Tag: English language

Q: I was looking through some letters online from people who lived in the 19th century and I noted that they wrote more, shall I say, elegantly than we do. I’ve read collected letters from contemporary people and have not found near the level of style and sophistication that I see exhibited in the letters of people who lived more than a century ago. We tend to use lots of $50 words where a $1 word will do, but the people from the past had a flair for sophisticated prose without seeming pretentious. Why is this?

A: That is the $64,000 question. The fact is that in the 19th century people understood more about sentence structure (they learned grammar in school, for example), read more (and I’m talking about literature), and regarded letter writing as an invaluable skill.

If you have a chance, look at some letters that Civil War soldiers wrote home. Privates with only a few years of formal education wrote more clearly than many college students do now. Simple language became eloquent in their hands.

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Q: I am frequently hearing speakers, especially on NPR, using the verb “devolve” to refer to a negative development or change, e.g., “The political debate devolved into a brawl.” Has the meaning of the word evolved? Or have NPR announcers never learned about the War of Devolution?

A: “Devolve,” a word that dates back to 1420 (almost 250 years before the War of Devolution between France and Spain), literally means to roll or revolve downward. It was originally used in the physical sense (for example, rivers devolving to the sea), according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but those literal uses are all now obscure or archaic.

By the mid-1500s “devolve” was used to refer to the handing down or passing down of something to a successor or heir. (The thing devolved might be property, duties, responsibilities, rights, or obligations.) And that’s roughly how we use it today.

A briefly used negative sense, “to fall or sink gradually, to degenerate,” is considered obscure by the OED, which has no citations for it since the early 1800s. This negative usage isn’t even listed in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.). However (and I think oddly), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), does include it as the last among its definitions.

Perhaps the NPR folks you mention are reviving an old obscurity? It’s more likely, though, that the verb they mean is “degenerate.”

As for that 17th century war, it was fought over the devolution of Spanish-ruled Belgium and Luxembourg (in other words, who would get them) when the Spanish king’s daughter married the king of France. No Belgian waffling in those days!

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Q: I saw a story on the NPR website with this title: “Kansas City’s Wholesome Image Belies Mob Past.” I would have expected Kansas City’s mob past to belie its wholesome image, not the other way around. How can an image belie a reality? Have I got things backwards?

A: I checked out the NPR story. Who knew Kansas City had such a rich history of mob bosses and rubouts? But on to your question about “belie,” which means, among other things, to show something to be a lie or to give a false impression.

Other definitions include to picture falsely, to misrepresent, or to show to be false, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.).

Additional references, including the Oxford English Dictionary, give even more meanings: to falsify, to disguise a person or thing so it appears other than it is, to deny the truth of, to contradict as a lie, or to run counter to.

So it would be correct, according to these definitions, to say either that Kansas City’s past belies its reputation (fact belies image) or that its reputation belies its past (image belies fact). I think many people use “belie” simply to mean to conceal or distort the truth, which is a legitimate usage.

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Q: Thanks for the lessons! And I’d like your opinion of the phrase “ever since,” which sounds redundant to me. My little Random House dictionary prefers “It has been raining since noon” to “It has been raining ever since noon.”

A: My big Random House dictionary doesn’t have anything to say against “ever since” and uses “ever since then” in an example. In that expression, the “ever” serves to add emphasis.

You may regard “ever since” as redundant (and sometimes it is), but it has its uses and is firmly entrenched in idiomatic English. The Oxford English Dictionary has citations for it dating back to the early 18th century: “The Coffee-houses have ever since been my chief Places of Resort” (Joseph Addison, 1714).

The grammarian Otto Jespersen, in Essentials of English Grammar, explains that “ever” is often used loosely in casual speech, as in “Who ever told you that’s a robin’s egg?” or “We saw ever so many bluebirds.” In some expressions, he adds, it corresponds roughly to “always,” as in “Ever since their marriage.”

There may be times, though, when “ever” is redundant. It certainly is in the phrases “rarely ever” (“rarely” or “rarely if ever” is better), and “seldom ever” (“seldom” or “seldom if ever” is preferred).

Many times, though, the uses of “ever” are idiomatic (“Did she ever!” or “I’m ever so sorry”). They don’t always make sense literally, but are used as intensifiers or for emphasis.

I think “ever” serves a purpose if it helps to clarify something. For instance, someone might say her roses “bloomed yesterday for the first time ever.” That would mean they had NEVER bloomed before. If she’d said they “bloomed yesterday for the first time,” it might mean for the first time this season.

The issue isn’t one of correctness or incorrectness, but of gracefulness of expression. Sometimes “ever” serves a purpose, sometimes not.

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Q: I know the words “preprandial” and “postprandial” refer to before and after dinner, respectively. Are there words for before and after breakfast?

A: In English, the adjective “prandial” means “of or relating to a meal,” according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), so it could refer to any meal.

“Preprandial” and “postprandial,” says American Heritage, mean before and after a meal, especially dinner. But they too could refer to before or after breakfast, lunch, supper, whatever.

