Category: Writing

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Is “trepidatious” a word?

Q: I hear people use “trepidatious” to mean fearful or anxious, but I can’t find it in my dictionary and my spell-checker tells me it’s wrong. Is “trepidatious” a word?

A: Yes, it’s a word, though it’s more common in the US than in the UK. Six of the 10 standard dictionaries we regularly consult recognize the adjective.

All five American dictionaries include it as standard English. However, it’s found in only one of the five British dictionaries, Lexico (the former Oxford Dictionaries Online), which describes the usage as informal. All 10 dictionaries include the noun “trepidation.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, defines the adjective as “apprehensive, nervous; filled with trepidation.” The dictionary says it originated with the addition of the suffix “-ious” to either trepidāt-, the past participial stem of the classical Latin verb trepidāre (to be alarmed), or to the root of the English word “trepidation.”

Although the usage is more popular in the US than the UK, the first OED citation is from an early 20th-century British novel about colonial India:

“Hilda looked up from the papers she had been busy with as he entered—in fact, made a guilty and trepidatious attempt at sweeping them out of sight” (The Sirdar’s Oath: A Tale of the Northwest Frontier, 1904, by Bertram Mitford, a member of the aristocratic and literary Mitford family).

The earliest American citation in the OED is from the May 18, 1940, issue of the Circleville Herald, an Ohio newspaper: “A trepidatious Europe today remained tense, worried, fearful, for the outcome of what military men predict will be the greatest battle in the history of the world.”

The much older noun “trepidation” ultimately comes from the Latin trepidāre. When it first appeared in the early 17th century, the OED says, “trepidation” referred to agitation in the scientific sense:

“Massiue bodies … haue certaine trepidations and wauerings before they fixe and settle” (from Of the Proficience and Aduancement of Learning, Diuine and Humane, 1605, by Francis Bacon).

Two decades later, the noun took on its modern sense of “tremulous agitation; confused hurry or alarm; confusion; flurry; perturbation,” according to the dictionary.

The earliest citation is from another work by Bacon: “There vseth to be more trepidation in Court, vpon the first Breaking out of Troubles, then were fit” (The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall, 1625).

Some sticklers have objected to the use of the relatively new adjective “trepidatious,” but we see nothing wrong with it. The linguist Arnold Zwicky, who uses the term himself, wrote a strong defense of the adjective in a Nov. 17, 2004, post on the Language Log.

[Note: This post was updated on Feb. 19, 2020, to reflect newer dictionary information. Posts on “trepidatious,” “trepidant,” and “trepidated” also appeared in 2015 and 2017. ]

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English English language Expression Usage Writing

Is ‘irregardless’ your #1 ‘uggie’?

Q: I’m sick of hearing people use “irregardless” instead of “regardless.” It’s not just ugly; it’s No. 1 on my list of “uggies.” Where did the superfluous “ir” come from? And how can we get rid of it?

A: “Irregardless” has been around for about a century and has been condemned for just as long. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary, from Harold Wentworth’s American Dialect Dictionary (1912), questions its legitimacy: “Is there such a word as irregardless in the English language?”

The OED defines it as a nonstandard or humorous usage for “regardless.” Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary agree that it’s nonstandard.

Where did that extra “ir” come from? Lexicographers (the folks who compile dictionaries) believe that “irregardless” is probably the result of the mushing together “irrespective” and “regardless.”

I agree with you that “irregardless” is ugly. It’s right up there on my list of “uggies” too. The best way to exorcise it from the English language is to avoid using it. Let’s all do our part. But “irregardless” has been around for a long time, and it doesn’t seem willing to go quietly.

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

A tough row to hoe

Q: I’m always hearing people say “a tough ROAD to hoe.” Hoeing a road is probably illegal, and using that expression should be illegal too. What are your thoughts?

A: We don’t know if hoeing a road is illegal, but an asphalt road must be a mighty tough road to hoe. The correct expression is, of course, “a tough row to hoe,” and it refers to hoeing rows on a farm. To have a “tough” or “hard” or “long” or “difficult” row to hoe means to have a daunting task to perform.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the correct expression is of American origin and dates back to the early 19th century. The first OED citation is from the March 24, 1810, issue of the New-York Spectator:

“True, we have a hard row to hoe—’tis plaguy unlucky the feds have taken him up.”

And here’s an example from An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East, an 1835 book by the frontiersman Davy Crockett: “I know it was a hard row to hoe.”

Interestingly, the “road” version of the expression showed up soon after Crockett’s book. The earliest example we’ve seen is from the Dec. 3, 1842, issue of the Daily Atlas (Boston).

A farmer, describing his long journey to take wheat to market, writes: “ ‘Truly you have a hard road to hoe,’ you will say; ‘why don’t you sell your wheat nearer home?’ ”

We sympathize with you, but we think substituting “road” for “row” in the expression is a misdemeanor and doesn’t deserve hard time. Definitely no more than an hour on a road crew!

