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Why ‘any other’ doesn’t mean ‘any’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why ‘well-heeled’ means well-to-do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wet behind the ears

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Is ‘curt’ terser than ‘terse’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Is ‘lovely’ a girly word?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The poop about a mass noun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The battle for ‘Kyiv’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We are met on a great battle-field

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

Q: Watching a recent rebroadcast of “The Civil War” on PBS, I was struck by this sentence in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “We are met on a great battle-field of that war.” Is “we are met” just a poetic usage? Or is something else going on?

A: “We are met” is a present-perfect construction, parallel to “we have met.” The usage dates back to the Middle Ages, but by Lincoln’s time it was considered archaic and poetic.

You can still hear it today, though the usage sounds unusual to modern ears because it combines “met” (the past participle of “meet”) with a form of “be” as the auxiliary verb instead of the usual “have.”

So, for instance, a speaker uses “we are met to honor him” in place of “we have met to honor him”—or, to use the simple present tense, “we meet to honor him.”

The poetic “we are met” gives the message a solemnity and gravity it wouldn’t otherwise convey.

Here “met” is used in the sense of “assembled” or “gathered” or “brought together.” And the auxiliary “be” is possible only when this sense of “met” is used intransitively—that is, without a direct object.

In its entry for “meet,” the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “in intransitive use the perfect tenses were freq. formed with the auxiliary be in Middle English and early modern English; subsequently this became archaic and poetic.”

The OED has citations from the 14th century onward, including this Middle English example from Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem “The Complaint of Mars” (circa 1385): “The grete joye that was betwix hem two, / When they be mette.”

This one is from Thomas Starkey’s A Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, written sometime before 1538: “Seying that we be now here mete … accordyng to our promys.”

And here’s a poetic 19th-century use from William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Virginians (1859): “The two gentlemen, with a few more friends, were met round General Lambert’s supper-table.”

Today, we’re more likely to encounter this usage on solemn occasions, as when people gather for religious worship or funeral eulogies.

Lincoln isn’t the only American politician to use “we are met” in elevated oratory. In 1965, in a speech before Congress in support of equal voting rights, President Lyndon B. Johnson said:

“There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.”

A somewhat similar use of “met” with the “be” auxiliary is also antiquated today. This is the expression “to be well met,” first recorded in the 15th century and meaning to be welcome or well received.

This is the source of the old expression “hail fellow well met,” which evolved in the late 16th century from the slightly earlier phrase “hail, fellow!”

“Hail, fellow!” was a friendly greeting of the 1500s that was also used adjectivally, the OED says, to mean “on such terms, or using such freedom with another, as to accost him with ‘hail, fellow!’ ”

We’ll quote 19th-century examples of the shorter as well as the longer adjectival phrases, courtesy of the OED:

“He crossed the room to her … with something of a hail-fellow bearing.” (From Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886.)

“He was popular … though not in any hail-fellow-well-met kind of way.” (From H. Rider Haggard’s novel Colonel Quaritch, V.C., 1888.)

We’ll close with a more contemporary example we found in a letter to the editor of the Bergen (N.J.) Record in 2012:

“The most exciting thing about the Republican National Convention was the hurricane. … Where is the enthusiasm, the fire they need to capture the voters? Where is the ‘Hail fellow, well met’? This convention was a snore fest.”

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Tracking the ‘daily double’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘On the TV’ vs. ‘on TV’

Q: “We watched the game on the TV” sounds non-standard, while “We listened to the game on the radio” sounds perfectly fine. Why does “the” seem wrong when applied to TV, but OK when applied to radio?

A: The use of the definite article in fixed expressions like those is arbitrary and idiomatic. For example, you can listen “to the radio” or “on the radio,” but you communicate “by radio” and work “in radio.”

As Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum explain in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, “A number of fixed expressions require the definite article. In such cases, it is largely arbitrary that the definite article is required rather than a bare noun (and often both are possible).”

Huddleston and Pullum note the use of “the definite article in expressions concerned with devices and institutions for the transfer of information, even though it is the activity or action that is relevant rather than the device used on a particular occasion.”

They cite “listened to the radio” and “spoke to her on the telephone,” where the definite article is necessary, but note that “the article is optional” in “watch something on (the) television” and not used in “watch (some) television.”

Searches with the News on the Web corpus, which tracks newspapers and magazines on the Internet, indicate that “on television” (91,933 hits) is much more popular than “on the television” (9,635). Nevertheless, dictionaries consider both versions standard English.

The wording of  Merriam-Webster’s entry for the usage, “on (the) television,” indicates that the article is optional.

M-W defines the expression as “broadcast by television” or “being shown by television or in a television program.”

The dictionary includes these examples: “What is on the television tonight?” and “There’s nothing (I want to watch) on television right now.”

The authors of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, Randolph Quirk et al., say the definite article is used in expressions like “the newsthe radiothe televisionthe paper(s)the press, etc., referring to aspects of mass communication.” But they add that “with television or TV, there is also the possibility that the article will be omitted.”

Quirk includes these among his examples: “Did you hear the ten o’clock news?” …  “What’s on the radio this evening?” … “What’s on (the) TV this evening?”

As we said at the beginning, the use of “the” in such expressions is idiomatic and arbitrary. Like you, we find “on TV” more natural than “on the TV,” but both versions are standard.

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Did great-granddad coin ‘bloviate’?

Q: My great-grandfather, Paul Jones, created the word “bloviate.” He was a magazine publisher in Topeka, KS.

A: Your ancestor had a long and impressive life, but it wasn’t long enough for him to have created the word “bloviate,” which appeared in print 18 years before he was born.

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

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

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

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of “bloviate,” which we’ve expanded, is from the Oct. 14, 1845, issue of The Huron Reflector in Norwalk, OH:

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

Your great-grandfather, the lawyer, publisher, and civil-rights activist Paul Jones, was born in a log cabin in 1856 “of slave parentage,” according to his obituary in The Call, an African-American weekly newspaper in Kansas City, MO. The obituary says he died on March 7, 1952, in Topeka at the age of 96.

A Dec. 19, 1902, article in The Plaindealer, an African-American weekly in Topeka, says Jones was born in Culpepper, VA, and moved with his family to Chicago at the age of nine.

He attended Northwestern University and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1880, according to the Plaindealer. He then practiced law in Chicago, Kansas City, MO, and Kansas City, KS.

A 1948 article in The Journal of Negro History says Jones was active in Kansas politics and worked to help African-Americans who migrated from the south.

On retiring, the article says, “he began the editing of the Paul Jones Monthly, a magazine which he continued to publish until ill health forced his retirement in 1942.”

“Today, at 93, although he is now partly blind, deaf, and cannot smell, his mind is as active and alert as when a much younger man,” the article continues. “As he sits on his porch in Topeka and regales his listeners with interesting stories of his past, it is apparent that he has led a very active life.”

(From “Benjamin, or ‘Pap,’ Singleton and His Followers,” by Roy Garvin, The Journal of Negro History, January 1948.) Singleton (1809-1900) escaped slavery in Tennessee, became a civil-rights activist, and established African-American settlements in Kansas.

In a 2006 post, which we recently updated, we note that the OED defines “bloviate” as “to talk at length, esp. using inflated or empty rhetoric; to speechify or ‘sound off.’ ”

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

The word was a favorite of President Warren G. Harding, who was a native of Ohio and something of a bloviator. The journalist and cultural critic H. L. Mencken couldn’t stand Harding’s writing and described it this way:

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

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

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What’s normal about a ‘normal school’?

Q: Have you any idea what’s “normal” in terms like “normal school” and “normal college” and “normal department”?

A: Many of today’s American universities got their start in the 19th century as “normal schools” or “normal colleges”—that is, teacher training schools intended to standardize requirements and raise the quality of teachers in public education.

Earlier in the century, a similar usage developed in British higher education, where an institution specifically for training teachers was a “normal school” and a large university’s department of education was its “normal department.”

Later on, the adjective was dropped as the “normals” grew more comprehensive and did more than train teachers.

For instance, the Normal School of Design, founded in 1837 to set standards for art and design education, was renamed the Royal College of Art in 1896.

And in the US, the California State Normal School, founded in 1880 to train teachers, eventually became UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles.

How did the word “normal” relate to the training of teachers in those days? The use can be traced to the classical Latin norma (a model, standard, or pattern). We’ll show later how this notion made its way into French educational terminology and then into English.

The educational sense of “normal” is defined this way in the Oxford English Dictionary: “Of, relating to, or intended for the training of teachers, esp. in Continental Europe and North America.”

This sense of the adjective “normal,” the OED says, is found “chiefly” in the phrase “normal school” and is “now historical”—that is, used in references to the past.

The dictionary adds this note: “In North America, normal schools were for training primary school teachers. In Continental Europe, different normal schools also trained teachers at secondary and tertiary levels.”

(A clarification: Many “normal colleges” in the US had both short- and long-term programs. They offered not only teaching certificates, qualifying people to teach in elementary schools, but bachelor’s degrees enabling them to teach high school as well.)

The educational use of “normal,” as well as the phrase “normal school,” was adopted from late 18th-century French, where an école normale (first recorded in 1793) was a school for the training of teachers. Here the adjective normale meant “which serves as a model,” according to the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest English example—for this use of “normal” and for “normal school”—is from an anonymous English author who had lived in France in the 1790s: “At the opening of the Normal schools” (A Residence in France, 1797, by an “English Lady”).

Oxford notes that France’s first école normale “was set up by decree in 1794, and later became dedicated to training teachers for secondary education and thus (from 1845) called the Ecole Normale Supérieure.”

