Tag: Expression

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

The pilgrimage of ‘progress’

Q: In looking up “progress,” I stumbled across this note: “The verb became obsolete in British English use at the end of the 17th century and was readopted from American English in the early 19th century.” Why did it become obsolete in Britain, not the US?

A: The verb “progress” wasn’t actually obsolete in British English during the 18th century, but it was apparently less common in Britain than in the US.

That passage from the Oxford Dictionary of English is outdated. It’s probably based on an etymological note in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that was updated in the online third edition.

(The ODE is a standard dictionary while the OED is an etymological dictionary. Both are published by Oxford University Press.)

Although the note in the OED second edition says the verb was “in 18th c. obs. in England,” the third edition (in a March 2022 update) says it was “apparently more common in U.S. than in British use in the 18th cent.”

Of the seven 18th-century citations in the updated entry, three are from Britain, three from the US, and one from Ireland. Here are the British examples in various senses of the verb:

  • “ ’Tis Ordain’d … that the Sun … should be more Certain in Motion, and usefully computable, by never progressing from his Ecliptick Line” (from Remarks on the New Philosophy of Des-Cartes, 1700, by Edward Howard).
  • “While England was progressing in that change of its constitution, Ireland as a dependent country was affected with it” (A View of the Internal Policy of Great Britain, 1764, by Robert Wallace).
  • “A glorious war, commenced in justice and progressed in success” (The Out-of-Door Parliament, 1780, by a Gentleman of the Middle Temple).

English borrowed the word “progress” from Latin, where progressus referred to a forward movement, an advance, or a development. It appeared as a noun in the 15th century and a verb in the 16th. Here are the first OED citations for the noun and the verb:

  • “In oure progresse to outward werkis aftir þese [these] now afore taken” (from The Reule of Crysten Religioun, circa 1443, by Reginald Pecock).
  • “Caesar returned out of Africke, and progressed vp and downe Italie” (from The Liues of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, 1578, Thomas North’s translation of the Greek historian Plutarch’s biographies).

The verb “progress” was used in the 16th and 17th centuries by leading British writers, including Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne. The OED cites this tearful example from Shakespeare’s King John, believed written in the mid-1590s but published in 1623:  “Let me wipe off this honourable dewe, / That siluerly doth progresse on thy cheekes.”

The verb continued to be used in American English during the 18th century, although it fell out of favor in British English. Noah Webster includes the noun and verb as standard in An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), while Samuel Johnson says in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that the verb is “not used.”

Johnson was aware of the verb’s history (he cites Shakespeare’s use of it in King John), but the mistaken belief among less informed Britons that the verb was an Americanism may have kept many from using it in the 18th century.

By the early 19th century, however, the reluctant British apparently found the verb so helpful that they resumed using it despite its supposed American origins.

The OED cites this example, which we’ve expanded, from Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832), a collection of sketches about rural life in England:

“In country towns, as in other places, society has been progressing (if I may borrow that expressive Americanism) at a very rapid rate.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Publishing Usage Writing

Blowing Their Cover

[Pat’s review of a book about how publishers tout their books, reprinted from the September 2022 issue of the Literary Review, London. We’ve left in the British punctuation and spelling.]

* * * * * * * * * * * *

PATRICIA T O’CONNER

Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A–Z of Literary Persuasion
By Louise Willder (Oneworld 352pp £14.99)

‘It starts with the rats.’

Gotcha, didn’t it? That line got me too. It’s from a blurb for The Plague, and the nameless copywriter deserves a plaque. Those five words conveyed all the ominous menace of the book and got there a lot faster than Camus, bless him.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm, Louise Willder’s homage to the persuasive end of publishing, is studded with jewels like that – sales pitches raised to artistry. Or to hilarity, as with the blurb for a campy German novel about Hitler’s return from the dead: ‘HE’S BACK. AND HE’S FÜHRIOUS.’

A ‘tell-all’ of shameless promotion, this book examines all the paraphernalia designed to hook a reader: title, subtitle, first sentence, jacket art, review quotes, flattering remarks from other authors, and so on. But the star here is the in-house précis and plug known as the publisher’s blurb, usually found on the back cover or a jacket flap. After twenty-five years in publishing, Willder figures she’s written more than five thousand. (A side note: in the United States, a ‘blurb’ is a prepublication endorsement by a fellow author, otherwise known as a ‘puff ’.)

Although Willder admires blurbal perfection, she has also put together a ‘little cabinet of horrors’ – blurbs so deliciously bad that we suspect the copywriters were impaired or never read the books. She describes these productions as ‘unhinged’, ‘barking’, ‘bats’, ‘deranged abominations’ and ‘a big “screw-you” to the reader’. A standout in that last category: ‘This is a Lord Peter Wimsey story. Need we say more?’ Well, yes.

Pulp editions of the classics are particularly rich in covers that in no way reflect what’s inside. Willder delights in a garish edition of Pride and Prejudice featuring a smouldering, hairy-chested Darcy, smoke curling from his cigarette, and the line ‘Lock Up Your Daughters… Darcy’s In Town!’ Often the writers of blurbs for pulp classics ‘take leave of their senses’, the author writes, citing a reprint of Zola’s Nana: ‘Voluptuous and violent, she created a world of luxury which revolved about her person.’ Her person?

In a more serious vein, Willder explores the history of book promotion, from William Caxton’s medieval flyers to the marketing tricks that helped sell Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. Dickens owned the author tour and the dramatic reading, we learn, while Hugo perfected the art of advance buzz, right down to press releases embargoed till publication date. And when it comes to advertising posters, Hugo was the original plasterer of Paris.

Now here’s a eureka moment. Think of the ridiculously verbose title pages of 17th- and 18th-century books, their inflated subtitles ballooning out to fill every inch of space. A case in point:

The
LIFE
AND
STRANGE SURPRIZING
ADVENTURES
OF
ROBINSON Crusoe,
of YORK, MARINER:
Who lived Eight and Twenty Years,
all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the
coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth of
the Great River of OROONOQUE;
Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck,
wherein all the Men perished but himself.
WITH
An Account how he was at last as strangely
deliver’d by PYRATES.
Written by Himself.

It’s a blurb! Daniel Defoe’s own blurb, Written by Himself. As Willder explains, early books had no covers, let alone jackets. They were just bundles of folded pages (the wealthy had them bound). So the logical place for any marketing hoo-ha was the title page, which a bookseller could hang on a string to attract shoppers.

Then as now, hyperbole sold books. And speaking as a copywriter, Willder admits to creating her share. The blub is ‘my 100 words of little white lies’, she says. ‘There has to be some kind of sugar coating and, yes, lying.’

Of course, one has to draw the line somewhere, and Willder would like to see fewer shopworn adjectives on book covers, specifically ‘luminous’, ‘dazzling’, ‘incandescent’, ‘stunning’, ‘shimmering’, ‘sparkling’, ‘glittering’, ‘devastating’, ‘searing’, ‘shattering’, ‘explosive’, ‘epic’, ‘electrifying’, ‘dizzying’, ‘chilling’, ‘staggering’, ‘deeply personal’ and the ubiquitous ‘haunting’.

Hooray! Publishers (and reviewers), take note. I never could understand ‘incandescent’. Even light bulbs aren’t incandescent anymore. And while we’re at it, I’d like to blue-pencil the noun phrases ‘rite of passage’, ‘coming of age’ and ‘richly woven tapestry’.

Louise Willder – we are cut from the same cloth. But you can’t escape without a couple of quibbles. It wasn’t Dorothy Parker who said, ‘I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.’ It was Tom Waits (one could fill a book with Dorothy Parker quips that Dorothy Parker never quipped). And ‘furlough’ is not an American term. It originated in 17th-century British English. Check the Oxford English Dictionary, a deeply shattering work of haunting luminosity.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Phrase origin Usage Writing

Can you break a phrasal verb up?

Q: I often encounter a construction like this: “Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushed through Congress a law overturning the 1820 Missouri Compromise.” Is “pushed a law through Congress” incorrect? It seems crisper, less contorted.

A: Some writers, probably influenced by the old “split infinitive” myth, are reluctant to break up a phrasal verb like “push through,” and this sometimes leads to contorted sentences.

However, we don’t think that’s the issue here. Our guess is that the writer of the passage (“Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushed through Congress a law overturning the 1820 Missouri Compromise”) simply wanted to keep the noun “law” close to its description.

We agree with you that “pushed a law through Congress” is usually more straightforward than “pushed through Congress a law,” but we think the passage is more effective as written.

A phrasal verb, as you know, is made up of a verb and one or more other words, typically adverbs or prepositions: “break up,” “carry out,” “shut down,” “find out,” “give up,” “put off,” “try on,” etc.

There’s nothing wrong with breaking up a phrasal verb as long as it still makes sense: you can “shut down a computer” or “shut a computer down.” It’s a question of style, not grammar.

The phrasal verb “push through,” meaning to carry out something to its conclusion, showed up in late 19th-century writing, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest OED example, which we’ve expanded, breaks up the phrase:

“If it is not pressing, neither party, having other and nearer aims, cares to take it up and push it through” (from The American Commonwealth, 1888, by the British historian and statesman James Bryce).

Finally, we’ve written several times on our website about the so-called “split infinitive,” a misleading phrase, since “to” isn’t part of the infinitive  and nothing is being split.

As we note in a 2013 post, when “to” appears with an infinitive, it’s generally referred to as an “infinitive marker” or “infinitive particle.” When an infinitive appears without “to,” it’s described as a bare, simple, or plain infinitive.

On the Language Myths page of our website, we note that writers have been putting words between the infinitive and its particle since the 1300s. It was perfectly acceptable until the mid-19th century, when Latin scholars—notably Henry Alford in his book A Plea for the Queen’s English—objected to the usage.

Some linguists trace the taboo to the Victorians’ slavish fondness for Latin, a language in which you can’t divide an infinitive. The so-called rule was popular for half a century, until leading grammarians debunked it.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

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

There, there, don’t cry

Q: I teach EFL and was asked about the origin of using “there, there” to comfort someone. I was unable to find this online. Not one single iota as to where it came from. Can you help?

A: The word “there” has gone in many different directions since it first appeared in Anglo-Saxon days as þara, an adverb indicating location or position, as in this example from a medieval English version of a 5th-century Latin chronicle:

“swiðe earfoðhawe, ac hit is Þeah Þara” (“very hard to perceive, yet it is still there”). From the Old English Orosius, a late 9th- or early 10th-century translation of Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Pagano Libri VII (“Seven Books of History Against the Pagans”).

We’ll skip ahead now to the 16th century, when the adverb “there” started being used in multiples as an interjection to express vexation, dismay, derision, satisfaction, encouragement, and so on.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary uses “there, there” to express satisfaction: “They gape vpon me with their mouthes, sayenge: there, there; we se it with oure eyes” (from the Coverdale Bible of 1535, Psalms 35:21; the King James Version of 1611 has “Aha, aha” instead of “there, there”).

The next OED example uses “there” four times to express dismay: “Why there, there, there, there, a diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats” (from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, believed written in the late 1590s).

The earliest example we’ve found for the adverb used to comfort someone is from the early 19th century: “There, there, my dear fellow—nay, don’t cry—it will be all well with you yet” (“Incident at Navarino,” The London Saturday Journal, Oct. 19, 1839).

Oxford’s first citation for the comforting usage appeared several decades later: “ ‘There, there,’ my poor father answered, ‘it is not that’ ” (from Routledge’s Every Boy’s Annual of 1872).

The dictionary’s next use, which we’ve expanded, is from Damon Runyon’s short story “Butch Minds the Baby” (1938): “He lays down his tools and picks up John Ignatius Junior and starts whispering, ‘There, there, there, my itty oddleums. Da-dad is here.’ ”

The most recent OED citation for the usage has “there-there” as a verb meaning to soothe or comfort: “Joyce took the baby … and lovingly there-thered his raucous cries” (from The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, a 1977 crime novel by Colin Dexter).

It’s possible that the comforting sense of “there, there” may have originated in its use with children, though we haven’t found any evidence to support this. Parents use many fully or partly reduplicative expressions in talking to young children: “choo-choo,” “dada,” “itty-bitty,” “mama,” “pee-pee,” “teeny-weeny,” “tum-tum,” “wee-wee,” and so on.

Although “there, there” and the similar expressions “there now” and “now, now” are often used in a comforting way, all three can also be used to express disapproval: “There, there, stop that” … “Now, now, that’s enough” … “There now, watch your language.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Linguistics Pronunciation Spelling Usage Word origin Writing

I can’t believe it’s not margerine!

Q: Why is “margarine” pronounced as if it were spelled “margerine”? The letter “g” is almost always hard when followed by an “a” and soft when followed by an “e.”

A: You’re right in thinking that the letter combination “ga” normally produces a hard “g,” as in the name “Margaret,” while the combination “ge” usually produces a soft “g,” as in “Margery.” In fact, “margarine” was originally pronounced with a hard “g,” as you’d suppose from its spelling.

It’s spelled with “ga” because the word was coined in the early 19th century in French, where margarine has a hard “g.” And when the word first entered English in the mid-19th century, it had the same hard “g” sound that it has in French.

Only later, in the early 20th century, did the original English pronunciation begin to shift. Today the letter is soft, like the “g” in “gin,” a development the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says was probably influenced by “words like margin and such alterations in pronunciation as those of Margaret and Margie.”

We’ll have more on the pronunciation later. First, a little history of this word, which didn’t originally refer to something you’d put on your pancakes. It got its start in French as a chemical term, margarine. The butter substitute wasn’t invented until many decades later.

The word was coined in 1813 by the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. In experimenting with animal fats, he synthesized what he believed to be a previously unknown fatty substance, which he’d extracted from soap made of pork lard.

He gave this substance the chemical name margarine, a term soon adopted into English chemistry as “margarin” or “margarine.” And three years later, in 1816, Chevreul gave the name acide margarique (“margaric acid”) to the fatty acid he thought it came from.

Why those names? As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the substance had “the appearance of mother-of-pearl,” so Chevreul adapted the name from the ancient Greek word for “pearl,” μαργαρίτης (margarites).

Keep in mind that in the first half of the 19th century, the words margarine, “margarin” and “margarine” were French and English chemical terms, not the names of edibles. The butter substitute wasn’t yet invented. The same is true of oléomargarine, a later French chemical term.

What the inventors of oléomargarine—Théophile-Jules Pelouze (a pharmaceutical scientist) and Félix Henri Boudet (a pharmacist)—synthesized in 1838 was a fatty solid derived from olive oil. They believed it to contain the same substances that Chevreul had synthesized from animal fats—margarine and another called oléine. By the late 1830s, these scientific terms were “olein” and “margarin” or “margarine” in English.

Pelouze and Boudet believed their discovery could have applications in the soap and candle industries. In fact, the terms “margarine candles” and “margarine soap” began appearing in English in the 1840s.

Although they discovered it in 1838, the new substance wasn’t given the name oléomargarine until 1854, when the French chemist Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot chose that name because of its supposed constituents, oléine and margarine. (Incidentally, the French oléine and English “olein” are derived from the Latin word for “oil,” eleum.)

Finally we come to the edible, spreadable butter substitute. Its invention in 1869 was inspired by a butter shortage in France and a contest sponsored by Napoleon III, who offered a prize to anyone who could develop an artificial butter.

The winner was yet another French chemist, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, who described his invention in the original 1869 patent as “comme le beurre” (“like butter”), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. He said its chemical constituents included the oléine and margarine identified by Chevreul more than half a century earlier.

In a later patent, filed in 1874, Mège-Mouriès added skimmed cow’s milk to the mixture, so it “a la même composition que le beurre” (“has the same composition as butter”), the OED says.

And based on its supposed ingredients, oléine and margarine, he formally gave his invention both a scientific and a general name: “L’oléomargarine, nommé vulgairement margarine” (“Oleomargarine, commonly called margarine”).

So the French word margarine didn’t specifically mean artificial butter until 60 years after the term was coined in chemistry.

Though Mège-Mouriès didn’t officially name his invention until 1874, two English nouns for it, “margarine” and “oleomargarine,” jumped the gun slightly—no doubt borrowed from his formula.