A few years ago, the linguists Geoffrey Pullum and Mark Liberman came up with the term “eggcorn” to describe such a substitution. (The term comes from the substitution of “egg corn” for “acorn.”)

[Note: This post was updated on Dec. 19, 2017.]

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English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Linguistics Usage Writing

The great divide

Read Pat’s review in the New York Times today of two new language books.

—————

Speech Crimes

By PATRICIA T. O’CONNER

Get a few language types together, and before long someone will bring up the great divide between the preservers and the observers of English, the “prescriptivists” and the “descriptivists” — those who’d rap your knuckles for using “snuck” versus those who might cite Anglo-Saxon cognates in its defense.

The truth is that the divide isn’t nearly as great as it’s made out to be. Most grammarians, lexicographers, usage experts and linguists are somewhere in between: English is always changing, but that doesn’t mean anything goes.

Ben Yagoda, the author of “When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It,” is with the right-thinking folks in the middle. His book, an ode to the parts of speech, isn’t about the rights or wrongs of English. It’s about the wonder of it all: the beauty, the joy, the fun of a language enriched by poets like Lily Tomlin, Fats Waller and Dizzy Dean (to whom we owe “slud,” as in “Rizzuto slud into second”).

If you’re old enough to have learned the parts of speech in school, you probably think of them as written in stone. Not so. The nine categories are arbitrary and shifting. Nouns get verbed, adjectives get nouned, prepositions can moonlight as almost anything.

Yagoda, who teaches English at the University of Delaware, agrees that the categories are artificial, but he’s smitten with them anyway. Each member of the “baseball-team-sized list” (adj., adv., art., conj., int., n., prep., pron. and v.) gets its own chapter. Don’t overlook the surprisingly entertaining one on conjunctions — yes, conjunctions — with its riffs on the ampersand (“the more ampersands in the credits, the crummier the movie”) and the art of “ ‘but’ management.” No word is too humble for Yagoda, who can get lexically aroused by the likes of “a” and “the.”

Read the rest of the review on Grammarphobia.com. And buy Pat’s books at a local store or Amazon.com.

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English English language Expression Language Usage Writing

Assure, ensure, and insure

Q: I am a puzzled editor. I cringe every time I see the word “insure” used in a non-financial sense in respected publications. I am under the impression (perhaps mistakenly) that “insure” should be used in regard to finances, and “ensure” in a more abstract and wider sense. I would appreciate any light that you can shed on this.

A: In the US, both “ensure” and “insure” can mean to make certain of something, but “insure” is preferred in the commercial sense (to issue or take out insurance). All five American standard dictionaries that we regularly consult agree on this, while the five British dictionaries we consult describe it as standard in the US.

Nevertheless, some usage and style manuals insist that “insure” should be used only in the financial sense.

A third verb, “assure,” is often confused with “ensure” and “insure.” In both the US and the UK, “assure” means to set someone’s mind at rest, though it’s sometimes used in the UK to mean underwrite financial loss.

All three verbs—“assure,” “ensure,” and “insure”—have their roots in a Latin word for “safe” or “secure.” 

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[Note: This post was updated on April 21, 2020.]
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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Did Mencken coin “bloviate”?

Q: I see the word “bloviate” whenever I pick up a newspaper. I’ve heard that it was created by H. L. Mencken in reference to Warren G. Harding. Is there more to the story?

A: The earliest example we’ve seen for “bloviate” appeared in an Ohio newspaper in the late 1830s and referred to the oratory of William Allen, a US congressman, senator, and governor from the state:

“We commend the fol’owing to the rapt perusal of all who ever had the high honor and exquisite pleasure of hearing Mr. Wm. Allen bloviate in the Court-House of this county, or on the stump in any of our highly favored precincts” (from The Scioto Gazette, March 8, 1838).

The passage was brought to our attention by Ken Liss, who comments about etymology, among other things, on his website and Twitter.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “bloviate” as “to talk at length, esp. using inflated or empty rhetoric; to speechify or ‘sound off.’ ”

In an etymology note, the dictionary says “bloviate” probably comes from combining the verb “blow” with the “-viate” ending of words like “deviate” and “abbreviate.”

The OED‘s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, is from the Oct. 14, 1845, issue of The Huron Reflector in Norwalk, OH:

“Peter P. Low, Esq., will with open throat reiterate the slang of the resolution passed by the County Convention, and bloviate about the farmers being taxed upon the full value of their farms, while bankers are released from taxation.”

“Bloviate” is a wonderful word—the very sound of it suggests terms like “blowhard” and “windbag.” It’s one of those humorous mock-Latin formations (like “absquatulate” and others). But as you can see, it didn’t originate with Mencken.

