Tag: Expression

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On mayors and mayoresses

Q: Do you think that using the word “mayoress” is offensive nowadays? Should I use “mayor” whether the leader of the group who governs a town is male or female?

A: We’d describe the use of “mayoress” today for a female mayor as dated, but some people might describe it as offensive, sexist, or politically incorrect.

We’ve checked five standard dictionaries and none of them find fault with the usage. However, we wouldn’t use it ourselves, and we wouldn’t recommend that you do either.

We discussed this issue briefly back in 2006 when we answered a question about whether a woman is an “actor” or an “actress.”

“We seem to be getting away from ‘ess’ and ‘ix’ endings to differentiate women from men,” we wrote then. “We no longer use ‘aviatrix,’ ‘executrix,’ ‘stewardess,’ and so on.”

We noted that this tendency may have something to do with linguistic simplification as well as gender sensitivity.

“Languages have a tendency to simplify and drop syllables or letters,” we wrote. “In this case, though, the advent of the women’s movement has certainly speeded up the process.”

When “mayoress” first showed up in English the mid-1400s, it referred to “a woman holding high office,” but that sense of the word died out, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the early 1500s, the word came to mean “the wife of a mayor” or “a woman nominated to fulfil the ceremonial duties of a mayor’s wife.”

The earliest example in the OED, from Robert Fabyan’s New Cronycles of Englande and of Fraunce  (1516), refers to a “Mayresse and her Susters Aldermennes wyfes.” (The citation itself is dated from sometime before 1513.)

The latest example—from Fairs, Feasts and Frolics, a 1989 book by Julia Smith about customs in Yorkshire—refers to “the dean and chapter, the mayor and mayoress and the city council.”

A similar term, “lady mayoress,” meaning “the spouse of a Lord Mayor” or “a person who accompanies a Lord Mayor on official occasions,” also showed up in the 1500s.

The dictionary’s first citation for this term is from a 1537 entry in the Privy Purse Expenses Princess Mary: “Bonetts bought of my Lady meyres of london for new yers gyfts.”

The most recent citation is from a July 26, 2002, issue of the Times of London: “Every Lady Mayoress of London does charity work.”

It wasn’t until the late 1800s, the OED says, that the term “mayoress” was used to mean “a woman holding mayoral office; a female mayor.”

Oxford says the new sense of the word originated in the US and is “not in official use in England and Wales and certain other countries.”

The first example of the new usage in the OED is from The Employments of Women: A Cyclopædia of Woman’s Work (1863), by Virginia Penny:

“Mrs. N. Smith was recently elected mayoress in Oskaloosa, Iowa, the first time that office was ever filled by a lady.”

As for “mayor,” English adopted it from Anglo-Norman and Old French, but the ultimate source is maior, Latin for greater, which also gave us “major.”

By the way, we live in a small town in New England and our “mayor” is a “first selectman,” a title she prefers to “first selectwoman.” If we had mayors in our neck of the woods, she’d undoubtedly be a “mayor,” not a “mayoress.”

[Update, Aug. 21, 2013: A reader of the blog, and a fellow admirer of E. F. Benson’s hilarious “Lucia” novels, writes to remind us that in Trouble for Lucia (1939), the heroine has been elected mayor of Tilling, and her archrival, Miss Mapp, gets herself appointed mayoress.  Tilling, by the way, was based on Rye, in East Sussex, where Benson lived and where he served as mayor in the 1930s.]

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How did news become copy?

Q: A journalist who writes “copy” would never call herself a “copywriter,” yet the journalist who edits her is a “copy editor.” Can you shed any light on the history of “copy” and its use in journalism and advertising?

A: “Copy” is an interesting noun that has, in the words of John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, “a very devious semantic history.”

When the word entered English in the 1300s, it could mean either an abundance of something or a written account of something.

English got the word via Old French, Ayto says, but the ultimate source is copia, a Latin noun whose primary meaning is abundance. (Copia is also the source of the English word “copious.”)

How did a Latin word for abundance give English a word for a written account?

Ayto explains that the Latin word had a secondary meaning, right or power, and this sense “led to its application to ‘right of reproduction’ and ultimately to simply ‘reproduction.’ ”

The Oxford English Dictionary traces this sense to such Latin phrases as dare vel habere copiam legendi (to give, or have, the power of reading) and facere copiam describendi (to give the power of transcription, to allow a transcript to be made).

In the Middle Ages, the OED notes, such phrases apparently influenced the evolution of the Latin term copia, which came to mean “transcript” in medieval Latin.

By the 1500s, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, the English word “copy” had evolved in turn to mean any example of writing, and figuratively any reproduction.

However, Chambers doesn’t indicate when the term “copy” began being used in the newspaper sense—that is, for a draft of a news story that hasn’t yet been edited.

The OED doesn’t have a listing for “copy” used in this sense, but the dictionary does include the word in the sense of grist, or material, for a news story.

The earliest example is from George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889): “Those Socialist speeches which make what the newspapers call ‘good copy.’ ”

In a search of Google Books, the earliest example we’ve found of “copy” used to mean a draft of a news story dates from the mid-1800s.

In Saunterings In and About London (1853), Max Schlesinger describes an editor as he “hurries to the Times’ office to read, shorten, and edit the copy sent in by the reporters.”

The term wasn’t used in an advertising sense until the early 20th century, according to OED citations. The first example of this use is from The Art of Modern Advertising (1905), by Earnest Elmo Calkins and Ralph Holden:

“The design and ‘copy’ used in the four-inch advertisement may involve just as much time.” (The quotation marks around “copy” suggest that the usage was relatively new then.)

The earliest citation for “copywriter” (originally “copy-writer”) is from a 1911 work about advertising and publicity that describes copywriters as “professional writers of advertisements.” (All the OED’s examples use the word in the advertising sense.)

Here are some journalistic “copy” compounds and the dates of their first OED citations: “copy-boy” (1888), “copy-reader” (1892), “copy editor” (1899), “copy-paper” (1902), and “copy desk” (1929).

Why, you wonder, isn’t someone who writes copy for a newspaper called a “copywriter”?

Well, it’s possible that newspaper writers simply don’t want to be identified by a word associated with advertising. But a more likely explanation is that the writers don’t need another word to identify them.

Terms like “newsman” (1650), “news writer” (1692), “correspondent” (1771), and “reporter” (1776) were well established long before “copywriter” showed up. (The OED’s first citation for “newswoman” in this sense is from 1953.)

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Blood, toil, tears, and quotes

Q: In your article for Smithsonian earlier in the year, you say it’s a myth that Winston Churchill responded to a pedant by scribbling, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” I’ve always thought that clever and so obviously Churchillian. The American Heritage Book of blah blah blah says he said it. The Oxford Companion to blah blah blah says he said it. You call it a myth, so is this a fact?

A: We’ve seen umpteen versions of the quotation and just as many descriptions of the incident that prompted  it.

In the most common version, Churchill scribbled the remark in the margin of a document after a pedant dared to tinker with the great man’s writing to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

However, no such document has ever surfaced. And there’s no solid evidence that one ever existed. You can believe what you want. We’ll believe it when someone comes up with the document, complete with Churchillian scribbles.

Word sleuths have searched high and low for proof that Churchill wrote or said something of the sort, using all the research tools of the digital age. So far, that proof hasn’t been found. And what little evidence there is suggests that someone else said it.

We’re not sure which references you mean when you refer to the American Heritage Book of blah blah blah and the Oxford Companion to blah blah blah.

Although the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations does attribute the remark to Churchill, its source is quite iffy—a half-hearted citation by Sir Ernest Gowers.

In his 1948 book Plain Words, Gowers qualified his remarks: “It is said that Mr. Winston Churchill once made this marginal comment.”

Because of space limitations, we didn’t have a chance to go into detail about this questionable quote in our Smithsonian article. However, we discussed it extensively in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths. Here’s an excerpt:

“Over the years, numerous versions of the quote and the incident that provoked it have circulated on both sides of the Atlantic, all of them claiming to be the genuine article. In various incarnations of the story, Churchill blusters not only at ‘the sort of English,’ but also at the ‘stilted English,’ ‘arrant pedantry,’ ‘errant pedantry,’ ‘errant criticism,’ ‘offensive impertinence,’ ‘insubordination,’ ‘bloody nonsense,’ ‘tedious nonsense,’ ‘pedantic nonsense,’ and … you get the idea. As for the end of the quote, it can be ‘up with which I will not put,’ ‘up with which I shall not put,’ ‘with which I will not put up,’ or ‘which I will not put up with.’

“The provocation that supposedly got Churchill so worked up? It’s sometimes a government document clumsily written by someone else, and at other times it’s clumsy editing of the great man’s own writing— here a book, there a speech, perhaps a memo or whatever. With so many genuine articles to choose from, it would take a linguistic anthropologist to track down the real story. Fortunately, one has. Benjamin G. Zimmer has traced the quotation to a 1942 article in The Wall Street Journal, citing an earlier mention in The Strand Magazine. The ‘offensive impertinence’ version of the quote is there, but (surprise!) Churchill is missing. The witticism is attributed to an unnamed writer in ‘a certain Government department.’

“It wasn’t until two years later that the quote (this time it’s the ‘tedious nonsense’ version) was pinned on Churchill. On February 27, 1944, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times all ran brief items from London saying Churchill had scrawled the remark on a ‘long, rambling’ government document— and that he’d done it only the week before.”

Is it a fact, you ask, that the attribution of the quotation to Churchill is a myth? In Origins of the Specious, we say it’s probably apocryphal. That’s perhaps a more accurate way of describing it.

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Falling in love again

Q: Why do we “fall” in love, “fall” into sin, “fall” apart, “fall” asleep, “fall” ill, “fall” in or out with someone? In other words, what’s with all the falling?

A: “Fall” is an ancient verb that’s been used figuratively for many centuries, often with the sense of sinking into some condition or state. And if we didn’t have these less literal uses of the word, English would be a poorer language.

The original and literal meaning of the verb, which has been recorded in writing since the 800s, is to “descend freely” or “drop from a high or relatively high position,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

One of the OED’s earliest examples is from Crist III, the third part of an anonymous Old English religious poem about the Second Coming. The reference here is to the Last Judgment: “Sceolon rathe feallan on grimne grund” (“They shall fall rapidly into the grim abyss”). 

But later, people began using “fall” in more inventive ways. Often these new meanings involved wrongdoing—that is, descending into evil.

In the 1100s, to “fall” could mean to sin or yield to temptation. This sense of the word was also used in phrases, like “fall into sin,” which was soon followed by “fall into error,” “fall into idolatry,” “fall into mistakes,” and “fall among thieves.”

In the 1200s and 1300s, writers began using “fall” to describe the destruction of walls, buildings, and cities, as in “is falle Babilon” (Babylon is fallen).

The later expression “fall to pieces” (1600s) came to mean “break into fragments” or disintegrate. And a couple of centuries after that, an overthrown empire or government was said to “fall.” 

You’ve probably noticed that negative senses of the word outnumber positive ones.

Since the 1300s, to “fall on” an enemy has meant to attack. Fear, death, disease, vengeance, and misfortune have been “falling” on people since the Middle Ages.

Not surprisingly, disappointment or sadness makes a person’s face “fall,” a usage traceable to the 1300s and one that the OED says was “originally a Hebraism.”

And it was around the 1600s that English speakers adopted the notion that a duty, a burden, an expense, a responsibility, or a loss (less frequently, a gain) could “fall on” or “fall to” a person. 

But other figurative meanings aren’t quite as grim—they’re either positive or neutral. And there are so many that we won’t even try to mention them all.