In fact, if you were speaking to great Caesar’s ghost and you used the term “preprandial,” he’d probably think you meant before breakfast or lunch, not dinner! That’s because “prandial” comes from the Latin prandium (a late breakfast or lunch).

The first published reference for “prandial” in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from the mid-1700s. The befores and afters, “preprandial” and “postprandial,” arrived on the scene in the early 1800s. For a while, both “anteprandial” and “preprandial” referred to before eating, but “pre” eventually bested “ante.”

The word “breakfast,” by the way, dates from 1463. It refers to the meal that we eat to “break” our overnight “fast.” That reminds me of a poem by Shelley that compares breakfasts “professional and critical” to dinners “convivial and political.”

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Q: There seems to be a trend in conversation these days to replace the more traditional “prior” with “previous” in certain prepositional phrases. For example, in Leonard Lopate’s recent interview with Alan Greenspan on WNYC, Greenspan uses the phrase “previous to that.” The word “prior” seems more appropriate here. Is it grammatically correct to use “previous” in such instances?

A: The phrases “prior to” and “previous to” have long histories, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Both date back to the 1600s.

They’re prepositions that can act as either adjectives or adverbs. We’ll invent an example with both kinds: “Construction prior to [adjective] 1900 is reviewed prior to [adverb] demolition.” In either case, “previous to” could be substituted, with no grammatical error.

In fact, both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) define “previous to” as “prior to” or “before.”

Grammar is one thing and style is another, however. “Prior” and “previous” all by themselves can be used as adjectives (“prior construction,” “previous regulations”) without raising any eyebrows.

But many style guides frown on the adverbial use of “prior to” and “previous to” in the sense of  “before.” Some critics have complained that “previous to” should be “previously to” when used as an adverb.

“Prior to” is more common in ordinary usage than “previous to.” (Google: “prior to,” 391 million hits; “previous to,” 2.5 million.) But we don’t particularly like either one. Using them for “before” is like using “subsequent to” for “after.” We much prefer “before” if it works.

Now we’ll sign off, prior to becoming cross-eyed.

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Q: Hello from North Dakota. I’m writing about the rampant use of “need” to replace “must” or “should” or “ought” or “have to,” as in “you need to” or “he needs to.” I hear “need” used for all kinds of other things too. I was in Kmart and heard an employee there say to a shopper: “I need you to take that to the customer service counter.”

A: “Need” is a confusing verb. But the short answer is that your first examples (using “need to” to replace “must” or “should” or “ought to” or “have to”) are grammatically correct. I’ll get to the Kmart example later.

As a verb, “need” can be either the main verb (“he needs glasses”) or the auxiliary. Usually “need” is the auxiliary verb only on special occasions: in present-tense questions (“need he wear glasses?”), negative statements (“he need not wear glasses”), or conditional clauses (“if need be”).

Here’s the confusing part. As a main verb, “need” can also be used with the “to”-infinitive (as in “he needs to go”; “the house needs to be cleaned”), in much the same way we use auxiliary verbs like “can” or “may” or “must.” But this is a legitimate use of “need,” going back at least as far as the 14th century. We also pair it up with the present participle (“he needs talking to”; “the house needs cleaning”). This too is a legitimate use.

What some usage authorities consider illegitimate is dropping “to be” and using a PAST participle, as in “the house needs cleaned” or “that child needs spanked.” There’s a good explanation of this in the usage note with “need” in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.).

However, this truncated expression (“needs washed,” “needs fixed,” and so on) is a well-known usage common to many widely scattered regions of the United States. It’s even more common in Britain, particularly northern England and Scotland. I would classify it as a dialectal usage, rather than incorrect.

There are two other ways to say this, both well established and both considered correct: “needs to be washed,” or “needs washing” (which I always heard as a kid growing up in Iowa). Since “washing” in this case is a gerund, meaning that it serves the function of a noun, “the car needs washing” is perfectly logical, like “he enjoys swimming.”

As for the Kmart example (“I need you to take that to the customer service counter”), it’s heard a lot in informal speech but it’s not good usage, in my opinion. (As a variation on this theme, some speakers add the preposition “for,” as in “I need for you to take that to the customer service counter.”)

The Kmart employee might just as well have said, “Please take that to the customer service counter.” I suspect this use of “I need you to” can be blamed on excessive politeness, or an unwillingness to ask for something more directly.

Hope this answers your needs!

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Q: A friend and I were discussing the use of the word “prom” without an article, as in “We’ll see you at prom,” rather than “We’ll see you at the prom.” We wondered if this might be a regionalism, since we both grew up in the Northeast and never heard it there. Thanks for any light you can shed on this.

A: In my day, the big dance at high school or college was “the prom,” but it appears that times have changed and many young people have dropped the definite article somewhere on the gym floor.

The first published reference for “prom” (short for “promenade”) in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from an 1879 article in the Yale Courant, which referred to “the Junior Prom. Com.” (the Junior Promenade Committee, I presume).