The dictionary’s next English citation is from a letter written on Aug. 29, 1826, by a Scottish clergyman visiting Copenhagen: “Colonel Abrahamson … has been with us all this afternoon, and has shewn us the Normal School” (The Life and Letters of Christopher Anderson, written by Hugh Anderson in 1853).

The earliest use we’ve found for the term in the US is from 1839, the year that the first such school opened in America. This is from a proclamation issued on April, 12, 1839, by the Massachusetts Board of Education:

“The Board of Education hereby give notice, that one Normal School, for the qualification of Female Teachers, is to be established at Lexington, in the county of Middlesex; and another, for the qualification of both Males and Females, is to be established at Barre, in the county of Worcester.” (From The Common School Journal, Boston, April 15, 1839. The journal was edited by Horace  Mann, who signed the proclamation as a member of the state board and who was later a US congressman.)

The Lexington Normal School opened first, on July 3, 1839 (it’s now Framingham State University). Among the school’s first graduating class was Mann’s niece Rebecca Mann Pennell Dean, who went on to teach at Antioch College in 1853, making her the nation’s first female college professor.

As a later citation from the OED shows, American educators commonly used variations like “normal college” and “normal university.” This is from legislation recorded in the Illinois House Journal (1857):

“Senate bill for ‘An act for the establishment and maintenance of a normal university’ was taken up. … There shall be established in said university … a normal college for the education of teachers of common schools.”

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When ‘nubile’ became sexy

Q: Could you comment on the near-complete transition in meaning for “nubile,” from marriageable to young and hot?

A: Yes, the adjective “nubile” meant marriageable when it showed up in English in the 17th century, but the transition to sexy may not be as near-complete as you think.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “nubile” ultimately comes from the classical Latin nubilis (suitable for marriage), a derivative of the verb nubere (to marry).

The dictionary says the English adjective, as well as its Latin ancestor, originally referred to a girl or young woman “of an age or condition suitable for marriage.” The lexicographer John Ayto notes in his Dictionary of Word Origins that nubere has also given English “connubial” and “nuptial,” a word we wrote about recently.

The OED’s earliest “nubile” citation, which we’ve expanded, refers to a marriage between a 9-year-old niece of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, and the 15-year-old son of James Hamilton, 2nd Marquess of Hamilton:

“And seing that Buckinghams neece was not yet nubile in yeares, and that before the mariage should be confirmed a way might be found out to annull it, vnto which he [Hamilton] was forced by deceitfull importunity, therfore he yeelded vnto the kings desire of the match.” From The Forerunner of Revenge (1626), a pamphlet by George Eglisham that says King James I, prodded by Buckingham, pressured a reluctant Hamilton into agreeing to the marriage.

Like you, we don’t see much of the marriageable sense of “nubile” these days, but five of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult still include that meaning.

Here, for instance, is the entry for “nubile” in Merriam-Webster: “1. of marriageable condition or age (nubile young women); 2. sexually attractive—used of a young woman (a nubile starlet).”

The sensual meaning of “nubile” appeared in the mid-20th century. The OED defines it this way: “Chiefly of a girl or young woman, or a personal attribute: sexually attractive.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation, which we’ve expanded, is from Dangling Man, a 1944 novel by Saul Bellow: “She no longer fought against me but, with her long hair reaching nearly to the floor and her round, nubile thighs bare, lay in my lap.”

We’ll end with an OED example that uses “nubile” to describe Marilyn Monroe: “A woman so sensitive and alive, so nubile as flesh and evanescent as a wisp of vapour” (from Marilyn: A Biography, 1973, by Norman Mailer).

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A sod story

Q: I’m puzzled by the word “sod” in Genesis 25:29 of the King James Version of the Bible: “And Jacob sod pottage: and Esau came from the field, and he was faint.” I looked up several definitions of “sod,” but I can’t figure out what it means in this verse.

A: The word “sod” in that passage means “boiled” or “cooked,” and that’s the way it’s translated in most modern versions of the New Testament.

Here’s the passage in  the New International Version: “Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished.” And here it is in the American Standard Version: “And Jacob boiled pottage. And Esau came in from the field, and he was faint.” This is from the New King James Version: “Now Jacob cooked a stew; and Esau came in from the field, and he was weary.”

As it happens, “sod” is an obsolete past tense of the verb “seethe,” which originally meant to boil a liquid or to cook food by boiling or stewing, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest example for “seethe” in the OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, is from Old English Leechdoms (circa 1000), a collection of Anglo-Saxon medical remedies:

“Gif mon syþ garleac on henne broþe” (“If a man seethes [boils] garlic in chicken broth”). The þ at the end of syþ, Old English for “seethes,” is a thorn, a letter pronounced like “th.”

The past tense of “seethe” was seaþ in Old English and originally seþseeth, etc., in Middle English, according to the dictionary. But the Middle English past tense was later “superseded by the form sod taken from the past participle” (soden or sodden).

The OED adds that the sod past tense for “seethe” is now obsolete, and sodden has “ceased to be associated with this verb.” By the 1600s “seethed” had replaced “sod” as the past tense, and by the 1700s it had replaced “sodden” as the past participle of the verb “seethe.”

The various contemporary uses of “sod” as a noun (a piece of turf, a contemptuous person, an annoying experience, etc.) aren’t etymologically related to the archaic Middle English past tense of the verb.

But “sodden” lives on as an adjective with the boiled-down sense of “having the appearance of, or resembling, that which has been soaked or steeped in water; rendered dull, stupid, or expressionless, esp. owing to drunkenness or indulgence in intoxicants; pale and flaccid,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “sodden” used in this sense, which we’ve expanded, is from The Fountaine of Selfe-Loue; or, Cynthias Reuels (1601), a satirical play by Ben Jonson: “By Gods will, I scorne him, as I do the sodden Nimph that was heere euen now; his mistris Arete: And I loue my selfe for nothing else.”

The boiling sense of “seethe” is now archaic, but the verb is often used figuratively today for someone or something boiling with agitation, anger, excitement, rage, turmoil, and so on.

The OED defines this figurative sense as to “be in a state of inward agitation, turmoil, or ‘ferment.’ Said of a person in trouble, fever, etc.; of plans, elements of discontent or change; also of a region filled with excitement, disaffection, etc.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida (1602). Pandarus, Cressida’s uncle, is talking here to a servant: “I come to speak with Paris from the Prince Troylus. I will make a complimentall assault vpon him, for my businesse seethe ’s.”

We’ll end with an example from Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem in blank verse: “She lay and seethed in fever many weeks, / But youth was strong and overcame the test; / Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled / And fetched back to the necessary day / And daylight duties.”

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Nuptial commotions!

Q: I recently corrected yet another person who pronounced “nuptial” as if it were spelled “nuptual,” and continue to lament the fact that I have almost never heard it pronounced correctly. Do any of the standard dictionaries you consult have it as an alternative, or (God forbid!) as the first choice?

A: It’s dangerous to correct someone, especially on pronunciation. Language changes and dictionaries change along with it. That said, you’re in the majority on “nuptial.”

Only one of the ten standard dictionaries we use accepts a three-syllable pronunciation, as if the word were spelled “nuptual.” The other nine accept only two-syllable versions.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary (5th ed.) is the outlier here. In listing acceptable pronunciations of “nuptial,” it first gives the two-syllable versions: NUP-shəl and NUP-chəl. (The ə symbol, called a schwa, represents an “uh” sound, like the “a” in “ago” or “about.”) Those pronunciations, as the dictionary explains in its front matter, may be regarded as “widely used in American speech.”

But following those, it lists these three-syllable variants introduced by “also”: NUP-shə-wəl and NUP-chə-wəl. In Webster’s New World, a variant pronunciation that’s qualified with an italicized “also” or “occas.” does not occur as regularly in American English but shouldn’t be considered nonstandard.

The only other dictionaries that comment at all on the three-syllable pronunciations—Merriam-Webster online and the larger, subscription-only Merriam-Webster Unabridged—do label them nonstandard. The remaining American and British dictionaries that we regard as authoritative list only two-syllable versions.

All ten dictionaries accept NUP-shəl (with “sh” in the last syllable) as the principal pronunciation, many giving it as the only one. Most add NUP-chəl (with “ch”) as well, though in actual speech it can be hard to tell the difference.

So that’s the picture as far as standard dictionaries. As for the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, it gives only the preferred two-syllable pronunciation (with “sh”), though it suggests there’s a hint of a “t” in there: NUPT-shəl.

As you know, “nuptial” is an adjective having to do with matrimony and the marriage ceremony, as well as a noun for a wedding. The noun appears sometimes in the singular but it’s mostly used in the plural, “nuptials.”

The word was borrowed, the OED says, either from French (nuptial) or from Latin, in which nuptialis means “of or relating to marriage or a wedding” and nuptiae means “wedding.” The nupt- element, the dictionary adds, is the past participial stem of the Latin nubere (to marry).

The adjective form entered English first, in the late 15th century, and the noun followed in the mid-16th.

This is the OED’s earliest example of the noun in English writing: “The goddesse Iuno, quene and patronesse of the commocyons [commotions] nupcyalle” (The Boke yf Eneydos [Aeneids], William Caxton’s 1490 translation from a French version of Virgil’s Latin). We like the phrase “nuptial commotions”!

And this is Oxford’s earliest citation for the noun: “Within a while after (he being vanquished with loue) maried her secretly at her house, and solempnized the nuptialles by a Prieste vnknowen” (The Palace of Pleasure Beautified, Adorned and Well Furnished, a book of stories collected and retold by William Painter, 1566).

Finally, since we’re occasionally asked which standard dictionaries we use, here they are in alphabetical order. They’re free online except where noted.