The OED’s earliest citation for “margarine” to mean artificial butter is from an American patent  issued in 1873: “When it is cold … it constitutes … a greasy matter of very good taste, and which may replace the butter in the kitchen, where it is employed under the name of ‘margarine.’ ”

The dictionary’s earliest example of “oleomargarine” in the buttery sense is from Scientific American (Oct. 18, 1873): “The manufacture of artificial butter by the ‘Oleomargarine Manufacturing Company.’ ”

The names “margarine” and “oleomargarine” have meant the kitchen product ever since. But we can’t overlook the short forms: “oleo” and “marge.” These are Oxford’s oldest examples:

“There is one firm in London which is able to turn out from ten to twenty tons of this valuable oleo per week” (Daily News, London, Dec. 11, 1884) … “Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes” (James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, 1922).

Notice that “marge” as a short form developed after the English “margarine” had largely shifted to a soft “g,” a development that was noticed—and condemned as a mispronunciation—at the turn of the century.

The soft “g” pronunciation wasn’t accepted by lexicographers until 1913, when it was included, though as a lesser variant, in the Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language, by Hermann Michaelis and Daniel Jones.

But soon after, the pronunciations switched places in the opinion of phoneticians. In An English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917), Daniel Jones listed the preferred pronunciation is /dʒə/ (soft “g”), with /ɡə/ (hard “g”) as a less frequent variant.

The older pronunciation, according to the OED,  “became rare in the second half of the 20th cent.” Now for a historic footnote:

The French terms oléomargarine and margarine were based on a scientific misunderstanding, according to the OED. “As subsequent research showed that neither the margarine of Chevreul, nor the oléomargarine of Berthelot, were definite chemical compounds,” the dictionary says, “these names are no longer in chemical use.”

But though defunct in scientific use, they live on in the names used today for the butter substitute.

[Note: On Sept. 21, 2022, a reader writes to say, “ ‘Margarine’ has hard ‘g’ in winter and a soft ‘g’ in summer.”]

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression food Language Usage Word origin Writing

On claret, hock, and sack

Q: I often see “claret,” “hock,” and “sack” used in British novels for what I take to mean red wine, white wine, and sherry. Where do these terms come from?

A: The word “claret” now refers to a French red wine, especially one from Bordeaux, while “hock” is a German white wine, especially one from the Rhineland. “Sack” is a historical term for a sweet white wine that was once imported from Spain.

Here’s the intoxicating story.

When English borrowed “claret” from Old French in the 15th century, it didn’t mean red wine. The term referred to “wines of yellowish or light red colour, as distinguished alike from ‘red wine’ and ‘white wine,’ ” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary cites a passage in French showing that in the late 14th century vin claret meant something other than red wine. Here we’ve expanded and translated the passage:

“et puis ils aportent de très bone cervoise et des bons vins; c’est a savoir vin claret, vermaille et blanc” (“and then they bring very good cervoise [beer] and good wines, namely claret, red, and white wine”). From La Manière de Langage Qui Enseigne à Parler et à Écrire le Français (circa 1396), a handbook intended to help the English improve their French.

The dictionary’s first example of “claret” in English is from Promptorium Parvulorum (c. 1440), an English-to-Latin dictionary: “Claret or cleret as wyne, semiclarus.” (In Latin, semiclarus means half-bright or half-clear.)

The OED’s first English example that clearly shows “claret” as a wine other than red or white is from Colyn Blowbols Testament (c. 1500), an anonymous poem about a drunkard: “Rede wyn, the claret, and the white.”

Oxford says that since about 1600 “claret” has meant a red wine, adding that it’s “now applied to the red wines imported from Bordeaux, generally mixed with Benicarlo or some full-bodied French wine.”

The dictionary’s earliest definite example of “claret” meaning a red wine, which we’ve expanded, is from the early 1700s:

“To be sold an entire Parcel of New French Prize Clarets … being of the Growth of Lafitt, Margouze, and La Tour” (The London Gazette, May 22, 1707).

We found this earlier example in an Oct. 17, 1634, letter by the British historian James Howell:

“As in France, so in all other Wine countries the white is called the female, and the claret or red wine is called the male, because it commonly hath more sulpher, body and heat in’t.” From Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ (“Letters of Howell”), Vol. 2, published in 1747.

As for “hock,” it’s a shortening of “hockamore,” an Anglicized form of Hochheimer, a Rhine wine from Hochheim am Main in Germany, the OED says. The dictionary’s earliest citation, which we’ve expanded, is for the shorter term:

“Nay, truly, he had as good a study of books, I’ll say that for him, good old authors, Sack and Claret, Rhenish and old Hock” (from Juliana, a 1671 tragicomedy by John Crowne). The passage refers to a proud cardinal who collected wines instead of books, and who “would not stoop to pray.”

The dictionary’s first example of the now-obsolete term “hockamore” is from Epsom Wells (1673), a comedy by Thomas Shadwell: “I am very well, and drink much Hockamore.”

Finally, “sack” refers to a sweet wine imported from Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries. The earliest example in the OED is from a 1531 Act of Parliament during the reign of Henry VIII, setting retail prices for imported sweet wines:

“It is further enacted … that no Malmeseis Romeneis Sakkes [Malmseys, Rumneys, Sacks] nor other swete Wynes … shalbe rateiled aboue .xij. d. the galon.”

The dictionary adds that “sack” was also used “with words indicating the place of production or exportation,” as in “Malaga sack,” “Canary sack,” and “Sherris sack.” (Málaga is a Spanish province and the Canary Islands a Spanish region in the Atlantic. “Sherris” is a transliteration of “Jerez,” a city in southwestern Spain and the Spanish word for “sherry.”)

As for the etymology, the OED says the term “sack” is derived from vin sec, French for “dry wine,” though it notes that “some difficulty therefore arises from the fact that sack in English … was often described as a sweet wine.”

Julian Jeffs, who has written books on sherry and other wines, has suggested that “sack” is derived from sacar, Spanish for to “draw out,” and saca, the wine extracted from a solera, a tiered cask for blending different vintages.

In his book Sherry (2014), Jeffs notes that wine exports were referred to as sacas in the minutes of the Jerez town council for 1435. However, he doesn’t cite any English evidence connecting sacar and “sack,” and we haven’t seen such evidence.

Was the “sack” of the 16th and 17th centuries similar to the fortified wine that we now know as sherry?

Jeffs says it’s “difficult to say exactly what Elizabethan sack wines were like,” but he adds that “they were certainly fortified.” As evidence, he cites a passage from Chaucer about the power of sack.

We’ll end instead with Falstaff’s praise of sack in this prose passage from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2

A good sherris sack hath a two-fold
operation in it. It ascends me into the brain;
dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy
vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive,
quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and
delectable shapes, which, delivered o’er to the
voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes
excellent wit. The second property of your
excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood;
which, before cold and settled, left the liver
white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity
and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes
it course from the inwards to the parts extreme:
it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives
warning to all the rest of this little kingdom,
man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and
inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain,
the heart, who, great and puffed up with this
retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour
comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is
nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work; and
learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till
sack commences it and sets it in act and use.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

On ‘bottom,’ a fundamental thing

Q: I am researching a book on le vice anglais and have become interested in when the word “bottom” came to mean the buttocks. Some dictionaries say the late 18th century, but an anecdote in Boswell’s Life of Johnson implies the word had that meaning by the 1780s.

A: Yes, that anecdote indicates that “bottom” had the sense of buttocks in the 18th century, which isn’t surprising since it had been used that way since the 16th century.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for “bottom” meaning “the buttocks, the posterior; (also) the anus” is from a 16th-century margin note in The Prose Brut Chronicle of England, a Middle English manuscript from the first half of the 15th century.

The OED says the term is written two ways in the manuscript (Harley 4827 at the British Library). It’s “erses” (arses) in the main text and “botumes” (bottoms) in this later marginal comment:

“Englishmen fyrst chaunghed there Aparell contrary to the old orders and women folowed wt foxe tayles to hyde there botumes.” The dictionary estimates the date of the marginal note with “botumes” at around 1550.

The next Oxford citation for “bottom” used in the buttocks sense is from a satirical poem about Scottish Presbyterians: “Like aples in the Lake of Sodom, / Like beautie clapped in the bodom” (Mock Poem, or, Whiggs Supplication, a manuscript copy written sometime before 1680, by the Scottish satirist Samuel Colvil).

The original sense of “bottom” as the lower part of something dates back to Anglo-Saxon days. The first OED citation is from a Latin-Old English glossary: “Fundum, fætes botm” (Cleopatra Glossaries, Cotton Cleopatra A. III, a 10th-century manuscript at the British Library). Fundum is Latin for “bottom”; “fætes botm” is Old English for “bottom of a cup.”

Finally, we should let our readers share that April 20, 1781, anecdote you mentioned from The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791). In the biography, James Boswell describes the drawing-room tittering that results when Johnson refers to a woman’s sensible character by saying, “the woman had a bottom of good sense.” Here’s Boswell on Johnson’s reaction:

His pride could not bear that any expression of his should excite ridicule, when he did not intend it; he therefore resolved to assume and exercise despotick power, glanced sternly around, and called out in a strong tone, ‘Where’s the merriment?’ Then collecting himself, and looking aweful, to make us feel how he could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced, ‘I say the woman was fundamentally sensible;’ as if he had said, hear this now, and laugh if you dare. We all sat composed as at a funeral.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English language Etymology Expression Language Linguistics Pronunciation Spelling Usage Word origin Writing

Phee-phi-pho-phum

Q: As a mathematician, I’m bothered by the inefficiency of transliterating the Greek letter ϕ as “ph.” Since it’s one letter in Greek, and we have “f,” which makes the same sound, why do we use two letters for it?

A: The letter ϕ (phi) in ancient Greek, spelled “ph” in many English words of Greek origin, didn’t originally have an “f” sound.

The ϕ sounded like the aspirated “p” in “pot,” as opposed to the ancient Greek π (pi), which sounded like the unaspirated “p” in “spot.” (An aspirated letter is pronounced with the sound of a breath.)

When the ancient Romans borrowed words from Greek, they transliterated the ϕ with the digraph ph to differentiate it from the unaspirated p in Latin. (A digraph is a pair of letters representing one sound.)

However, the pronunciations of both the Greek ϕ and the Latin ph evolved during the first few centuries AD and came to sound like the English fricative “f.” (A fricative is a consonant produced by the friction of forcing air through a narrow space.)

In Vox Graeca (1968), a guide to ancient Greek pronunciation, the Cambridge philologist W. Sidney Allen says “the first clear evidence for a fricative pronunciation of ϕ comes from 1 c. A.D. in Pompeiian spellings such as Dafne ( = Δάφνη).” He adds that “from the 2 c. A.D. the representation of ϕ by Latin f becomes common.”

In Old English, spoken from roughly the mid-5th century to the late 11th, the “ph” digraph in words of Greek origin that the Anglo-Saxons borrowed from Latin was sometimes transliterated as f and sometimes as ph.

In an anonymous Old English version of a Latin history, for example, “philosopher” is filosofum in one place and  philosophe in another:

  • “Gesetton him to ladteowe Demoste[n]on þone filosofum” (“They appointed as their leader Demosthenes the philosopher”).
  • “Philippus … wæs Thebanum to gisle geseald, Paminunde, þæm strongan cyninge & þæm gelæredestan philosophe” (“Philip … was given as a hostage to the Theban Paminunde, that strong king and learned philosopher”).

The passages are from the Old English Orosius, a loose translation in the late 9th or early 10th century of Historiarum Adversum Pagano Libri VII (“Seven Books of History Against the Pagans”), a 5th-century chronicle by Paulus Orosius. Modern scholars doubt an attribution of the translation to King Ælfred.

The linguists Thomas Pyles and John Algeo say Old English had “somewhat more than 500 in all” loanwords from Latin, including those of Greek origin. Some loanwords came directly from Latin and others indirectly from Celtic or Germanic terms. (The Origins and Development of the English Language, 4th ed., 1993.)

However, the majority of Greek words in English appeared after the Norman Conquest of the 11th century and the adoption of Anglo-Norman as the language of the aristocracy in England.

“From the Middle English period on, Latin and French are the immediate sources of most loanwords ultimately Greek,” Pyles and Algeo write.

In Middle English (roughly 1150 to 1450), the “f” sound in words of Greek origin was sometimes represented with an “f” and sometimes with a “ph” digraph. So “philosopher” was spelled variously felesophre, filosofre, filosophre, fylosofre, phelesophre, philesofre, philisofre, and so on. Yes, spelling was a mess in Middle English.

In the late 15th century, as Middle English was giving way to early Modern English, the printing press arrived in England and helped standardize spelling, including the use of “ph” for the “f” sound in words from Greek.

As it turns out, some Romance languages derived from Latin (such as Spanish and Italian) preferred “f” in these words, while  others (notably French) chose “ph.”

Getting back to your question, the use of the “ph” digraph here may be less efficient than using “f,” but we find it more interesting. The usage preserves a fascinating chapter in the history of English.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Expression Grammar Language Usage Writing

‘Got a screwdriver?’ … ‘I do.’

Q: If I ask a question like “Have you got a screwdriver?” and someone answers, “I do,” it sets my teeth on edge. I extrapolate that to mean “I do got.” Is that answer incorrect, or is it just me?

A: The use of “I do” in reply to “have you got” is a normal and correct construction in English. There is no “rule” against this common usage.

What’s thrown you off is the idiomatic verb construction “have got.” Both the Oxford English Dictionary and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language say “have got” here means “have” (in the sense of own or possess). Oxford calls it a “specialized” usage while the Cambridge Grammar calls it an informal idiom.

So in the type of question you mention, “have got” and “have” are interchangeable. And whether it’s worded “Have you got a screwdriver?” or “Do you have a screwdriver?” the question has several grammatically correct replies, including (1) “Yes I have” and (2) “Yes I do.”

Both of those are elliptical replies, in which the verb is stranded at the end. They might be expanded as “Yes I have [or have got] a screwdriver” and “Yes I do have a screwdriver.”

So as you can see, the “do” in reply #2 is elliptical for “do have,” not “do got.” As the Cambridge Grammar explains, the “got” in the idiomatic “have got” cannot be stranded at the end of a sentence. This means that in an elliptical construction with a verb at the end, an auxiliary like “have” or “do” is used.

Keep in mind that “have you got” is an idiom to begin with, so it’s not unexpected that the common reply—“Yes I do,” or “No I don’t”—should be idiomatic too.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.) says that in answer to a “have you got” question, the “do” reply is a familiar feature of both British and American English. Fowler’s, edited by Jeremy Butterfield, offers this analysis:

“Question: Have you got a spare room? Answer: Yes, we do. This apparently illogical use of do, replacing have as the auxiliary verb, arises because the question implicitly being answered is ‘Do you have a spare room?’ It is a common pattern in AmE and causes less surprise to British visitors than formerly, since it has also become a feature of BrE.”

In ordinary usage, rather than in the idiom, “have got” is the present perfect tense of the verb “get,” with “have” as the auxiliary (as in “I have got infected”). But in the idiom we’re discussing, the OED says, “have got” functions as the present-tense equivalent of “have.”

And “have” in the idiomatic “have got” is the main verb (not an auxiliary). So both grammatically and semantically, “I have got” = “I have.” In fact, the question  “Have you got a screwdriver?” could be rephrased more formally as “Have you a screwdriver?”

(We might add that many speakers find a sentence like “Have you a screwdriver?” to be excessively formal. Americans in particular seem to prefer questions phrased with “do” when there’s a direct object: “Do you have a screwdriver?”)

You might wonder why English speakers started using the idiomatic “have got” in the first place. After all, the simple “have” performed that function for hundreds of years, and still does.

As we said in a 2014 post, there are two theories about the likely origins of this usage, which dates back to Elizabethan times.

One is that the verb “have” began losing its sense of possession because of its increasing use as an auxiliary. Thus “got” was added as an informal prop.

The other theory is that “got” was originally inserted because of the tendency to use contracted forms of the verb “have.” So if a sentence like “I’ve a cat” felt unnatural or abrupt, one could use “I’ve got a cat” instead.