The article “the” is present in all of the OED‘s subsequent “prom” citations through 1991, when a film script has the line, “There’s no way you are going to the prom.” But a 2001 entry reads: “I needed a date for senior prom.” No article!

My diligent research took me to a website that ought to know, promspot, where I found quotations like this one: “There’s a wonderful sense of calm when an established couple decides to go to prom together.” And this: “After prom, the couple headed to a school-sponsored after-party.”

Nevertheless, I find that the article “the” is still boogying, even if it doesn’t get asked to the dance as often as it did in my prom days. I googled “to the prom” and got 423,000 hits while “to prom” got 478,000.

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Q: Was the Bronx cheer born in the New York borough of the same name?

A: How did you guess? Actually, the Bronx may have given us the term, but not the sound of contempt made by sticking one’s tongue between the lips and letting out air.

A far older term for this sound is “raspberry,” which may in turn (though this is debatable) be derived from “raspberry tart,” Cockney rhyming slang for “fart.”

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for the contemptuous “raspberry” dates from 1890 – a reference in a slang dictionary to “a particularly squashy noise that is extremely irritating.”

The expression “Bronx cheer” doesn’t show up in the OED until a 1929 issue of Collier’s magazine. But I prefer the dictionary’s next citation, a quote from the P.G. Wodehouse novel Hot Water (1932): “She told me … that she was through .… No explanations. Just gave me the Bronx Cheer and beat it.”

The expression “Bronx cheer” purports to describe the bad manners exhibited by residents of the Bronx, according to Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, but I beg to disagree. I’m married to a particularly well-mannered former denizen of the Bronx.

The word sleuth Barry Popik says the term has long been associated with Yankees fans and Yankee Stadium, which is in the Bronx. And anyone who has attended a ballgame at the Stadium knows what rude noises Yankees fans are capable of making when they’re displeased.

Over the years, some Bronx officials have not been happy to be associated with the “cheer.” On his website, The Big Apple, Popik quotes a former borough president as saying, “The Bronx cheer was brought here from outside somewhere and for some inexplicable reason was named for our borough.”

Yeah, yeah!

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Q: I’m an editor at a travel magazine and I have an apostrophe problem. How do I refer to the duties of a maître d’? Is it maître d’s, maître d”s, or something else?

A: We can’t find any style manuals that address this issue directly, so we’ll have to tippy-toe into unknown waters and rely on common sense!

But first let us recommend the cowardly solution. Why not avoid the issue? You could say the maitre d’hotel’s duties or the duties of the maitre d’. If you insist on facing this possessive problem head on, though, here are our thoughts.

You have two needs for an apostrophe in this case: the apostrophe of elision (the one that stands for what’s missing in maitre d’hotel) and the apostrophe of possession. If any reference book did advise you to use both apostrophes, we’d say it was nuts. So we advise maitre d’s as the possessive.

One clue you could use to justify this is that The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language  says the plural of maitre d’ is maitre d’s. American Heritage is a dictionary that makes single letters (like d) plural by adding an apostrophe plus s (‘s). With maitre d’, however, it drops one of the apostrophes.

In other words, the dictionary pluralizes maitre d’ as maitre d’s, not as maitre d’’s. One can only assume that it would have done the same for the possessive, if it had dealt with the issue.

A couple of parting remarks. In English, one doesn’t italicize maitre d’. We’ve used italics here to avoid the quotation marks that we normally use to set off words. And in English usage, the circumflex is optional: “You can call him maitre d’, maitre d’hotel, or headwaiter, but he’s George to me.”

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Q: I don’t want to kvetch too much, but I’m seeing the phrase “etch out” used in place of “eke out.” If this catches on, I’ll have this to say: “E-e-e-k!”

A: I’ve seen this usage a couple of times, but I don’t think you have to worry about the loss of “eke out” in the foreseeable future. I googled “etch out” and found the correct meaning clearly engraved on the minds of most people.

The verb “etch,” by the way, comes from an old Germanic word meaning to cause to eat or be eaten. When the word first appeared in English in the early 17th century, this eating business clearly referred to the eating away of a surface with acid – that is, engraving.

Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary has two early citations for the use of “etch out” to mean “eke out,” but that usage apparently died out in the 17th century (the OED describes it as obsolete).

The verb “eke” is derived from an Old English word meaning to enlarge or increase. It didn’t come to mean to achieve with great effort (as in “eke out a living”) until the 19th century. The first citation for this usage in the OED is from Thomas Jefferson’s Autobiography (1825): “To eke out the existence of the people, every person … was called on for a weekly subscription.”

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Q: We have a bet going on (thankfully no more is at stake than a Caramel Frap at Starbucks). I say the word “futile” is pronounced as FEW-tile. A coworker thinks it’s pronounced FEW-dul (kind of like “feudal”). I’m thinking that a billion Borg drones, saying “resistance is futile,” can’t be wrong.

A: The adjective “futile” is most often pronounced FEW-till, less often with a long “i,” as in FEW-tile. Both pronunciations are correct.