  1. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
  2. Cambridge English Dictionary
  3. Collins English Dictionary
  4. Dictionary.com, based on The Random House Unabridged Dictionary
  5. Lexico, formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online
  6. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
  7. Macmillan Dictionary
  8. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary
  9. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, subscription only
  10. Webster’s New World College Dictionary (5th ed.), print only

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Comparatively speaking

Q: Here in Colorado all the TV stations are following a devastating wildfire in the town of Superior. But like Ogden Nash’s language-obsessed Professor Twist, I’m wondering why we have the comparatives “superior” and “inferior,” but not an in-between one like “medior.”

A: True, there’s no comparative adjective “medior” along the lines of “superior” and “inferior.” The closest adjective we can think of would be “mediocre” (middling, average), but it’s not a comparative like the “-ior” adjectives—and no, we don’t recommend “mediocrer.” (We’ll have something to say later about Professor Twist.)

There are English words formed with “medio-,” a combining element derived from the classical Latin medius (middle), but they’re not comparatives. And they’re used only in botany, zoology, and medicine (as in “mediodorsal,” “mediocarpal,” etc.).

If a comparative “medior” did exist, it would be a blend of “medio-” and the suffix “-ior.” But evidently English, sensible language that it is, doesn’t need a word that would mean “more average.”

When we examine comparative adjectives like “superior,” we’re looking at a very simple kind of word. Sometimes there’s no real stem, just a prefix (“super-”) and a suffix (“-ior”).

Words like this have been simple from the beginning. The English suffix “-ior” represents the “Latin -ior of comparatives,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

So, for example, the classical Latin adjective superior, from which the English word was borrowed, was the comparative form of superus (upper), derived from super (above).

Similar formations are “inferior,” “interior,” “exterior,” “senior,” “junior,” and “ulterior.” That last one, unlike the others, doesn’t have an opposite.

We’ve already given the Latin etymology of “superior,” which was first recorded in English some time before 1393. Here are the sources of the others, along with the earliest dates given in the OED:

  • “inferior” (probably 1387): from the Latin adjective inferior (lower), the comparative form of inferus (low).
  • “interior” (1490): from the Latin adjective interior (inner), comparative of the preposition and adverb inter (among, between, etc.).
  • “exterior” (before 1538): from the Latin adjective exterior (outer), comparative of exter and exterus (outside, outward), derived from ex (out of).  A related English prefix, “extra-”  (situated outside of), is from the Latin preposition and adverb extra (beyond, outside of).
  • “junior” (1606): from the Latin junior (younger), the comparative form of juvenis (young).
  • “senior” (probably 1397): from the Latin senior (older), the comparative form of senex (old).
  • “ulterior” (1646): from the Latin ulterior (more distant), comparative of an unrecorded Latin adjective reconstructed as ulter (distant), a relative of ultra (beyond), which is the source of our English prefix “ultra-.”

The “-ior” suffix in English, the OED says, was formerly spelled “-iour,” equivalent to the French -ieur, seen in supérieur, inférieur, intérieur, extérieur, and ultérieur.

As for the pronunciation of “-ior” comparatives, Oxford says the “primary stress is usually attracted to the syllable immediately preceding this suffix and vowels may be reduced accordingly.”

For instance, the word “super” is stressed on the first syllable, but in the comparative “superior,” the stress is on the second. In addition, the sound of the vowel “e” in “super” changes in “superior.”

Getting back to your question, one can indeed obsess too much about language, like Professor Twist in Ogden Nash’s poem “The Purist.”

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”

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Waste paper

Q: I once read that Cotton Mather wrote something like this: “As a cure for human ills, human excreta is a remedy that is hardly to be paralleled.” I took the “hardly to be paralleled” part to heart and sometimes use it with my wife. We find it droll. I have not been able to find this quotation now, though I do not think I hallucinated it. Can you help?

A: You didn’t hallucinate that passage from the Puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663-1728), who wrote extensively about medical subjects. You’ve had a hard time finding it because the original differs a bit from your memory of it.

The quote comes from The Angel of Bethesda, a medical treatise that was substantially finished in 1724 but not published in Mather’s lifetime. In a section on the use of human excrement in treating disease, he first discusses feces (one use is for treating eye problems!), then turns his attention to urine:

“And yett there is another Excrement of Humane Bodies that is hardly to be parallel’d! Medicinal Springs have been of great Esteem in the World, and much Resorted to. People expect Much from Going to the Waters. But, my Friend, thou hast one within thee, that Exceeds them all. The Uses and Vertues of Humane URINE, St. Barnaby’s Day were scarce Long Enough to enumerate them. The People, who take a Daily Draught of it, (Either their own or some young healthy persons,) have Hundreds of Thousands of them, found a Presærvative of Health (even to Old Age) hardly to be æqualled.”

The treatise was published for the first time in 1972, edited by the historian Gordon W. Jones, though excerpts had appeared in print earlier.

For a time as a young man, Mather studied medicine because a stammer seemed likely to prevent him from becoming a minster, according to the historian Vern Bullough, who reviewed The Angel of Bethesda in the fall 1973 issue of the journal Early American Literature.

In general Mather believed that sin was the cause of sickness, and sickness was the punishment of God. Although many of his ideas sound strange today, the recommended treatments reflected the medical thinking in early 18th-century Colonial America.

However, he was criticized by many doctors for his support of smallpox inoculation. He helped introduce variolation, a precursor of smallpox vaccination, to New England in 1721 and ’22.

He also differed with many doctors in his belief that germs spread disease, though he considered germs to be minuscule insects, tinier than the tiniest grains of sand, that propagated sickness with their eggs.

Thanks for a question that’s hardly to be paralleled. And in case you’re interested, Mather’s ophthalmological remedy involved drying poop, grinding it into powder, and then blowing it into the eye.

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A fortuitous  etymology?

Q: The editor of The Bridge World is more of a stickler than I, but the magazine recently used “fortuitous” in the sense of  “fortunate,” a usage that I consider unfortunate: “Levine’s initial pass had the fortuitous effect of putting him on lead against three notrump.” Do you condone this?

A: The adjective “fortuitous” meant “accidental,” not “fortunate,” when it entered English more than 350 years ago, but it has evolved over the last century to describe a fortunate accident as well as a mere accident.

As Pat explains in Woe Is I (4th ed., 2019), her grammar and usage book, “those notions of good fortune and chance have blended so much that dictionaries also accept a hybrid definition—something fortuitous is  a lucky accident.”

All ten standard dictionaries that we regularly consult—five American and five British—accept that new sense of the word. In fact, three of the dictionaries list it as the only sense. And that’s the meaning of “fortuitous” in that passage from The Bridge World.

We’d add that this serendipitous sense is now so common that we generally avoid using “fortuitous.” If we use it for something that’s just accidental, we’re likely to be misunderstood. And if we use it for a happy accident, we’ll stir up the sticklers. It’s now in what a reader of the blog has described as a never-never land.

As for the etymology, English adopted “fortuitous” in the 17th century from the Latin fortuitus (accidental, casual). The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry, which hasn’t been fully updated since 1897, has only one definition: “That happens or is produced by fortune or chance; accidental, casual.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is found in a treatise opposing atheism: “This Argument against the fortuitous concourse of Atoms.”  From An Antidote Against Atheism, or an Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man, Whether There Be Not a God (1653), by the English philosopher Henry More.

The hybrid sense of “fortuitous” to describe a happy accident began appearing in the early 20th century, according to a usage note in Merriam-Webster online. The dictionary says, “the fact that ‘fortuitous’ sounds like a blend of ‘fortunate’ and ‘felicitous’ (meaning ‘happily suited to an occasion’) may have been what ultimately led to a second meaning.”

“That use has been disparaged by critics, but it is now well established,” M-W adds. “Perhaps the seeds of the newer sense were planted by earlier writers applying overtones of good fortune to something that is a chance occurrence. In fact, today we quite often apply ‘fortuitous’ to something that is a chance occurrence but has a favorable result.”

The earliest example we’ve seen for the hybrid sense showed up in a usage manual at the turn of the 20th century. In a list of questionable citations “from New York newspapers for the most part,” the book includes this passage: “The change of system is considered fortuitous [fortunate] at this time.” From Word and Phrase: True and False Use in English (1901), by Joseph Fitzgerald.

But as you know, this sense of “fortuitous” has been used by many respected writers since the mid-20th century. Here are a few from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage:

“We have a great and fortuitous advantage, for if there is nothing the Kremlin wants more than to rule the world, there is nothing the United States wants less than to rule the world” (Call to Greatness, 1954, by Adlai Stevenson).

“The circumstance was a fortuitous one for Abraham Lockwood” (The Lockwood Concern, 1965, by John O’Hara).

“She panted into the underground, snatched a ticket from the machine, belted down the stairs, and there was a fortuitous train” (The Good Terrorist, 1985, by Doris Lessing).

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Cut to the chase

Q: What’s the origin of “cut to the chase”? Keystone Cops? Hounds on a fox scent? Or other?

A: The expression “cut to the chase,” which was first recorded in the early 20th century, is derived from the use of the verb “cut” in filmmaking to mean move rapidly from one scene to another.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense of “cut” as “to make a quick transition from one shot to the next.” The earliest example that we’ve seen for the usage is from an early 20th-century book on motion-picture technique:

“Perhaps we can cut to Sam wondering what effect the marriage will have on his chances” (from Technique of the Photoplay, 2d ed., 1913, by Epes Winthrop Sargent). Oxford cites as its first example a different passage from the 1916 third edition of the book.

The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, says the expression “cut to the chase” was originally a film usage meaning “to cut to a chase scene; (hence) to cut to an interesting or fast-paced part of a film.”