We should mention another familiar idiomatic use of “have got”—the one that means “must.” Here too, the “got” is not essential to the meaning. “I have got to leave” = “I have to leave” = “I must leave.”

And again, a “do” reply to this variety of “have got” question is perfectly acceptable: “Have you got to leave?” … “I do.”

The “have got” that indicates obligation or necessity is followed by a “to” infinitive, like “to leave.” (The other “have got” idiom, the one indicating possession, is followed by a direct object, like “a screwdriver.”) We wrote about this usage in 2010.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Usage Word origin Writing

Casting a little light

Q: Living a life in theatre, I cast actors, though I don’t throw them out the window. “Cast” is one of those verbs with the same form in the past and present. Interesting word, and with so many meanings. I could look it up in my Compact OED, but I can’t read the tiny print—even with the magnifier.

A: Yes, “cast” is an interesting verb, but it’s not always the same in the present tense, past tense, and past participle. The third-person present is “casts.” Some similar verbs are “bet,” “cost,” “cut,” “hit,” “hurt,” “let,” “put,” and “shut.”

You’re right that “cast” has a lot of senses, as both a verb and a noun. All of them are derived from the Old Norse verb kasta (to cast or throw), which first appeared in Middle English and took the place of an Old English verb with the same meaning, weorpan, the ancestor of “warp.”

But as the Oxford English Dictionary points out, “cast,” a Scandinavian migrant that replaced an Old English word, “has now in turn been largely superseded in ordinary language and in the simple literal sense by throw,” which began life as the Old English þrawan (thrawan), and originally meant to twist or turn.

Today, the OED says, “cast” has an old-fashioned air when used in its original English sense: “ ‘Cast it into the pond’ has an archaic effect in comparison with ‘throw it into the pond.’ ” But the word “is in ordinary use in various figurative and specific senses, and in many adverbial combinations, as cast about.”

When “cast” first appeared in the Middle English of the early 13th century, Oxford says, it was a verb meaning “to project (anything) with a force of the nature of a jerk, from the hand, the arms, a vessel, or the like.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from Hali Meidenhad (Holy Virginity,) an alliterative homily written around 1230: “Ha cast hire fader sone se ha iboren wes fram þe hehste heuene in to helle grunde” (“As soon as she [Pride] was born, she cast her father from the highest heaven into the deep of hell”).

The OED’s earliest example for the noun “cast” used in the sense of a throw is from the Wycliffe Bible of 1382: “If a stoon he throwe, and with the cast sleeth [slayeth], lijk maner he shal be punishid” (Numbers 35:17-18).

Interestingly, the noun “cast” showed up earlier in a figurative example that likened the Last Judgment to a game of chance where everything is risked on a throw of dice:

“On domesdai be-for iustise, þar all es casten on a cast” (“On doomsday before justice, there all is risked on a single cast”). From Cursor Mundi, an anonymous Middle English poem believed written sometime before 1325.

As we’ve said, the word “cast” has a great many senses, so many that the OED arranges the verb in 13 categories, though some of the usages are labelled archaic, obsolete, rare or dialect:

“I. To throw. II. To throw down, overthrow, defeat, convict, condemn. III. To throw off so as to get quit of, to shed, vomit, discard. IV. To throw up (earth) with a spade, dig (peats, a ditch, etc.). V. To put or place with haste or force, throw into prison, into a state of rage, sleep, etc. VI. To reckon, calculate, forecast. VII. To revolve in the mind, devise, contrive, purpose. VIII. To dispose, arrange, allot the parts in a play. IX. To cast metal, etc. X. To turn, twist, warp, veer, incline. XI. To plaster, daub. XII. Hunting and Hawking senses, those of doubtful position, and phrases. XIII. Adverbial combinations.”

Here are some of the more common uses of the verb that have evolved from its original sense of throwing, along with dates of the earliest OED citations: “cast out” (circa 1200), “cast into prison” (before 1225), “cast a fishing line” (c. 1250), “cast away” (c. 1325), “cast an eye, glance, look, etc.” (c. 1385), “cast off” (c. 1400), “cast aside” (1475), “cast molten metal” (1512), “cast about” (1575), “cast with plaster or the like” (1577), “cast a shadow” (1630), “cast the parts of a play” (1711), “cast some light” (1752), “cast adrift” (1805), “cast a stitch”  (in knitting, 1840), and “cast a horoscope” (1855).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

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

Weak in the knees

Q: Can you write about the expression “weak in the knees”? I know it has to do metaphorically with fear or apprehension, but as someone who suffers from literal weak knees I’d like to know more about it.

A: The image of weak or unsteady knees as a metaphor for vacillation—being indecisive or afraid, lacking faith, not standing firm—came into English from biblical writings. It can be found in ancient Hebrew and Greek versions of the Bible and in later Latin translations.

The imagery was preserved in early English translations of the Bible, where the knees of people lacking spiritual stamina were first described as “trembling” and “feeble” (1300s) and later as “weak” (1500s).

And in wider, secular use, irresolute or faint-hearted people went from having “weak knees” to being “weak in [or at] the knees” (1700s) or “weak-kneed” (1800s).

Here’s a closer look at the history.

As we mentioned, the metaphoric equivalent of “weak knees” was known in biblical Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The noun “knee” in Hebrew is ברך (berek), in Greek γόνατο (gonato), and in Latin genu. The adjectives used in the metaphor can be translated as feeble, weak, trembling, unable to move, and so on.

In Hebrew, various Old Testament figures who are struck with terror or who are unsteady in their faith are said to have weak or feeble knees, as in ברכים כרעות (birkayim karaot,  Job 4:4) and ברכים כשלות (birkayim kashalot, Isaiah 35:3).

This imagery was passed along in Greek translations of the Old Testament and of the New Testament as well.

For example, in Hebrews 12:12 in the New Testament, where the people are admonished to bear up and keep their faith, the Greek phrase used in describing their vacillation is παρaλυτα γόνατα (paralya gonata), literally “paralyzed knees.” Biblical scholars say the Greek verb παραλύειν (paralyein, paralyze) is used idiomatically here, so that to “lift up one’s paralyzed knees” means to gain courage, be unafraid, stand firm.

Biblical translations in Latin used similar imagery to express fear or faithlessness; genua trementia confortasti (strengthen trembling knees) in Job 4:4; genua debilia roborate (strengthen feeble knees) in Isaiah 35:3; soluta genua erigite (lift up weak knees) in Hebrews 12:12; omnia genua ibunt aquae (all knees will be weak as water) in Ezekiel 7:17.

By the way, the image of weak or trembling knees as a metaphor for fear was known earlier in Greek mythology and in Latin lyric poetry. It can be found, for example, in the Greek legend of Tiresias, whose knees shake in terror before the king, and in the Odes of Horace, where Chloe’s knees tremble in fear.

But we won’t dwell on the earlier literary sources, since the metaphor found its way into English via the Bible.

The earliest English version, the Wycliffe Bible, was made in Middle English in 1382 from late fourth-century Latin versions. And in rendering that metaphor, it has “knees tremblynge” (Job 4:4), “feble knees” (Isaiah 35:3), and “knees shall tremble” (Ezekiel 7:17).

As far as we know, the earliest example of the exact phrase “weak knees” used figuratively is in a translation of the New Testament by William Tyndale, published in 1534. Here’s Tyndale’s rendering of Hebrews 12:12, made from Greek and Hebrew texts: “Stretch forthe therfore agayne the hondes [hands] which were let doune & the weake knees.”

Tyndales’s work was completed and greatly enlarged by Miles Coverdale, whose 1535 translation from Greek and Hebrew was the first English version with both Old and New Testaments. Here’s how Coverdale rendered that passage: “Life [lift] vp therfore the handes which were let downe, and the weake knees.”

This image became a familiar theme of sermons and commentaries from the later 16th century onwards. For instance, John Calvin evoked it in a sermon delivered in January 1556: “It is the ministers charge to strengthen the weake knees.”

The figurative use of “weak knees” as a religious device became more or less official when the Anglican priest and scholar Thomas Wilson included it his popular book A Christian Dictionarie (1612), his attempt to define English words as used in the Old and New Testaments. Wilson defined “weak knees” as meaning “feeble, remisse, and slothfull mindes” (citing Hebrews 12:12).

Wilson’s dictionary went through many editions. A 1661 printing, edited after his death, added the literal condition of “weak knees” and also expanded the figurative meanings to include “dejected in courage, and faint-hearted,” “fearful and dejected in minde,” and “sluggish in the way of godliness” (citing Job 4:4, Isaiah 35:3, and Hebrews 12:12).

By the mid-1600s, “weak knees” was in secular use as well, meaning not only fearful and irresolute but disloyal. The earliest example we’ve found is in John Ford’s play The Chronicle Historie of Perkin Warbeck (1634), about a foiled plot to overthrow King Henry VII.

Here Sir Robert Clifford, a leader of the plot, has decided to plead for his life in return for betraying his co-conspirators:  “Let my weake knees rot on the earth, / If I appeare as leap’rous in my treacheries, / Before your royall eyes; as to mine owne / I seeme a Monster, by my breach of truth.”

The longer phrase “weak in the knees” didn’t appear in writing until the late 18th century, as far as we can tell. The earliest example we’ve found is in a work of astrology, where it’s listed among character faults attributed to people born under the sign of Capricorn:

“weak in the knees, not active or ingenious, subject to debauchery and scandalous actions; of low esteem, &c. amongst his associates.” (From Astronomy and Elementary Philosophy, Ebenezer Sibly’s 1789 translation of a Latin work written in 1650 by the Italian scholar Placidus de Titis.)

The variant phrase “weak at the knees” followed a half-century later. The oldest use we’ve found is from an anonymous collection of Irish verse: “What an ease to the minds of the mighty J.P.s, / Who felt chill at their hearts and grew weak at the knees” (The Lays of Erin, 1844).

The Oxford English Dictionary has no entries for “weak knees” or “weak in [or at] the knees.” But it does have an entry for the adjective “weak-kneed,” which it defines as “having weak knees,” and says is a “chiefly figurative” expression meaning “wanting in resolution or determination.”

We found this example in a Missouri newspaper: “So come out, you weak-kneed false-tongued slanderer of the Whig press of Missouri.” (From the Hannibal Journal, May 12, 1853, quoting a dispatch in the St. Louis News.)

The OED’s earliest example appeared a decade later: “But we must forego these comforts and conveniences, because our legislators are too weak-kneed to enact a tax law.” (From the Rio Abajo Press, Albuquerque, Feb. 24, 1863.)

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Grammar Language Linguistics Usage Word origin Writing

A sticky question

Q: The verb “stick” seems to have uses that don’t allow conjugation. You can say, “We got stuck in the elevator,” but not “The elevator sticks us.” Are there other verbs with one sense applicable only in the past tense?

A: In a clause like “We were stuck in the elevator” or “We got stuck in the elevator,” the word “stuck” is either a past participle or a participial adjective, depending on the meaning. In either case, “stuck” is a nonfinite verb form, one that isn’t inflected for tense.

When a state or condition is meant, “stuck” is usually a participial adjective in an intransitive clause. When an action is meant, “stuck” is usually a past participle in a passive transitive clause.

The “be” version is used for a condition or an action, while the “get” version tends to be used for an action.

You can expand the two elevator clauses above to make clear that the first refers to a condition (“We were stuck in the elevator all night”) and that the second refers to an action (“We got stuck in the elevator when the power failed”).

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language refers to the past participle in such uses as a “verbal passive” and the participial adjective as an “adjectival passive.”  Cambridge calls the two conditions “stative” and “dynamic.” It discusses “be” and “get” passives in more detail on pages 1429-1443.

The grammar’s authors, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, cite several examples of adjectives derived from past participles but with special meanings:

“She’s bound to win” … “We’re engaged (to be married)” … “Aren’t you meant to be working on your assignment?” … “His days are numbered” … “Are you related?” …  “I’m supposed to pay for it” … “He isn’t used to hard work.”

For readers who’ve forgotten the terminology, a verb is transitive when it needs a direct object to make sense (“Beverly raises calla lilies”) and intransitive when it makes sense without one (“The yellow ones died”).

A  verb is active when the subject performs the action (“Gertrude grows lupins”) and passive when the action is performed on the subject (“The lupins are grown by Gertrude”).

When an active transitive clause becomes passive, as in that latter example, the former direct object (“lupins”) becomes the subject, and the former subject (“Gertrude”) becomes the object of a prepositional phrase, though the prepositional phrase is not always expressed.

As for the etymology here, when “stick” was originally used to mean fix in place it was an intransitive verb spelled sticiað in Old English. The Oxford English Dictionary says transitive uses “are typically recorded later than their intransitive equivalents and chiefly occur in the passive, as to be stuck, to get stuck, etc.”

The earliest intransitive example in the OED is from the Old English Boethius, a translation made in the late ninth or early tenth century of De Consolatione Philosophiae (“The Consolation of Philosophy”), a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius:

“Gesihst þu nu on hu miclum & on hu diopum & on hu þiostrum horoseaða þara unðeawa ða yfelwillendan sticiað” (“Do you see now in how great and in how deep and in how dark an abyss of sins men of evil vices stick”).

The dictionary’s first citation for “stick” used as a transitive passive is from a letter written on Oct. 4, 1635, by William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, to the English statesman Thomas Wentworth:

“When he saw the man and his horse stuck fast in the quagmire.” (Here “stuck” is a participial adjective.)

The OED’s earliest “be stuck” example is figurative: “It is Natural to men in the wrong to persist, and believe they take Wing when they are deepest stuck in the Mire” (from The Portugues Asia, John Stevens’s 1695 translation of a work by the Portuguese historian Manuel de Faria e Sousa).

And the dictionary’s first “get stuck” citation is from the transcript of an 1899 case before the New York State Court of Appeals: “If the logs get stuck we keep men there with pevies and work them through.” A “peavey” (the usual spelling) is a hooked lumberjack tool.

Finally, we should mention that the verb “stick” took on a bloody sense in Middle English when it came to mean “to impale (a thing) on (also upon) something pointed.” The OED’s first citation is from an anonymous medieval romance:

“And Þe bor is heued of smot, / And on a tronsoun of is spere / Þat heued a stikede for to bere” (“And he beheaded the boar and stuck the head on the end of his spear so he could carry it”). From The Romance of Sir Beues of Hamtoun (circa 1300).

Two centuries later, the verb came to mean “to pin (a person) to a wall, the ground, etc., by running a weapon through his or her body.” The first OED citation is from the Coverdale Bible of 1535:

“And Saul had a iauelynge [javelin] in his hande, and cast it, and thoughte: I wyll stycke Dauid fast to the wall” (1 Samuel 18:11).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Expression Language Pronunciation Punctuation Usage

Speaking of grandparents …

Q: If I say “grandparents” or “grandparents’ ” or “grandparent’s,” it sounds the same but can mean different things. How do I pronounce them so people will know which I mean. Is it wrong to add an extra syllable like “iz”?

A: These words are all pronounced exactly the same: “grandparents” (plural), “grandparent’s” (singular possessive), and “grandparents’ ” (plural possessive). The listener has to judge from the context which form you’re using.

This is true not just of “grandparent” but of any regular noun whose singular form does not end in a sibilant—a hissing, shushing, or buzzing sound, like s, sh, ch, x, or z. (A regular noun forms its plural in the usual way, by adding “s” or “es.”)

In pronouncing the plural and possessive forms, only an “s” sound is added to the singular, not an extra syllable. These are the four forms, how they’re spelled, and how they’re pronounced:

  • “grandparent”—singular: “She’s my only surviving grandparent.”
  • “grandparents”—plural, no added syllable: “I once had four grandparents.”
  • “grandparent’s”—singular possessive, no added syllable: “My one surviving grandparent’s health is good.”
  • “grandparents’ ”—plural possessive, no added syllable: “I have all four grandparents’ family trees.”

The same rule holds even if the noun is a proper name, like “Bob.”

  • “Bob”—singular: “Bob is my oldest friend.”
  • “Bobs”—plural, no added syllable: “I know two other Bobs.”
  • “Bob’s”—singular possessive, no added syllable: “My friend Bob’s middle name is James.”
  • “Bobs’ ”—plural possessive, no added syllable: “All three Bobs’ middle names are different.”