Since around 1000, meteorological events like rain, hail, lightning, and thunder have been said to “fall” from the heavens. A bit later, people began speaking of evening, night, seasons, and shadows as “falling.”

Sometimes to “fall” means merely to lessen or subside, as with the volume of music (1500s), the price of something (1500s), or the temperature (1800s). 

Some figurative uses of “fall” have to do with the senses. Sounds “fall” upon the ear, just as sights “fall” upon the eye (both 1800s). And when people speak, we say that words “fall” from their lips or tongues (1700s).

All kinds of figurative usages have to do with passing, perhaps suddenly or accidentally, into a certain state or condition.

This is how we got “fall to sleep” (1200s) and “fall asleep” (1300s); “fall sick” (1400s); “fall into favor,” “fall in love,” and “fall into trouble,” meaning to get pregnant (all 1500s); “fall lame,” “fall ill,” and “fall back,” meaning to retreat (all 1600s); “fall vacant,” “fall silent,” and “fall flat,” meaning to prove uninteresting or ineffective (all 1800s).

To “fall out” (also “fall out with”) has meant to quarrel or disagree since the 1500s. And a century or so later, people began using “fall in with” to mean agree, concur, or share the views of.

To “fall short of” has meant to fail in some objective since the 1500s, the OED says. And “fall in,” meaning to get into line in a military sense, came into use in the 18th century.

More recently, “to fall for” has meant to be taken in or carried away by, a usage the OED dates from 1903.

“Fall apart” has been used since the 1600s in the sense of “to separate” or “to go separate ways,” the OED says.

But the use of “fall apart” to mean “break up” or “collapse” was first recorded in the mid-1700s, and a still newer meaning—to have a nervous breakdown, more or less—is from the 1930s.

And we’ll stop here, before we “fall behind” (1500s) in our other work! But if you want to read more, we had a post some time ago about why Americans have two words for “autumn” while the British have only one.

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Out goes you!

Q: I teach ESL to very smart students who have amazing questions. This one stumped me. Shouldn’t the inverted verb be “go,” not “goes,” in this poem? Acca bacca soda cracker, / Acca bacca boo. / Acca bacca soda cracker, / Out goes you!

A: Yes, grammatical correctness would require “Out go you!” But one doesn’t expect proper grammar in playground rhymes, with their nonsense words and quirky syntax. On the playground, grammar is never as important as rhythm and onomatopoeia.

But was “goes” ever the second-person singular of “go” in English? If so, the usage could be a relic from the past.

Well, we couldn’t find this use of “goes” in the Oxford English Dictionary, but the second-person singular was sometimes spelled “gose” in Middle English.

Here’s a 15th-century example from The Towneley Plays, a manuscript named for the family that once owned it: “Who owe this child thou gose withall?”

Nevertheless, we see no evidence of an etymological connection between that 15th-century spelling and the 19th-century children’s doggerel you’ve asked about.

The poem is typical of what are called children’s counting-out rhymes. These frequently end in three emphatically stressed words: “out goes you.”

Children chant such rhymes in order to select a player who’s “counted out” or selected to be “it”—for instance, in a game of tag or hide-and-seek. 

 We found many similar poems in a book called The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children (1888), by Henry Carrington Bolton. A pair of examples:

Acker, backer, soda cracker,
Half-past two.
A pinch of snuff,
That is enough,
Out goes you!

Hackabacker, chew tobacco,
Hackabacker chew;
Hackabacker, eat a cracker.
Out goes you!

Other versions, found in this book and elsewhere, end in variations on this theme, typically with “O-U-T spells out goes you” or “One, two, three, and out goes you.”

Very rarely does one find “out go you.” And we can see why. The punchy “z” sound in “Out goes you” is phonetically pleasing amid all those vowel sounds. In other words, it’s more fun to say—or yell.

Besides, “out goes you” is easily adaptable to substitution—“out goes Jack,” “out goes Mary,” and so on.

Such counting-out rhymes are common among children throughout the world, and according to scholars they make no more sense in French or Russian or Czech than they do in English. But let’s get back to English.

In a study entitled “Children’s Traditional Speech Play and Child Language” (1976), Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Mary Sanches quote one such rhyme, which they characterize as “gibberish”:

Inty, ninty, tibbety fig
Deema dima doma nig
Howchy powchy domi nowday
Hom tom tout
Olligo bolligo boo
Out goes you.

In children’s poetry, the authors write, sound is what counts, not grammar or syntax or sense: “only the phonological rules are observed: the phonological sequences neither form units which have grammatical function nor lexemes with semantic reference.”

“That children enjoy playing with sound for its own sake has long been recognized as a prominent feature of child speech,” they add.

In short, the words that kids chant on the playground aren’t about grammar—they’re about sound. Put ’em together and what have you got? Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!

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Circular reasoning

Q: Can you explain how a leaflet or newspaper insert came to be called a “circular”? I’ve always wondered about this.

A: A leaflet or newspaper insert is called a “circular” because it was originally intended to circulate—to make the rounds among a circle of people.

The noun was born in the early 19th century as an abbreviated form of a much earlier phrase, “circular letter,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

A “circular letter,” the OED says, was defined by Samuel Johnson in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as “a letter directed to several persons, who have the same interest in some common affair.”

Here, the adjective “circular” means “affecting or relating to a circle or number of persons,” the OED says.

Oxford’s earliest citation for “circular letter” (sometimes called a “circular epistle” or “circular note”) is from a biblical commentary, The Considerator Considered (1659), by Brian Walton, Bishop of Chester:

“Their chief Priest … sends circular letters to the rest about their solemn feasts.”

The phrase survived until well into the 19th century, especially in historical references. This example is from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The History of England From the Accession of James II (1849):

“Circular letters, imploring them to sign, were sent to every corner of the kingdom.”

Meanwhile, in ordinary usage the expression had become shortened to “circular” by the early 1800s.

Although it began as an abbreviated form of “circular letter,” the OED says, its meaning is “now esp. a business notice or advertisement, printed or otherwise reproduced in large numbers for distribution.”

Henry John Todd, who edited an 1818 edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, didn’t take kindly to the use of “circular” as a noun. The OED quotes from Todd’s entry for “circular letter”:

“Modern affectation has changed this expression into the substantive; and we now hear of nothing but circulars from publick offices, and circulars from superintendants of a feast or club.”

Common usage won out, as it always does. As Lord Byron wrote in a letter in 1822: “The Circulars are arrived and circulating.”

If your head isn’t spinning in circles by now and you’d like to read more, we had a posting a few years ago about whether a circular argument is a “vicious circle” or a “vicious cycle.”

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Spill proof

Q: I’m wondering why we “spill” secrets. It seems such an odd verb to use when we mean “tell.”

A: This use of “spill” originated  in World War I-era American slang, though a similar usage showed up briefly across the Atlantic in the 16th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of the 20th-century usage is from a master of slanguage, Ring Lardner. Here’s the citation from his novel Gullible’s Travels (1917):

“ ‘Go ahead and spill it,’ I says.” (We found another one in the same book: “I promised her I wouldn’t spill none o’ the real details.”)

In this sense, the OED says, to “spill” means “to utter (words); to confess or divulge (facts).”

The usage soon caught on, and variations appeared. Another American slang phrase, “to spill the beans” (meaning “to reveal a secret”), showed up within a couple of years, the OED says.

Oxford’s earliest example of this one is from Thomas H. Holmes’s novel The Man From Tall Timber (1919): “ ‘Mother certainly has spilled the beans!’ thought Stafford in vast amusement.”

And another variation, “to spill one’s guts,” meaning “to divulge as much as one can, to confess,” came along in the Roaring Twenties, according to citations in the OED.

The dictionary’s first example is from Francis Charles Coe’s underworld novel Me—Gangster (1927). “ ‘Throw him out, eh?’ the old man snarled. … ‘Throw him out an’ have him spill his guts about the whole gang?’ ”

So when we use “spill” to mean confess or give away a secret—to pour out something that was held in—we’re using a century-old American slang term.

But in a quirk of linguistic history, it turns out that Americans weren’t the first to use “spill” in this figurative way. The OED records an isolated example from 16th-century England.

This line appeared in Familiar Epistles, Edward Hellowes’s 1574 translation of a collection of letters by the Spanish friar Antonio de Guevara: “Although it be a shame to spill it, I will not leaue to say that which … his friends haue said vnto me.”

In this citation, the OED says, “spill” is used figuratively to mean “to divulge, let out.”

The volume of Guevara’s Epistolas Familiares that Hellowes translated was first printed in Spanish in 1539. This raises a question: Were the Spanish already using their verb for “spill” in a figurative way to mean “divulge”?  

We located the passage in the original Spanish, and it begins, “Aunque es vergüenza de lo decir …”—literally, “Although it’s a shame to say it ….”

So Hellowes’s figurative use of “spill” for Guevara’s decir (to say) was original.

Interestingly, the English word “spill,” which comes from old Germanic sources, didn’t always mean to pour out.

When it entered Old English around the year 950, it meant to kill, destroy, put to death, ruin, overthrow, wreck, and so on.

Those hair-raising meanings are now obsolete or archaic, but they survived poetically for many centuries. 

Here’s an example from Thomas Taylor’s A Commentarie vpon the Epistle of S. Paul Written to Titus (1612): “Caring no more in their fury to spill a man, then to kill a dogge.”

How did a word for “destroy” come to mean overflow or pour out?

Sometime in the early 12th century, “spill” took on another meaning, the OED says: “to shed (blood).”

And a couple of centuries later, the OED says, that sense expanded to mean “to allow or cause (a liquid) to fall, pour, or run out (esp. over the edge of the containing vessel), usually in an accidental or wasteful manner; to lose or waste in this way.”

We still use “spill” in this way. We’ve also used the noun “spill” since the mid-19th century to mean a tumble or a fall, as in “He had a spill from his horse” or “She took a spill on the steps.”

Another handy usage, the adjective “spill-proof,” came along in the 1920s. This more recent OED example is from an ad that ran in Glamour magazine in 1963: “New spray mist! Unbreakable. Spill-proof…. Intimate by Revlon.”

In short, “spill” has come a long way.

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Hear Pat on Iowa Public Radio

She’ll be on Talk of Iowa today from 10 to 11 AM Central time (11 to 12 Eastern) to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: It’s summertime and the language is breezy.

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Bird play

Q: What is the origin of the unfortunate phrase “to kill two birds with one stone”? I do use it by habit, but I catch myself every time I say it.

A: We think you’re being overly sensitive about this. The expression is rarely used literally. In fact, the phrase was used figuratively when it first showed up in writing in the 1600s and it has generally been used that way ever since.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the usage as a proverbial phrase meaning “to accomplish two different purposes by the same act or proceeding.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from a 1655-56 exchange of views about free will between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the Anglican Bishop John Bramhall: “T. H. thinks to kill two birds with one stone, and satisfy two arguments with one answer.”

However, we’ve found an earlier example in A Complete History of the Present Seat of War in Africa Between the Spaniards and Algerines, a 1632 book by an author identified on the title page as “J. Morgan Gent.”

The gentleman writes that a Berber military chief “came resolved to kill two Birds with one Stone, return the Spaniards their Compliments, and conduct his insolent Turks, where he was certain at least some of them would be knocked on the head.”

We’ve seen quite a bit of speculation online that the expression originated in other languages—Latin, Greek, Chinese, and so on—but we’ve seen no evidence that English borrowed the usage.

A typical theory is that the expression originated with Ovid, but the closest example we’ve found in the Roman poet’s writing is the scene from Metamorphoses where Tiresias strikes two copulating snakes with a stick and is transformed into a woman.