The usage appeared in writing for the first time in J. P. McEvoy’s Hollywood Girl (1929), a novel about a Broadway showgirl who finds success in the Hollywood talkies. These three passages in the novel are from script directions in a fictional screenplay (the OED cites an abbreviated version of the third passage):

(1) “Chaney in plaster cast, chewing orchids. Cut to chase”; (2) “with a custard pie klunk that’s a laugh isn’t that a wow now we cut to the chase”; (3) “Quick flashes, breasts, hips, legs. Jannings escapes―I’ll figure it out later … Cut to chase.” (The ellipsis is in the novel.)

As far as we can tell, the expression didn’t appear in print again until 15 years later. In this example from a Canadian newspaper, it’s one of several slogans that Helen Deutch, an MGM screenwriter, has on a wall of her Hollywood office:

“Miss Deutsch has another motto, which had to do with the writing of cinematic drama. It also is on the wall where she can’t miss seeing it, and it says: ‘When in doubt, cut to the chase’ ” (Winnipeg Free Press, March 10, 1944).

In a few years, the usage took on its usual current sense, which the OED defines as “to get to the point, to get on with it; to concentrate on the essential elements of an issue, etc.” The earliest example we’ve found is from a Massachusetts newspaper:

“Let’s cut to the chase. There will be no tax relief this year. No $300 to $400 tax credit for middle-class families. No $5,000 credit for first-time home buyers” (The Berkshire Evening Eagle, Feb. 24, 1947).

The OED’s earliest citation for this sense is from Cross My Heart (1955), an autobiography by the American writer and humorist Frank Scully: “I am the sort who wants to ‘cut to the chase.’ As far as I’m concerned, we can read the instructions later.”

Interestingly, Scully used the expression in the filmmaking sense in an earlier book: “That I suspect does not conflict with the Hollywood saying, ‘Let’s drop the romancing and cut to the chase’ ” (from Behind the Flying Saucers, 1950).

[Note: A reader of the blog offered this comment later the same day. “As someone who used to inhabit cutting rooms, I think there’s another little element to this one. Why ‘cut’? That’s because in the earlier days of filmmaking, in order to edit a film you literally ‘cut’ the piece you wanted out of the main roll with scissors, and then glued those selected scenes together.

“Later, ‘splicers’ turned up―clever little guillotine devices that made far more accurate and consistent cuts to be made, and joins to be made with clear specialist tape to create the ’cutting copy,’ the first edited version of the film.]

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The twisted history of ‘bent’

Q: Colson Whitehead uses the adjective “bent” in this passage from Harlem Shuffle, his latest novel: “Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked.” One can read many meanings into “bent” and I began wondering about its derivation and use over time. What can you tell us?

A: Yes, the adjective “bent” has a variety of meanings. You might say it bends in all directions, every way but straight. A piece of wire can be bent, an angry person can be bent out of shape, a speculator can be bent on making a killing in options, someone on a bender can be bent, and a crook, as well as his illicit gains, can be bent.

Appropriately, the adjective “bent” has a winding history, dating from the Middle English of the 14th century when it was derived from the verb “bend.” And as we’ve written in a 2012 post, “bend” itself has a romantic origin, evoking the graceful curve of a medieval archer’s bow.

But the story begins even farther into the past, when “bend,” both noun and verb, had menacing meanings. In Old English, a “bend” was originally a fetter or a shackle—anything used to restrain or tie someone up—and to “bend” was to fetter them.

The noun was first recorded (as bęnd) around the year 890, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s the OED’s earliest example, which uses the Anglo-Saxon plural benda:

“Þa benda sumes gehæftes” (“the ties were loosed”). From An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, an Old English translation from Bede’s Latin chronicle of the 700s.

The noun was used in that sense until it was eventually superseded by “band” and “bond,” two competing nouns adopted later from Old Norse in the 12th and 13th centuries. “Band” and “bond” were originally variants of each other and meant the same thing as “bend,” the OED says: “a shackle, chain, fetter, manacle,” and so on.

That sense of “bend” is now obsolete except in nautical usage (it means a knot), but for a time during the Middle English period all three nouns—“bend,” “band,” and “bond”—were used interchangeably in that early sense of something for restraining a person.

Not surprisingly, all those words have been traced to the same prehistoric Indo-European source. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots says a verb stem reconstructed as ‌‌bhendh- (to bind) is the ultimate origin, not only of  “bend,” “band,” and “bond” but also of “bind,” “bandana,” and “ribbon.”

Meanwhile, the verb “bend” had come into the language soon after the noun. In Old English, it meant “to fasten or constrain with a ‘bend’ or bond; to confine, fetter,” the OED says.

When first recorded around 1000 (as bęndan), it specifically meant “to constrain or bring into tension by a string,” as an archer would draw a bow. The dictionary’s earliest use in writing is quoted from an illuminated manuscript, The Paris Psalter: “He bende his bogan, se is nu gearo to sceotanne” (“He bent his bow, that is now ready to shoot”).

Later on, in the first half of the 14th century, the verb began to take on its modern meanings. That early sense, “to constrain a bow with the string,” became associated “with the curved shape into which the bow is brought,” the dictionary says, and the verb acquired a new meaning—to arch or curve.

Oxford’s earliest citation for that sense of the verb is from an anonymous poem that uses a participle. The poet’s beloved is described as having eyebrows that arch: “Heo haþ browes bend an heh” (“She hath brows bent on high”). From “The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale,” written sometime before 1350 and collected in The Harley Lyrics, edited by George Leslie Brook in 1968.

[A historical aside, from The Middle English Ideal of Personal Beauty (1916), by Walter Clyde Curry: “The word which seems to express most forcibly and clearly for Middle English poets their ideal of beautiful eyebrows, is the adjective ‘bent.’ It describes the eyebrows arched or curved in the form of a strung bow.”]

Because of its association with arches and archery, the verb “bend” developed two different groups of meanings in the 14th through 16th centuries, Oxford explains: (1) “to bow or curve, deflect, inflect, bow oneself, stoop, submit, yield”; and (2) “to direct or level a weapon, to aim, bring to bear, bring one’s force or energies to bear.”

And those senses in turn blended into a third set of meanings, recorded from the early 15th century onward: “to direct or turn one’s steps, oneself, one’s mind, eyes, ears, in any specified direction.” All this, from a verb that once meant to tie somebody up!

Meanwhile, as the verb “bend” was taking on all those meanings, its participle “bent” emerged as an adjective with corresponding senses: arched, curved, bowed, stooped, directed, determined, and so on. Here are some of those adjectival meanings, along with dates of the first OED sightings:

Braced for action, ready to spring, leveled or aimed like a weapon (c. 1330); forced into a curve, curved, crooked (c. 1374); arched (1380, when “bent brows” meant sharply curved eyebrows); determined or resolute (1548); furrowed (1647, when a “bent brow” was a frowning or wrinkled forehead); bound for or directed at (1697, as in “homeward bent travelers”).

Now we arrive at the figurative slang uses of “bent” that came along in the 19th century. The most prolific of these have to do with being drunk or stoned, and the OED’s earliest example, from American fiction, describes an inebriated doctor:

“He was seldom downright drunk; but was often … confoundedly bent.” From Asa Greene’s 1833 satire of medical quackery, The Life and Adventures of Dr. Dodimus Duckworth, A.N.Q.

This may have come into American use from Scots dialect, Jonathan E. Lighter suggests in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. In mid-18th-century Scots slang, as recorded in poetry, to “bend” was to drink hard.

Scots dialect may also have influenced the use of the noun “bender” for a drunken binge, which dates back to the early 1840s in American writing. The earliest example we’ve found is in a Vermont newspaper’s account of a man arrested after drunkenly (and violently) defending the memory of Ethan Allen:

“When brought before the Recorder in the morning, he had forgotten all about old Ethan, said he had been on a bit of a bender, and was let off by paying for his lodging at Harper’s Hotel.” (The Spirit of the Age, Woodstock, Dec. 10, 1841.)

In the 20th century, the drinking sense of “bent” was applied more widely (like the term “wasted”) to narcotics use. This is the OED’s earliest example: “He was bent, barely able, it seemed, to keep his head up” (Nathan C. Heard’s novel Howard Street, 1968).

And around that same time, according to Random House, the expression “bent out of shape” could mean drunk, high on drugs (especially on LSD), or angry, while  the phrase “get bent” could mean either “get stoned” or “go to hell!”

Another sense of “bent,” penniless (that is, almost “broke”), came along in the early 20th century. The first known example is from a feature story in The Evening Sun, New York, fall 1909:

“ ‘What’s the matter, old man?’ asked a man near him. ‘Broke?’ ‘Not yet, friend,’ replied the sorrowful one, ‘but I’m—well, bent.’ ” From an article by Quincy Sharpe Mills cited in a book about him, One Who Gave His Life (1923), by James Luby.

The use of “bent” that you spotted in Colson Whitehead’s novel—corrupt or “crooked”—also appeared in the early 20th century. The OED’s first example, which we’ve expanded here, is from a glossary of underworld terms:

“BENT, Adjective. General usage. Crooked; larcenous. See ‘TWISTED.’ Example: ‘His kisser shows that he’s bent.’ ” From A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang (1914), by Louis E. Jackson with C. R. Hellyer, a police detective in Portland, OR.

In an associated usage, the adjective also came to mean illegal or stolen, as in “bent car” or “bent goods” (dating from 1930 in the OED). The dictionary also has these senses of “bent”: ruined or out of order (1930); eccentric or insane (both 1942); homosexual (1959); and altered in pitch or tone (1950, used in music to describe a sliding or “blue” note).