As for FEW-dul, it sounds as if your coworker’s pronunciation has been influenced by the knights of Camelot, not the cyborgs of Star Trek.

The word “futile,” by the way, comes from the Latin futtilis, meaning leaky, untrustworthy, or useless.

Enjoy your Caramel Frappuccino – and your biological distinctiveness. Watch out for the Borg!

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Q: You mentioned on your blog that the word “stop” has roots in Old English and other early Germanic languages. It got me to thinking that we would be saying “stoppen” and “halten” instead of “stop” today if German hadn’t missed by one vote from becoming the official language here.

A: Thanks for writing, but I have to tell you that this business about German almost becoming the “official” language of the United States is a myth. In fact, there has never been an official language in the U.S.

The true story dates back to 1794, when a group of German American farmers from Virginia asked Congress to publish Federal laws in German as well as English.

In early 1795, the House considered the request but ultimately decided to publish Federal laws in English only. During the debate about the farmers’ request, a vote to adjourn failed by one vote, which apparently led to this myth.

Goodbye to another language legend. Or, as those farmers would have said, “Auf Wiedersehen!”

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Q: A reporter on the NPR news recently pronounced “Tuesday” as CHYOOZ-day. Is this considered standard English?

A: No, it’s not an accepted pronunciation. In American English, “Tuesday” is usually pronounced TOOZ-day. An acceptable variant, chiefly heard in the South, is TYOOZ-day. In British English, the usual pronunciation is TYOOZ-day, though TOOZ-day is also acceptable. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English doesn’t include CHYOOZ-day, but this pronunciation is widespread in Britain.

Britons also use CHYOO for many similar words. Some examples are “tube”‘ (TYOOB, which becomes CHYOOB), “tune” (TYOON, which becomes CHYOON), and “tulip” (TYOO-lip, which becomes CHYOO-lip). None of these CHYOO versions are in Longman’s.

In American English, “tu” sounds usually are only pronounced as CHOO/CHYOO when they are inside words, not at the beginning. Typical examples are “natural,” “eventual,” and “punctual.”

In some parts of Appalachia, however, people do say CHOOZ-day or CHYOOZ-day. In addition, “Tuesday” is spelled “Chuesday” in Gullah, an English-based creole language spoken by African-Americans in coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida. The word also appears as “Chuesday” in some 19th-century slave narratives.

Here’s an interesting sidelight. In 2001 a pair of scholars published a paper in the journal American Speech based on their study of letters written by semi-literate white overseers on rural Southern plantations before the end of the Civil War.

Since these largely uneducated men wrote words the way they were pronounced (one example: “poly” for “poorly”), the letters give us a picture of how they spoke. At least one of the overseers wrote “chusday” for guess which day of the week?

Studies of the development of Southern American English have at times been controversial. Some scholars believe many field slaves learned much of their English by exposure to illiterate or semi-literate overseers. But other scholars feel many slaves picked up some English from Europeans before leaving Africa. One has to be very careful before drawing conclusions from this about the development of Black English in general. Still, it’s interesting to think about!

Getting back to that NPR reporter, most Americans would think that someone who pronounced “Tuesday” as CHYOOZ-day was speaking with a mouthful of marbles or a bad case of Anglophilia.

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Q: I always thought the expression “thin as a rail” referred to fence rails, but I’ve read recently that it actually refers to a skinny bird called a rail. Which is correct?

A: Although quite a few birdwatchers and ornithologists believe the expression refers to avian rails (members of the family Rallidae), the rail in question is of the fence variety.

The Oxford English Dictionary has five entries for the noun “rail,” but all of its published references for “thin as a rail” or “lean as a rail” are listed under the entry for the “rail” that means a rod, stick, bar, etc. The word is derived from the Latin regula, meaning a straight stick – that is, a ruler.

The OED’s first citation for “thin as a rail” comes from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872): “You’ll marry a combination of calico and consumption that’s as thin as a rail.” A 1927 quotation in the dictionary, “as thin as a lath or rake or rail,” reinforces the idea that the rail involved is something man-made.

Many of the feathered rails are skinny (or, as ornithologists are wont to say “laterally compressed”), but the evidence for an avian connection to the expression is thin.

If any birders out there still have doubts, here’s a quotation from the Audubon web page for the Virginia rail (Rallus limicola):

“Although ‘thin as a rail’ refers to the rail of a fence, it aptly describes the Virginia Rail, whose narrow body allows passage through the thick vegetation found in fresh and salt water wetlands.”

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Q: Can you tell me if Ms (as in Ms Jean Smith) requires a period? I never use one because Ms is not an abbreviation, unlike Mrs. (an abbreviation of Mistress) or Mr. (Mister).