The only nouns that add an extra syllable in their plural and possessive forms are those that end in a sibilant. We’ll illustrate with the proper noun “Jones” and the common noun “church.”

  • singulars: “Nathan Jones is the pastor of our church.”
  • plurals, add a syllable: “The many Joneses in our town attend several different churches.”
  • singular possessives, add a syllable: “Pastor Jones’s car has its own spot in his church’s parking lot.”
  • plural possessives, add a syllable: “All the other Joneses’ cars are lucky to find spots in their churches’ parking lots.”

The syllable that’s added when those plurals and possessives are spoken sounds like ez. The apostrophe at the end of the plural possessives isn’t sounded.

We’ve published several blog posts about forming the plurals and possessives of nouns, including one in 2011 about names like “Chris.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

The case of the sluggish slugger

Q: How did “slug” come to mean either a good or a bad thing? As in, “The slugger hit a home run and ran sluggishly around the bases.” Perhaps the same derivation morphed into different connotations?

A: English has several distinct—that is, etymologically unrelated—senses of “slug.” One is the source of “slugger” and the other of “sluggishly.”

When “slug” first appeared in early Middle English (as “sluggi” or “sloggi”), it was an adjective meaning indolent or sluggish.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation, which we’ve expanded, is from Ancrene Riwle (also known as Ancrene Wisse), an anonymous guide for monastic women, written sometime before 1200:

“hwa mei beon for schame slummi sluggi & slaw, þe bihalt hu bisi ure lauerd wes on eorðe” (“Who can, for shame, be sleepy, sluggish, and slow, who sees how very busy our Lord was on earth?”). The text cited by the OED uses “sluggi” where some other Ancrene Riwle manuscripts use “sloggi.”

The term “slug” later appeared in the verb “forslug” (to neglect by sluggishness). This Oxford example was written around 1315:

“Wanne man leteth  adrylle / That he god ȝelde schel, / And for-sluggyth by wylle / That scholde men to stel” (“When a man lazily and willfully neglects his duties toward God and man”). From The Poems of William of Shoreham, vicar of Chart Sutton in Kent. (The University of Michigan’s Middle English Dictionary uses the thorn þ for the th digraph in its citation for the passage.)

The word “slug” appeared as both a noun and a verb around the same time in the early 15th century, according to the OED. The verb meant “to be lazy, slow, or inert; to lie idly or lazily,” the dictionary says, while the noun meant “a slow, lazy fellow; a sluggard” as well as the personification of slothfulness.

Oxford’s earliest citation for the verb, from the Life of St. Mary of Oignies, circa 1425, says Mary, a member of the Beguines, a lay religious order, “slugged neuer wiþ slouþe; she defayled in trauayle neuere or seldom” (“was never lazy with sloth; she grew weak from toil never or seldom”).

The dictionary’s first example for the noun is from The Castle of Perseverance, an anonymous morality play written around 1425:

“A, good men! be-war now all of Slugge & Slawthe, þe fowle þefe!” (“Ah, good men! Beware now all of Sluggishness and Sloth, the foul thief!”)

This slow, lazy sense of “slug” is the source of “sluggard” (1398), “sluggish” (c. 1450), “sluggishly” (c. 1450), and the slimy, slow-moving garden “slug” (1725). The dates are for the OED’s earliest citations.

An entirely different sense of “slug” appeared in the early 17th century, when the word came to mean “a piece of lead or other metal for firing from a gun,” the OED says. We haven’t seen any convincing theories for the source of this sense.

The dictionary’s first citation is a 1622 entry in mixed Latin and English from the court records of Durham, England: “Unum tormentum anglice a gun oneratum cum quadam plumbea machina vocata a Slugg” (“One English cannon loaded with lead ammunition called a Slugg”). From Quarter Sessions Rolls, Durham.

This sense of “slug” led to its use as a term for a strong drink (1756), a metal bar to mark a division in printing (1871), a counterfeit coin (1887), and an identifying title of a draft news story (1925), according to evidence in the OED.

We’ve wondered if the ammo sense of “slug” may also have inspired its use as a verb meaning to hit hard and a noun meaning a hard hit, but the OED doesn’t make that connection. It notes only that a somewhat earlier noun and verb spelled “slog” had the same hitting senses, but was “of obscure origin.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins suggests that the hitting “slug” and “slog” share a distinct etymology and “probably go back ultimately to the prehistoric Germanic base *slakh-, *slag-, *slog-, ‘hit’ (source of English slaughter, slay, etc.).”

The OED defines the noun “slug” here as “a heavy or hard blow; a beating.” The first Oxford citation is from a poem in the Geordie dialect of northeast England about the life of a coal miner in Newcastle:

“We’ll spend wor hin’most plack, / Te gi’e them iv’ry yen a slug” (“We’ll spend our last penny to give every one of them a slug”). From The Pitman’s Pay, or, A Night’s Discharge to Care (1830), by Thomas Wilson.

The earliest OED example for the verb used similarly is from a northern English dialectal dictionary: “SLUG. To beat. ‘Been an’ slugg’d muh wi’ a stick as thick as his neive [fist]!’’ From The Dialect of Leeds and Its Neighbourhood (1862), by C. Clough Robinson.

Getting back to your question, this hitting sense of the verb “slug” is the source of “slugger” used for a hard-hitting prize fighter or baseball player. The boxing sense was the first to show up.

The OED has an 1877 citation from The Underworld of Chicago (1941), by Herbert Asbury, that refers to two African-American boxers as “sluggers.” However, we couldn’t find the cited passage in searching three editions of the book for an expanded version.

The earliest boxing example we’ve seen is from an account of a match in Cincinnati “between Thomas Day of Scranton and Dan Callahan, ‘The Galway Slugger,’ of Louisville. The referee decided in favor of the Slugger, the score standing 7 to 4 in his favor.” From the New York Clipper, a sporting and theatrical weekly, May 22, 1880.

The term was often attached to the most famous fighter of his day, John L. Sullivan, as in this headline from a West Virginia newspaper about a match with Paddy Ryan: “SULLIVAN,  THE SLUGGER: The Fighter and His Trainer in New Orleans—Confident of Victory” (Wheeling Register, Dec. 21, 1881).

The use of “slugger” in baseball appeared a few months later: “There are plenty of ‘sluggers’ and three-bagger batsmen, who do big things against poor pitching, but very few scientific hitters, who know how to place a ball, make a telling sacrifice-hit, or to earn a base well” (New York Clipper, May 6, 1882).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Expression Grammar Language Usage Writing

Clause encounters

Q: In retirement, I’m pursuing my interest in grammar. Right now, I’m studying noun clauses, but I can’t figure out the function of these wh-ever question clauses: “Whoever you ask, you get the same answer” … “Whatever you do, don’t lose this key” … “Whoever calls, he must be admitted” … “He’s an honest man, whoever his friends might be.” I’d appreciate any guidance you might give me.

A: These are not, as you suggest, “wh-ever question clauses.” They’re adverbial clauses—more specifically, subordinate clauses that modify a main clause.

This type of clause can begin with a pronoun (like “whoever,” “whatever,” “whichever”) or an adverb (“wherever,” “whenever”). But no matter whether it begins with a pronoun or an adverb, the clause functions as an adverb that modifies a verb or adjective.

When “whoever” is used to introduce a modifying subordinate clause, the Oxford English Dictionary says, it means “if any one at all; whether one person or another; no matter who.” And in similar use, “whatever” means “no matter what” or “notwithstanding anything that.”

So in your four examples, the modifying clauses are the equivalent of “no matter whom you ask,” “no matter what you do,” “no matter who calls,” and “no matter who his friends are.”

The same is true of the other “wh-” words: “whichever,” “wherever,” “whenever.” When they introduce a subordinate clause that modifies a main clause, they’re the equivalent of “no matter which,” “no matter where,” “no matter when.” And their function is adverbial.

Of the four clauses in your examples, three modify verbs: “get,” “lose,” and “admit.” They indicate the manner in which, or the condition under which, some action should or should not be performed. The fourth modifies an adjective (“honest”). It indicates how honest a person is.

Another indication that these are adverbial clauses is that you could substitute a simple adverb (like “regardless,” “nevertheless,” “nonetheless,” “notwithstanding,” etc.) in grammatically similar sentences.

The “wh-ever” words can introduce a modifying clause that’s the grammatical equivalent of these:

(1) A conditional clause (typically beginning with “if” or “unless”): “If you ask anyone, you’ll get the same answer”

(2) A concessive clause (beginning with “though,” “although,” “even though,” “even if,” etc.): “Even though you ask everyone, you’ll get the same answer.”

(3) A disjunctive clause (often constructed with “whether … or”): “Whether you ask politely or not, you’ll get the same answer.”)

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

A singular journey

Q: I grew up with the understanding that “singular” as a descriptor of human behavior was closest in meaning to “strange” or “weird.”  But nearly all such usage of “singular” I’ve encountered in contemporary writing seems closest in meaning to “unique.”  Whichizzit, pray tell?

A: As a grammatical term, “singular” is a noun and adjective used in reference to a single entity, as opposed to “plural.” But in ordinary usage, “singular” is an adjective meaning remarkable, uncommon, out of the ordinary, or—as you’ve found—unique. And this wider usage appeared in English before the grammatical sense.

Both uses of “singular”—the grammatical meaning and the sense of remarkable or unique—ultimately come from the Latin singularis (alone of its kind). And both English senses were common in Latin. Here’s the story.

When the adjective “singular” first appeared in early 14th-century English writing, it had a range of meanings characterized by singleness, unity, separateness, individuality, or being out of the ordinary, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Many of these early meanings are now rare or obsolete, like alone, apart, solitary, separate, individual, sole, exclusive, and private.

But the general meanings of “singular” that are still around today also developed in the first half of the 14th century, such as remarkable, extraordinary, unique, unusual, uncommon, rare, and special. The University of Michigan’s Middle English Dictionary cites several such uses.

For instance, in the Psalter of Richard Rolle of Hampole, written sometime before 1340, the devil is described as “the wild best [beast] that is of syngulere cruelte [cruelty],” and a godly woman is said to be “in synguler ioy [joy]” of Christ.

The dictionary also cites some later 14th-century examples of “singular” in these senses. We like this one, which uses the phrase “singularly singular” in describing the phenomenon of the rainbow:

“Þe reyne bowe … is in many manere wise dyuers [diverse], and singulerliche singuler.”  From On the Properties of Things, John Trevisa’s translation, sometime before 1398, of De Proprietatibus Rerum, an encyclopedic Latin work by Bartholomaeus Anglicus.

(The adverb “singularly,” by the way, also dates from before 1340 in the writings of Richard Rolle of Hampole. But early on it meant solely.  John Trevisa was apparently the first to use it in the sense of unusually or especially.)

In the late 1300s, “singular” began appearing in its grammatical sense, defined this way in the OED: “Denoting or expressing one person or thing. … Opposed to plural.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from John Trevisa’s translation, dated sometime before 1387, of Polychronicon, a Latin chronicle written by Ranulf Higden earlier in the 14th century:

“Kynges þat regnede þere after hym … were i-cleped Antiochi, and everiche in þe singuler nombre was i-cleped Anthiochus” (“Kings that reigned there after him … were called Antiochi, and each in the singular number was called Antiochus”). We’ve expanded the quotation for context.

In Old English, spoken from roughly 450 to 1150, the adjective anfeald (literally “onefold”) meant “simple,” “plain,” and “uncomplicated,” as well as “singular” in the grammatical sense.

(Oxford notes that the “Latin singularis appears in the grammatical sense from the time of Varro onwards.” Marcus Terentius Varro, author of De Lingua Latina [On the Latin Language], lived from 116 to 26 BC.)

The adjective “singular” also has technical meanings in logic (dating from the 17th century) and in mathematics (19th century).

As for the noun “singular,” it’s mostly used today in its grammatical sense, defined in the OED as “the singular number; a word in its singular form.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is again from John Trevisa’s translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum in the late 1390s. This passage is about the forms of the Latin word porrum (leek), a noun that’s irregular in gender:

“Porrum is hoc Porrum [leek, neuter] in þe singuler & hii porri [leeks, masculine] in þe plurel.”

In medieval times, as you can see, Trevisa was a singularly prolific translator.

[Note: This post was updated on June 19, 2022.]

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Why is a coward called a ‘chicken’?

Q: Why do we call a cowardly person a “chicken”? And when did the usage first turn up? Also, what about “chicken-hearted” and “chicken-livered”?

A: The cowardly sense of the noun “chicken” ultimately comes from the use of “hen” for a fainthearted person, contrasted with “cock” (rooster) for a dominant person.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary for “hen” in its timorous sense is from the York Mystery Plays, a series of 48 religious works that the OED dates at sometime before 1450.

We’ve expanded the citation, which uses the compound noun “hen-heart” for a coward: “Be pe deuyllis nese, ze ar doggydly diseasid / A! henne-harte! ill happe mot ȝou hente” (“By the devil’s nose, you’re accursed and diseased, / Ah, hen-heart, evil fate has taken hold of you”).

The adjective “hen-hearted” appeared in the early 16th century. The first OED citation is from a political poem that describes English courtiers during the reign of Henry VIII as timid cuckolds:

“They kepe them in theyr holdes. Lyke henherted cokoldes” (Why Come Ye Nat to Courte, a poem by John Skelton that Oxford dates at sometime before 1529).

In the early 17th century, the noun “hen” appeared by itself in the sense of “a cowardly, timid, or spineless person; (also) anyone who adopts a subservient role, often explicitly contrasted with cock,” according to the dictionary.

The earliest OED citation for both “hen” and “cock” in those contrasting senses is from More Knaues [Knaves] Yet? The Knaues of Spades and Diamonds, a satirical tract by Samuel Rowlands, printed around 1613:

“It saues thy head from many a bloudy knocke, / To play the Hen and let thy wife turne Cocke.”

This sharp contrast between rooster and hen may have helped popularize the figurative use of “chicken” when it showed up in its cowardly sense. Like “hen,” the fearful “chicken” originally appeared in a compound with “heart.” This is the first Oxford citation:

“Such Chicken-heartes (and yet great quarrellers).” From Blurt, Master-Constable (1602), an Elizabethan comedy that the dictionary attributes to Thomas Dekker, though some scholars consider Thomas Middleton the author.

“Chicken” in its fearful sense soon appeared by itself in this OED example from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, produced in 1611:

“Forthwith they flye Chickens, the way which they stopt [swooped] Eagles.” The passage describes fleeing soldiers as chickens who once swooped like eagles.

The adjective “chicken-hearted” showed up nearly two decades later in an English translation of a satirical poem that the Latin author Juvenal wrote in the second century AD:

“As red hayre [hair] on a man is a signe of trechery, what tis in a woman, let the sweet musique of rime inspire vs [us]; a soft hayre chicken-hearted; a harsh hayre churlish natur’d; a flaxen hayre foolish brain’d” (from a funeral oration in A Iustification [Justification] of a Strange Action of Nero, a 1629 translation by George Chapman).

The adjective “chicken-livered,” meaning cowardly or timid, appeared in the early 19th century in this OED citation:

“I am resolved, and they will find me no chicken livered fellow” (from the March 31, 1804, issue of The Corrector, a semi-weekly newspaper in New York City).

The dictionary notes that two similar adjectives with the same meaning, “pigeon-livered” and “pigeon-hearted,” showed up in the early 17th century:

  • “But I am pidgion liuerd, and lack gall / To make oppression bitter” (from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, written sometime around 1600).
  • “I never saw such Pigeon-hearted people” (The Pilgrim, a comedy by John Fletcher, written sometime before his death in 1625).

The phrasal verb “chicken out” appeared in the 20th century. The first OED example is from a Utah newspaper:

“The Irish outfit was highly ballyhooed at the beginning of the football season, with the result that logical competition ‘chickened out’ ” (Salt Lake Telegram, Feb. 19, 1931).

You didn’t ask about the word “chicken” itself, but the noun meant a young chicken when it showed up in Old English as cicen, ciken, and so on.