Standard dictionaries describe the criminal sense of “bent” as chiefly British, but slang dictionaries and the OED, an etymological dictionary, don’t make that distinction. Colson Whitehead, an American writer, set Harlem Shuffle in the New York of the early 1960s.

In case you’re interested, we wrote in 2008 about  the expression “hell-bent for leather.” And we wrote a post a few years later about verbs, like “bend,” that have two possible endings for the past tense and past participle: either “-d” or “-t.” Today, the past tense “bended” survives only in the expression “on bended knee.”

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Greenwashing and pinkwashing

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

Q: I’m curious about the use of “washing” in terms like “greenwashing” and “pinkwashing.” Has “washing” here lost its original meaning, like the “gate” of “Pizzagate,” “Russiagate,” and “Irangate”?

A: No, the use of “washing” as a terminal element here reflects its original source in Anglo-Saxon times: wæscan, Old English for to wash away dirt with water. The “gate” of “Pizzagate” comes from the Watergate scandal, not its original sense of an opening in a wall.

A: The word “wash” or “washing” began showing up in the 1980s in various compound terms for the use of superficial, insincere, or misleading information about the environment, feminism, race, and so on, intended to improve the image of a business, organization, country, etc.

The two most common of the terms are “greenwashing” and “pinkwashing.” Others include “rainbow washing,” “purplewashing,” “sportswashing,” “redwashing,” “humanewashing,” “straightwashing,” and “hetwashing.”

(These recent formations are brand-new in comparison with the centuries-old “whitewashing.” And later we’ll discuss “brainwashing,” a term inspired by mid-20th-century totalitarianism and traceable to Chinese in the era of Mao Zedong.)

Nine of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult have entries for “greenwashing” or “greenwash” used in this sense.

American Heritage defines “greenwashing” as “the dissemination of misleading information that conceals abuse of the environment in order to present a positive public image.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “expressions of environmentalist concerns especially as a cover for products, policies, or activities.”

Two of the standard dictionaries also have entries for “pinkwashing.” It’s defined in Collins as “a superficial or insincere display of concern for the homosexual community” and in Macmillan as “the use of support for LGBT rights and issues by a state or business to boost its own image.”

The collaborative online dictionary Wiktionary adds that a “breast cancer-related sense refers to the pink ribbon, an international symbol of breast cancer awareness.” Though the standard dictionaries don’t include that sense, our database searches suggest that it may be the more common use of the term.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, has entries for the nouns “greenwash” and “greenwashing” as well as the verb “greenwash.”

The dictionary says the noun “greenwash,” derived from the adjective “green” and the noun “wash,” is modeled after the noun “whitewash,” which dates from the 16th century. The verb “greenwash” is derived from that noun, and the noun “greenwashing” is derived from the verb.

The OED’s definition of “greenwashing” is similar to the ones above from American Heritage and Merriam-Webster. It defines the noun “greenwash” as “misleading publicity or propaganda disseminated by an organization, etc., so as to present an environmentally responsible public image; a public image of environmental responsibility promulgated by or for an organization, etc., regarded as being unfounded or intentionally misleading.”

And the verb, Oxford says, has these two senses: “(a) to mislead (the public) or counter (public or media concerns) by falsely representing a person, company, product, etc., as being environmentally responsible; (b) to misrepresent (a company, its operations, etc.) as environmentally responsible.”

In the earliest recorded example we’ve seen, the noun “greenwash” refers to a plan for an open-space buffer between the cities of Louisville and Lafayette in Colorado:

“It’s a great game, this open space whitewash which should be renamed the ‘political greenwash’ or, better yet, ‘open space hogwash’ because that’s all it is—a salve for all the guilty consciences who now have awakened to see the two cities grown together” (an Aug. 10, 1983, editorial in The Louisville Times).

(We’ve seen earlier examples of “greenwash” or “greenwashing” used in the sense of money laundering or applying a thin wash of color.)

The OED’s first citation for the noun “greenwash” appeared four years later: “They create a lot of environmental ‘greenwash,’ and thank god for it, because they create some very good nature reserves. But they’re also commissioning uneconomic nuclear power stations.” (From the September 1987 issue of Sanity, journal of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, London.)

Oxford’s earliest example of the verb “greenwash” is from another London periodical: “Continuing to ‘greenwash the public’ would be foolish” (Daily Telegraph, Oct. 14, 1989).

And its earliest citation for “greenwashing” appeared in a California newspaper: “The activists will keep a booth outside the fair and continue to fight what the group calls ‘greenwashing’ by large corporations who tell the public they are working for the environment while continuing to pollute” (The Orange County Register, April 5, 1990).

(The environmental activist Jay Westerveld has been credited by some sources with coining the term “greenwashing” in a 1986 essay about the hotel industry’s practice of promoting the reuse of towels to save the environment. However, we haven’t been able to find the essay in a search of book, newspaper, and scholarly databases.)

As for “pinkwashing,” the earliest example we’ve found uses the term in its breast-cancer sense: “Jeanne Rizzo, executive director of the Breast Cancer Fund in San Francisco, which is co-sponsoring the hearing, says companies have co-opted breast cancer awareness and are engaged in a ‘pinkwashing’ of the problem.” (From a report of the California legislature on a joint Senate-Assembly hearing on breast cancer and the environment held on Oct. 23, 2002.) Earlier examples use “pinkwashing” in its literal, coloring sense.

The use of “pinkwashing” for the promotion of gender or sexual-identity issues showed up a decade later. The first example we’ve seen uses the term to describe an Israeli campaign comparing its treatment of gays and lesbians with their treatment in the Arab world: “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’ ” (the headline on an opinion article by Sarah Schulman in The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2011).

“Greenwashing” is a much more common term than “pinkwashing,” according to a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares words and phrases in digitized books. The other terms mentioned earlier didn’t register:

“rainbow washing” (promoting gender issues), “purplewashing” (feminism), “sportswashing” (sports), “redwashing” (rightist promotion of leftist issues), “humanewashing” (claims of humane treatment on meat and dairy labeling), “straightwashing” and “hetwashing” (making gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters in fiction act like heterosexuals).

Now on to the more sinister “brainwashing,” which makes those other compounds seem like mere marketing strategies.

This is defined in the OED as “the systematic and often forcible elimination from a person’s mind of all established ideas, esp. political ones, so that another set of ideas may take their place.” It also means “this process regarded as the kind of coercive conversion practised by certain totalitarian states on political dissidents.”

But in a “weakened sense,” the dictionary adds, it can also mean  “the action of pressurizing or persuading a person into a belief considered undesirable.”

The noun came into English in the early 1950s, the OED says,  and was “probably” modeled after the Chinese term xǐ nǎo, from “ to wash, cleanse + nǎo brain.”

The term has become associated with Edward Hunter, an American journalist who reported from Asia and who’s been identified as a clandestine American intelligence agent. His book Brain-washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds was completed in 1950 and published on Jan. 1, 1951.

On Sept. 24, 1950, The Miami News published an article by Hunter entitled “ ‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party.”

However, the term appeared in print earlier in 1950. The OED has this as the term’s earliest published use: “China under Red flag…. ‘Brain-washing’—a new version of the mental purge” (a heading in The Times of India, Mumbai, Jan. 23, 1950). We haven’t been able to determine whether Hunter wrote this article or not.

The OED also has entries for the noun “brainwash” (1950), the verb “brainwash” (1951), the adjective “brainwashed” (1951), and the noun “brainwasher” (1952), all in reference to China.

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

Swear like a sailor

[Note: We inadvertently sent this post to some readers last Friday. We’re publishing it today so that all our readers can see it.]

Q: Why do we say someone who cusses a lot “swears (or curses) like a sailor (or trooper, soldier, marine)”? Do people in the military cuss more than others? Is it simply a question of quantity or is something else at work?

A: Yes, many of the “swear like a …” and “curse like a …” usages refer to a sailor, trooper, soldier, or marine, but not all of them. We’ve seen versions of the expression applied to a docker, drunken monk, fishwife, mule-skinner, pirate, porter, preacher’s son, stevedore, termagant, and more.

The two most common versions are “swear like a sailor” and “swear like a trooper,” according to a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares the use of words and phrases in digitized books. (The “soldier” usage barely registers and the “marine” one doesn’t register at all in the books searched, though they appear in old newspaper databases.)

Why are the “trooper” and “sailor” variants so common? Probably because troopers and sailors had reputations for boorish language and behavior when the two phrases showed up (the “trooper” one in the 18th century and the “sailor” in the 19th).

As Christine Ammer explains in The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, “The troopers in this term were the cavalry, who were singled out for their foul language from the early 1700s on.”

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by Elizabeth Knowles, says, “A trooper was originally (mid 17th century) a private soldier in a cavalry unit, and from the mid 18th century was proverbial for coarse behaviour and bad language.”

In fact, many soldiers still speak an expletive-ridden language that the author Tom Wolfe referred to as “Army Creole.” In The Right Stuff, his 1979 book about the test pilots and astronauts of the space program, he cites this conversation as an example of Army Creole:

“I tol’im iffie tried to fuck me over, I was gonna kick’is fuckin’ ass, iddnat right?”

“Fuckin’ A.”

“Soey kep’on fuckin’ me over and I kicked ’is fuckin’ ass in fo’im, iddnat right?”

“Fuckin’ A.”

“An’ so now they tellin’ me they gon’ th’ow my fuckin’ ass inna fuckin’ stoc-kade! You know what? They some kinda fuckin’ me over!”

“Fuckin’ A well tol’, Bubba.”

Sailors on civilian or military vessels have had a similar reputation, according to the historian Paul A. Gilje.