A: Although the courtesy title “Ms.” is not a true abbreviation, style manuals generally recommend using a period. As the Chicago Manual of Style website explains, “Chicago style is to use a period after ‘Ms.’ even though it’s not technically an abbreviation, following Webster’s 11th Collegiate, which suggests that ‘Ms.’ is a shortened form combining ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs.’ “

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), which includes the dotless “Ms” as an acceptable, though less common, variation, has an interesting usage note on the history of the term:

“Many of us think of Ms. or Ms as a fairly recent invention of the women’s movement, but in fact the term was first suggested as a convenience to writers of business letters by such publications as the Bulletin of the American Business Writing Association (1951) and The Simplified Letter, issued by the National Office Management Association (1952).”

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Q: At a recent reading, Mary Gordon spoke of her mother’s use of “going to business” rather than “going to work” when talking about women in clerical positions. A woman in the audience wondered if the expression was used mainly by Irish Catholics. But my mother came from a different background and used it too. I felt it was a foolish attempt to give everyday “work” a higher status by using the word “business.” Could you comment on this usage?

A: I don’t find many references to the expression, but it seems to have been used in England in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, as well as in the United States in the mid-20th century.

Here’s an amusing use of the expression by P.G. Wodehouse in his short story “Extricating Young Gussie” (1915):

“I was surprised to find the streets quite full. People were bustling along as if it were some reasonable hour and not the grey dawn. In the tramcars they were absolutely standing on each other’s necks. Going to business or something, I take it. Wonderful johnnies!”

In the Wodehouse example, “going to business” clearly means going to work, a concept that’s obviously foreign to the narrator!

Here are a couple of quotations from novels:

“And now let’s go to business, gentlemen, and excuse this sermon.” (Thackeray, The Great Hoggarty Diamond, 1841)

“The thing is, she says she is sick and tired of going to business.” (Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote, 1986)

The expression “going to business” does not appear in any of the phrase finders I use. But at least we know that it wasn’t confined to women or to Irish Catholics.

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Q: I’ve noticed that some people use the term “mano a mano” to mean man to man. What puzzles me is that mano means hand in Spanish, not man, so “mano a mano” should mean hand to hand. Why do people misuse this term and how did the mistake come about?

A: You’re right: mano does mean hand in Spanish, and mano a mano literally means hand to hand in Spanish. But Spanish speakers use the phrase to mean between the two of them, especially between two men. So, two Chilean legislators could have a mano a mano debate, and two Spanish bullfighters could have a mano a mano in the ring.

In English, the expression refers to a direct (think “hand-to-hand”) conflict or competition between two people, such as a mano-a-mano playoff between two golfers or a mano-a-mano struggle between two prize-fighters.

The term “man to man,” on the other hand, means frank and honest (as in a man-to-man talk) or refers to a one-on-one defense in sports, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Many people, though not dictionaries, think that “man to man” also means hand to hand (as in man-to-man combat), which probably accounts for much of the confusion between “mano a mano” and “man to man.”

What’s more, the Spanish word for brother, hermano, has a slang version in Spanglish: the short form mano. So “Hey, mano” is a rough equivalent of the greeting “Hey, man.” This usage, which cropped up in the 1960s, is probably influenced by the English word “man,” according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

Thanks for the interesting question. You deserve a hand!

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Q: I saw your blog item on “ucalegon” and I just had to use that odd word in a limerick.

Ucalegon must be in town.
I heard that your house had burned down.
The one with a porch on it?
Hun, how unfortunate.
All you have left is that gown?

O.V. Michaelsen (Ove Ofteness)

A: Thanks for the limerick, Ove. I love rhymes like “porch on it … fortunate.” Bravo!

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Q: Help! I work for a nonprofit policy-research organization. Which of these sentences is correct?
1. “A majority of workers has access to some paid sick days, but a substantial minority of them does not.” 2. “A majority of workers have access to some paid sick days, but a substantial minority of them do not.”

A: “Majority” is a collective noun, and collective nouns can be either singular or plural, depending on whether you’re talking about a group of individuals or the individuals in the group.

If you’re talking about the group itself, use the singular (“the majority is significant”), but if you’re talking about the individuals, use the plural (“a majority of the residents were polled”).

Here’s a trick from my grammar book Woe Is I: The word “the” before a collective noun (“the majority”) is usually a tip-off that it’s singular, while “a” before the noun (“a majority”), especially when “of” comes next, usually indicates a plural.

So, getting back to your question and putting the little trick to work, number 2 is correct: “A majority of workers have access to some paid sick days, but a substantial minority of them do not.”

Some other examples of collective words are “couple,” “none,” “number,” “any,” and “all.” As with “majority,” they can be either singular or plural, depending on whether you’re talking about the group or the members of the group. I discuss “none,” which trips up a lot of folks, in the Nov. 18, 2006, entry on The Grammarphobia Blog.

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Q: I was listening to you on the Leonard Lopate Show when Leonard remarked on all the English words that the French were using. He gave the stop sign as an example. Actually, the word stop is French and comes from the verb stopper. We have had stop signs in France forever and never used arrêt signs as the Canadians do.

