictionary of the English Language (1830): “For some time past, ‘the bridge is being built,’ ‘the tunnel is being excavated,’ and other expressions of a like kind, have pained the eye and stunned the ear.”

That passage does not appear in the original, 1805 edition of Booth’s book, so the new construction must have come to his attention sometime between then and 1830.

The linguist Mark Liberman, in a Jan. 11, 2013, post on the Language Log, notes that the new usage was still being criticized in the second half of the 19th century.

The literary critic Richard Grant White, for example, wrote in Words and Their Uses (1870) that the construction served “to affront the eye, torment the ear, and assault the common sense of the speaker of plain and idiomatic English.”

But there were good reasons why the passive progressive developed, as we’ll see.

Long before Austen’s time, in fact since the late 1300s, people had been combining the old preposition “a” with gerunds used passively to describe an action in progress.

Here’s an example from the King James Bible (1611): “In the dayes of Noah while the Arke was a preparing.”

Here, “preparing” is a gerund—essentially, a noun—rather than a present participle. The “a” preposition, the OED says, was used with a gerund in “expressing process,” and meant “in process of, in course of,” or “underdoing (some process)” such as making, building, mending, etc.

“On,” and “in” had been used the same way. So a theoretical 16th-century writer might say that court papers were “on preparing” or “in preparing” or “a preparing” and mean the same thing—the papers were in preparation.

By Austen’s time, the prepositions had mostly fallen away. But eventually these “-ing” usages led to ambiguity, since in identical constructions one “-ing” word was a participle and the other a gerund.

Someone might write, for example, that his lawyers “were preparing” papers (participle), but also that the papers themselves “were preparing” (gerund).

For an extreme example of the confusion this might cause, take a look at this OED citation from Henry More’s An Antidote Against Atheisme 1653): “The shreeks of men while they are a murdering.”

The writer didn’t mean that the men shrieked as they murdered people. He meant that they shrieked as they were being murdered: “a murdering” here meant undergoing murder. But only the context would tell the reader which meaning was intended.

Obviously, English needed a new tense—one combining a form of “be” + “being” + past participle, as in “were being murdered.”

The OED’s earliest use for the new tense is dated 1772, in a letter written by the Earl of Malmesbury: “I have received the speech and address of the House of Lords; probably, that of the House of Commons was being debated when the post went out.”

Two later examples are cited from the 1790s, also from private letters. But it wasn’t until after Jane Austen’s time that the passive progressive became common.

Remnants of the old usages are still with us today. We still say “time’s a-wasting” for “time is being wasted.”

And we still say “nothing doing,” a leftover from the Middle Ages when people said that things were “doing” instead of “being done.”

As the OED says, the old passive construction “to be doing” meant “to be in the course of being done, to be happening.”

Here’s the old usage in action: “Little thought false Reyner what was doing at Canterbury, whiles hee was trotting to Rome.” (From The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans, by John Speed, 1614.)

And here’s one with a very modern sound, quoted in the OED: “He always says there is nothing doing.” (From a letter written by the Earl of Manchester in 1700.)

Eventually, in the 19th century, the phrase became simply “nothing doing.” The OED gives this example:

“A friend of mine hailed an outfitter the other day, ‘How is business?’ ‘Nothing doing.’” (From a Liverpool weekly, the Porcupine, 1870.)

And in the first decade of the 20th century, the meaning changed. “Nothing doing” became “an announcement of refusal of a request or offer, failure in an attempt, etc.,” Oxford says.

The dictionary gives this example from the Dec. 13, 1910, issue of the New York Evening Post: “Spottford offered the porter a dime. The negro waved it aside and said: ‘Nothing doing; my price is a quarter at least.’ ”

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We are met on a great battle-field

Q: Watching a recent rebroadcast of “The Civil War” on PBS, I was struck by this sentence in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “We are met on a great battle-field of that war.” Is “we are met” just a poetic usage? Or is something else going on?

A: “We are met” is a present-perfect construction, parallel to “we have met.” The usage dates back to the Middle Ages, but by Lincoln’s time it was considered archaic and poetic.

You can still hear it today, though the usage sounds unusual to modern ears because it combines “met” (the past participle of “meet”) with a form of “be” as the auxiliary verb instead of the usual “have.”

So, for instance, a speaker uses “we are met to honor him” in place of “we have met to honor him”—or, to use the simple present tense, “we meet to honor him.”

The poetic “we are met” gives the message a solemnity and gravity it wouldn’t otherwise convey.