In his 2016 book Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750 to 1850, he cites 18th-century reports of the “wicked conversation,” “carnal songs,” “ill language,” and “profane language” of sailors, especially their rampant use of the expression “damn son of a bitch.”

“Others might curse and swear, but the liberty of the waterfront enjoyed by sailors and their own maritime culture gave the phrase ‘to swear like a sailor’ a resonance that rebounded throughout society,” Gilje writes. “Other members of the working class understood that going to sea offered a special license to resort to bad language.”

The earliest written example of the expression we’ve seen is from a religious treatise that uses the “trooper” version in describing one of the Apostles:

Peter seems to have been the boldest. He cou’d curse and swear like a Trooper. And his denying Jesus thrice, shows that he was capable of any thing” (A Conference Upon the Miracles of Our Blessed Saviour, 1730, by William Stevenson).

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of the “trooper” variant, which we’ve expanded, appeared a decade later: “Bless me! she curses and storms at me like a Trooper, and can hardly keep her Hands off me” (from Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela).

As far as we can tell, the “sailor” variant didn’t appear in writing until a century later. The earliest written example we’ve seen is in a book by a traveler who found surprisingly little swearing aboard a ship sailing from New York to Liverpool:

To swear like a sailor, is a common mode of characterising excessive profanity. And yet I was on board this ship ten days before I heard an oath from one of the crew” (Memoranda of Foreign Travel: Containing Notices of a Pilgrimage Through Some of the Principal States of Western Europe, 1845, by Robert J. Breckinridge). The crew may have watched their language around Breckinridge because he was a Presbyterian minister.

And here’s an example that appeared a dozen years later: “he did swear like a sailor, from mere habit and forgetfulness, for no man not professedly religious had a diviner instinct of reverence and worship than he” (from “Uncle Josh,” a short story by Rose Terry Cooke, Putnam’s Monthly, September 1857).

The only OED citation for the “sailor” variant is from the 20th century: “Della was a pretty little thing. Tough as nails—on the surface. She could—and did—swear like a sailor” (The Rose Petal Murders, 1935, by Charles G. Givens).

We’ll end with a poem, “The Sailor’s Folly,” cited in Swear Like a Sailor. It was written on Feb. 13, 1801, in Charleston, SC, by Simeon Crowell, a reformed seaman who had once prided himself on his cursing and carnal songs.

When first the sailor comes on Board
He dams all hands at every word
He thinks to make himself a man
At Every word he gives a dam

But O how Shameful must it be
To Sin at Such a great Degree
When he is out of Harbour gone
He swears by god from night to morn. 

But when the Heavy gale doth Blow
The Ship is tosled to and froe
He crys for Mercy Mercy Lord
Help me now O help me God

But when the storm is gone and past
He swears again in heavy Blast
And still goes on from Sin to Sin
Now owns the god that Rescued him. 

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

A belated Christmas carol

Q: I got stuck on one word when I read A Christmas Carol to my family on Christmas Eve. What is the story behind the boy’s use of the exclamation “Walk-ER!” when Scrooge asks him to buy a big turkey? I’ve looked for the etymology, with no success whatever.

A: The use of the name “Walker” as an exclamation expressing skepticism showed up in the early 19th century, originally as “Hookee Walker.”

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the origin is uncertain, but the usage apparently comes from “the name of Hookey (or Hooky) Walker, although no person of this name has been positively identified.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the interjection is from a slang dictionary: “Hookee Walker, an expression signifying that the story is not true, or that the thing will not occur” (Lexicon Balatronicum, 1811).

In the OED’s next citation, the name “Walker” appears by itself: “Walker, an ironical expression synonymous with bender and used in the same manner.” From “A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language” in Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux, Written by Himself (1819).

(“Flash” is an obsolete term that refers to thieves, prostitutes, or the underworld, especially their language. Vaux was an English convict transported to Australia three times. In his “Comprehensive Vocabulary,” he defines “bender” as “an ironical word used in conversation by flash people.”)

As for the skeptical use of the term “Walker” in A Christmas Carol (1843), Scrooge asks a boy on Christmas Day if a prize turkey is still hanging in the window of the neighborhood poultry shop.

“It’s hanging there now,” replied the boy.
“Is it?” said Scrooge. “Go and buy it.”
“Walk-ER!” exclaimed the boy.
“No, no,” said Scrooge, “I am in earnest.”

Dickens used the exclamation a few years earlier in one of his “Mudfog Society” stories: “Sir Hookham Snivey was proceeding to combat this opinion, when Professor Ketch suddenly interrupted the proceedings by exclaiming, with great excitement of manner, ‘Walker!’ ” From “Full Report of the Second Meeting of the Mudfog Society for the Advancement of Everything” (Bentley’s Miscellany, September 1838).

We’ve seen several questionable theories about the source of “hookey walker”—that it comes from the name of a popular song or a celebrated horse or a theatrical character or a clerk with a hooked nose. However, the OED notes that the interjection appeared in print before all those other usages were recorded.

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Cut, butt, skip, or ditch in line?

Q: When I was growing up in Columbus, Ohio (I’m 68 now), if someone cut in line, we called it “dishing.” It later changed to “ditching.” I think it’s still used that way, but I now live in Cincinnati, where I don’t hear it.

A: There are quite a few regional variations in the way Americans refer to the act of unfairly getting in front of people who are standing in line.

The most common of the expressions is “cutting in line,” but Americans also speak of “butting,” “budding,” “budging,” “skipping,” “ditching,” and “dishing” in line, according to the linguist Steve Hartman Keiser. In Britain, this boorish behavior is usually referred to as “jumping (or barging) the queue,” as we note in a 2014 post.

In “Ditching the Immigration Line,” a paper about the use of these various expressions in discussing US immigration policy, Keiser says the “cutting” version “is by far the most widely used and recognized. It is attested in each of the 25 states in which my students and I have conducted interviews, and in most states it is clearly the majority response” (American Speech, fall 2007).

“The upper Midwest is an exception to this rule: budging in line is the most common term in Minnesota and is also widely attested in Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and Iowa,” he writes. “Butting in line is even more common than budging across much of this area (in spite of folk perceptions in Wisconsin that budging is the dominant term throughout the state), and these two are in competition as the most common terms across western Canada as well.”

Keiser notes that “butting” is sometimes spelled “budding” to reflect the flick-of-the-tongue pronunciation of “t” when it follows a vowel and precedes an unstressed syllable—a sound that linguists refer to as a “flap.”

He says “budding” (or “butting”) “appears to have a wider general distribution than budging” and “can be found in eastern Canada, upstate New York (where budging is also attested), Pennsylvania, Maryland, and northern Ohio.”

Skipping in line is the dominant variant in the Milwaukee metropolitan area and the immediately surrounding counties, though it is a minority variant (alongside cutting) as one moves south to Racine, Kenosha, and the Chicago metropolitan area,” Keiser writes, adding that “it competes with budging and butting as one moves west toward Madison and north toward Sheboygan.”

Although Milwaukee “appears to be unique in privileging skipping in line,” he says, “the term is used at least as a minority variant in other parts of the country,” noting sightings in Ohio, Louisiana, and Michigan.

As for “ditching in line,” Keiser says it’s “perhaps the most interesting” of the variants, “first, because its origins are unclear, and second, because it is extremely robust within a very limited geographic region and apparently nonexistent elsewhere.”

“The geographic distribution of ditching in line is sharply delimited to central Ohio,” he says, “specifically the several-county region surrounding Columbus including towns such as Circleville, Lancaster, Newark, Delaware, and Bellefontaine, but not cities such as Springfield, Dayton, Cincinnati, Mansfield, and Cleveland.” Within the Columbus metropolitan area, he adds, “dishing in line” is also a variant.

The “ditching in line” usage apparently showed up in central Ohio in the mid-20th century. The earliest example we’ve seen is one discovered by the linguist Grant Barrett and cited in Keiser’s American Speech paper:

“Along the hall in the new gym the seemingly endless cafeteria line forms. Girls, giggling and laughing, ‘ditch’ in line.” The Coshocton Tribune, Nov. 2, 1956 (from The Red and Black, the student newspaper of Coshocton High School).

Keiser’s paper doesn’t include any citations for “dishing in line,” and we couldn’t find any written examples.

As far as we can tell, the more common “cutting in line” version appeared a decade earlier. The earliest example we’ve found is from the Dec. 8, 1945, issue of The Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois:

“ ‘When they used to come and cut in line, I’d make them go to the end,’ he recalled. ‘I tried to treat everybody fair’ ” (from an interview with an employee who was leaving a job at the Illini Union).

And here are some of Keiser’s examples of the other variant expressions:

“They don’t get to butt in line where somebody wants to go through the process in a legal way” (from comments by President George W. Bush at a Jan. 9, 2004, meeting with women owners of small businesses at the Commerce Department in Washington).

“However, what do you say to the people who are waiting patiently and going through the correct processes to come legally? How do you justify people who butt in line?” (KSL Television & Radio, Salt Lake City, April 11, 2006, from a post to an online discussion about immigration).

“Oh, that’s just great! Come here illegally, budge in line, get rewarded” (Iowa State Daily, March 29, 2006, from an online comment to an article about immigration and residency).

“Have you ever been skipped in line at a movie, the motor vehicle department or at a shopping mall? Well multiply the anger you felt over that by many fold to describe the situation taking place for aspiring immigrants waiting in line to enter our country legally” (Chicago Tribune, April 19, 2006, from an online letter to the editor).

We’ll end with an interesting example Keiser cites from John Kasich, a former Ohio congressman and governor: “What I can tell you is this—if the American people were not concerned about people who ditched the line, and jumped in front of people who waited for years, you would have an immigration bill” (Fox News, April 19, 2006).