The earliest OED example is from the West Saxon Gospels: “Swa seo henn hyre cicenu” (“As a hen gathers her chickens”) Matthew 23:37.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Linguistics Usage Word origin Writing

Not ‘al-’ there

Q: Is the “al-” at the beginning of “although” related to the “al-” of “albeit”?  And what about the archaic “un-” of “unto” and the gradually fading “un-” of “until”?

A: The “al-” at the beginning of the conjunctions “although” and “albeit” is a shortening of “all” that’s seen in some words that were originally compounds.

“Although” originated in Middle English as a compound of the adverb “all” plus the conjunction “though,” while “albeit” appeared around the same time as a compound of the conjunction “all,” the verb “be,” and the pronoun “it.”

(“All” is now an adjective, a pronoun, a noun, and an adverb, but it was once a conjunction too.)

Interestingly, a precursor of “although” appeared in Old English as two words (eal and þeah) with the order reversed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s an example from Beowulf, an epic poem that may have been written as early as 725:

“Ic hine sweorde swebban nelle, aldre beneotan þeah ic eal mæge” (“With my sword I won’t slay him, deprive him of life, although I could”). The phrase “þeah ic eal mæge” is literally “though I all could.” Beowulf is speaking here about the monster Grendel.

As for the Middle English compound, the earliest OED example, which we’ve expanded, is from a homily written in the first half of the 14th century that warns against the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. This passage refers to worldly pleasure:

“sone is sotel as ich ou sai / þis sake alþah [although] hit seme suete / þat i telle a poure play / þat furst is feir & seþþe vnsete / þis wilde wille went awai” (“Soon it’s clear, I say to you, / this sin, although it seems sweet, / I judge a poor pleasure / That first is fair and afterward foul”). From the Harley Lyrics. The homily is known by its first line, “Middelerd for mon wes mad” (Middle Earth was made for men), or more commonly as “The Three Faces of Men.”

The earliest Oxford example for “albeit,” a vintage way of saying “although,” is from an entry, dated sometime before 1325, in The Statutes of the Realm, a collection of Acts of Parliament in England:

“Also þerase man rauisez womman … mit strenkþe, albehit þat heo assente afterward, he sal habbe þilke iugement þat his iseid bifore” (“Also in that case where man ravishes woman … with violence, albeit that she assents afterward, he shall have such judgment as was said of him before”). From A Middle English Statute-Book (2011), edited by Claire Fennell.

If you’d like to read more about “albeit,” we wrote a post about it in 2017.

The shortening of “all” to “al-” appears at the beginning of other words that originated as compounds, including “almighty,” “almost,” “also,” “altogether,” and “always.” And “al-” is seen at the beginning of some English words of Arabic origin, including “alchemy,” “alcohol,” “alcove,” “algebra,” and “almanac.” (In Arabic, al- is a definite article.)

As for “unto,” we’d describe it as old-fashioned or literary rather than archaic. The term still shows up in contemporary writing, as in this recent example:

“The Skiing Aigners Are a Nation Unto Themselves” (the headline on a New York Times article about the Beijing Paralympics, March 13, 2022).

In the earliest OED citation, which we’ve expanded, “unto” is hyphenated: “Cum nu swiþe un-to him / Þat king is of þis kuneriche / Þu fule man. þu wicke swike” (“Come now unto him, / the king of this country, / thou foul man, thou wicked traitor”). From The Lay of Havelok the Dane, an anonymous tale of chivalry written in the late 13th century.

The dictionary says “unto” was modeled after “until,” with “to” replacing “til.” (The preposition “until” had appeared more than a century earlier.)

And that brings us to your comment about “the gradually fading ‘un’ of ‘until.’ ” As it turns out, “til” appeared by itself hundreds of years before “un-” joined it to form the compound “until.”

In northern Old English, til was a preposition, used as we would now use “to.” The OED’s earliest til citation  is from an Anglo-Saxon inscription on the Ruthwell Cross. The stone cross is in the Scottish village of Ruthwell, which used to be in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria.

Here’s the inscription written in Old English runes: ᛣᚱᛁᛋᛏ ᚹᚫᛋ ᚩᚾ ᚱᚩᛞᛁᚻᚹᛖᚦᚱᚨ ᚦᛖᚱ ᚠᚢᛋᚨ ᚠᛠᚱᚱᚪᚾ ᛣᚹᚩᛗᚢ ᚨᚦᚦᛁᛚᚨ ᛏᛁᛚ ᚪᚾᚢᛗ. And here it is, transliterated into Old English script: “krist wæs on rodi hweþræ þer fusæ fearran kwomu æþþilæ til anum ic þæt al bih[eald]” (“Christ was on the cross. Yet the eager came there from afar to the noble one that all beheld”).

When the preposition “until” appeared in Middle English, it meant “to” or “unto,” roughly the same sense as the Old English til. The term is derived from the Old Norse und (under) and the Northumbrian til (to). This is Oxford’s earliest citation:

“Forr whatt teȝȝ fellenn sone dun off heoffne. & inn till helle” (“For what they soon fell down off heaven and unto hell”). From the Ormulum (circa 1175), a collection of homilies written by an Augustinian monk who identifies himself as Orm in one place and Ormin in another. The word “until” is written as “inn till,” “unntill” and “inntill” in various parts of the Ormulum.

Around the same time, the words “til” and “till” showed up as conjunctions meaning up to a certain time, action, event, and so on. (The OED includes Old English and early Middle English examples of “til” among its citations for “till” as a preposition and a conjunction.)

The first OED citation for “til” used in the conjunctive sense is from an 1154 Middle English document in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

“dide ælle in prisun til hi iafen up here castles” (“he put them all in prison until they gave up their castles”). The passage refers to King Stephen’s arrest of several bishops, one of them the Lord Chancellor, in 1137.

The dictionary’s first citation for “till” used this way appeared a few decades later: “Fra þatt he wass full litell. Till þatt he waxenn wass” (“From when he was very little till he was grown”). From the Ormulum (c. 1175).

In the early 13th century, “until” took on a similar sense as a conjunction. The first OED example is from the Middle English Harrowing of Hell, an anonymous manuscript that the dictionary dates at sometime before 1250:

“lucifer, here y þe binde, / schaltow neuer heþen winde / vntil it com domesday” (“Lucifer, here I bind thee. Never shall thou wend to heaven until Doomsday comes” (published in the Middle English Harrowing of Hell, and Gospel of Nicodemus, 1907, edited by William Henry Hulme).

In the 14th century all three terms—“until,” “till,” and “til”—appeared as prepositions with the same sense (up to a certain time), according to citations in the OED.

The first “until” example is from Cursor Mundi, an anonymous Middle English poem written sometime before 1325: “Fra adam tim until noe” (“From Adam’s time until Noah’s”).

The earliest “till” citation is from a chronicle written around 1330 by the English monk Robert Mannyng: “Fro Eneas till Brutus tyme.” And the first “til” example is from The Last Age of the Church (1380), by John Wycliffe: “Fro Crist til now.”

The terms are prepositions when followed by a noun or noun phrase (“I’ll be busy from noon till three o’clock”), and conjunctions when followed by a clause. (“Can you stay until the office closes”).

The use of “til” as a preposition or a conjunction died out in Middle English, but “till” and “until” have continued to be used that way, and both are now considered standard English.

However, two questionable variants of “till” appeared in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the apostrophized “ ’till” and “ ’til.” The apostrophe was apparently added in the mistaken belief that “ ’till” and “ ’til” were contractions of “until.” But as we’ve shown, “until” is an expansion of “til.”

The earliest “ ’till” example that we’ve found is from the announcement of a court-decreed sale of 110 acres of land, four slaves, household furniture, and livestock to satisfy a debt of  “seventy two pounds, fourteen shillings and [e]leve[n] pence, with interest from the 8th day of May, 1788, ’till paid, together with the costs and expenses of the said decree.” (The Virginia Argus, Richmond, Feb. 14, 1797.)

And this “ ’til” example appeared a dozen years later in an Indiana newspaper: “The Thebans were indebted for their victories over the ’til then unconquered Spartans, as much to some new manoeuvres which had been introduced into their tactics and which they had practiced with unwearied assiduity” (from The Western Sun, Vincennes, Aug. 11, 1810).

As for today, all ten standard dictionaries that we regularly consult include “until” and “till” as standard English terms meaning up to a certain time, event, etc., though some note that “until” is more common at the beginning of a sentence. None include “ ’till,” though a few recognize “ ’til” as an informal variant

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Religion Usage Word origin Writing

On Passover and Easter

Q: Why do the words for Passover and Easter sound similar in different languages? They can’t have the same origin, can they?

A: Words for Passover and Easter are similar in many languages, especially European languages, because the lookalikes are derived from the Hebrew word for the Jewish holiday, פסח (Pesach).

So “Passover” is Pâque in French, Passah in German, Pasqua in Italian, Påske in Norwegian, Pascha in Polish, Pascua in Spanish, etc.

Similarly, “Easter” is Pâques in French, Pasqua in Italian, Påske in Norwegian, Pascua in Spanish, and so on.

Two notable exceptions are in English and German, where “Easter” and Ostern are believed to be derived from prehistoric words for “east” and “dawn,” and may have been influenced by an ancient Germanic goddess of the spring.

Among other European exceptions are those in some Slavic languages that refer to Easter with various terms meaning “Great Night” or “Great Day.”

The Hebrew word פסח was first recorded in the biblical account of the freeing of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt.

In the Book of Exodus, it’s a verb usually translated as to pass over and a noun for the ritual sacrifice of a lamb on the first Passover, the meal eaten from it, and God’s passing over the homes of the Israelites.

In Exodus 12:23, the clause “ופסח יהוה” means “and the Lord will pass over”—that is, skip or omit—the homes of the Israelites during the last of the Ten Plagues (the killing of Egypt’s firstborn).

In other verses of Exodus 12, the noun פסח refers to the the sacrifice, the meal, and God’s passing over:

“פסח הוא ליהוה” (“a passover [sacrifice] to the Lord,” Ex. 12:11) … “ושחטו הפסח” (“and slaughter the Passover [sacrifice],” Ex. 12:21) … “זבח־פסח הוא ליהוה” (“a sacrifice to the Lord’s passover [passing over],” Ex. 12:27) … “זאת חקת הפסח” (“this is the rule of the Passover [meal],” Ex. 12:43).

The “pass over” sense of the verb פסח was first recorded in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament from the third-century BC. Although that’s the usual way the verb is translated in English versions of Exodus, the Hebrew term has been translated several other ways over the years, such as take pity or protect.

The term first appeared in English in William Tyndale’s 1530 translation of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: “And ye shall eate it in haste, for it is the Lordes passeouer” (Exodus 12:11).

The English term showed up a few years later in the same passage from Myles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the New and Old Testaments: “and ye shal eate it with haist: for it is ye LORDES Passeouer.”

Most European languages refer to Easter with variations on pascha, post-classical Latin for “Passover.” (The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus took place during the seven days of Passover, according to the Christian Gospels.) The Latin pascha is a transliteration of πάσχα in Hellenistic Greek, which is in turn a rendering of פסחא, the Aramaic version of the Hebrew פסח.

In Old English, pasca (“pasch” in Modern English) could refer to either Easter or Passover, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. Both usages appear in Byrhtferð’s Enchiridion (1011), a wide-ranging compilation of information on astronomy, mathematics, logic, grammar, rhetoric, and more:

  • “Pasca ys Ebreisc nama, and he getacnað oferfæreld” (“Pasca is the Hebrew name, and it signifies Passover”).
  • “He abæd æt þam mihtigan Drihtne … þæt he him mildelice gecydde hwær hyt rihtlicost wære þæt man þa Easterlican tide mid Godes rihte, þæne Pascan, healdan sceolde” (“He prayed to the mighty Lord … that He kindly make known to him where under God’s law one should rightly observe the Pasch, the Easter season”).

However, an early version of “Easter” had appeared centuries before in Old English. The oldest recorded example in the OED is from an early eighth-century Latin manuscript in which the Northumbrian monk Bede discusses the origin of Old English names for the months.

In De Temporum Ratione (“The Reckoning of Time”), 725, Bede says the Old English Eostur-monath (“Easter-month”) is derived from Eostre, a goddess of the dawn celebrated by pagan Anglo-Saxons in Northumbria around the time of the vernal equinox or beginning of spring:

“Eostur-monath, qui nunc paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a dea illorum quae Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant, nomen habuit, a cujus nomine nunc paschale tempus cognominant, consueto antiquae observationis vocabulo gaudia novae solemnitatis vocantes.” (“Easter-month, which is now taken to mean the Paschal month, was once named for a goddess called Eostre, who was celebrated with a festival that month and whose ancient name is now used for a joyful new rite.”)

In its entry for “Easter,” the OED includes an extensive discussion of Bede’s etymology, but it notes that his “explanation is not confirmed by any other source, and the goddess has been suspected by some scholars to be an invention of Bede’s.” However, the dictionary adds that “it seems unlikely that Bede would have invented a fictitious pagan festival in order to account for a Christian one.”

The dictionary says the Old English term for the Christian holiday is probably derived from the same prehistoric Germanic source as “east,” which can be traced to an ancient Indo-European base with the probable meaning “to become light (in the morning).”

The first OED citation for an Old English version of “Easter” that refers to the holiday itself, not the month, is from a Latin-Old English glossary of the 10th century: “Phase, eastran” (Phase is a Latin term for “Easter”). From The Latin-Old English Glossary in MS Cotton Cleopatra AIII (1951), by William Garlington Stryker.

The dictionary’s next example is from De Temporibus Anni (“On the Seasons of the Year”), a 10th-century handbook by Ælfric of Eynsham: “On sumon geare bið se mona twelf siðon geniwod, fram ðære halgan eastertide oð eft eastron” (“In some years, the moon becomes new twelve times, from the holy Eastertide to Easter again”).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Usage Writing

When Mom dies, is it your loss or hers?

Q: When I wrote my mother’s obit several years ago, the expression “we mourn her loss” stopped me, since the loss was ours, not hers. The usage doesn’t make logical sense, but I’m assuming it’s idiomatic and correct. Can you advise?

A: In a usage such as “we mourn her loss,” the pronoun “her” is a genitive adjective, not a possessive.

As we’ve written several times on our blog, the term “genitive” is much broader and includes many categories in addition to possession. So while a genitive construction may look possessive, it doesn’t necessarily imply ownership.

A genitive adjective—whether a pronoun or noun with an apostrophe—can indicate a wide range of relationships, including possession (“the boy’s jacket”); source or origin (“the family’s history”); date (“Wednesday’s mashed potatoes”); type or description (“a women’s college”); part (“the car’s engine”); measure (“a night’s sleep”); duration (“three years’ experience,” “a day’s drive”); or other close association (“a summer’s day,” “a doctor’s appointment,” “his death”).

In the case of “we mourn his loss,” the phrase “his loss,” like “his death,” expresses something associated with him.

Often genitive relationships can be expressed with “of” instead of an apostrophe or a pronoun that looks possessive. For instance, “the history of the family,” “the engine of the car,” “a night of sleep,” “three years of experience,” “a day of summer,” “the loss of him.”

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains in its entry on “his” used in genitive constructions: “In some cases the objective genitive is expressed periphrastically by of him (e.g. ‘his defence, I mean your defence of him, was well conducted’).”

In its entry for the noun “loss,” the OED includes a sense that’s been around since the early 15th century: “The being deprived by death, separation, or estrangement, of (a friend, relative, servant, or the like).” The OED adds that in context, “loss” often means “the death (of a person regretted).”

So this sense of “loss” is used in two ways. The “loss” can be associated with either the survivors (“Frank’s widow still mourns her loss”) or the dead (“Frank’s widow still mourns his loss”). Both of those are genitive constructions, but here we’ll concern ourselves with the second kind, in which “his loss” means “the loss of him” (that is, “his death”).

Most of the OED’s examples for this use of “loss” are genitive constructions with “of.” This is the earliest: “For los of frendes or of any þynge [thing].” From Instructions to Parish Priests, by John Myrc (also known as John of Lilleshall), probably written before 1420.