Many online “experts” believe the usage originated in the story of Daedalus and Icarus, who escaped from the Labyrinth on Crete by making wings and flying out, according to Greek mythology.

Daedalus supposedly got the feathers to make the wings by killing two birds with one stone. However, neither Ovid nor Appolodorus, the principal sources of the myth, say anything about how Daedalus got the feathers.

In the 1600s, when the expression arrived in English, one sense of the word “bird” was a game bird, especially a partridge, according to the OED. And one sense of the term “stone” (or “gunstone”) at that time was a bullet.

A more likely explanation is that the expression was influenced by one that appeared nearly a century earlier: “to stop two gaps with one bush.”

The OED defines the earlier usage as “to accomplish two ends at once” or (you guessed it) “to kill two birds with one stone.”

The first citation for this usage is from John Heywood’s 1546 collection of proverbs: “I will learne, to stop two gaps with one bushe.”

And, with that, we’ll stop.

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Let’s do “do”

Q: I’m wondering how “do” has universally replaced almost all specific verbs: “do Italy,” “do quiche,” “do tennis,” “do the mail,” and on. I was in a diner with a friend who asked the Greek waiter, “Did you do the broccoli yet?” He had no idea what she meant. I interceded, “Did you cook the broccoli?” I’m an English teacher and it drives me crazy.

A: You might as well make peace with this usage. It may be overdone, but it’s not new, and it’s not likely to go away.

We’ve all heard it for years now, from “Let’s do lunch” to the eternal refrain of cleaning people everywhere: “I don’t do windows.”

In fact, from a historical standpoint, this kind of construction—“do” followed by a noun as direct object—isn’t unusual.  For more than a thousand years, English speakers have used it to mean achieve, perform, bring about, carry out, accomplish, and so on.  

We still use “do” this way, as in “do honor to one’s country,” “do the work,” “do nothing,” “do one’s duty,” “do justice,” “do evil,” “do penance,” “do your best,” etc.

We also use “do” plus an object to mean prepare, arrange, clean, put in order, deal with, work on, or make ready.

Your example “do the mail” falls into this category, and it’s not unusual. Similar examples include “do the flowers,” “do the room,” “do housework,” “do one’s hair [or makeup],” “do his homework,” “do the accounts,” “do your taxes,” and so forth.

“Do” is extremely useful in this way. As the Oxford English Dictionary remarks, “Since every kind of action may be viewed as a particular form of doing, the uses of the verb are as numerous as the classes of objects which it may govern.”

We’ve written before on the blog about usages like “do a burger,” “do lunch,” and so on. As we noted, “do” has been used to mean consume (as in “do a couple of pints” or “do a chop”) since the mid-19th century.

A related sense, “to eat or drink, esp. habitually,” dates from the 1970s, Oxford says. The dictionary’s citations include “do booze” (1970), “do sushi” (1987), “do coffee” (1989), and “do alcohol” (1994). We might add your example “do quiche” (as in “Does he do quiche?”). 

As we also mentioned in that earlier post, “do lunch” is vintage 1970s. This expression (sometimes it’s “do dinner”), was first recorded in Ladies’ Man (1978), a novel by Richard Price:

“ ‘Kenny, whata you doin’ now?’ ‘Now? I was gonna do lunch; you wanna do lunch?’ ”

The OED defines the phrase as meaning “to meet for the specified meal, esp. with a view to conducting business.”

This more businesslike exchange of pleasantries is from Marc Blake’s novel 24 Karat Schmooze (2001): “ ‘And if you come up with something more, do get in touch.’ ‘I will.’ ‘We must do lunch.’ ”

Let’s look at the other usages you mention: “do Italy,” “do tennis,” and “do the broccoli.”

It was 19th-century tourists, the OED says, who began using “do” to mean to visit a site.

Oxford’s citations include “do the Rhine” (1817), “done North and South America” (1830), “ ‘did’ a bit of continent” (1844), and “ ‘do’ Cologne Cathedral” (1854).

The fact that the writers sometimes used quotation marks or italics probably indicates that they considered  this usage a colloquialism.

Phrases like “do tennis” are more recent. The OED has citations since 1990 for “do” used to mean “to (be able to) partake of or engage in,” mostly in negative constructions.

The dictionary’s examples include “he didn’t ‘do’ relationships” (1990), “can ‘do intimacy’ ” (1994), “he doesn’t do boyfriends” (1999), and “doesn’t do small talk.”

As for “do the broccoli,” the OED says that since the 1600s “do” has been used to mean “to prepare or make ready as food; to cook.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Samuel Pepys’s Diary (1660): “We had … a carp and some other fishes, as well done as ever I eat any.” (He’s using “well done” here in the sense of “well prepared.”)

In another citation for the usage, an advertisement from the 1890s seeks a young woman “capable of doing pastry.”

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the verb “do” in our language.

For example, we use “do” with a pronoun as object, in both questions and statements: “What has Jack done?” … “That does it!” … “What does your brother-in-law do?” … “This just isn’t done.” 

As auxiliary forms, “do”/”do not” and “did”/”did not” are especially handy.

We use the auxiliary “do” plus an infinitive to form an emphatic imperative, as in “Do tell!” … “Do be quiet” … “Do stay.”

In addition, the auxiliary “do” is often used with an infinitive to form a question: “Do you smoke?” … “Did they drive?” … “Does he love her?” Without this flexibility, we’d have to resort to the clumsy “Smoke you?” … “Drove they?” …”Loves he her?”

And in negative sentences, as Oxford points out, “do not” and “did not” allow “the negative to come after the auxiliary, instead of following the principal verb: e.g., ‘We did not recognize him’ instead of ‘We recognized him not.’ ”

In short, forms of “do” have helped English no end! We could go on, but for now this will do.

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Why is a hick town a jerkwater?

Q: The two citations for “jerkwater” in my dictionary refer to remote, unimportant towns. Are there other uses for the word? And does it refer to pulling down the arm of a water tank or some other kind of jerking?

A: The term “jerkwater” was originally an adjective that described a stagecoach, train, or other conveyance serving a remote provincial area, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

The earliest example of the usage in Random House is from the March 1869 issue of the Overland Monthly, a California-based magazine published by Bret Harte.

The citation describes mules and oxen carrying mining supplies as “ ‘jerkwater’ stages, which had been three or four days making the trip of one hundred and ten miles.”

The dictionary’s next example of the adjectival usage—from the May 15, 1909, issue of the Saturday Evening Post—uses the word to describe a railroad train:

“The farther along Flagg got in the list the more disgusted he became with the prospect of living on jerk-water trains.” (We’ve gone to the original to expand the Random House citation.)

The slang dictionary also has examples of “jerkwater” used as a noun for a stagecoach or train serving a rural area. The first citation for the noun is from The Sazerac Lying Club, an 1878 book by Fred H. Hart:

“I wish I may be runned over by a two-horse jerk-water if there was a sage-hen in sight.”

And here’s a 1905 example—from Dialect Notes, a publication of the American Dialect Society—of the noun used for a train: “Jerkwater (train), n. Train on a branch railway. ‘Has the jerkwater come in yet?’ ”

Why was a train serving a remote area called a “jerkwater”? The Oxford English Dictionary points the reader to this explanation in Santa Fe: The Railroad That Built an Empire, a 1945 book by James Marshall:

“The Santa Fe was the Jerkwater Line—because train crews, when the water got low, often had to stop by a creek, form a bucket brigade and jerk water from the stream to fill the tender tank.”

By the late 19th century, the term “jerkwater” was also being used as an adjective to describe something provincial or insignificant, according to Random House.

The dictionary’s first citation for this usage is from the July 25, 1897, issue of the Chicago Tribune: “John J. Ingalls regards the Swiss mission as a jerkwater job, and would not take it if it were offered to him.”

The first Random House example of the adjective used to describe a small town is from “Above the Law,” a 1918 short story by Max Brand: “A jerk-water shanty village like Three Rivers.”

Interestingly, the dictionary’s earliest example of “jerkwater” used as a noun for a small town (from a June 1927 issue of the journal American Speech) suggests the usage was already on the way out:

“The advent of gasoline … has brought the expression filling-station to take the place of tank town or jerkwater.”

You’ve also asked about other uses for the word. Random House has many examples of the term used broadly to mean insignificant: “jerkwater hotels” (1936), “jerkwater cowcollege” (1938-39), “jerk water country” (1953), “jerkwater paper” (1983), and so on.

By the way, the word “hick” in the title of this post is derived from an old nickname for someone called Richard.

In the mid-1500s, according to the OED, the nickname came to mean “an ignorant countryman; a silly fellow, booby.” By the early 20th century, the term was being used adjectivally to mean unsophisticated or provincial.

Although the provincial sense of “hick” originated in Britain, Oxford says, it’s now chiefly an American usage. 

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Is there a bee in your bonnet?

Q: It can be difficult putting up with a bee in one’s bonnet—and where did THAT one come from?

A: Persistent (and perhaps crazy) ideas have reminded people of bees buzzing about the head for 500 years.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that “to have bees in the head or the brains,” or “a bee in one’s bonnet,” means to have “a fantasy, an eccentric whim, a craze on some point, a ‘screw loose.’ ”

However, standard dictionaries generally say you don’t have to be nutty to have a bee in your bonnet. The expression can refer to having an idea, a notion, or a fancy as well as an obsession.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, defines “a bee in one’s bonnet” as an impulse, a notion, or an obsession. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines it as an eccentric notion or a fancy.

The earliest recorded example in the OED is from Virgil’s Eneados, Gavin Douglas’s Middle Scots version of the Aeneid:

“Quhat berne be thou in bed, with hede full of beis?” (“What, man, rot thou in bed with thy head full of bees?”)

The OED dates this citation from 1553, but scholars say Douglas finished his translation in 1513.

In a comic play written around the early 1550s, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, we find the same image: “Who so hath suche bees as your maister in hys head.”

A century later, bees began invading brains. Here’s a line from Samuel Colville’s Mock Poem (1751): “Which comes from brains which have a bee.”

Bonnets entered the picture in the mid-19th century. The OED cites an essay Thomas De Quincey wrote for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1845):

“John Hunter, notwithstanding he had a bee in his bonnet, was really a great man.”

Here’s a 1935 example, from Oliver Wendell Holmes, cited in the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged: “He has the presidential bee in his bonnet.”

And in case you’re inspired to ask, we’ve written blog posts before on the phrases “bee’s knees” and “spelling bee.”

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Human resources?

Q: I am an HR manager. Am I a Human Resources Manager or a Human Resource Manager?  I’ve heard that one or the other is correct. I’ve also heard that both are correct. Which is it?

A: The usual term is “human resources manager,” though “human resource manager” is often seen. Both are correct.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the usual term is “human resources,” whether the phrase is used as a noun (“She’s in charge of human resources”) or as an adjective (She’s our human resources manager”).

The OED describes the adjectival use of “human resource” as occasional, but we think the dictionary may be underestimating the usage.

Here’s the Google scorecard: “human resources manager,” 10.3 million hits; “human resource manager,” 3.6 million.

The use of “human resources” to refer to people isn’t as modern as you might think.

The OED says it was first recorded in Britain in World War I, when it meant “people (esp. personnel or workers) regarded as an asset of a business or other organization (as contrasted with material or financial resources).”

Oxford’s earliest published example is from a 1915 issue of the Times of London:

“Side by side with the committees that have been set up to deal with the production of material there should be an organization to take stock of the human resources still at the disposal of the nation.”

The usage soon spread to the US. The OED has this 1920 example from the American Journal of Sociology, which was (and still is) published in Chicago:

“Federalism would have saved the Balkans from devastation and appalling waste of human resources.”