A: I’m no expert on Gallic etymology, but I suspect that the French did indeed borrow the word stop from English, though this isn’t exactly breaking news. My French language references have many citations for stop and stopper over the last century. But the few that are any older, such as one in Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons, seem to be derived from the English “stop.”

In fact, the verb stopper doesn’t appear in any of the online Académie Française dictionaries until the eighth edition, which dates from the early 1930s. And the ninth edition suggests stop is derived from the English word.

The English “stop,” on the other hand, is very old, going back to Anglo-Saxon days. It comes from the Old English forstoppian (occurring only once) and is similar to words in other early Germanic languages.

By the way, the stop sign originated in the U.S. in 1915, according to Wikipedia, and went through various shapes and colors before settling on the familiar red-and-white octagon in 1954. Stop signs usually have the same shape and color all over the world, but the wording may differ from country to country. Signs in Latin America say “PARE” or “ALTO,” for example, while signs in China, Japan, Thailand, and the Arab countries use their own alphabets.

All the European Community countries, including France, have used the English word in stop signs since the 1970s, when road signs were standardized by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. In Quebec and some other areas of Canada, the signs say “ARRÊT,” “STOP ARRÊT,” or “ARRÊT STOP.”

And now, I believe, it’s time to stop.

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Q: I’m hearing the expression “snarkfest” used all over the place, even by Brian Lehrer. What does it actually mean?

A: The term “snarkfest” hasn’t made it into the three dictionaries I consult the most: the Oxford English Dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.). But that doesn’t mean it won’t get there one of these days. I had 25,000 hits when I googled “snarkfest,” so the word is getting around.

The online Urban Dictionary, whose users define slang terms, suggests that a “snarkfest” is a nasty affair in which bloggers may be set up to be attacked as liars. But the FAQ of Snarkfest 3.0, an online forum, says: “Don’t personally attack other posters.” H-m-m. This is a word that’s still baking in the oven.

Earlier this year, The Grammarphobia Blog had an item on the origins of “snarky,” which means snide or sarcastic or snotty. (No, it doesn’t come from Lewis Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark.)

It would seem that a “snarkfest” (and here language is evolving before our very eyes) is an extended session of snarky exchanges. In other words, a feeding frenzy of snarkiness.

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Q: In New York, you can tell someone’s a tourist when he asks for directions to Houston Street and pronounces “Houston” like the city in Texas. Why is “Houston” pronounced “HEW-ston” in Texas and “HOW-ston” in New York?

A: I’ve wondered about that myself, but I never got around to checking it out. Luckily, the New York Times recently discussed the subject in an article offering tips to out-of-towners arriving in the city for their freshman year at college.

The article had a history and pronunciation lesson for any newbies who plan to visit the street in Lower Manhattan that “put the H in SoHo.” As it turns out, the city in Texas and the street in New York are named for two different guys.

The city is named after the first president of the short-lived Republic of Texas, Sam Houston, while the street is named for William Houstoun, a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress who married into a Manhattan family that owned land on the street.

The street, whose name was shortened from Houstoun to Houston in the early 1800s, runs east-west across Manhattan from the Hudson River to the East River. Greenwich Village and the East Village are to the north; SoHo (South of Houston) and the Lower East Side are to the south.

If you don’t want to sound like a tourist when asking a cabbie to take you to Houston Street, just remember that the first syllable of “Houston” sounds like the “how” of “boy howdy.”

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Q: I have a question about foreign places. Why don’t we use the same names and pronunciations as the people who live in those places? Why do we use “Germany” instead of “Deutschland,” “Italy” and not “Italia,” “Spain,” not “España”? It isn’t as if those names contained sounds we don’t have in English.

A: You might as well ask why the French and the Spanish don’t say “United States” instead of “États-Unis” and “Estados Unidos.” Or, for that matter, why Spaniards and Italians don’t say “table” instead of “mesa” and “tavola.”

What’s “Deutschland” to Germans is “Germany” to us, “Allemagne” to the French, “Alemania” to the Spanish; and “Germania” to the Italians (as it was to the ancient Romans). Americans and Britons say “London” and “Paris”; the French say “Londres” and what sounds like “Paree”; the Italians say “Londra” and “Parigi.”

The point is that geographical names, like other words, are different from language to language. Does this mean that every culture is committing “linguistic imperialism” upon every other culture? No. We don’t say “Paree” but neither do we pronounce “Detroit,” “Baton Rouge,” or “St. Louis” as the Frenchmen who named them.

If a country asks others to adopt its preferred version of a geographical name, the rest of the world usually complies, though the transition may take a while and may be a messy process. In this way, Bombay has become Mumbai in English, Burma is now Myanmar, and Peking is Beijing.

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Q: I often see “whither” in titles, perhaps too often, and it doesn’t always make sense to me. My understanding is that “whither” means wherever, but how do you explain it in, say, Monty Python’s “Whither Canada” episode?

A: I imagine that John Cleese and the other Monty Python writers were just having some withering fun. I too have had my fill of “whithers”: “Whither Imus?” “Whither the Dollar?” “Whither Socialism?” “Whither Newspapers?” Lazy editors use it a lot in headlines to mean “Where Goes X?” or “Where Has Y Gone?”