And here’s a mid-17th-century “loss of” example: “Ther be many sad hearts for the losse of my Lord Robert Digby.” From James Howell’s Epistolæ Ho-elianæ, Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren (1645). Epistolæ Ho-elianæ is also a genitive construction and means “Letters of Howell” in Latin.

This OED example shows “loss” modified by the pronoun “whose”: “[Died] John Case Browne, esq. whose loss will be severely felt … by the whole neighbourhood.” From a death notice in the Monthly Magazine, London, June 1798.

Elsewhere in the dictionary there are other examples, from the 18th century onward, of “loss” modified by pronouns that look like possessives (“her loss,” “his loss,” “their loss”). But in these cases, the pronouns refer to the dead, and the constructions are genitive rather than strictly possessive:

“But Posterity will do Her Justice, and perhaps the present Age may live to regret Her Loss.” A reference to the late Queen Anne in “English Advice, to the Freeholders of England” (1714), a political tract by Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester.

“His Adventures gave Life and Subsistency to the Colony, and his Loss was their Ruin and Destruction.” A reference to the death of Capt. John Smith, from The History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia (1747), by William Stith.

“Though motherless, though worse than fatherless, bereft from infancy of the two first and greatest blessings of life, never has she had cause to deplore their loss.” A reference to the orphaned heroine’s parents in Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina (1778).

We’ll end with an example from Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (1852): “Let the bell be toll’d … / And the volleying cannon thunder his loss.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

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

Bomb cyclone: A blast from the past

Q: Is “bomb cyclone” a new term? I don’t remember seeing it in the past. Who decides when a new weather term will be used?

A: No, “bomb cyclone” isn’t new. Since 1980, scientists have used “bomb” as a meteorological term for a large, rapidly growing cyclone storm system. The related terms “bomb cyclone” and “weather bomb” emerged in the mid-1980s, but only recently made their way into popular journalism.

Two MIT scientists, Frederick Sanders and John R. Gyakum, gave these intense and rapidly growing cyclone storms the name “bomb.”

In their paper “Synoptic-Dynamic Climatology of the ‘Bomb,’ ” Sanders and Gyakum define a “bomb” as a cyclone storm in which the barometric pressure at the center falls by at least 1 millibar per hour for 24 hours—a very steep and sudden drop.

The authors also described the “bomb” as a “predominantly maritime, cold-season event,” and said the “more explosive bombs” develop over the Atlantic (Monthly Weather Review, October 1980).

A phrase meaning the same thing, “weather bomb,” appeared in 1986, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED defines it as as a rapidly developing severe storm “in which barometric pressure at the centre of the storm drops by at least 24 millibars over a 24-hour period at or north of 60˚ latitude.”

Here’s the OED’s earliest example: “In this positive feedback process, the storm rapidly intensifies into a weather bomb” (Science News, May 17, 1986).

The earliest example we’ve seen for “bomb cyclone” is from a 1987 scientific paper that uses the phrase “bomb cyclone case study” in reference to a 1984 paper by Gyakum. (“Rapid Surface Anticyclogenesis: Synoptic Climatology and Attendant Large-Scale Circulation Changes,” by Stephen J. Colluci and J. Clay Davenport, Monthly Weather Review, April 1987).

It should be noted here that the terms “bomb” and “Nor’easter” are not interchangeable. Not all Nor’easters become “bombs,” and not all “bombs” are Nor’easters, though the two weather patterns sometimes converge. A “bomb” is not a hurricane either, though in their 1980 paper Sanders and Gyakum said that “bombs” often have “hurricane-like features in the wind and cloud fields.”

In an interview Gyakum, who is now a professor of atmospheric science at McGill University, explained why “bomb” was used in the 1980 paper:

“I was a graduate student at the time [at MIT], and my adviser, who was the lead author, Frederick Sanders, actually coined the term. He had quite a bit of experience making forecasts for cyclones in the North Atlantic that were developing very rapidly. Oftentimes, we’d even say explosively. Given their explosive development, it was an easy path to take to just call these systems ‘bombs.’  … The name isn’t an exaggeration—these storms develop explosively and quickly” (The Washington Post, Jan. 24, 2018).

But even before large intense cyclone systems were called “bombs,” scientists had been using terms likening them to explosions.

For example, “cyclogenesis” (dating from the early 1920s) means the formation of a cyclone storm around a low-pressure area. And “explosive cyclogenesis” (early ’50s) refers to the kind in which pressure drops so steeply and rapidly—24 millibars in 24 hours, by definition—that the storm becomes what’s now called a “bomb.”

Even the term “bombogenesis,” another name for “explosive cyclogenesis,” was known to science in the late ’80s but didn’t show up in popular journalism until around 2015.

Here are Oxford’s earliest examples of the three terms—“cyclogenesis,” “explosive cyclogenesis,” and “bombogenesis”:

“Let us emphasize that any discussion of the so-called wave-theory of cyclogenesis will remain futile as long as the mathematical treatment of the subject is as incomplete as at present” (from the Swedish journal Geografiska Annaler [Geographical Annals], 1925).

“Wintertime conditions when the primary planetary wave activity is often initiated by explosive cyclogenesis in the troughs” (Meteorological Monographs, 1953).

“Climatology shows that a high frequency of ‘bombogenesis’ occurs over the ocean.” (From “Anatomy of a ‘Bomb’: Diagnostic Investigation of Explosive Cyclogenesis Over the Mid-West United States,” a master’s thesis by Michael E. Adams, North Carolina State University, 1989.)

Finally, “cyclone” came into English in the mid-19th century from the Greek words κύκλος (kyklos, circle) or κυκλῶν (kykloun, moving in a circle, whirling around), the OED says. It’s been used in three ways in English, the dictionary explains:

As first used, in 1848, “cyclone” was “a general term for all storms or atmospheric disturbances in which the wind has a circular or whirling course.”

Beginning in 1856 “cyclone” was also used in a more specific sense, for “a hurricane or tornado of limited diameter and destructive violence.”

The term as used in science today was first recorded in 1875, the OED says. The National Weather service, in its glossary, defines “cyclone” this way: “A large-scale circulation of winds around a central region of low atmospheric pressure, counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.”

We wrote a 2018 post about the etymology of “bomb,” so we won’t repeat ourselves. We’ll just add its meteorological definition, courtesy of the National Weather Service: “Popular expression of a rapid intensification of a cyclone (low pressure) with surface pressure expected to fall by at least 24 millibars in 24 hour.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

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

How a clotheshorse became chic

Q: I’m curious about why somebody who lives to dress fashionably is referred to as a “clotheshorse.” What’s horsey about fashion?

A: The fashionable meaning of “clotheshorse” is derived from the term’s original sense of a frame for hanging wet or musty clothes inside a house.

When the usage first appeared in the early 19th century, it referred to “an upright wooden frame standing upon legs, with horizontal bars on which clothes are hung out to dry or air,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary’s earliest example is from The Miseries of Human Life (1807), a book by the English clergyman James Beresford about the indignities of everyday life: “You look like a clothes-horse, with a great-coat stretched out upon it, just ready for the rattan.”

The next OED example is from Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836). We’ve expanded the citation to give readers more of the Dickensian flavor: 

“We keep no horse, but a clothes-horse; enjoy no saddle so much as a saddle of mutton; and, following our own inclinations, have never followed the hounds.  Leaving these fleeter means of getting over the ground, or of depositing oneself upon it, to those who like them, by hackney-coach stands we take our stand.”

In the mid-19th century, Oxford says, “clotheshorse” took on the figurative sense of “a person whose main function is or appears to be to wear or show off clothes.” It cites a political pamphlet that explains why “plain Tom and Jack” may be better qualified than “Lord Tommy and the Honourable John” for parliamentary duties:

“Tom and Jack have been at least workers all their days, not idlers, game-preservers and mere human clothes-horses.” We’ve expanded the citation, which is from Thomas Carlyle’s Latter-day Pamphlets (1850).

The next OED example is from Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). In the citation, which we’ve also expanded, the narrator criticizes England’s choice of people to memorialize:

“With the spirit of prophecy upon me, I could look into the future and see her erect statues and monuments to her unspeakable Georges and other royal and noble clothes-horses, and leave unhonored the creators of this world—after God—Gutenburg, Watt, Arkwright, Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell.”

As for “clothes” and “horse,” the nouns had the meanings you’d expect when they showed up in Old English writing. As the OED says, claoas meant “covering for the person; wearing apparel; dress, raiment, vesture.” And hors meant “a solid-hoofed perissodactyl quadruped (Equus caballus), having a flowing mane and tail, whose voice is a neigh.”

So how did “clotheshorse” come to mean a frame for hanging clothing, first a wooden one and later a fashionable human one?

Over the years, Oxford says, the noun “horse” was used figuratively for “things resembling the quadruped in shape, use, or some characteristic real or fancied,” such as in the sense of a sawhorse (1718), vaulting horse (1785), and iron horse or steam locomotive (1874).

As we’ve said, the term “clotheshorse” first appeared in the early 19th century in the sense of a wooden frame for drying clothing. However, “horse” by itself was used a century earlier with the same meaning.

The OED cites an entry for “horse” in an early 18th-century dictionary that includes this sense: “Also a wooden Frame to dry wash’d Linnen upon” (The New World of Words, 6th ed., 1706, compiled by Edward Phillips and edited by John Kersey).

We’ll end with an example we found in a London newspaper, using “clotheshorse” to describe a member of the British royal family who isn’t particularly known for her sense of fashion:

“Princess Anne, 71, is the only daughter of the Queen, 95, and is regularly described as the hardest-working member of the Royal Family. She has become known as a workhorse as opposed to a clotheshorse like other female royals” (Daily Express, March 7, 2021).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Usage Word origin Writing

Three degrees of separation

Q: How does one refer to the first degree of an English adjective or adverb? If the second degree is comparative and the third is superlative, may the first degree be called descriptive?

A: The degrees of English adjectives and adverbs are (1) positive, (2) comparative, and (3) superlative. Here, “positive” doesn’t have its ordinary meaning (the opposite of negative). In the grammatical sense, “positive” means basic or primary.

This is how the Oxford English Dictionary defines “positive” as a term in grammar: “Designating the primary degree of an adjective or adverb, which expresses simple quality without qualification; not comparative or superlative.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of “positive” as a grammatical term is from a 15th-century treatise by an English schoolmaster:

“Þe [The] positif degre … be-tokenyth qualite or quantite with outyn makyng more or lesse & settyth þe grownd of alle oþere [other] degreis of Comparison.” (From a 1434 work cited in “John Drury and His English Writings,” by Sanford Brown Meech, published in the January 1934 issue of Speculum, a medieval studies journal.)

As you know, many adjectives and adverbs change degree by inflection—that is, with a change in form. In this case, suffixes are added: “-er” for the comparative and “-est” for the superlative.

For instance, “little” as an adjective of size has the usual degree forms: “little/littler/littlest.” Similarly, the adverb “hard” has the degree forms “hard/harder/hardest.”  Here they are in sentences:

“He’s little (positive adjective), but he works hard” (positive adverb) … “He’s littler, but he works harder” (comparatives) … “He’s the littlest, but he works the hardest” (superlatives).

However, not all adjectives and adverbs work this way. Many aren’t inflected, as we wrote on the blog in 2018. To change degree, adverbs (like “more” or “less”) are added to them.

An adjective like “popular,” for example, would become “more/less popular” (comparatives), “most/least popular” (superlatives). An adverb like “easily” would become “more/less easily” (comparatives), “most/least easily” (superlatives).

There are also irregular adjectives and adverbs, where the positive, or primary, degree changes completely in the comparative and superlative. The most familiar of the irregular adjectives are “good” and “bad.” The gradations in degree are “good/better/best” and “bad/worse/worst.”

And some common irregular adverbs are “much,” which has the degree forms “much/more/most,” and “little,” which as an adverb has the degree forms “little/less/least.” Here they are in sentences:

“They were much offended” (positive) … “They were more offended” (comparative) … “They were most offended” (superlative). Here the adverbs modify an adjective, “offended.”

“He cared little about money” (positive) …  “He cared less about money” (comparative) … “He cared least about money” (superlative). Here the adverbs modify a verb, “cared.”

And speaking of “much” and “little,” they can be not only adverbs but adjectives of quantity. In that case, the adjectives can have the same degree forms as the adverbs: “much/more/most” and “little/less/least.”

Examples: “He has much/little money” (positive) … “He has more/less money” (comparative) … “He has the least/most money” (superlative).

Similarly, the adverb “well,” like the adjective “good,” has “better” and “best” as its comparative and superlative: “Your solution works well, his works better, but mine works best.”

By the way, you’ll notice that superlatives are often preceded by “the,” as in “He’s better, but you’re the best.” In its entries for many superlative adjectives and adverbs, the OED says they’re “frequently” or “chiefly” or “usually” accompanied by “the.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Spelling Word origin Writing

Orthographic origins

Q: What is the connection between “orthography” and “orthographic projection”? The definitions of the two terms seem unrelated.

A: We’ll have to look at their ancient Greek roots to see how “orthography” (the study of correct spelling) is related to “orthographic projection” (depicting three-dimensional objects in two dimensions, as on maps and in architectural drawings).

In ancient times, the combining forms ὀρθο- (ortho-) and -γραϕία (-graphia) had several different meanings that are now seen in the English words derived from them, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In Greek, ὀρθο- could mean straight, correct, or upright (that is, perpendicular). In “orthography,” the combining form “ortho-” means correct, while in “orthographic projection,” it means upright.

Similarly, -γραϕία could mean writing, drawing, or recording. In “orthography,” the combining form “-graphy” refers to writing, while in “orthographic projection,” its cousin “-graphic” refers to drawing. The Greek term comes from the verb γρᾰ́φω (graphō, write) and originally meant to scratch, as on a clay tablet.

The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, defines “orthography” as “correct or proper spelling; spelling according to accepted usage or convention.” The dictionary’s earliest example is from a Middle English rendering of a Latin treatise on Roman warfare:

“Thi writer eek [also], pray him to taken hede / Of thi cadence and kepe Ortographie, / That neither he take of ner multiplye” (from Knyghthode and Bataile, 1458-60, by John Neele, a verse paraphrase of De Re Militari, circa 390, by Flavius Vegetius Renatus). In the citation, from the last stanza, future scribes are asked to preserve the rhythm and spelling in copying the work.

Although the adjective “orthographic” has been used since the early 1800s in reference to “orthography,” it originally appeared in the sense you’re asking about, “of a projection used in maps, elevations, etc.,” according to the OED.

The dictionary’s first example is from a review of a 17th-century book that discusses the optical projections from an astrolabe, a device once used to make measurements in astronomy:

“The Orthographick Projection, by Perpendiculars falling from the respective Points of the Circles of the Spheare, on the Projecting Plain: Such a Projection, if the Plain be the Meridian, Ptolemy called the Analemma” (from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, 1668-69).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Pronunciation Usage Word origin Writing

‘Sewer,’ Uncle Matthew’s pet slur

Q: In Nancy Mitord’s novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Uncle Matthew repeatedly uses the term “sewer” for anyone he doesn’t like. Is this a unique idiomatic quirk of his or do people in real life actually use “sewer” this way?

A “sewer” is literally a channel for carrying off wastewater and refuse, but the term has also been used nonliterally in reference to places and people. The earliest nonliteral example in the Oxford English Dictionary uses the term for Britain:

“This Island hath from time to time been no other then as a sewer to empty the superfluity of the German Nations.” From An Historicall Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England (1647), by Nathaniel Bacon, an American colonist who led an unsuccessful uprising in Virginia.

The next OED citation is from “London,” a 1738 poem by Samuel Johnson that describes the city as a home of hypocrisy and corruption: “London! the needy villain’s general home, / The common sewer of Paris, and of Rome.”

The dictionary’s only example that refers to people is from Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (1945): “Who is that sewer with Linda?” The sewer is Tony Kroesig, a young banker who marries Linda, one of Matthew Radlett’s daughters.

We’ve seen a few nonliteral examples since then in novels by other writers. Most use “sewer” figuratively for someone who’s a conduit for something objectionable.

This is from Dean Koontz’s False Memory (1999): “He’s a sewer” (a reference to “a drug-sucking jerk”). And this is from Path of Blood (2006), by Diana Pharaoh Francis: “True enough, but he’s a sewer for gossip and sordid rumor.”