The phrase added a new meaning in corporate America in the mid-1960s, the OED says.

In American usage, “human resources” came to mean “the department in an organization dealing with the administration, management, training, etc., of staff; the personnel department.”

This additional, and more specialized, sense of the term was first recorded in an advertisement that ran in The New York Times in 1965: “Forward complete resume of education, experience, history and salary requirement to: Director Human Resources.”

The OED has an example of the specific usage you ask about. It’s from Business Week (1975): “Results of the experiment, which ended in mid-1974, are still being analyzed, says human resources manager Charles J. Sherrard.”

This corporate meaning of the phrase is now current in Britain too, according to OED citations.

An example of the adjectival usage in the less common singular form appeared in the British magazine Accountancy (1994): “Part of the background to all of this is the growing tendency for the human resource function itself to shrink in size.”

And this example of the noun phrase comes from Turning Thirty (2000), by the young British novelist Mike Gayle: “I would be free to leave as soon as I told Human Resources where I wanted to go.”

The two of us are old enough to remember when companies had “personnel managers” and “personnel departments.” And for a time we regarded “human resources” as jargon. But we’re human and resourceful, so we’ve come to terms with it.

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Andy Borowitz is filling in for Leonard. Today’s topic: What would Jane say? Jane Austen’s contributions to the English language. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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Is a clunker used or pre-owned?

Q: It seems to me that illiterate used-car salesmen have introduced the term “pre-owned” into the language to avoid advertising what they actually sell: USED CARS! This is driving me nuts. Please tell me that it’s incorrect and that you’ll help me stamp it out.

A: We don’t like this euphemism either, and we don’t use it ourselves, but the usage has been around for dozens of years and it’s in many standard dictionaries, including the two we consult the most.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines “preowned” (it doesn’t use the hyphen) as “previously owned or used; secondhand: a preowned car.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines the hyphenated version as “secondhand, used.”

All six American or British dictionaries we checked list the term, with or without the hyphen, as standard English.

The usage first showed up in the 1930s, according to published examples in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest OED citation is from a May 27, 1934, advertisement in the Syracuse (NY) Herald: “Factory branch close out sale—floor sample and pre-owned washers.”

We’re generally more amused than irritated by euphemisms. We’re sorry that this one is driving you nuts. We suspect, though, that it’s here to stay. All you can do to stamp out a usage that bugs you is avoid using it yourself.

If you’re bothered by a “pre-owned” car, you’ll probably be bothered even more by a similar usage— a “pre-need” funeral—that is, a prepaid one. We had a brief post about it a few years ago.

The first citation for this usage in the OED is from a March 5, 1945, ad in the Waterloo (Iowa) Daily Courier: “Who will pay the Funeral Bill? … Ask us today for details of our pre-need plan. No obligation.”

By the way, the term “euphemism,” which entered English in the mid-1600s, is derived from the Greek compound euphemismos (speaking with good words), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto says the term “originally denoted the avoidance of words of ill omen at religious ceremonies, but it was subsequently taken up by grammarians to signify the substitution of a less for a more offensive word.”

He notes that the opposite of a “euphemism” is a “dysphemism” (the use of a more offensive word), which he describes as a late 19th-century coinage based on the Greek prefix dus- (bad, difficult) instead of the Greek prefix eu- (good).

Although the term “dysphemism” is a relative latecomer, the usage itself has been around a lot longer.

Shakespeare, for example, uses it in All’s Well That Ends Well (circa 1605), when Mariana describes the advances of Count Rousillon as “engines of lust.”

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It’s a gas

Q: Does the expression “It’s a gas” (meaning “It’s a lot of fun”) come from the use of laughing gas?

A: It’s possible that the use of “a gas” to mean a lot of fun may somehow be connected with the common name for nitrous oxide, but we haven’t found any solid evidence to support this.

Eric Partridge, in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, speculates about such a connection, but he doesn’t come to any conclusion.

In writing about the Irish English use of “gas” to mean fun, Partridge adds this brief notation: “Ex ‘laughing gas’?”

The use of “gas” to mean a vapor was coined in the mid-1600s by the Flemish physician and chemist J. B. van Helmont, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the Dutch word used by van Helmont was probably an alteration of chaos, the ancient Greek word for empty space.

Chambers says the letter “g” in Dutch “represents a sound somewhat like the modern Greek sound transliterated as ch.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that van Helmont used a Dutch version of the Greek chaos “to denote an occult principle, supposedly an ultra-refined form of water, which he postulated as existing in all matter.” 

The first use of “gas” in English, according to OED citations, was in a 1662 translation of van Helmont’s 1648 work Ortus Medicinæ: “for want of a name, I have called that vapour, Gas, being not far severed from the Chaos of the Auntients.”

The word’s modern sense of a shapeless substance that “expands freely to fill the whole of a container” dates from the late 17th century, according to Oxford citations.

As for nitrous oxide, the gas was first synthesized by the English chemist Joseph Priestly in 1772, and first used to anesthetize a dental patient in 1844.

The OED’s earliest example of “laughing gas” used for nitrous oxide is from a June 23, 1819, issue of the Times of London that refers to the “chymical experiments on gas at 9, when the laughing gas will be exhibited.”

“Laughing gas is so called from the euphoric intoxication it causes when inhaled at low concentrations,” the OED says. “It has been used as a general anaesthetic in dentistry and surgery, and also illicitly as a recreational drug.”

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the word “gas” took on the sense of “enjoyment, amusement, fun” in Irish English.

The OED’s first citation for the usage is from Dubliners, James Joyce’s 1914 story collection. In “An Encounter,” a story about two boys who skip school, Mahony tells the narrator that he’s brought along a slingshot “to have some gas with the birds.”

However, the usage you’re asking about (the use of “it’s a gas” or variants to mean it’s a lot of fun) didn’t show up in print until the mid-20th century, according to written examples in the dictionary.

The earliest citation in the OED is from “Sonny’s Blues,” a 1957 short story by James Baldwin in The Partisan Review: “Brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.”

Here’s a more recent example from Paul Auster’s 1990 novel The Music of Chance: “ ‘I’m looking forward to it immensely.’ ‘Me too, Bill,’ Pozzi said. ‘It’s going to be a gas.’ ”

The OED doesn’t speculate about the origins of this sense of “gas,” but it points the reader to a related slang word, “gasser,” which it says originated as a jazz term. 

The earliest Oxford citation is from “The Hepsters Dictionary” (1944), a brief glossary by Cab Calloway: “When it comes to dancing, she’s a gasser.”

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang also links this use of “gas” to jazz. It cites several jazz examples, including one from Corner Boy, a 1957 novel by Herbert Simmons, in which a group of teen-agers discuss the jazz singer Nellie Lutcher:

“Man, don’t Nellie kill you?”

“She’s a gas, man, a natural petrol.”

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In a pickle

Q: I was eating a half-sour the other day, which inspired this question: Where does the expression “in a pickle,” meaning in trouble, come from?

A: We’ll be in an etymological pickle if we try to explain the origin of “in a pickle” without first discussing the history of “pickle” itself. Here’s the story.

When it first showed up in English in the 1300s or 1400s, the noun “pickle” referred to a spicy sauce served with meat or fowl.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says English probably borrowed the word “pickle” from Middle Dutch, where pekel referred to brine.

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the ultimate source of pekel may have been the Germanic base of another Middle Dutch word, peken, meaning to prick or pierce.

With the -el suffix added, the OED says, the original sense of pekel was “something that pricks or is piquant.”

The English “pickle,” according to the OED and Chambers, was first recorded in the alliterative Morte Arthure, an anonymous Middle English poem that appeared in writing around 1440 but is thought by many scholars to date from the 1300s.

(The alliterative Morte Arthure, the stanzaic Morte Arthure, and several other Arthurian sources influenced the better-known Le Morte d’Arthure, 1470-85, attributed to Sir Thomas Mallory.)

The word “pickle” (pekill in Middle English) appears in the alliterative Morte Arthure in this gruesome description of a giant’s diet:

“He sowppes all this seson with seuen knaue childre, / Choppid in a chargour of chalke-whytt syluer, / With pekill and powdyre of precious spycez.” (He sups all this season on seven knavish children, chopped in a bowl of chalk-white silver, with pickle and powder of precious spices.)

Here “pickle” refers to a sauce, but by the early 1500s the word had taken on a new meaning: the brine, vinegar, or other solution in which food is preserved.

The earliest citation in the OED for this new sense is from an entry, written around 1503, in a chronicle of the London merchant Richard Arnold: “To make a pigell to kepe freshe sturgen in.”

By the late 1500s, “pickle” was being used in an extended figurative sense to mean a disagreeable or troubling condition—the sense found in the expression “in a pickle.”

The first two OED citations for this new usage are somewhat ambiguous, but here’s a clear 1585 example from the writings of the Protestant clergyman and historian John Foxe:

“In this pickle lyeth man by nature, that is, all wee that be Adams children.”

And here’s an example of the usage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (circa 1610-11).

Alonso: “How cam’st thou in this pickle?”
Trinculo: “I haue bin in such a pickle since I saw you last.”

Why is someone in a disagreeable predicament described as “in a pickle”? The OED and Chambers don’t explain, but it seems clear to us that the usage alludes to the sour state of being in a pickling solution.

And where does the expression come from? “The usage is common and natural enough to English to be formed therein,” Chambers says, “but may have been reinforced by Dutch.”

The dictionary cites two Dutch phrases: in de pekel zijn (to be in a pickle) and iemand in de pekel zijn laten, or zitten (to get someone in a pickle).

Chambers says both Dutch phrases were common in the 1500s when the troublesome sense of “pickle” was first recorded in English.

It wasn’t until the late 1600s that the word “pickle” was used to refer to “a whole vegetable, or a piece of one, that has been preserved in vinegar, brine, etc.,” according to citations in the OED.

Oxford describes the use of the term “pickle” for a pickled cucumber as chiefly North American.

In Britain, the usual term is a dill cucumber or a pickled cucumber, according to Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.

In a post on her blog Separated by a Common Language, Murphy says the British use “pickle” or “sweet pickle” for a condiment of chopped vegetables or fruit preserved in vinegar and a sweetener. Americans would refer to such a condiment as relish.

We’ll end with a half-sour comment from the Aug. 29, 2004, issue of the Montreal Gazette: “Today’s studs would sooner immerse themselves in a vat of pickles than spray themselves with Aqua Velva or Old Spice.”

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Is the present a gift?

Q: A friend posted this on Facebook: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a GIFT. That’s why they call it the present.” Is there a connection between “the present” and “a present”?

A: That saying, which is often mistakenly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, A. A. Milne, and others, is merely a play on words.

The “present” that means now and the “present” that means a gift are two separate nouns, though they have a common source.

Both of them originated in the notion of presence—of being at hand or on the spot. They can be traced to the Latin noun praesens (presence) and adjective praesentem (present or at hand, not absent).

In these Latin words we find the prefix prae- (before, in front of) and a participial form of the verb esse (be). So the original notion was of being before (in the presence of) a person or thing.

Derivatives of the Latin words came into English in the Middle Ages by way of Anglo-Norman and Old French.

And it was in Old French that the noun present first came to mean a gift, a sense that was passed along into English.

As John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “The use of the related word present for ‘gift’ originated in Old French in the concept of ‘bringing something into someone’s presence,’ and hence of giving it to them.”

The other sense of the noun “present”—the time at hand—was also influenced by French, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But it developed separately from the “gift” sense.

And the English adjective “present” is from French as well, in its usual senses related to place (here) and time (now).