“Whither” is an extremely old word, dating back to the 800s. It means to what place, situation, position, degree, or end, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.). In other words, “whither” essentially means where or wherever.

The two most famous uses of “whither” are in the Bible: “Whither goest thou?” (the Vulgate translation of Quo vadis?) and “Whither though goest, I will go” (the Book of Ruth).

Today, “whither” has the flavor of antiquity and is rarely used except by those who like its quaintness. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that in modern times, “whither” has been replaced by “where.”

We see “whither” almost exclusively these days in newspaper or magazine headlines in which the verb is either understood or dropped: “Whither the Middle East?” (Where Goes the Middle East?); “Whither the Moderates?” (Where Have the Moderates Gone?), and so on. And on and on!

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Q: I’m a bit skeptical about using “dubious” in place of “skeptical.” Do you have any thoughts on this usage?

A: “Dubious” implies vacillation or uncertainty. It comes ultimately from the Latin verb dubitare (to vacillate or waver), which is related to the Latin dubius (doubtful). In the Latin roots you can recognize the “twoness” (from the Latin duo) that’s involved in being hesitant. When we can’t decide or are dubious about something, we sometimes say we’re of two minds.

The classical roots of the word “skeptical” mean simply inquiring or reflective. But in ancient Greece several schools of philosophy emerged, arguing that knowledge is limited (even impossible) and that all inquiry should start with doubt. Disciples called themselves the Skeptics (Skeptikoi). Thus the adjective “skeptical,” when adopted into English in the 17th century, referred not to someone who was inquiring and reflective but to someone who was doubtful.

So much for the history. Today’s definitions of the words overlap a lot. Someone who’s dubious about something harbors doubt – he’s hesitant or undecided. Someone who’s skeptical also harbors doubt, but perhaps disbelief or incredulity besides. So if you’re talking about a doubting person, you could use either adjective, but if the person is also a bit incredulous, “skeptical” would be a stronger word.

A warning, though. “Dubious” is a two-edged sword. It can mean harboring doubt: an undecided person might be dubious about something. But it can also mean arousing doubt: a dubious expense sheet, for example, is one whose veracity is in question. So if you want to avoid casting aspersions on somebody or something, “doubtful” might be better than “dubious.”

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Q: I’ve been seeing much of the Latin phrase “annus horribilis” lately. It’s been in the New York Times in reference to Britney Spears, Michael Dell, Martin Amis, and many other people in the news. Can you tell me something about the expression? Did it originate with Queen Elizabeth II?

A: The Queen used the phrase in her 1992 Christmas message at the end of a scandalous year for the royal family that included a fire at Windsor Castle. Although she popularized “annus horribilis” (horrible year), she didn’t coin it.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1985 article in the Guardian newspaper. The author uses the term as a play on the expression “annus mirabilis” in The Engineer of Human Souls, a novel by Josef Skvorecky.

As for “annus mirabilis” (wonderful year), it’s been around for centuries. The OED’s first reference is in the title of a 1667 poem by Dryden about the English defeat of the Dutch navy and London’s recovery from the Great Fire.

I imagine that the Queen (or her speechwriter) was aware that fire played a major role in both Dryden’s “annus mirabilis” and Elizabeth’s “annus horribilis.”

I agree with you that we’ve been seeing a lot of “annus horribilis” lately. Too much, as far as I’m concerned. It’s getting to be horribly tiresome.

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Q: I was recently listening to a police lieutenant describe how he drove from Jersey City to Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. The New Jersey Turnpike was closed to all but military vehicles but he “badged” his way on so he could get to the scene. I hadn’t heard that usage before, but it makes perfect sense to me.

A: Thanks for the observation. I’ll make note of it.

Interestingly, “badge” has been used as a verb as far back as the 14th century. Over the years, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it has meant to mark or distinguish, to buy something for resale, and to harvest a crop.

Here’s a quotation from Macbeth for the first meaning: “Their Hands and Faces were all badg’d with blood.” The second meaning (to buy for resale) is a reference to the old term “badger” (a middleman or itinerant dealer). The third definition (to harvest) may be related to the words “bag” or “batch.”

The verb “badge” comes, as one might expect, from the noun “badge,” but the origin of the noun is unknown. Etymologists have speculated that it might be derived from Anglo-Latin or Anglo-French words for emblem.

As for the quadruped that we call a “badger,” the origin of the word is uncertain, though some wordsmiths speculate that it might refer to the white marks or badges on the animal’s head.

I won’t badger you any more about this, except to note that the verb “badger” (to pester or persecute) comes from badger-baiting or badger-drawing, a so-called sport in which dogs were once used to draw captured badgers from artificial dens. Shades of Michael Vick!

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Q: I have a couple of questions about pronunciation. I can’t stand it when people say CAR-mel for “caramel” and va-NELLA for “vanilla.” Am I too uptight or do I have a right to be annoyed?