The word was a favorite of President Warren G. Harding, who was a native of Ohio and something of a bloviator himself. Mencken, who couldn’t stand Harding’s writing, describes it this way:

“It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” (From a 1921 article in the Baltimore Evening Sun entitled “Gamalielese.” Gamaliel was Harding’s middle name.)

Because Harding is associated with the word “bloviate,” and because Mencken criticized Harding’s blowhard writing style, some sources may have mistakenly credited Mencken with inventing the term “bloviate.” But as we’ve said,  it goes back much further than that.

[Note: This post was updated on Feb. 15, 2022.]

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English English language Linguistics Punctuation Uncategorized Writing

A comma, too?

Q: I’ve managed to get myself into a debate with my girlfriend that is now running to two weeks and threatening our relationship. The question is whether or not one should use a comma before the word “too” at the end of a sentence—e.g., “Steve likes chocolate ice cream too.” The Chicago Manual of Style says you shouldn’t, but my girlfriend has found a website that says you should. I’m no grammarian, but I’d appreciate something approaching a definitive answer. Can you help?

A: In the universe of yeses and noes, the comma-bef0re-“too” question is a maybe (which explains why two intelligent people can disagree about it). There’s no grammatical rule that says you must use a comma with “too” in the kind of sentence you describe. It’s largely optional, and depends on the inflection the writer intends. In the case of “too,” use a comma if you intend to be emphatic about it.

Take your example: “Steve likes chocolate ice cream too.” Context might call for a comma or it might not. If Grandma has just given Steve’s pushy little brother Sam a scoop of ice cream, and their mother wants to suggest that shy little Steve should get the same, she might say, “Steve likes chocolate ice cream, too.” (With a little lilt at the end, emphasizing the “too.”)

But if Mom is just describing a catalog of the stuff that Steve likes, and has already mentioned, say, vanilla ice cream, she might say, “Steve likes chocolate ice cream too.” (No particular inflection there.) It’s often a judgment call.

In the middle of a sentence, however, a comma before “too” can be a help to the reader.

[Update, Feb. 19, 2021: Since we published this post, almost 15 years ago, The Chicago Manual of Style (now in its 17th edition) has clarified its position. It now says (section 6.52): “The adverbs too and either used in the sense of ‘also’ generally need not be preceded by a comma.” One of the examples given: “Anders likes Beethoven; his sister does too.” It adds: “When too comes in the middle of a sentence or clause, however, a comma aids comprehension.” The example: “She, too, decided against the early showing.”]

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English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Linguistics Phrase origin Slang Usage Word origin Writing

Can you cut the mustard?

[Note: This post was updated on May 26, 2021.]

Q: Where did the phrase “can’t cut the mustard” come from? It doesn’t seem to make any sense to me.

A: The phrase “cut the mustard” originated in late 19th-century America. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “slang (originally U.S.),” and says the noun “mustard” here means “something which adds piquancy or zest; that which sets the standard or is the best of anything.”

The OED says the the phrase and its variants mean “to come up to expectations, to meet requirements, to succeed.” The variant phrases “to be the mustard” or “to be to the mustard” are also defined as “to be exactly what is required; to be very good or special.”

The dictionary’s earliest recorded use of “cut the mustard” is from a Texas newspaper, in an article about legislative debate:

“They applied several coats of carmine hue and cut the mustard over all their predecessors” (Galveston Daily News, April 9, 1891).

The same newspaper used the phrase again the following year: “Time will reveal that he cannot ‘cut the mustard’ ” (Sept. 12, 1892).

The OED cites these early uses of other “mustard” phrases, also from North America.

“For fear they were not the proper mustard, he had that dog man sue him in court for the balance, so as to make him prove the pedigree” (The Log of a Cowboy, 1903, by Andy Adams).

“Petroskinski is a discovery of mine, and he’s all to the mustard” (You Can Search Me, 1905, written by George Vere Hobart under the pseudonym Hugh McHugh).

The OED suggests that “to be mustard,” when used to describe a person, might be compared to the expression “hot stuff.” An example: “That fellow is mustard” (from Edgar Wallace’s 1925 novel A King by Night).

However, somewhat similar “mustard” expressions were used much earlier in British English. According to the OED, “strong as mustard” (1659) and “hot as mustard” (1679) meant “very powerful or passionate,” while “keen as mustard” (1672) meant “very enthusiastic.”

Why the “cut” in “cut the mustard”? Nobody seems to know for sure. But we can offer a suggestion.

In the late 19th century, just before “cut the mustard” was first recorded, the verb “cut” was used to mean “excel” or “outdo,” according to OED citations.

The earliest OED example is from the April 13, 1884, issue of The Referee, a British sporting newspaper: “George’s performance … is hardly likely to be disturbed for a long time to come, unless he cuts it himself.”

So perhaps to “cut the mustard” is to surpass mustard—that is,  to be even more mustardy than mustard itself.

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