It’s difficult to sort out which English words came first.

For example, the OED says the English adjective “present” was first recorded in writing in 1340, but that it may have influenced various noun usages, some of which were recorded more than a century earlier.

The etymology of these words helps explain why the English verb “present” has so many meanings.

The OED says that when first recorded, around 1300, to “present” meant “to bring or place (a person) before or into the presence of; to bring to the notice of another; to introduce, esp. formally or ceremonially; spec. to introduce at court or to society, or before a sovereign or other distinguished person.”

Today “present” can mean, among other things, to introduce someone or something (like a person, a product, a performer); to put before the public (a play, exhibition, etc.); to hold vertically in salute (as in the phrase “present arms”); or to lay before a court or other authority (as a lawyer offers documents to a judge).

That last meaning explains the use of the term “these presents” in legal language, a usage the OED says dates back to 1379. In the legal sense, “presents” means the  present documents, writings, words, or statements. (No, they’re not gift-wrapped.)

Here’s an example from the preamble to the Articles of Confederation (1781): “To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting.”

As you’ve probably gathered, the verb “present” is almost always transitive—that is, it has a direct object, the something that’s being presented.

But as we noted in a blog posting a few years ago, there’s an exception. In medicine, to “present” means to appear before a doctor. It’s one of the rare cases in which the verb is intransitive and doesn’t have an object.

The examples we used: “The patient presented in my office with symptoms of fibromyalgia” … “The head of the fetus is presenting.”

The OED has examples of this medical usage going back to 1719. So it may be odd, but it’s presentable.

As for that saying your friend posted on Facebook, it’s been cited in print in one form or another since at least the 1990s, and it may have originated in a Hallmark greeting card, according to the language sleuth Barry Popik.

In an entry on his Big Apple website, Popik traces the saying to an Aug. 31, 1994, installment of “The Family Circus,” a comic strip by Bill Keane: “Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a GIFT. That’s why it’s called the present.”

Popik, who had help on his posting from the lexicographer Jonathan Lighter, says an earlier version of the saying that doesn’t connect the two senses of “present” appeared in the July 11, 1967, issue of the Altoona (PA) Mirror:

“You must forget the past. Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery. Follow the AA philosophy of quitting one day at a time and seeking divine guidance.”

A partial version of the saying showed up in the Aug. 2, 1993, issue of the Galveston (TX) Daily News, in a typo-ridden ad that suggested a greeting-card connection:

“Today is a gift, thats why its called the present
“MAINLAND FLORAL, INC.
“Hallmark.”

A citation from The Ten Habits of Naturally Slim People, a 1998 book by by Jill H. Podjasek with Jennifer Carney, also suggests a greeting-card origin of the saying:

“I read the following wisdom in a greeting card years ago: ‘Yesterday is history; tomorrow is mystery; today is a gift; that is why they call it the present.’ ”

If any readers of the blog have one of the greeting cards up in the attic, please send us a photo of it!

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If we had our druthers

Q: What does “if I had my druthers” mean and from where did the phrase originate?

A: The expression “if I had my druthers” means “if I had a choice” or “if I had a preference.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) describes “druthers” here as an informal plural noun meaning a choice or a preference.

American Heritage gives this example from the columnist George Will: “Given their druthers, these hell-for-leather free marketeers might sell the post office.”

The noun “druthers” actually began life as a verb in 19th-century America. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a US dialectal alteration of the verb phrase “would rather.”

The OED’s only two examples of the verb are in the writings of Mark Twain. Here’s the earliest, from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876): “I’d druther they was devils a dern sight.”

The noun “druthers” showed up a couple of decades later. Oxford has this example from an 1895 issue of the American Dialect Society’s journal Dialect Notes:

“Bein’s I caint have my druthers an’ set still, I cal’late I’d better pearten up an’ go ‘long.”

The OED says the usage is also seen as “druther,” “ruther,” and “ruthers.” Here’s an example with “ruthers,” from William Alexander Percy’s 1941 autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee:

“ ‘Your ruthers is my ruthers’ (what you would rather is what I would rather). Certainly the most amiable and appeasing phrase in any language, the language used being not English but deep Southern.”

If we had our druther, ruther, druthers, or ruthers, we’d take a break now. And so we will. See you tomorrow.

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Turning the tables

Q: What do you think is the origin of the expression “turn the tables”? Does it have anything to do with a table supposedly moving around at a séance?

A: No, the verb phrase “turn the tables” has nothing to do with séances. It originated with the playing of board games in the 17th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It means “to reverse one’s position relative to someone else,” the OED says, especially “by turning a position of disadvantage into one of advantage; to cause a complete reversal of the state of affairs.”

In its literal meaning, the phrase referred “to the position of the board in a board game being reversed, hence reversing the situation of each player in the game,” Oxford adds. But apparently it was used figuratively from the very beginning.

The expression first appeared in writing, the OED says, in The Widdowes Teares, a 1612 comedy by the poet and playwright George Chapman: “You doe well Sir to take your pleasure of me, (I may turne tables with you ere long).”

It showed up a few decades later in a sermon delivered by Bishop Robert Sanderson in 1648: “Whosoever thou art that dost another wrong, do but turn the tables: imagine thy neighbour were now playing thy game, and thou his.”

This more contemporary example is from Cynthia Freeland’s But Is It Art? (2001): “The images … celebrate the female artist’s ability to turn the tables on the men.”

Imagine that!

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A case in point

Q: I am gradually becoming obsessed with the phrase “a case in point.” Does anyone know its origin? It looks like a clumsy translation from another language (French, perhaps) but is it?

A: You’re onto something. The phrase at the heart of your obsession, “in point,” does indeed come from French—or, rather, Anglo-Norman, a dialect of Old French used by England’s Norman conquerors.

In the Anglo-Norman phrase en point, the word point refers to a state or condition, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says the word “point” showed up in English in the early 1200s with the sense of a condition, state, situation, or plight, though that meaning is now considered historic.

In the early 1600s, according to Oxford, “point” took on another sense—appropriate or pertinent—a sense that’s now chiefly seen in the expression “case in point,” meaning an example that illustrates the point.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the expression is from Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875) by William Stanley Jevons:

“The wampumpeag of the North American Indians is a case in point, as it certainly served as jewellery.”

The most recent citation is from the January 1996 issue of Scientific American:

“Much of the ecological evidence about sex is open to sharply differing interpretations. A case in point concerns the ‘haplodipoid’ sex-determining system of ants, bees and wasps.”

And with that, we’ll buzz off.

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Bilingual education

Q: My Danish stepmother is completely bilingual, with one exception: she uses the phrase “not that I know to” instead of “not that I know of” when speaking English. It would be interesting to understand where this usage comes from.

A: There’s a verbal phrase in Danish, kende til, that means to “know about.”

But someone attempting a literal translation into English might render kende til as “know to.” That’s because the Danish verb kende means to “know” and the preposition til frequently means “to.”

Louise Møhl, a cultural officer with the Danish Consulate in New York, provided us with a couple of Danish-to-English examples of these terms used in the first-person singular:

Jeg kender ham fra mit arbejde. = “I know him from work.”

Det kender jeg ikke noget til. = “I don’t know anything about that.”

As for til, Ms. Møhl said, it “has many meanings in Danish depending on the situation.”

When it’s not part of the expression kende til, the preposition til can mean “to” (perhaps its most frequent sense), “of,” “for,” “about,” “toward,” “from,” or “at.”

Incidentally, the Danish til has a similar-sounding cousin in English, “till.” The Old Norse preposition til (“to”) is the ancestor of both the Danish til and the English prepositions “till” and “to.”

We’ve written on our blog about the English words “till” and “until” (you may be surprised to learn which came first).

Sorry that we can’t be more definite about why your Danish stepmother says “know to” instead of “know of,” but here’s a suggestion: ask her why she does it.

You might as well get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Or, as a Dane would put it, lige fra hestens mund.

Why a horse’s mouth? We had a brief posting back in 2006 that says there are two theories about the origin of the English expression, one involving horse racing and the other horse trading.

The most likely explanation is that it originated in the early 20th century in reference to inside information from a racing tipster that was supposedly as good as if it came straight from the horse itself.

We’ll end with an example from “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald,” a 1928 short story by one of our favorite writers, P. G. Wodehouse. The wooer (and eavesdropper) here is Archibald Mulliner:

“It might be an ignoble thing to eavesdrop, but it was apparent that Aurelia Cammarleigh was about to reveal her candid opinion of him: and the prospect of getting the true facts—straight, as it were, from the horse’s mouth—held him so fascinated that he could not move.”

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The rhubarb phenomenon

Q: Is there a term for the phenomenon of a word sounding completely nonsensical when you say it over and over again? That happens for me with the word “only.” I’d be interested if you folks have had the same experience.

A: Yes, we too have had this experience. After we repeatedly think, speak, or look at a word—say, “rhubarb”—it becomes gibberish.

This phenomenon isn’t new. James Boswell wrote about it in the 18th century, Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th, and James Thurber in the 20th.

In his memoir My Life and Hard Times (1933), Thurber recalls lying in bed, racking his brain in an attempt to remember the name Perth Amboy, the city in New Jersey:

“I fell to repeating the word ‘Jersey’ over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless. If you have ever lain awake at night and repeated one word over and over, thousands and millions and hundreds of thousands of millions of times, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into.”

A common term for this experience is “semantic satiation,” a phrase used by the psychologist Leon Jakobovits James in his 1962 doctoral dissertation. Other terms are “semantic saturation” and “verbal satiation.” (We might add “the rhubarb phenomenon.”)  

In his paper,  “Effects of Repeated Stimulation on Cognitive Aspects of Behavior: Some Experiments on the Phenomenon of Semantic Satiation,” James describes experiments testing subjects’ responses to repeated words, numbers, concepts, and so on.

He concludes, among other things, that “Repeated presentation of verbal stimuli results in a decrease of their meaning.”

What this means is that with enough repetition, “rhubarb”  becomes a meaningless collection of letters or sounds.

In 2010, many years after writing his dissertation, James contributed a few comments to a discussion of semantic satiation on the website Language Hat.

James wrote that his dissertation “was the first objective demonstration of a measurement of the intensity of reduction of meaning with repetition.”

“I demonstrated that this meaning reduction was a general cognitive and perceptual and temporary process, e.g., it slowed down our computing time for simple arithmetic when numbers were repeated first,” he said.

He said the paper also showed “that this meaning reduction process occurs at the macro or societal level, e.g., reduction of popularity of hit songs as a function of the number of times they were played on the radio.”

“I note from a Google search that the phrase and idea of semantic satiation has been applied to new areas in the past forty years (e.g., advertising, music, neurosemantics, etc.),” he added. “Today I still think that semantic satiation operates at several levels: universal, general, specific, and particular.”

He predicted that research “in the next forty years will uncover many of these effects produced by cumulative repetition or exposure (words, topics, issues, objects, tastes, experiences, colors, etc.).”

“Further,” he said, “there will be connection made to personality traits which I discuss in my dissertation as ‘semantic satiability’—people who for instance like to hear the same song over and over again (movie, etc.), vs. people who vary their way home because they get bored, etc.”

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Like the back of one’s hand

Q: From a Canadian television commercial: “The monks of Oka, Quebec, knew how to make cheese like the back of their hand.” What do you think? It doesn’t sound right to me.

A: We agree that the Canadian commercial is oddly phrased. It’s odd for several reasons.

First, the expression “like the back of one’s hand” is more familiar when used in the singular—“like the back of my (or his or her) hand.”