A: “Caramel” can be pronounced with two syllables or three, according to modern dictionaries. Some reference books list the twosome first and some go first with the threesome, but both are correct.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) leads off with the two-syllable version (CAR-mel) while The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) goes with the three-syllable job (CAR-a-mel).

Dictionary palates aren’t quite as indiscriminate about “vanilla,” but you can find different pronunciations in the standard references. In Merriam-Webster’s, for instance, there are two pronunciations (va-NILL-a and va-NELL-a). American Heritage has only one (va-NILL-a).

Dictionaries often list several pronunciations for an individual word. All are usually acceptable, and the difference between them (as far as how common each is) may be so slight as to be negligible.

So, loosen up, or one of these days you’ll be singing: “You say va-NILLA and I say va-NELLA. Let’s call the whole thing off!” (My apologies to Ira Gershwin for playing with his lyrics!)

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Q: I was reading an Op-Ed piece that used the medical term “fugue” to describe that dreamlike state of consciousness that so many survivors had after 9-11. Is this term related etymologically to the musical “fugue”?

A: Both words come from the Italian word fuga, meaning flight, which is ultimately derived from the Latin verb fugere (to flee).

The psychiatric “fugue” (think of it as a flight from reality) refers to a sort of amnesiac state in which someone does various things but has no awareness of them when he returns to normal consciousness.

The musical “fugue” (think of it as a flight of harmony) is a composition that weaves one or more melodies in different voices.

The musical “fugue” entered English in the late 16th century. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a musical composition in which “one part beginneth and the other singeth the same, for some number of notes (which the first did sing).”

The first medical reference in the OED is from a 1901 English translation of a book by Pierre Marie Félix Janet, The Mental State of Hystericals, which describes the condition as “those strange excursions, accomplished automatically, of which the patient has not the least recollection.”

The Latin word fugere and its relatives have also given us “centrifuge,” “fugitive,” “refuge,” “refugee,” “subterfuge,” and others.

I’ll knock off now and take one of my favorite musical flights, with Glenn Gould and the Well-Tempered Clavier.

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Q: Lately, I’ve noticed the increasing use, or rather misuse, of “shambles” as a plural (“His house was in shambles”) instead of a singular (“His house was in a shambles”). This is on my list of 250 worst language offenses. What has become of the language?

A: “Shambles” is a very, very old word that has had more makeovers than an aging socialite. We’ve had it in one form or another since the 9th century. Various spellings include shammel, shamil, shamwelle, shammoulle, sheamble, schambylle, shambulles, chambulles, and shambylles.

It’s been singular and plural as well as noun and verb. As a noun, it’s meant a stool, a butcher’s table, a scene of bloody mayhem, and a plain old mess, among other things. As a verb, it’s meant to walk or shuffle or stumble or cut up or slaughter.

In the 9th century, the noun sceamol was an Old English word for a stool or table (it came to us in a roundabout way from the Latin scammelum, a bench). By the 10th century, the word was being used to mean a table in a shop or market, and by the 1300s it meant specifically a butcher’s table or stall – that is, an area for the slaughter and sale of meat.

Over the years, a “shamble” or “shambles” came to mean a slaughterhouse, and eventually, by extension, a disorderly scene of carnage, ruin, or devastation.

By the 1500s it was used mostly in the plural and had acquired a “b” along the way. Even when used with an “s” at the end, however, the word was generally treated as a singular (similar to words like “measles,” “checkers,” and “news”). In 1610, for example, the poet John Donne wrote of “a spirituall shambles” of souls and “a Temporall shambles” of bodies.

In the 20th century, the word lost much of its blood and gore. We now use the noun “shambles” to refer to any chaotic or messy situation.

Back to your question: Is it correct today to say “in a shambles” or “in shambles”?

Modern dictionaries describe “shambles” as a plural word that’s usually treated as a singular. The examples given nearly always include the article “a.” But these dictionaries may be behind the times. In practice, the word is now used more often without the article. I just did a bit of googling and got these results: “in a shambles” (132,000 hits) and “in shambles” (678,000).

I believe either expression is OK, but you can always say, “What a dump!”

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Q: I have always tried to instill in my children the correct use of English. But they (and all their friends) insist on substituting the word “go” for “say” in colloquial speech: “After my question, he goes, ‘I don’t get it,’ and I go, ‘What’s not to get?’” I would have been ostracized for this in my younger days. Has it become acceptable? Have I become superannuated?

A: Linguists call this usage the “quotative go.” Is it acceptable? Well, it all depends on whom you ask. It drives a lot of parents crazy, but language scholars generally like it.

I recently did a piece for the New York Times Magazine on the use of quotatives, “like” in particular. But “go” is in the same category, as is “all.” (Example: “I’m all, ‘Where’s the car?’ And he’s all, ‘Don’t tell me it’s stolen!'”)

You can find the On Language column on my website. It says in short that quotatives are OK in informal speech, but not in situations requiring your best English.

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