Here “met” is used in the sense of “assembled” or “gathered” or “brought together.” And the auxiliary “be” is possible only when this sense of “met” is used intransitively—that is, without a direct object.

In its entry for “meet,” the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “in intransitive use the perfect tenses were freq. formed with the auxiliary be in Middle English and early modern English; subsequently this became archaic and poetic.”

The OED has citations from the 14th century onward, including this Middle English example from Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem “The Complaint of Mars” (circa 1385): “The grete joye that was betwix hem two, / When they be mette.”

This one is from Thomas Starkey’s A Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, written sometime before 1538: “Seying that we be now here mete … accordyng to our promys.”

And here’s a poetic 19th-century use from William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Virginians (1859): “The two gentlemen, with a few more friends, were met round General Lambert’s supper-table.”

Today, we’re more likely to encounter this usage on solemn occasions, as when people gather for religious worship or funeral eulogies.

Lincoln isn’t the only American politician to use “we are met” in elevated oratory. In 1965, in a speech before Congress in support of equal voting rights, President Lyndon B. Johnson said:

“There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.”

A somewhat similar use of “met” with the “be” auxiliary is also antiquated today. This is the expression “to be well met,” first recorded in the 15th century and meaning to be welcome or well received.

This is the source of the old expression “hail fellow well met,” which evolved in the late 16th century from the slightly earlier phrase “hail, fellow!”

“Hail, fellow!” was a friendly greeting of the 1500s that was also used adjectivally, the OED says, to mean “on such terms, or using such freedom with another, as to accost him with ‘hail, fellow!’ ”

We’ll quote 19th-century examples of the shorter as well as the longer adjectival phrases, courtesy of the OED:

“He crossed the room to her … with something of a hail-fellow bearing.” (From Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886.)

“He was popular … though not in any hail-fellow-well-met kind of way.” (From H. Rider Haggard’s novel Colonel Quaritch, V.C., 1888.)

We’ll close with a more contemporary example we found in a letter to the editor of the Bergen (N.J.) Record in 2012:

“The most exciting thing about the Republican National Convention was the hurricane. … Where is the enthusiasm, the fire they need to capture the voters? Where is the ‘Hail fellow, well met’? This convention was a snore fest.”

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Enniched, inurned, and entombed

Q: I beg to disagree with you about the use “inter” for ashes placed in a columbarium. Actually, the proper verb is “enniche” because “cremains” are placed in a niche. Just sayin’.

A: Our “Burial Ground” post was about whether the verb “inter” could be used for remains placed in a niche in a columbarium.

We also mentioned the verb “inurn,” a term favored by many in the funeral or cemetery business. Perhaps we should have mentioned “enniche,” another example of morticianese, and “entomb,” a more established term.

The four standard dictionaries we’ve checked agree that to “inter” means to place in the earth or a tomb (most add “or the sea”).

All four also have entries for “inurn” in the sense of to place cremated ashes in an urn. However, none of them have entries for “enniche,” and the verb barely exists in literary, news, and more general databases.

One of the few examples we’ve found is on a Toledo, Ohio, cemetery website that offers “The Right Place for the Right Price,” as well as this piece of advice:

“A common misconception that people often have when they purchase the right of internment [sic] in a cemetery is that they have purchased the land itself, when in fact what they have really purchased is the right to be interred (also referred to as buried, entombed, enniched or placed) on or in that particular piece of property.”

As we noted in our post, a tomb can be either above the ground or entirely or partly below. So there’s no contradiction in using “inter” for placing ashes in a columbarium.

These days, of course, the funeral industry, like so many other enterprises, has fancier terms for its services.

We suspect that “enniche” (to put remains—or “cremains,” as if we needed to be reminded of the method—into a columbarium) is simply trade jargon.

And we doubt that “enniche” will ever become a term in common usage. Two things should be noted about this verb.

(1) People would disagree on the pronunciation and look askance at one another. As we wrote on our blog in 2009 and 2010, the traditional pronunciation of “niche” is NITCH.

The industry, we’ll bet, prefers the newer, Frenchified NEESH. No funeral director wants to sound as though he’s saying “an itch.”

(2) There was once an old verb “enniche,” which the OED says is now obsolete and which was used in a different, semi-humorous way. The meaning of this now defunct verb was “to set up in a niche, as a statue.”

Oxford gives an example of the usage from Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1761): “He … deserves to be en-nich’d as a prototype for all writers.”

Finally, in case you’re interested, we wrote on the blog a few year ago about why “bury” is pronounced like “berry.” It all began back in Anglo-Saxon times.

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