By the way, we wrote a post in 2016 on the reluctance of some sewing enthusiasts to call one who sews a “sewer” (pronounced SOH-er) because the term is spelled the same as the waste “sewer” (pronounced SOO-er). Instead, they prefer “sewist.” That post also explores the etymologies of both words spelled “sewer.”

And in 2021 we discussed the history of “seamstress” as well as gender-free nouns for someone who sews, including “sewer,” “sewist,” “seamster,” “tailor,” and “needleworker.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Genealogy Language Linguistics Pronunciation Usage Word origin Writing

On Ralphs and Rafes

Q: I’ve read that the British don’t pronounce the “l” of Ralph because it was originally silent in Old English. Is that true?

A: No, the “l” was pronounced in the Old English predecessors of the name Ralph, and it’s usually pronounced now in both Britain and the US. However, some Ralphs in the UK, like the actor Ralph Fiennes and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, have pronounced their name as if it were spelled “Rafe.”

Words were pronounced as they were spelled in Old English, which was spoken from roughly 450 to 1100. There were no silent letters. So the “l” was vocalized in Radulf, Radolf, Raulf and Raulfus—the Old English predecessors of Ralph.

The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (2016), by Patrick Hanks, Richard Coates, and Peter McClure, says Radulf and Radolf first appeared in the Domesday Book (1086), a survey of taxpayers in England and Wales that was ordered by William I, known as William the Conqueror.

The authors add that the other two names, Raulf and Raulfus clericus (Latin for Raulf the clerk), showed up soon afterward in the 1095 feudal records of the abbey of Bury Saint Edmunds. The four Old English names are all derived from the Old Norse Raðulfr (“counsel wolf” or “wise wolf”).

The dictionary, now considered the definitive authority on British and Irish family names, is a four-volume, 2,992-page work that was 20 years in the making.

Some other family-name references cite Raedwulf (“red wolf” in Old English) as the original Anglo-Saxon ancestor of Ralph. However, the Oxford authors don’t include it and apparently don’t consider Raedwulf, the name of an obscure king of Northumbria, an early form of Ralph.

The ancestors of the name Ralph in Middle English, which was spoken from roughly 1100 to 1500, include Radulfus (1140), Raulf (1296), Rolf (1308), Ralf (1327), and Rolffe (1410), according to the Oxford authors.

The earliest “l”-less version, Radufus, appeared around 1200 in a Danelaw document from Lincolnshire. Danelaw, or Danish law, held sway in parts of northern and eastern England that had been occupied by the Danes and other Norse invaders.

Additional early “l”-less versions cited in the Oxford reference were Raffe and Rauf, which were recorded in 1273 in the Hundred Rolls, a census in England and part of what is now Wales.

The “Rafe” pronunciation of Rauf and Raulf emerged as the articulation of vowels underwent a vast upheaval in late Middle English and early Modern English (from roughly 1350 to 1550). Linguists refer to this as the Great Vowel Shift.

As the Oxford authors explain, “In late Middle English the diphthong -au- was sometimes simplified to long -a-, later pronounced ‘ay’ as in modern English day, which accounts for Rafe. This pronunciation of the personal name Ralph is still occasionally found in modern times.”

The “Ralph” spelling of Raulf and Rauf became common in the 16th century, according to the family-name dictionary. Printing, which had been introduced into England the century before, helped standardize that spelling, but some Ralphs have continued to pronounce their name without the “l,” as “Rafe.”

One of those Rafes, the British philosopher Ralph Wedgwood, says, “My name has always been pronounced in this way by my family and close friends. (I was named after my great-grandfather Ralph L. Wedgwood (1874–1956), who always pronounced it in this way as well.)”

In a page entitled Ralph on his website, Wedgwood says he doesn’t object when strangers pronounce his first name the usual way, but he doesn’t feel this pronunciation “is really my name at all.”

“I love my name,” he writes. “To me, it somehow seems to sum up the quirky historical contingency and poetry of language, all in one sonorous monosyllable.” (His full name is Sir Ralph Nicholas Wedgwood, 4th Baronet, though he doesn’t mention the title on his website.)

We’ll end with a passage from Gilbert and Sullivan’s H. M. S. Pinafore, in which Little Buttercup rhymes the first name of Ralph Rackstraw with “waif”:

In time each little waif
Forsook his foster-mother,
The well-born babe was Ralph––
Your captain was the other!

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Expression Grammar Language Usage Writing

Why ‘any other’ doesn’t mean ‘any’

Q: I become a little apoplectic (alright, my husband would say very apoplectic) whenever I hear or read “any other” illogically cropped to “any,” as in this passage from Timothy Snyder’s newsletter: “Russia has done more for the cause of nuclear proliferation than any country in the world.” Am I being needlessly pedantic?

A: No, we don’t think you’re being pedantic. That sentence from the Yale historian’s newsletter is dissonant to us too, though it doesn’t give us apoplexy.

The comparison is off-kilter because it contrasts an individual entity (“Russia”) with a group it belongs to (“any country in the world”). The two have to be exclusive for the comparison to make sense: “Russia” vs. “any other country in the world.”

Faulty comparisons like that one aren’t rare. And they don’t cause misunderstandings as long as we know—as we do with that example—what the writer intends. He doesn’t mean to imply that Russia isn’t a country.

However, not all comparisons using “any” instead of “any other” are as easy for a reader to interpret. Some can be ambiguous and leave us wondering. We’ll make up an example:

“She is better qualified than any European candidate.” If we don’t know anything about the person, we might assume she’s not European. But if she is European, this is a misleading comparison that should read, “She is better qualified than any other European candidate.”

What purpose does “other” serve here? It separates the individual from the group, allowing for a legitimate comparison.

Not many usage guides comment on this. An exception is Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4th ed.). The editor, Jeremy Butterfield, says that comparisons using “any” can be marred by “a fine net of illogicality.”

He uses this example, then corrects it: “a better book than any written by this author (read any others).”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

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

Why ‘well-heeled’ means well-to-do

Q: I’ve read online that the well-off meaning of “well-heeled” comes from cock-fighting. Could this be true?

A: Yes, the use of “well-heeled” to mean well-to-do is indeed derived from the verb “heel” and adjective “heeled” used in reference to a gamecock fitted with sharp artificial spurs.

These terms can be traced to hela, the Anglo-Saxon noun for “heel,” the body part. The Oxford English Dictionary’s oldest example of the noun is from a Latin-Old English prayer:

“[Tege] talos cum tibis et calcibus / helan sconcum helum” (“[Protect] my ankles with shins and heels”). From Glosses to Lorica of Laidcenn. A “lorica,” from the Latin term for body armor, is a prayer to protect each part of the body from evil.

The verb “heel” (meaning to replace the heel of a shoe, stocking, etc.) appeared in the late 16th century:

“Vnwilling to vndertake the cutting out of a Garment, before I can heele a Hose.” From A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Seruingmen (1598), by “I. M.,” believed to be the English writer Gervase Markham.

In the early 18th century, the verb “heel” took on the sense of “to provide (a fighting cock) with spurs; to arm (a fighting cock),” according to the OED. The dictionary’s earliest example is from a book about cock fighting:

“I would let no man Heel a Cock, unless he has first seen him Sparr, and know his way of Striking” (The Royal Pastime of Cock-Fighting, 1709, by Robert Howlett).

The book has several other examples of “heel” used as a verb as well as a few examples of “heeled” and “heel’d” as adjectives. However, the adjectives apparently refer to gamecocks with naturally sharp or dull spurs, not artificial ones.

In discussing the choice of a fighting cock, for instance, the author recommends “a Cock that is hard, Sharp-Heel’d, and handsome shaped.”

We’ve seen several examples from the 1600s for “heeld” or “heel’d” used similarly. But in the following passage, it’s possible that “heelde” may mean artificially spurred:

“The best cock-maisters are of opinion, that a sharpe heeld cocke, though hee be a little false, is much better then the truest cocke which hath a dull heele, and hitteth seldome.” From “Of the Fighting Cocke,” Chapter 19 in Country Contentments, or The Husbandmans Recreations, by Gervase Markham. (The book first appeared in 1611, but our citation is from the fourth edition, 1631.)

The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, defines the artificial sense of “heeled” this way: “of a fighting cock: provided with artificial spurs.” The dictionary’s earliest recorded example is from the 19th century:

“In this inhuman contest, a number of cocks heeled with artificial spurs, are turned down together.” From Clavis Calendaria; or, a Compendious Analysis of the Calendar (1839), by John Brady, an author and Royal Navy victualing clerk.

A couple of decades later, the OED says, “heeled” was used in writing to describe someone “armed with a revolver or other weapon.” The dictionary’s first example, which we’ve expanded, cites Mark Twain’s Letters From Hawaii (1866):

“In Virginia City, in former times, the insulted party, if he were a true man, would lay his hand gently on his six-shooter and say, ‘Are you heeled?’ ”

And a few years later, Oxford says, “heeled” came to mean “provided or equipped with resources, esp. money; well off, wealthy.” The dictionary’s earliest example has “well-heeled,” though “heeled” is in quotes, suggesting the usage is relatively new:

“Mr. L. L. Northrup is … so well ‘heeled’ that he gives his attention entirely to the banking business” (The Neosho Valley Register, Iola, KS, Sept. 21, 1871).

The latest OED citation is from A House Is Not a Home, the 1953 memoir of the madam Polly Adler (ghost-written by Virginia Faulkner): “I made up my mind to go back in the whorehouse business and this time not to quit until I was really heeled.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Writing

Wet behind the ears

Q: Am I right in assuming that the expression “wet behind the ears” refers to a newborn baby still wet with amniotic fluid?

A: Yes, the expression is believed to be an allusion to a wet newborn, but it first appeared in English in a negative version, “not yet dry behind the ears.”

The ultimate source of the usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the German “(noch) nass hinter den Ohren,” which showed up in the 1640s, and means “(still) wet behind the ears.”

The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, describes the usage as “apparently with allusion to the idea that the area behind the ears is the last part of a newborn’s body to become dry after birth.”

A German version using “dry” showed up in the early 1700s as “(noch nicht) trocken hinter den Ohren,” meaning “(not yet) dry behind the ears,” and that’s the version that appeared in English in the early 1800s. The earliest English example in the OED is a translation of the negative German version:

“The French call such inexperienced uneducated boys, green creoles, (des créoles verts), as in German we usually say of such a person, ‘he is not yet dry behind the ears.’ ” (From the Aug. 21, 1802, issue of The Port Folio, a Philadelphia political and literary newspaper.)

The “wet” version of the expression appeared in English in the mid-19th century. The earliest Oxford example is from The Boston Daily Atlas, March 25, 1851:

“Such a louse student, who is still wet behind his ears, thinks because he is received in the castle, he is some great person!”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Is ‘curt’ terser than ‘terse’?

Q: What are the connotations of “terse” vs. “curt”? Why does the latter seem somehow terser?

A: When used to describe language, “terse” and “curt” can both mean brief, concise, and pithy, but “curt” often has the negative senses of brief to a fault or rudely brief, especially when characterizing speech.

The differing senses of the two adjectives may reflect their Latin origins. “Terse” comes from tersus, Latin for clean, neat or correct, while “curt” comes from curtus, Latin for broken off, mutilated, or shortened.

“Terse” referred literally to something clean, neat, and correct when it first appeared in English at the beginning of the 17th century. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary, which we’ve expanded, describes a street in Rome:

“I protest to thee, I am enamord of this streete now, more then of halfe the streetes of Rome, againe; tis so polite, and terse: Ther’s the front of a Building now. I study Architecture too: if euer I should build, I’de haue a house iust of that Prospectiue.” (From Poetaster; or, The Arraignment, 1602, a satirical comedy by Ben Jonson.)

The OED says that old sense of “terse” is now obsolete, and the current meaning is “freed from verbal redundancy; neatly concise; compact and pithy in style or language.” We’ve expanded the dictionary’s first citation for this sense:

“In eight terse lines has Phædrus told / (So frugal were the Bards of old) / A Tale of Goats; and clos’d with grace / Plan, Moral, all, in that short space.” (From The Goat’s Beard: A Fable, 1777, by the English poet and playwright William Whitehead.)

The adjective “curt,” which appeared in the early 17th century, describes a word, sentence, and so on that’s terse or terse to a fault, according to the OED. The dictionary’s first example refers to the simply terse name of a hostler, someone who cares for horses at an inn:

“Peck! his name is curt, / A monosyllabe, but commands the horse well.” (From Ben Jonson’s 1631 comedy The New Inne: or, The Light Heart.)

The next Oxford citation, which refers to Hebrew passages in the Old Testament, uses “curt” to mean terse to a fault:

“The obscure and curt Ebraisms that follow.” (From Tetrachordon, a 1645 treatise by Milton. Its title comes from τετράχορδον, ancient Greek for “four stringed.” Milton, whose wife left him, cites four biblical passages to justify divorce.)

In the early 19th century, “curt” took on the additional sense of “so brief as to be wanting in courtesy or suavity,” according to the OED. The earliest example cited is from Benjamin Disraeli’s novel The Young Duke (1831):

“ ‘Ah! I know what you are going to say,’ observed the gentleman in a curt, gruffish voice. ‘It is all nonsense.’ ”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Writing

Is ‘lovely’ a girly word?

Q: Sixty-six years ago, my high-school Latin teacher interrupted a lesson to digress about the word “lovely.” He said it’s used only by women in describing another woman. My late wife used it a few times, always to express admiration for a woman. Was my Latin teacher right?

A: Is “lovely” a girly word, one largely avoided by guys? Over the last century many people have said as much, including respected linguists. The two of us have a feeling that this may be true, but intuition isn’t evidence.

The “lovely” we’re talking doesn’t merely mean beautiful. The adjective is also used figuratively to express approval or admiration, as in “a lovely idea,” or “a lovely thing to say,” or “he’s ugly as sin but he’s a lovely old man.” And it’s used sarcastically too, as in “lovely weather we’re having” when there’s a hurricane on the way.

Differences between men’s and women’s speech have long fascinated researchers in the field. But until recently there hasn’t been much hard data analyzing the actual speech of men and women and measuring the frequency with which they use particular adjectives. What evidence there is about “lovely” isn’t definitive.

In the early 1920s, the philologist J. M. Steadman began asking students at Emory University to collect lists of words they avoided using for one reason or another. They were given ten weeks to collect their lists, which Steadman compiled over the years and later analyzed in a series of articles.

Among the taboo words was “lovely,” which appeared on a list of 194 words that the college students—both men and women—considered affected. But more significantly, “lovely” scored high on a list of 44 words regarded by both sexes as effeminate, alongside “charming,” “adorable,” “cute,” “sweet,” “darling,” and “divine.”

As Steadman comments, “The most curious thing about the attitude towards effeminate words is that this classification (which was not suggested to the students) was made independently by both the men and the women, while no student classified any taboo words as masculine.” (From the journal American Speech: “A Study of Verbal Taboos,” April 1935, and “Affected and Effeminate Words,” February 1938.)

The view of “lovely” as an effeminate word gained ground in the 1970s, when the linguist Robin Lakoff included it in a set of adjectives that, when used figuratively to show approval or admiration, seemed “to be largely confined to women’s speech.” (Others in the “women only” column were “adorable,” “charming,” “sweet,” and “divine.”)

Lakoff says the similar figurative use of “great,” “terrific,” “cool,” and “neat” was “neutral as to sex”—that is, found equally in the speech of men and women. (From “Language and Woman’s Place,” a paper published in the journal Language and Society, April 1973; her book of the same title followed in 1975.)

She adds that some categories of men—academics, ministers, “hippies,” and upper-class Englishmen—can get away with using “the words listed in the ‘women’s’ column,” but only among themselves. Her evidence, she notes, was based largely on her own observations.

Lakoff’s findings prompted a flurry of similar work through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, with some linguists supporting her conclusions and some disputing them.

However, none of the scholarly research done in the 20th century was based on measurable data taken from recorded speech and showing how real men and women actually talk. That kind of evidence has become available only in the last 15 years or so, thanks to digitized collections of transcribed speech.