Although Kasich was born and raised in a Pittsburgh suburb, he has a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University in Columbus, center of the “ditching” usage.

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Disparate, or merely different?

Q: Some readers may enjoy your take on the difference between “different” and “disparate.” This sentence from a recent New York Times does not sit well with me: “Two similarly titled papers with markedly disparate conclusions illustrate the range of disagreement on this subject.”

A: We think the use of “disparate” can be justified in that Oct. 20, 2021, opinion column by Thomas B. Edsall.

He discusses two scholarly papers that concluded for “markedly disparate” reasons that conservatives were on the whole happier than liberals. (As Edsall writer later, that’s questionable.)

“Disparate” is generally a much stronger word than “different.” Traditionally, it means that there are no common grounds for comparison. And that seems to be true of the two papers’ explanations for the so-called happiness gap between conservatives and liberals.

We won’t attempt to summarize the explanations, since this isn’t a blog about politics or sociology; we’ll simply say that they don’t lend themselves to comparison. Their reasons aren’t merely “different” in the simplest sense of that word (like apples and oranges, which are both fruits). And they aren’t opposites, since things that are opposite are correlated—that is, they have a relationship.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that in logic “disparate” applies to “things or concepts having no obvious common ground or genus in which they are correlated.”

The dictionary adds that “disparate” is “distinguished from contrary, since contrary things are at least correlated in pairs, e.g. good and bad.” And it’s “also distinguished from disjunct, since disjunct concepts may all be reduced to a common kind.”

The OED is an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, and its entry for “disparate” may be outdated (it has no examples later than 1883). Nevertheless, its principal definition—“essentially different or diverse in kind”— largely agrees with those in most current standard dictionaries. Here’s a representative sampling, from two British and two American sources:

Lexico: “Essentially different in kind; not allowing comparison … Containing elements very different from one another.”

Collins: “Disparate things are clearly different from each other in quality or type … A disparate thing is made up of very different elements.”

American Heritage: “Fundamentally distinct or different in kind; entirely dissimilar … Containing or composed of dissimilar or opposing elements.”

Merriam-Webster: “markedly distinct in quality or character … containing or made up of fundamentally different and often incongruous elements.”

M-W adds in a synonym note that “different may imply little more than separateness but it may also imply contrast or contrariness,” as in “different foods.” But “disparate emphasizes incongruity or incompatibility,” as in “disparate notions of freedom.”

As for the etymology, the OED says that “disparate” came into English in the early 17th century from the Latin disparatus (“separated, divided”), past participle of the verb disparare (“to separate, divide”). The Latin verb was formed from the prefix dis- (in the sense of “in twain, in different directions, apart”) and the verb parare (“to make ready, prepare, provide, contrive, etc.”).

In English use, the dictionary adds, “disparate” is “apparently often associated with Latin dispar unequal, unlike, different.” However, only one of the ten standard dictionaries we consult, Webster’s New World College Dictionary (5th ed.), includes “unequal” among its definitions. That sense of “disparate” seems to be found mostly in legal language, as in “disparate treatment,” a phrase often used in discrimination cases.

The OED’s earliest example of the adjective in written English is from a sermon delivered on Nov. 5, 1608, by John King, Bishop of London: “Two disperate species and sorts of men.”

And this is the latest citation: “The questions are so utterly disparate as not to be reducible to the same argument” (Frederic Harrison, writing in The Pall Mall Gazette, Nov. 3, 1883).

A noun form, used chiefly in the plural, was recorded a couple of decades earlier than the adjective. The OED defines “disparates” as “disparate things, words, or concepts; things so unlike that they cannot be compared with each other.”

Oxford’s earliest example is from Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie (1586): “Contrary faculties, or such as we call disparates in logicke.”

Like “disparate,” the much older adjective “different” has its roots in Latin. And as we’ll explain, it’s often used today in ways that overlap “disparate.”

It can be traced ultimately to the classical Latin verb differre (to differ), derived from ferre (to bear or carry) plus dif-, a prefix used instead of dis- before a verb beginning with “f.”

To the Romans, the OED says, differre had many meanings: “to carry away in different directions, to scatter, disperse, to separate, to bewilder, distract, to spread abroad, publish, to postpone, defer, to keep (someone) waiting,” as well as “to be different, to disagree.”

The earliest sense of “different” that’s still used in modern English, according to the dictionary, is “unlike in nature, form, or quality; not of the same kind; dissimilar,” a sense not unlike “disparate.” This use of “different” was first recorded in the late 14th century and is still quite common now.

Two other uses of “different” are also current today: (1) “distinct; separate; other” (mid-16th century), used in reference to “two or more separate people or things of the same type, rather than two or more things which differ in nature, form, or quality”; and (2) “out of the ordinary, unusual; other than is expected; novel” (mid-19th century).

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A usage with legs

Q: The other day one of my students asked me why a segment of a journey is called a “leg.” I didn’t have an answer. Could it be because distance was once measured in leagues, and someone misheard “league” as “leg”?

A: Many English words have literal meanings as well as figurative ones fashioned from them. The noun “leg” originally referred to one of the two long limbs that we stand or walk on, but it has taken on many metaphorical senses over the years.

For example, it may refer to something that covers a human leg (like a pants leg, 1558), or functions as a human leg (a furniture leg, 1616), or serves as a part of something else (a leg of a relay race, 1933). And in the plural, it may describe something popular with staying power (a show with legs, 1930). The dates are for the earliest citations of the senses in the Oxford English Dictionary.

When “leg” is used in the journey sense, according to the OED, it refers to “a part or section of something,” specifically “a distinct stage or stretch.” The dictionary’s earliest written example uses the term nautically for “the course and distance sailed on a single tack”:

“The Swash was under what Mrs. Budd might have called her ‘attacking’ canvas, and was close by the wind, looking on a good leg well up the harbor” (Graham’s Magazine, December 1846).

When English borrowed the word “leg” from early Scandinavian languages (lägger in Old Swedish, leggr in Old Icelandic, leg in Old Danish), it meant “the lower limb of the human body, or the part of the lower limb between the hip and the ankle,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, is from Layamon’s Brut, a chronicle of Britain written in Middle English sometime before 1200:

“hii ȝogede hire harmes and greiþede ham-seolue breost wiþ breost bones þar crakede hii soten hire legges þe kempes weren stronge” (“They yoked their arms and crushed themselves breast to breast. Their bones cracked. They thrust out their legs. The warriors struggled fiercely”).

In the struggle, the Trojan warrior Corineus defeats the giant Gogmagog. The clash ends a battle between a group of giants and a Trojan force led by Brutus of Troy, a legendary founder of Britain.

So how did English speakers refer to their legs before the word “leg” appeared in the 12th century? The Anglo-Saxons used the word “shank” (sceancascanca, or scance in Old English), a noun that could mean the whole leg or just the lower part, from the knee to the ankle.

The earliest example we’ve seen for “shank” used to mean a leg is from Old English Martyrology, a collection of the lives of saints and other religious figures, written in the second half of the ninth century:

This passage is from the life of St. Victor Maurus, a Christian Moor said to have been tortured and beheaded in 303 on orders of the Roman Emperor Maximian (circa 250-310). Victor is speaking here to the guards taking him to his execution:

“cwæð he to þæm þe hine lædon secgað ge maximiane þæm casere þæt he bið to geare dead ond him beoð þa scancan forbrocen hæfdon ær þon he sy bebyrged” (“Then he said to those who were escorting him, tell Emperor Maximian that he will be dead within a year, and that his legs will be crushed before he will be buried”). Maximian retired to a life of luxury in 305, but he hanged himself five years later after being defeated in a rebellion against Emperor Constantine.

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Don’t badger me

Q: I’m wondering about the use of the expression “don’t badger me” to mean don’t bother me, a usage that may have a different connotation in Madison, home of the University of Wisconsin Badgers.

A: As you may suspect, the verb “badger,” meaning to pester, comes from the noun “badger,” for the mammal that’s fierce when attacked. The pestering sense of the verb is probably derived from the human baiting of badgers as a blood sport.

The European badger (Meles meles) was common in Anglo-Saxon England, but it wasn’t called a “badger” until the early Modern English of the 16th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

In Old English and Middle English, the word for the animal was a term of Celtic origin, spelled broc, brokbrock, etc. (In The Tale of Mr. Tod, a children’s book by Beatrix Potter, a badger named Tommy Brock is the arch enemy of Mr. Tod, a fox.)

So how did the animal come to be called a “badger”? The OED says the name probably comes the noun “badge” and is “so called with reference to the white mark borne like a badge on its forehead.” The word “badge” originally referred to a heraldic symbol worn to identify a knight and his retainers.

The earliest OED citation for the noun “badger,” which we’ve expanded, refers to the “propertyes … of a bauson or a badger” and cites “a whyte rase [slash] or a ball in the foreheed.” (From The Book of Husbandry, 1523, by John Fitzherbert.) The word “bauson” is an archaic, French-inspired term for a badger.

The verb appeared more than two and a half centuries later. The dictionary defines it as “to bait, hound; to subject to persistent harassment or persecution; to pester, bother.”

The OED says the meaning is “probably with allusion to baiting or drawing of badgers by humans,” though it notes “the supposed tenacity of a badger in biting until its teeth met.”

The dictionary’s first citation for the verb, which we’ve also expanded, is from a critical description of the Académie Française, the official authority on the French language:

“Paris is the only place where it can support any kind of consequence; though, even there, sorely badgered by the wits of the capital, who, expecting neither favour nor friendship, point all their epigrammatical batteries against their members.” (From Paris in Miniature, 1782, Joseph P. Macmahon’s translation of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Le Tableau de Paris.)