The imagery is out of kilter in the plural “backs of their hands”—and even more out of it in the illogical mixing of singular and plural in “back of their hand,” the version on Canadian TV.

Second, a person generally knows something—not how to do something—“like the back of his hand.”

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the verb “know” in the expression refers to “a thing, place, or person.”

So we’d say, “He knows French like the back of his hand,” not “He knows how to speak French like the back of his hand.”

Finally, a literal-minded person might interpret the commercial to be saying the monks knew how to make cheese that resembled the backs of their hands. Or, as one viewer of the commercial commented online, “old, wrinkly, and smelly.”

The OED says that “to know (something) like the back of one’s hand” means “to be thoroughly familiar or conversant with.”

While the expression sounds venerable, Oxford has no published examples older than the mid-20th century. Here are the OED’s citations, all from mystery or suspense novels.

“I know him as well as I know the back of my hand.” (From Margaret Millar’s Wall of Eyes, 1943.) 

“I know that book like the back of my hand.” (From Michael Innes’s The Weight of Evidence, 1944.)  

“I know the district like the back of my hand.” (From Mary Stewart’s Wildfire at Midnight, 1956.)

“I know that photograph like the back of my hand.” (From Catherine Aird’s Henrietta Who? 1968.)

We’ve spotted a few earlier examples, though.

For instance the expression appears twice in John Collis Snaith’s novel The Sailor, first published in 1916:

“So much had he knocked about the world that he knew men and cities like the back of his hand” … “his native city of Blackhampton, certain parts of which he knew like the back of his hand.”

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In a jiffy

Q: I was packing my latest manuscript in a Jiffy bag when I thought of a question for my go-to word guys. What is a jiffy?

A: It’s an instant or a moment, which doesn’t describe the amount of time we’ve taken to get to your question. Sorry, but our in-box has been overflowing lately.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “jiffy” as a colloquial noun of “origin unascertained,” and defines it as “a very short space of time.”

The OED says the word is seen “only in such phrases as in a jiffy,” but it later notes the use of “jiffy” in the names of padded bags and other products.

The first Oxford citation is from Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785), by Rudolf Erich Raspe: “In six jiffies I found myself and all my retinue … at the rock of Gibralter.”

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology speculates that the word might have been “spontaneously coined” by Raspe, a German librarian, writer, and scientist.

The full phrase “in a jiffy” was first recorded (with the spelling jeffy) in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796): “It will be done in a jeffy: it will be done in a short space of time, in an instant.”

In the 1950s, “Jiffy” showed up in trademarked names for a padded envelope, a book bag, and a peat pot for sowing seeds. The first Jiffy Lube opened in Ogden, Utah, in the 1970s, and franchises followed … in a jiffy.

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The tip of my fingers?

Q: I remember hearing the country song “The Tip of My Fingers” when I was a young’un in Upstate South Carolina 50 years ago. I’m old enough to know by now, but shouldn’t that be “Tips”? Thank y’all very much.

A: As we’ve written before on the blog, song writers are allowed a lot of leeway in the way they use English.

Bill Anderson wrote “The Tip of My Fingers” and released it as a single under that title in 1960. And we won’t fault him for it, even though most people would say “tips of my fingers.”

But the original title has apparently bothered some of the artists who’ve recorded the tune over the years.

It’s been recorded by Hank Snow, Eddy Arnold, Jean Shepard, and others—sometimes under the original title and sometimes as “The Tips of My Fingers.”

In fact, singers haven’t always pronounced the title the way it reads on the record label or album cover.

For instance, on the album Roy Clark Sings The Tip of My Fingers (1963), Clark very distinctly says “tips,” and so do his backup singers.

So you’re in good company if the original title bugs you.

Here’s an excerpt from Teresa Brewer’s 1966 recording of the song (she says “tip”):

I reached out my arms and I touched you
With soft words I whispered your name.
I held you right on the tip of my fingers
But that was as close as I came.

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A loaded question

Q: I recently came across this quote from the Mormon lawman Porter Rockwell: “I never shot at anybody, if I shoot they get shot! He’s still alive, ain’t he?” That got me to thinking. You shoot an arrow, not the bow, but you shoot a gun, not the bullet. A friend of mine says he shoots targets. I’m confused.

A: The verb “shoot” has a lot of flexibility. It can be used intransitively—that is, without a direct object. Example: “He likes to go into the woods and shoot.”

But “shoot” can also be used transitively—with a direct object. When we’re talking about weapons, the transitive verb “shoot” can mean to discharge, to let fly, or to hit.

Consequently, it can have a variety of objects. You can “shoot” (that is, discharge) a gun, bow, slingshot, or catapult. You can “shoot” (let fly) a bullet, arrow, spear, javelin, or similar projectile. And finally, you can “shoot” a target.

All of these senses of the verb are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary and have been around for hundreds of years.

By the way, that last sense of the word—to “shoot” a target—implies that the target was hit. But “shoot at” means only to fire in a particular direction.

We’ll have something to say later about Orrin Porter Rockwell, a colorful and controversial Mormon figure from the Wild West.

But first let’s look at the life of “shoot,” a verb with an interesting history, and not just in weaponry.

Its ancestors were old Germanic words that meant to go swiftly or suddenly, to rush or fly—yes, like an arrow from a bow.

It was first recorded in Old English in the ninth century in reference to the shooting of arrows, according to citations in the OED.

But other Old English examples use the term in a wider sense that reflects its earlier Germanic roots—to dart swiftly from one place to another.

So at the root of the word is the sense of moving quickly, and this ancestry explains the many ways in which “shoot” is used today.

For example, meteors “shoot” across the night sky, rafters “shoot” the rapids, and a toboggan “shoots” down a slope. A racehorse “shoots” from the gate, then “shoots” ahead of the pack.

A golfer “shoots” a birdie,” while a basketball player “shoots” a basket. Grownups “shoot” pool or dice, and children “shoot” marbles. If the kids are growing fast, they’re said to “shoot” up.

Plants in spring send out new “shoots” (a noun usage). Rays of the sun “shoot” through the clouds, and on a more prosaic note, product sales “shoot” up.

An indiscreet person “shoots off” his mouth or “shoots” himself in the foot, while an ambitious colleague “shoots” for success.

To lock a door a night, we “shoot” a bolt into its fastening. And if we don’t look where we’re going, our feet “shoot” out from under us (after which we experience “shooting” pains).

With that, we’ve “shot our bolt.” In case you’re curious (even if you’re not), the “bolt” in this old proverb is a thousand-year-old word for a short, blunt arrow fired from a cross-bow.

In olden days, there was a similar expression, “a fool’s bolt is soon shot.” The lesson: conserve your ammunition.

In case any readers are wondering about that quote you mention, Porter Rockwell was, among other things, a gunfighter, a deputy US marshal, and a bodyguard to the Mormon leader Joseph Smith Jr.

Rockwell was arrested in St. Louis in March of 1843 in connection with an attempt to kill Lilburn Boggs, a former governor of Missouri, the year before. (In 1838, as governor, Boggs issued an executive order evicting Mormons from the state.)

A grand jury found that there wasn’t enough evidence for an indictment on the charge of attempted murder, but Rockwell was tried in December of 1843 for trying to escape.

He supposedly made his comments at that trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to five minutes in jail, according to Enemy of the Saints, a biography of Boggs by Robert Nelson.

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Earth angles

Q: I love your blog, but I just want to point out an easily fixed typo in your posting about why English is a Germanic language. In the seventh paragraph of your answer, you refer to “the earth’s population.” The word “Earth” requires capitalization.

A: We’re glad you like the blog, but this isn’t a mistake. We properly used “earth” as a common noun.

As The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) says, “In nontechnical contexts the word earth, in the sense of our planet, is usually lowercased when preceded by the or in such idioms as ‘down to earth’ or ‘move heaven or earth.’ ”

“When used as the proper name of our planet, especially in context with other planets,” the Chicago Manual adds, “it is capitalized and the is usually omitted.”  

Other standard references agree.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, says the word is often capitalized when it stands alone and refers to “the third planet from the sun.” Otherwise, it’s lowercased.

So unless you’re using it in a strictly astronomical sense (as in “the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth”), the word is lowercased. In fact, it’s sometimes lowercased even when used in reference to the planet.

As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, “The names of planets other than our own are invariably capitalized, but earth is more often than not lowercased.”

The usage guide goes on to say that the name is more likely to be capitalized when it appears with the names of the other planets, as in “the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Earth.”

Another guide, Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) says, “In reference to the planet we live on, earth is usually preceded by the and is not capitalized. The sun and the moon are treated the same way.”

Garner’s gives this example: “a full moon occurs when the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the earth.”

But “when Earth is referred to as a proper noun,” the usage guide says, “it is capitalized and usually stands alone.”

Garner’s gives this example from an article about the dwarf planet Quaoar: “It’s about one-tenth the size of Earth and orbits the sun every 288 years.”

The Old English word eorthe, which first showed up in in Beowulf around 725, could refer to the ground, the soil, or the earth, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. The modern spelling appeared in the last half of the 1500s.

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A matter of course

Q: In texting me, my daughter used the phrase “of course” (spelling it “of coarse,” naturally), which got me to thinking. How is it that we use “course” to refer to something in a positive manner (as in “of course”) as well as to a path, a route, or a plan—from a “concourse” to an “obstacle course” to a “course of study”?

A: The phrase “of course” means something akin to “naturally” or “it goes without saying.” When we say something occurred “of course,” we mean it was only to be expected, or that it was in the normal course of events.

And that last phrase, “in the normal course of events,” is a clue to the etymology of the phrase “of course.”

Our word “course” came into English in the late 13th century, and for several hundred years it was spelled without an “e” at the end, like the French word it came from (cours).

The French got it from Latin, in which cursus means a race, a journey, a march, or a direction. The Latin noun comes from the verb currere, to run.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that a wide range of English words is derived from currere, including “current,” “courier,” and “occur.”

In English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “course” originally meant an onward movement in a particular path, or the action of running or moving onward.

Consequently, “course” has long been used to mean a customary or habitual succession of things, or a part of such a series.

It has also been used for hundreds of years to mean the place or time where the series has its “run,” as well as the natural order or the ordinary manner of proceeding.

This notion—of a habitual path or a prescribed series of things—explains a great many uses of “course” in English.

To mention a few, it explains why the parts of a meal are “courses,” why a flowing stream is a “watercourse,” why a normal event happens “in due course,” why an orderly ship maintains a certain “course,” why we let nature or the law “take its course,” and why colleges offer “courses” of study and doctors prescribe “courses” of treatment.

It also explains how “racecourse” and “golf course” got their names. And it explains why women in the 16th through the 19th centuries called their menstrual periods their “courses.”

The phrase we’re getting to, “of course,” came along in the mid-16th century, according to citations in the OED.

In the early 1540s it was used both as an adjective to mean “natural” or  “to be expected” (as in the phrase “a matter of course”) and as an adverb to mean “ordinarily” or “as an everyday occurrence” (as in “the cake was of course homemade”).

By the early 19th century, “of course” was being used to qualify entire sentences or clauses, according to OED citations.  And that’s how we generally use it today.

Oxford’s earliest example of this usage is from John Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America (1823):

“She made some very particular inquiries about my people, which, of course, I was unable to answer.”

This later example is from a bit of dialogue in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1838): “ ‘You will tell her I am here?’ … ‘Of course.’ ”

We now take the phrase “of course” for granted, but it had some competition over the centuries.

It’s proved more durable than several variants with the same meaning—“upon course,” which was first recorded in this sense in 1619, “on course” (1677), and “in course” (1722).

In other words, its survival was not necessarily a matter of course.