Yet even these new research tools haven’t settled the question. Some scholars analyze such data and conclude that men and women use adjectives differently; others disagree or say the results are ambiguous or the methodology is faulty.

For instance, two linguists in the “ambiguous” camp published a paper in 2018 challenging the notion of “lovely” as a woman’s word. They found that men used it slightly more than women in the large database they analyzed, which was compiled from speech recorded at the University of Michigan. But though they found a quantitative difference, they didn’t see it as important.

The two linguists, Shala Barczewska and Agata Andreasen, said that the difference in the use of “lovely” was minor, and that neither sex used it much. Their conclusion: “Although the difference is not statistically significant, and limited to one particular genre, it does suggest that Lakoff’s intuitions may have been off and more work should be done into the notion of ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ adjectives.”

(From “Good or Marvelous? Pretty, Cute or Lovely? Male and Female Adjective Use in MICASE,” published in December 2018 in Suvremena Lingvistika, a Croatian journal devoted to language and gender. Barczewska and Andreasen analyzed the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, a database of 1.85 million words recorded in 1997-2002 in college classrooms, lectures, seminars, office hours, meetings, student presentations, and so on.)

In Lakoff’s defense, she did say back in 1973 that male academics were more likely to use “lovely”-type words than men in other occupations. And Barczewska and Andreasen themselves acknowledge that the database they used was limited to “the context of university life.”

A larger database than the Michigan collection, and one not confined to a college setting, is the speech section of the British National Corpus. It’s huge—about 10 million words transcribed from thousands of interviews and conversations in the 1990s in a wide variety of contexts, both public and private.

As the linguist Paul Baker has written, in the spoken BNC database the frequency of “lovely” per million words “is 433.97 for females and 134.35 for males, so we could conclude that females say lovely about three times as much as males—quite a large difference.” (From his book Using Corpora to Analyze Gender, 2014.)

But those numbers are misleading. For the most part, Baker notes, the men in the BNC were recorded at the workplace and the women at home. That would influence the atmosphere, the subjects discussed, and the vocabulary used. As Baker says, “When males and females are compared in similar settings, the amount of difference reduces.”

Closer scrutiny of the BNC data reveals a less stereotypical picture. “The majority of males and females in the corpus did not say lovely,” Baker writes, and “the word is not distributed equally across the speakers.” He notes that one woman, who contributed 1,974 words of speech, used “lovely” 27 times. “In fact, over half of the female utterances of lovely were made by just 36 speakers (or 2.6% of the female speakers in the BNC).”

In short, he says, “This is a relatively rare word for both males and females, with a few atypical females using it a lot.” He concludes that “a focus on just the differences does not reveal the full picture—we also need to take into account the fact that any group of speakers that are compared (including men vs men or women vs women) will produce differences.”

So as of now, scholars are divided as to whether (and how, and why) gender affects language. Work in the field continues, but keep in mind that people’s speech changes with the times—probably faster than speech databases can keep up. The English spoken 25 or 30 years ago, when some of that speech was recorded, isn’t the English spoken today.

Our guess is that as time goes by, differences in the way people use words like “lovely”—if gender differences indeed exist—will get narrower and narrower.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Expression Grammar Language Usage Word origin Writing

The poop about a mass noun

Q: I came across your “waste paper” posting online, but it didn’t answer a question that’s been puzzling me. Which is correct, “bodily waste” or “bodily wastes”? I’m referring to the undigested food eliminated by human beings.

A: When “waste” refers to an unusable or unwanted byproduct, such as “bodily waste” or “industrial waste,” it’s usually a mass or uncountable noun, one that doesn’t typically have a plural form (like “air,” “knowledge,” “water,” etc.). However, the plural is sometimes used to make clear that different kinds of waste are intended.

We’ve seen written examples of both “bodily waste” and “bodily wastes,” but the “waste” version is much more common in comparisons done with Googles’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks digitized books, and the News on the Web corpus, a database from online newspapers and magazines.

“Waste” is also a mass noun when it refers to the unnecessary use of resources, as in a “waste” of time, money, electricity, and so on. And “wastes” is a mass noun in plural form when it refers to a large, barren area, such as the “the icy wastes of Antarctica” or “the arid wastes of the Sahara.”

Interestingly, the noun “waste” had that barren sense when it first appeared 800 years ago. As John Ayto explains in his Dictionary of Word Origins, the “etymological notions underlying waste are ‘emptiness’ and ‘desolation.’ ” Ayto says the source of the English word is the classical Latin vastus (empty),  which has also given English “vast” and “devastate.”

When the noun entered Middle English around 1200, it meant an “uninhabited (or sparsely inhabited) and uncultivated country; a wild and desolate region, a desert, wilderness,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The first OED citation is from the Trinity Homilies at the University of Cambridge:

“Ac seðen hie henen wenden, atlai þai lond unwend and bicam waste, and was roted oueral and swo bicam wildernesse” (“But it’s true that after they [the old tillers] left, the land lay idle and untilled and became a waste, and took root all over and so became a wilderness”). The citation is from a homily on the Assumption of Mary that compares the sinful world to a field not tilled.

The OED, an etymological dictionary, notes that an even older, now obsolete adjective had a similar meaning in Old English: “Of a place: uninhabited and uncultivated; wild, desolate, waste.” The Anglo-Saxon term (woeste, woste, wæste, etc.) comes from prehistoric Germanic, but it’s ultimately derived from the same Indo-European root as vastus, the Latin source of “waste.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the Anglo-Saxon adjective is from Psalm 69:25 in the Vespasian Psalter, an eighth-century illuminated manuscript written in Latin as well as Old English:

“Fiat habitatio eorum deserta, et in tabernaculis eorum non sit qui inhabitet. Sie eardung heara woestu & in geteldum heara ne sie se ineardie” (“Let their dwelling place be desolate [deserta in Latin and woestu in Old English], and let no one dwell in their tents”).

Getting back to the noun “waste,” its sense of a “useless expenditure or consumption, squandering (of money, goods, time, effort, etc.)” appeared in late 13th-century Middle English. The dictionary’s first citation is from The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester (1297), an account of early Britain: “Wiþ so gret prute & wast & so richeliche” (“With such great pride and waste and so richly”).

The sense of “waste” as trash, including an unusable or unwanted byproduct, was recorded in the early 15th century. The earliest OED example is from Libeaus Desconus (1430), a Middle English version of a romance about Gingalain, son of King Arthur’s knight Gawain:

“For gore, and fen, and full wast, That was out ykast” (“For all the filth and dung and waste that was cast out”). The Middle English wast here means trash, while both gore and fen could mean either filth or dung.

Interestingly, the OED entry for the noun “waste,” which hasn’t been fully updated since 1923, doesn’t include an example in which the unwanted byproduct sense refers to the undigested food eliminated by the human body.

As far as we can tell from a search of digitized newspapers and books, the excretion sense of “waste” first appeared in the 19th century. Here’s an example that we found in a medical textbook:

“There is a direct sympathy between the stomach and the rest of the body, by means of which the stimulus of hunger becomes unusually urgent where the bodily waste has been great, although a comparatively short time has elapsed since the preceding meal” (from The Physiology of Digestion, 1836, by the Scottish physician Andrew Combe).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language News Pronunciation Usage Word origin

The battle for ‘Kyiv’

Q: Ukraine is dominating the news right now, and its capital, when written, is spelled “Kyiv.” But at one time the common spelling was “Kiev.” Any idea why the new spelling and how it happened so quickly?

A: This didn’t happen overnight. The change from a Russian-influenced spelling (“Kiev”) to a Ukrainian one (“Kyiv”) had been in the works for decades, though it didn’t begin appearing in American news articles until 2019.

Ukraine had been pushing for the spelling change since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the country gained independence and declared Ukrainian its official state language. The government repudiated the use of “Kiev,” a Soviet-era spelling based on a Russian transliteration, in favor of “Kyiv,” the Ukrainian transliteration.

As you probably know, neither language, Ukrainian nor Russian, is written in the Latin alphabet that English uses. Both use Cyrillic scripts; the city’s name is Ки́їв in Ukrainian Cyrillic and Киев in Russian Cyrillic.

And the governments of Ukraine and Russia also have different ways of romanizing the name—that is, transliterating it into the Latin alphabet. It’s “Kyiv” in Ukraine, “Kiev” in Russia.

The difference seems small but it’s significant. Since English is the language of international diplomacy, the spelling that any particular country approves for government use—whether “Kiev,” “Kyiv, “Kiyev,” “Kyyiv,” or something else—is the one that appears in that country’s official correspondence with other governments. And the spelling matters for practical reasons too, as you’ll see.

Ukraine’s official adoption of the “Kyiv” spelling was made law in 1995. In 2006, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names approved “Kyiv” as the preferred spelling to be used within the federal government. The board said the change was requested by the U.S. State Department, which recommended “Kyiv” because it was the romanized spelling used in Ukraine.

But though the Board on Geographic Names officially approved “Kyiv” in 2006, it also allowed the conventional spelling “Kiev” as an alternative. That later changed.

On June 11, 2019, the board voted to disallow “Kiev,” announcing that “Kyiv” was “now the only name available for standard use within the United States (U.S.) Government.” Again, the board said it made the change on the recommendation of the State Department.

The panel added that its action would affect usage “inside and outside the United States, in particular on international flights and in airports around the world.”

It went on to say that “many international organizations, including the International Air Transport Association (IATA), refer specifically to official names in the database of the United States Board on Geographic Names.”

Later that same year, news organizations in the US and the UK began changing the way they spelled the name. As far as we can tell, The Associated Press was first to make the change, in August 2019, with NPR and the BBC, along with major American and British newspapers, soon to follow.

At the The New York Times, the change to “Kyiv” became effective in articles published after Nov. 18, 2019. The paper explained at the time that the policy reflected “the transliteration from Ukrainian, rather than Russian.”

Today the “Kyiv” spelling has become almost universal throughout Western news organizations. Most recent to adopt it is the French state-owned news agency Agence France-Presse in January 2022.

Now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the pronunciation of “Kyiv” has been getting attention. The actual Ukrainian pronunciation, as heard in this YouTube video, eludes many westerners. It sounds more like KEEV than key-EV, according to a recent article in The Times.

NPR, which endorsed the new spelling in 2019, announced last month that it was also adopting a new on-air pronunciation. A similar one can now be heard on the BBC.

As for the name itself, it’s thought to come from “Kyi,” a personal name. The city, according to legend, was founded in the sixth century by a group of siblings and named for the oldest brother, Kyi. But that may be a folk etymology.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check outour books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

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

We are met on a great battle-field

[Note: In observance of Presidents’ Day, we’re republishing a post that originally ran on Dec. 9, 2015.]

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.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Writing

Tracking the ‘daily double’

Q: I’m guessing you’re familiar with the “Daily Double” feature on the game show Jeopardy! It’s catchy and alliterative, but I find the usage jarring, since it scarcely resembles the “daily double” I know from my misspent days at the horse races.

A: The “Daily Double” is popular with viewers of Jeopardy! and, as you say, the name is catchy and alliterative. Our guess is that the show’s producers aren’t bothered one whit that their use of the expression bears little resemblance to the original horse-racing term.

In the game, contestants who hit a “Daily Double” can bet part or all of their accumulated winnings and—they hope—collect double their wager. But at the track, a  “daily double” is a single bet that picks the winners of two separate races.

So the Jeopardy! use of “daily double” isn’t historically authentic. But seriously, if McDonald’s can name a two-patty cheeseburger the “Daily Double” (basically a “McDouble” with different toppings), then why can’t Jeopardy! make use of the term too? At least the game show usage involves betting, so it preserves some of the original wagering sense.

The noun “daily double” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, as “a single bet placed on the winners of two (often consecutive) races in a single day’s racing; (also) the two races designated as eligible for such a bet.” It’s a “chiefly Horse Racing” usage, the OED says.

The dictionary’s examples of “daily double” begin in the 1930s, but we’ve found earlier uses of the phrase. Searches of old newspaper databases show that it first appeared as a turf expression in late 19th-century Britain, where it cropped up in newspaper ads placed by tipsters, bookmakers, and “commission agents” (those who place bets on behalf of clients).

The earliest example we’ve found is from an ad in The Sporting Life (London, March 13, 1899). A turf insider offered to telegraph tips to clients for a fee, including “two-horse wires (a daily double, magnificent value).”

Unfortunately, the precise meaning of “daily double” isn’t spelled out in early uses. No doubt it was commonly known among bettors before it showed up in print.

The term continued to appear in turn-of-the-century British newspapers, in articles by sports writers as well as in ads placed by bookies and tipsters:

“Chief interest centres in the Liverpool Cup today, for which I think FOUNDLING will go close. For my daily double I shall couple the following” (The Daily Mirror, London, July 22, 1904) … “Suggested daily doubles” (The Sporting Chronicle, Lancashire, Oct. 22, 1904) … “All sportsmen should remit a sovereign for week’s Daily Double” (Dublin Daily Express, April 1, 1905).

And this ad, placed by a well-known commission agent, was trumpeted in Ireland and England: “ARTHUR COCKBURN IN MARVELLOUS FORM [headline] His daily Three-horse Wires are simply Invincible. Every Wire indicates his Daily Double and also Special One-horse Selection” (in both The Belfast Telegraph and The Leeds Mercury, Aug. 30, 1909).

The meaning of daily double” is clear in this later example, where a prognosticator boasted after the fact that “I selected four winners in Dutch Toy, Plum, and Vertigo, whilst daily double was Plum and Vertigo” (The Daily Herald, London, Sept. 13, 1920). So three of his tips were for individual winners and the fourth was for a “daily double,” a single bet picking two winners.

And here’s another example, from a bookmaker’s ad promising unlimited payouts: “No doubt, in common with most backers, you fancy your daily double. Have you ever seen your selections winning at multiplied odds totalling hundreds to one and been paid at the rate of some ridiculous limit?” (Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, London, Feb. 9, 1924).

The OED’s earliest examples for “daily double” begin in 1930, when England officially approved the use of the bet on the government-regulated apparatus known as the totalizator. (Invented in the 19th century, the totalizator was a mechanical device for recording bets and total amounts wagered. The noun came into English in 1879, adopted from the term for the same device in French, totalisateur, 1870.)

The first OED citation for “daily double” is a heading in The Times (London, Sept. 25, 1930): “Totalisator Daily Double.”

A news item later that week in an Australian newspaper explained how the “daily double” worked: “DAILY DOUBLE ON TOTE: The English [Racetrack] Betting Board of Control has instituted a daily double on the tote. The first day it was tried no backer was lucky enough to pick the winner of the two selected races. … According to rule, the pool was equally divided between those who named the winner of either race. Fifty backers participated in the pool, sixteen naming Last of the Estelles, winner of the first race, with a loser, and thirty-four Story Teller, who won the second race, with a loser” (The Queensland Times, Nov. 1, 1930).

According to newspaper accounts of the time, the first official “tote daily doubles” in England were run at Leicester and Brighton on Sept. 22, 1930, and at additional tracks on subsequent days and weeks.

The term “daily double” crossed the Atlantic—officially, at least—the following year. The OED’s earliest North American example is from a Canadian newspaper: “The ‘daily double’ system of betting was inaugurated for the first time on this continent at Victoria Park this afternoon” (The Manitoba Free Press, Winnipeg, May 21, 1931).

The earliest example we’ve seen in a US newspaper is from later that year. After describing the long-shot winners of the third and fifth races at Agua Caliente, Mexico, the article goes on: “Had someone thought to play the combination as a ‘daily double,’ he would have won $4678.80, the highest price ever paid on a $2 ticket” (Imperial Valley Press, El Centro, Calif., Aug. 19, 1931).

Soon afterward, according to Oxford citations, “double” was used in the US as short for “daily double.” Here’s the dictionary’s first example: “Only two men … held tickets on the double, which is governed somewhat along the lines of a parley bet” (New York Times, Sept. 15, 1931).

And as this later OED example shows, the usage also appears in British English: “David Nicholson and Peter Scudamore … brought off a 285-1 double on a day of shocks and spills at Windsor” (The Sporting Life, March 8, 1983).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.