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Yeah, no

Q: We North Queenslanders are considered rednecks even by Australian standards. I thought I’d pass on an example of English usage in this part of the world: Yeah, no, as in “Yeah, no, they should’ve won in the last quarter.”

A: We’ve written on the blog about “yeah,” but we haven’t looked into “yeah, no” until now.

Others, however, have studied this conversational response, which is used by both Americans and Australians.

In fact, Australians may use it, more—at least there’s been more written about “yeah, no” by language scholars in Australia.

A 2004 article in The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, quoted the Australian linguist Kate Burridge as saying, “It’s not going to disappear. It’s always hard to predict with language change, but it looks like its use is on the increase.”

The author of the Melbourne article, Bridie Smith, pointed out that English speakers aren’t alone in this usage, since “Germans use a similar ‘ja nein’ and the South Africans ‘ya nay.’ ”

“In Australia,” Smith wrote in 2004, “where the phrase has become entrenched in the past six years, ‘yeah no’ can mean anything from ‘yes, I see that, but can we go back to the earlier topic’ to an enthusiastic ‘yes, I can’t reinforce that point enough.’ ”

The meaning of “yeah, no” depends on its context, Smith says. She quotes Dr. Burridge, the linguist, as saying: “It can emphasise agreement, it can downplay disagreement or compliments, and it can soften refusals.”

Burridge and a colleague, Margaret Florey, published a paper in the Australian Journal of Linguistics in 2002 entitled “ ‘Yeah-no He’s a Good Kid’: A Discourse Analysis of Yeah-no in Australian English.”

An abstract of the paper said that as of 2002, “Yeah, no” was relatively new in Australian English and served many functions. It kept a conversation rolling, helped with “hedging and face-saving,” and indicated agreement or disagreement.

Since then, American linguists and language watchers have taken note of “yeah, no” in the US.

Linguists have discussed it on the American Dialect Society’s mailing list. And articles have been written by Stephen Dodson for Language Hat, by Mark Liberman for the Language Log, and by Ben Yagoda for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Even presidents of the United States aren’t immune. When a radio interviewer in 2011 asked Bill Clinton how he felt about being spoofed on TV comedy shows, Yagoda writes, “The former president replied, ‘Oh yeah, no I thought a lot of the Saturday Night Live guys were great.’ ” 

Liberman surveyed the speech databases in the Linguistic Data Consortium, and found that “in all the cases that I looked at, the yeah and the no seem be independently appropriate in the context of use, even if the sequence seems surprising when viewed in merely semantic terms.”

In one comment on the ADS list, the lexicographer Jonathan Lighter quoted a former New York City police detective as saying on CNN: “Yeah, no, you’re right!”

Lighter added: “There it seems to mean, ‘Yes indeed, and no, I wouldn’t think of contradicting you.’ ” 

But it can also mean disagreement, as in this tweet a few months ago about horror movies: “yeah no i hate blood and guns and stuff like that.”

PS: Readers of the blog have reported sightings (or, rather, hearings) of the usage in New Zealand, in South African English as well as Afrikaans, and in Danish.

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Let’s rustle up an answer

Q: The other day, I asked my office manager  to order me new business cards. Her answer: “Sure, I’ll rustle up some for you.” So where in the world does “rustle up” come from?

A: The verb “rustle” dates back at least as far as the 14th century, and it may have its roots in the early days of Old English.

It originally meant—and still means—to move about with a rustling sound, or as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “to make a soft, muffled crackling sound when moving.”

The OED says the origin of the word is uncertain, but it’s probably imitative—that is, “rustle” probably imitates the sound it describes.

The dictionary suggests that it may possibly be related to a “small group of very poorly attested Old English words” that refer to making noises: hristan, for example, meant to make a noise, and hrisian meant to shake or rattle.

Over the years, the verb “rustle” took on many different meanings in connection with making noises while moving around. People as well as things noisily rustled “about,” “in,” “through,” “to,” “up,” and so on.

In the 19th century, however, “rustle” took on several colloquial senses in the United States, including the one you’re asking about. Here are the new meanings and their first citations in the OED:

● to stir or rouse oneself into action: “Get up, rouse and rustle about, and get away from these scores” (1835, The Partisan, a novel by William Gilmore Simms).

● to search for food, forage: “Cattle and horses rustled in the neighbouring cane-brake” (1835, The Rambler in North America, a travel book by Charles Joseph Latrobe).

● to acquire, gather, provide something: “He nailed my thumb in his jaws, and rostled up a handful of dirt & throwed it in my eyes” (1844, Spirit of the Times, a weekly newspaper in New York City).

● to move quickly: “ ‘Rustle the things off that table,’ means clear the table in a hurry” (1882, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine).

● to gather people or animals: “I just told Billy … that it wasn’t any use for me to take her through … and he could rustle up some one to finish my drive” (1883, Our Deseret Home, by W. M. Eagan).

● to round up and steal cattle, horses, etc.: “He and Turner … went to Coppinger’s pasture, intending to kill the negro Frank, and ‘rustle’ six head of fat cattle, then in Coppinger’s pasture” (1886, Texas Court of Appeals Reports).

The sense that you’ve asked about (to acquire, gather, provide something) is defined more fully in the OED:

“To acquire or gather, typically as a result of searching or employing effort or initiative, and in response to a particular need; to provide (a person) with something urgently required; to hunt out; (freq. in later use) to put together (a dish or meal). Now usu. with up.”

Now, it’s time for us to take a break and rustle up some grub!

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Death, the great intensifier

Q: I find the death imagery in a sentence like “I love her to death” to be inappropriate and grotesque. I’d be thrilled (though not to death) if you would write something about this on the blog.

A: We’re sorry to disappoint you, but you won’t be thrilled by our answer. We don’t find the usage inappropriate or grotesque.

In fact, it has a long history, going back to the 1300s, though it’s often used negatively, not positively as in your example.

We’ve checked a half-dozen standard dictionaries and all of them list the use of “to death” in this sense as standard English for excessively or extremely.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the phrase “to death” (or “to dead”) has been used since the Middle Ages to intensify verbs of feeling or adjectives.

The OED defines the phrase in this sense as “to the last extremity, to the uttermost, to the point of physical or nervous exhaustion, beyond endurance.”

The dictionary’s earliest written example is from Cursor Mundi, a Middle English poem written sometime before 1400: “Herodias him hated to ded.”

And here’s an example from John Dryden’s 1672 play The Conquest of Granada: “I’m sad to death, that I must be your Foe.”

The common verbal phrase “to do something to death” showed up in Victorian times, according to published references in the OED.

Oxford’s earliest written example is from Recaptured Rhymes (1882), a collection of verse from the Saturday Review by the British writer Henry Duff Traill: “I am also called Played-out and Done-to-death, / And It-will-wash-no-more.”

The most recent citation is from an April 16, 1965, article in the New Statesman that describes a tune as “mercilessly done to death by countless performers.”

Although all the OED citations for the intensifier use it in a negative sense, we often see “to death” used positively and see nothing wrong with using the phrase for doing something intensely positive—like loving someone to death!

In case you’re wondering, the word “death” first showed up in Old English around 725 in Beowulf, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

It ultimately comes from reconstructed Proto-Germanic and Indo-European words for the act of dying.

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Punctuation Usage

The singularity of Mother’s Day

Q: Which is correct, Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day? I have a customer who wants to use the name as an imprint on promotional gifts for the holiday. I think of Mother’s Day as singular possessive, my mother, but in this case is it correct?

A: We also think it’s Mother’s Day, and so do the 10 standard dictionaries we regularly consult—five American and five British.

More to the point, Anna Jarvis, the woman primarily responsible for the modern holiday honoring mothers, thought so as well, according to a dissertation by the historian Katharine Antolini.

In “Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Defense of Her Mother’s Day,” Antolini says Jarvis wanted the singular possessive to emphasize that the day was to honor one’s own mother, not mothers in general.

As for common usage, “Mother’s Day” is the overwhelming favorite, according to our searches of online databases, though you’ll find many examples of the plural-possessive “Mothers’ Day” and the apostrophe-free “Mothers Day.”

Although the modern holiday originated in the US in the early 20th century, people have been celebrating mothers in one way or another since ancient times.

The specific term “Mother’s Day,” however, didn’t show up in print until the 19th century. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the June 3, 1874, issue of the New York Times:

“ ‘Mother’s Day,’ which was inaugurated in this City on the 2d of June, 1872, by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, was celebrated last night at Plimpton Hall by a mother’s peace meeting.” (We’ve gone to the Times archive to expand on the citation.)

The OED points out that Howe saw Mother’s Day not as a day to honor mothers (the modern sense) but as a “day on which mothers met to advocate peace, as by the dissolution of a standing army, etc.”

Howe, an abolitionist and social activist, is perhaps best known for writing the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” (The music is from the song “John Brown’s Body.”)

Like Howe, Anna Jarvis’s mother—Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis—was an activist who organized women for various social causes.

After the death of her mother on May 9, 1905, Anna Jarvis organized several “Mother’s Day” services and began a campaign, with the help of the Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker, to make Mother’s Day a national holiday.

The first two services—on May 12, 1907, and May 10, 1908—were held at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Jarvis’s mother had taught Sunday school.

The national campaign got off to a bumpy start. On May 9, 1908, Senator Elmer Burkett, a Nebraska Republican, introduced a resolution to recognize the following day as Mother’s Day.

But as an article in the May 10, 1908, issue of the New York Times reports, the resolution inspired “a number of witty sallies” in the Senate and was referred to the Judiciary Committee where “it will be permitted to sleep peacefully.”

Interestingly, Burkett’s resolution used the plural possessive, according to an OED citation from the Congressional Record for May 9, 1908: “Resolved, That Sunday, May 10, 1908, be recognized as Mothers’ Day.”

Jarvis pressed ahead with her Mother’s Day campaign, writing letters and sending pamphlets to public officials. Two years after the Burkett resolution was put to rest, she had her first victory.

In 1910, William Glasscock, the Governor of West Virginia, proclaimed the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, and soon the holiday spread to other states.

In 1912, Jarvis trademarked the phrases “Mother’s Day” and “second Sunday in May,” and established the Mother’s Day International Association to promote the holiday around the world.

On May 8, 1914, the US Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, and on May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day.

The American holiday inspired Mother’s Day observances around the world, but the date of the celebration varied from country to country.

In Britain, for example, where the holiday is also called Mothering Sunday (a name with roots in a religious ceremony dating back to the 16th century), it’s celebrated on the fourth Sunday in Lent.

A final note: Anna Jarvis, who was childless, began campaigning in the 1920s against the commercialization of Mother’s Day. She denounced confectioners, florists, and other commercial interests that she accused of gouging the public.

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English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Linguistics Phrase origin Usage

Parsing the Preamble

Q: I’m puzzled by this phrase from the Preamble: “in order to form a more perfect union.” What part of speech is “in order to”? It looks like a preposition. But how can the verb “form” be an object of a preposition? I struggle with this.

 A: You’ve raised an interesting Constitutional question. The short answer is that “in order to” is an idiomatic phrase that might be translated “so as to” and is followed by a verb.

As to what parts of speech are in play here, we think you can regard “in order to form” and similar constructions in two different ways:

(1) “In order to” is a compound preposition that has a bare infinitive (“form”) as its object.

(2) “In order” is a compound preposition that has a “to” infinitive (“to form”) as its object. The “to” here isn’t actually part of the infinitive, as we’ve written before on the blog.

In our opinion, arguing for one view over the other would be splitting hairs.

“In order” may not look like a preposition, but it functions like one, resembling “so as.” And as we’ll explain later, an infinitive can indeed be the object of a preposition.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language has an explanation that agrees with our option #2 above. Cambridge describes “in order” as a preposition followed by either a “to” infinitive or by a clause starting with “that.”

The “in order that” construction, according to Cambridge, “is somewhat more formal and considerably less frequent” than one with the “to” infinitive. 

And “in order that” requires the use of more words. As Cambridge notes, it often calls for “a modal auxiliary,” such as “might” or “can.”

Take a sentence like “I left work early in order that I might go to the gym.” It’s much wordier than “I left work early in order to go to the gym.” (In fact, as we’ve written before on the blog, you can often drop “in order” and be even less wordy!)

The Cambridge Grammar adds that the subjunctive mood is sometimes used with “in order that,” giving this example: “The administration had to show resolve in order that he not be considered a lame-duck president.” (Note the subjunctive “be.”)

But getting back to “in order to,” we were surprised to find only one standard dictionary that analyzes how the phrase functions as a part of speech.

The Collins English Dictionary calls “in order to” a preposition that is followed by an infinitive. Collins defines the phrase as meaning “so that it is possible to.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English language (5th ed.) simply say the phrase means “for the purpose of.”

But that definition is problematic on a literal level, since you can’t swap one expression for the other.

“For the purpose of” is followed by a gerund, like “forming,” while “in order to” is followed by an infinitive, like “form.” (A gerund ends in “-ing” and acts like a noun.)

The Oxford English Dictionary says “in order to” is used “with infinitive expressing purpose.” It defines the phrase as meaning “so as to do or achieve (some end or outcome).”

The OED’s first example of the usage is from the 1609 Douay translation of the Bible: “These are they that speak to Pharao, king of Egypt, in order to bring out the children of Israel from Egypt.”

A less lofty example is this caption from a 1994 issue of Food and Wine magazine: “True risotto must be stirred continuously in order to develop its unique texture.”

You expressed some doubt as to whether a verb can be the object of a preposition.

As we wrote on the blog in 2010, an infinitive as well as a gerund can be a direct object. We’ve also written about bare versus “to” infinitives several times, including posts in 2009 and 2013. 

We’ll add here that it’s not unusual for an infinitive—bare or not—to be the object of a preposition. For example, in all of these sentences, infinitives (both bare and with “to”) are the objects of prepositions:

“He can do everything but cook” … “She had no choice except to lie” … “I’d rather starve instead of steal” …  “We have better things to do than to argue” …”They were about to leave” … “He opened his mouth as if to speak.” (When used in this way, “as if” has a prepositional function, according to Cambridge.)

Finally, a Constitutional footnote. In case you’re bothered by the Founders’ use of  “more perfect” in that passage from the Preamble, take a look at our post on the subject.

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English English language Etymology Expression Linguistics Phrase origin Slang Usage Word origin

On the lam

Q: Some time ago I wrote you to recommend an essential book for someone in your trade: How the Irish Invented Slang, by Daniel Cassidy. There you will find, among many hundred entries, his view of the derivation of “lam” from the Irish word leim. Alas, Danny has since died, and his extraordinary achievement has not been properly recognized. I feel sure that if you look through his book you will be inspired to extend at least his scholarly life.

A: You won’t like what we have to say. This book sounds like a lot of fun, but perhaps there’s more fun in it than truth.

Cassidy’s book, which won an American Book Award for nonfiction in 2007, maintains that American slang is teeming with words of Irish origin—“jazz,” “spiel,” “baloney,” “nincompoop,” “babe,” and “bunkum,” to mention only a few.

But many of his claims have been disputed by linguists and lexicographers because they’re based merely on phonetic similarities.

The critics include Grant Barrett, a lexicographer and dictionary editor who specializes in slang, and Mark Liberman, a linguist who has called Cassidy’s book an “exercise in creative etymology.”

Cassidy himself has acknowledged that he based his etymologies on phonetic similarities. A New York Times interviewer wrote in 2007 about the inspiration that led to the book:

 “Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having ‘unknown origin.’ ”

 The article continues: “He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word ‘gimmick’ seemed to come from ‘camag,’ meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick.”

 “Buddy,” as Cassidy told the interviewer, sounded like bodach (Irish for a strong, lusty youth); “geezer” resembled gaosmhar (wise person); “dude” was like duid (foolish-looking fellow), and so on. He thus compiled lists of American slang words that sounded as if they came from Irish, and based his book on them.

But in doing serious etymology, one has to do more than show that words in one language sound or look like those in another. A superficial resemblance might provide a starting point, but it shouldn’t be the conclusion.

A more authoritative approach would be to apply the academic standards that a lexicographer or a comparative linguist would use, supporting one’s case with documented evidence from written records. 

Let’s focus on the phrase you mention—“on the lam.”

Cassidy suggests an etymology of “lam” in a passage about an Irish-American gambler named Benny Binion: “Benny went on the lam (leim, jump), scramming to Vegas with two million dollars in the trunk of his maroon Cadillac.”

So Cassidy is proposing that “lam” in this sense is derived from the Irish leim. But other than that parenthetical note, he offers no evidence for the suggested etymology.

It’s true that leim (pronounced LAY-im) is Irish Gaelic for “jump” or “leap.” It’s similar to nouns with the same meaning in other Celtic languages (llam in Welsh, lam in Breton and Cornish, lheim in Manx Gaelic, leum in Scottish Gaelic), and it shows up in many Irish place names.

But we haven’t found a single other source that connects the Irish leim with the American slang term “lam,” meaning to run away. Not one.

If there were any truth in Cassidy’s assertion, etymologists and lexicographers would have picked up on it by now. 

Slang scholars still describe the origin of the “lam” in “on the lam” as unknown, and they would be only too happy to discover it.

Several theories have been proposed over the years: (1) that “lam” is short for “slam”; (2) that it’s from “lammas,” a mid-19th century British slang word meaning to run off; and (3) that it’s from the verb “lam” (to beat), used like “beat” in the older phrase “beat it.”

The last theory is the most commonly proposed—that the slang “lam” comes from the verb meaning to beat.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “lam” has had this meaning (to “beat soundly” or “thrash”) since Shakespeare’s day. The earliest citations in writing come from the 1590s.

In the late 19th century, the OED says, this verb “lam” acquired a new meaning in American slang—“to run off, to escape, to ‘beat it.’ ”

Oxford’s earliest citation for the slang verb is from Allan Pinkerton’s book Thirty Years a Detective (1886), in a reference to a pickpocket:

“After he has secured the wallet he will … utter the word ‘lam!’ This means to let the man go, and to get out of the way as soon as possible.”

The following year, the OED says, the word started appearing as a noun to mean “escape” or “flight.” Oxford’s earliest example here is from an 1897 issue of Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly: “To do a lam, meaning to run.”

Over the next few decades, according to slang dictionaries, to run or escape was to “lam,” “do a lam,” “make a lam,” “lam it,” “go on the lam,” “take a lam,” “take it on the lam,” and “be on the lam.”

Similarly, the OED says, a fugitive or somebody on the run was called a “lamster” (1904; also spelled “lamaster” and “lammister”).

It’s not hard to see how the “lam” that means to beat it might have descended from the “lam” that means to beat.

Since Old English, as the OED says, to “beat” has been “said of the action of the feet upon the ground in walking or running.”

This use of “beat,” according to Oxford, has given us phrases like “beat the streets,” “beat a path,” “beat a track,” and so on. In the 17th century, to “beat the hoof,” or “beat it on the hoof,” was to go on foot. 

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says the phrase “beat it” (to clear out, go in a hurry), was first recorded in 1878, when it appeared in A. F. Mulford’s Fighting Indians in the 7th United States Cavalry:

“The Gatling guns sang rapidly for a few seconds, and how those reds, so boastful at their war dance the night before, did ‘beat it!’ ”

So the slang use of “beat it” was around before “lam” (to beat) acquired its extended slang meaning (to run or beat it).

But we haven’t discussed where the earlier “lam” came from. Etymologists believe it’s derived from the Old Norse lemja (to flog or to cripple by beating). However, an even earlier source has been suggested, one that’s older than writing.

The linguist Calvert Watkins, writing in The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, identifies the source of “lam” and “lame” (both verb and adjective) as an Indo-European root that’s been reconstructed as lem-, meaning “to break in pieces, broken, soft, with derivatives meaning ‘crippled.’ ”

This Indo-European root developed into prehistoric Proto-Germanic words that have been reconstructed as lamon (weak limbed, lame) and lamjan (to flog, beat, cripple), according to Watkins and to the lexicographer John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

Other authorities, including the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, say the Indo-European lem– also has descendants outside the Germanic languages, including an adjective in Old Irish and Middle Irish, lem (“foolish, insipid”).

The modern Irish equivalent, leamh, is similarly defined (“foolish, insipid, importunate”) in An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, by Alexander McBain. 

This is a different word entirely from the Irish leim (jump), which McBain says was leimm in Old Irish.

We mentioned above that leim can be found in many Irish place names.

To mention just a few, there are Limavady (the Irish name is Leim an Mhadaidh, or “leap of the dog”); Lemnaroy (Leim an Eich Ruaidh, “leap of the reddish horse”); and Leixlip (Leim an Bhradain, “leap of the salmon”).

This last one is an interesting case. Leixlip is on the river Liffey, which is rich in salmon. The town’s original name came from Old Norse, lax hlaup (“salmon leap”).

In the 1890s, when Leixlip adopted an Irish name, it chose Leim an Bhradain (“leap of the salmon”), a direct translation of the Old Norse. Of course, the Vikings who settled there in the Dark Ages may have used a Norse translation from Irish. Who knows?

Some etymological questions may never be settled for sure. That doesn’t mean scholarly methods can’t be used to make an educated guess. Still, uneducated guesses are made all the time because people are so eager to know.

Woody Allen once satirized this desperate need to know. In a humorous essay called “Slang Origins,” from his book Without Feathers (1972), he wrote:

“How many of you have ever wondered where certain slang expressions come from? Like ‘She’s the cat’s pajamas,’ or to ‘take it on the lam.’ Neither have I. And yet for those who are interested in this sort of thing I have provided a brief guide to a few of the more interesting origins. …

“ ‘Take it on the lam’ is English in origin. Years ago, in England, ‘lamming’ was a game played with dice and a large tube of ointment. Each player in turn threw dice and then skipped around the room until he hemorrhaged. If a person threw seven or under he would say the word ‘quintz’ and proceed to twirl in a frenzy. If he threw over seven, he was forced to give every player a portion of his feathers and was given a good ‘lamming.’ Three ‘lammings’ and a player was ‘kwirled’ or declared a moral bankrupt. Gradually any game with feathers was called ‘lamming’ and feathers became ‘lams.’ To ‘take it on the lam’ meant to put on feathers and later, to escape, although the transition is unclear.

“Incidentally, if two of the players disagreed on the rules, we might say they ‘got into a beef.’ This term goes back to the Renaissance when a man would court a woman by stroking the side of her head with a slab of meat. If she pulled away, it meant she was spoken for. If, however, she assisted by clamping the meat to her face and pushing it all over her head, it meant she would marry him. The meat was kept by the bride’s parents and worn as a hat on special occasions. If, however, the husband took another lover, the wife could end the marriage by running with the meat to the town square and yelling, ‘With thine own beef, I do reject thee. Aroo! Aroo!’ If a couple ‘took to the beef’ or ‘had a beef’ it meant they were quarreling.”

We think there’s a lesson here—and some lessons come with a laugh. The human mind abhors a vacuum. When the most advanced methods of scholarship can’t (or haven’t yet) come up with definitive answers, then answers will be invented. 

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