The OED includes a mid-19th-century naturalist’s explanation of the verb: “A ‘brock’ … led such a persecuted life, that to ‘badger’ a man came to be the strongest possible term for irritating, persecuting, and injuring him in every way.” (From Sketches and Anecdotes of Animal Life, 1855, by the Rev. John George Wood.)

We’ll end with a picture of Bucky the Badger, the fierce-faced mascot of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Badgers:

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The life of a lived experience

Q: It seems that the phrase “lived experience” originated in research, but like so many terms that are understood in a particular context it has escaped into the wild, where it has much the same meaning as “experience.” Any thoughts?

A: The term “lived experience” has been used since at least the late 19th century to mean an experience lived through as opposed to one learned about secondhand.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the adjective “lived” can be used to describe “life, an experience, etc.: that has been lived or passed through.” The dictionary’s first citation, with “lived” modifying “life,” is from a theological treatise:

“It is the actual lived life, and the actual died death of Jesus which makes the moral and mathetic [learning] life so instinct with converting power” (from The Antiquity of the Gospels Asserted on Philological Grounds, 1845, by Orlando T. Dobbin).

The earliest example we’ve seen for “lived experience” is from a late 19th-century feminist magazine in Australia. A report on a paper read at a feminist meeting cites the various issues facing women and says, “all these subjects are open to discussion, suggestion and action, upon the ground of lived experience” (The Dawn, Sydney, July 1, 1889).

In the 20th century, “lived experience” took on a related sense in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and so on: one’s perception of events firsthand rather than through representations by other people. The earliest example we’ve seen is from a book about the French philosopher Henri Bergson:

“ ‘Tensional’ experience is the term used in this essay to describe the intermingling of lived experience and of the experience which is of increasing practical use the more superficial it becomes” (The Ethical Implications of Bergson’s Philosophy, 1914, by Una Bernard Sait).

This more recent OED example, which we’ve expanded, is from a book about interracial friendship and communication among adolescents:

“direct questioning regarding racial attitudes is very difficult where young people are involved, for they are at an age when they are only beginning to establish the relationship between their lived experience and social ‘opinion’ and ‘knowledge’ about it” (White Talk Black Talk, 1986, by Roger Hewitt).

search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books, indicates that the use of “lived experience” has increased sharply in recent decades—in both its original sense and the newer one, which is common in phenomenology (the study of how human beings perceive phenomena).

However, none of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult include “lived experience,” perhaps because the noun “experience” by itself can have much the same meaning in general usage.

American Heritage’s “experience” entry, for example, says the noun may mean, among other things, an “event or a series of events participated in or lived through.”

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Is your Mandarin rusty?

Q: When a friend, a fourth-generation Maine islander, likes something, he says, “Well, that’s not too rusty.” I always assumed it was just him, but I recently reread Huckleberry Finn, where a hungover duo is “looking pretty rusty.” Is this an Americanism or does it go farther back? I’ve always thought of rusty as strictly having to do with old iron.

A: English speakers have used “rusty” figuratively since the Middle Ages to describe the appearance, morals, refinement, or fitness of people. And we still often use the adjective in figurative senses derived from its original use for the coating on oxidized iron and its alloys.

For example, if your knowledge or skill is impaired by lack of practice, you might say your tennis or typing or constitutional law or Mandarin is rusty. Something that’s the color of rusting metal—hair, leaves, fur, a sunset—may be described as rusty. And a hoarse or grating voice is sometimes said to be rusty.

The noun “rust,” as you may imagine, is very old. When it showed up in early Old English writing, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it meant a “red, orange, or yellowish-brown substance which forms progressively as a flaking, permeable coating on the surface of iron and its alloys as a result of oxidation, esp. through exposure to air and moisture.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from an eighth-century Latin-Old English glossary: “Erugo, rust” (Corpus Glossary, MS 144, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge).

The OED’s next citation is from a Latin-Old English version of Matthew 6:19 in the Lindisfarne Gospels: “In terra ubi aerugo et tinea demolitur: in eorðo ðer uel huer rust & mohða g[e]freten bið uel gespilled bið” (OE translation: “On earth where rust and moth corrode or devour”). The manuscript was written in Latin around 700. A scribe added an Old English gloss, or translation, in the 900s.

The adjective “rusty” also showed up in Anglo-Saxon times. It’s written as rustega in the dictionary’s earliest Old English example: “Þa wurdon Ianes dura fæste betyned & his loca rustega, swa hie næfre ær næron” (“Then the gates of Janus were shut fast and their locks became rusty as never before”). In ancient times, the doors at the Temple of Janus in the Roman Forum were closed in times of peace and opened in wartime.

Getting back to your question, “rusty” began taking on figurative senses in the 1300s, when the term could mean physically decrepit or morally corrupt. The OED’s earliest citation for the decrepit sense is from Chaucer’s Middle English translation of an Old French allegorical poem:

“Ful hidous was she forto sene / Ful foule and Rusty was she” (“Full hideous was she to the sight / Full foul and rusty was she”). From Fragment A of The Romaunt of the Rose, a translation, believed done by Chaucer in the 1360s, of the first part of Le Roman de la Rose (circa 1230), by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the morally corrupt sense of “rusty” is from William Langland’s Piers Plowman (1378). In the allegorical poem, Piers says he won’t hire “Robert þe Ribaudour [the tale-teller] for his Rousti wordes.”

Over the years, “rusty” has been used figuratively to describe many other things, including something that’s rust colored (late 1300s), writing that’s rough or unsophisticated (c. 1425), a grating sound or hoarse voice (c. 1430), someone lacking polish or refinement (1456), physical or mental impairment because of age or inactivity (perhaps 1507), something that’s old-fashioned or obsolete (1549), and knowledge or accomplishment impaired by disuse (1575).

Some of those senses are rare or obsolete today, but contemporary standard dictionaries say “rusty” can now refer to something that’s rust-colored, to knowledge or skill impaired by lack of recent practice, to someone who’s stiff with age or inactivity, and to a hoarse or croaking voice.

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A friend of Dorothy

Q: In The Crown, Queen Elizabeth uses the phrase “a friend of Dorothy” to mean a gay person. Do you know when or where the expression was first used this way? The episode was set in the early 1980s.

A: An early version of the expression showed up in writing in the 1970s, but it had undoubtedly been used before that in speech, where “friend of Dorothy” or “Dorothy’s friend” was a coded way of identifying a man as gay.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the name “Dorothy” here comes from “the heroine of the book The Wizard of Oz (1900) and its sequels, by L. Frank Baum. The film version of the story (1939), with Judy Garland as Dorothy, was a particular favourite amongst some homosexuals.”

That’s the most common (and authoritative) explanation for the source of the expression, but others cite the American writer Dorothy Parker or Dorothy Dean, a socialite who was associated with Andy Warhol and gay New York culture.

The dictionary’s earliest example, which we’ll expand, cites a definition of the phrase “Dorothy and Toto” in The Queens’ Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon (1972), by Bruce Rodgers: “1. gay boy and his dog 2. dominating effeminate homosexual man with his paid-for escort 3. extended to any male couple whose effeminate partner is in command ‘When’s Dorothy and Toto getting here with the chest of drawers?’ ”

The next two examples in the OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, treat the expressions “Dorothy’s friend” and “friend of Dorothy” as meaning simply a gay man:

“Dorothy’s friends, the male gay community, from the 50s onwards” (Slanguage of Sex: A Dictionary of Modern Sexual Terms, 1985, by Brigid McConville and John Shearlaw).

“A Somewhere-Over-The-Rainbow Coalition which offers little to the friends of Dorothy because, like the Wizard of Oz, its power is illusory” (Capital Gay, a London magazine, Feb. 12, 1988).

And here’s the entry for “friend of Dorothy” in Gay-2-Zee: A Dictionary of Sex, Subtext, and the Sublime (2006), by Donald F. Reuter:

“Phrase meaning someone is gay, and rooted in: 1) our fondness for Judy Garland, the iconic entertainer who played Dorothy Gale in the classic film musical The Wizard of Oz with her trio of sexless male buddies; 2) our association to and admiration for sharp-tongued writer Dorothy Parker, whose famed ‘vicious circle’ of pals included gay men; and 3) the need for gay men, during much of the twentieth century, to speak in code (for fear of being found out).”

Getting back to The Crown, in season four, episode seven of the streaming TV series, Princess Margaret’s love interest, Derek (Dazzle) Jennings, says he’s becoming a Roman Catholic priest. When Margaret tells the Queen, this exchange follows:

Elizabeth: That’s the second reason he was never the right man for you.

Margaret: The first being?

Elizabeth: Well, he’s, you know, a friend of Dorothy.

Margaret: Dazzle?

Elizabeth: Famously, yes.

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To beg the question

Q: I notice with distressing regularity the misuse and cheapening of words and phrases. One expression that comes to mind is “beg the question.

A: Like it or not, “beg the question” has more meanings in modern English than the one it started out with.

Essentially, a 16th-century technical phrase with a very narrow definition became so widely used in general English that its original meaning was left behind. It now has so many meanings that it’s best avoided except in a treatise on logic.

Back in 1581, when “beg the question” was first recorded, it had a specific meaning in philosophy. It described a fallacy in logic that consists more or less of arguing in a circle—that is, basing an argument on premises that are unproven, or that simply restate the argument.

To illustrate, here’s an argument that “begs the question”: “My son is innocent because he’s a good boy and would never commit a crime.”

The argument to be proved is “My son is innocent,” but the premises on which it’s based—“because he’s a good boy and would never commit a crime”—also need to be proved; they merely state the argument in different terms. The premises of an argument should be indisputable, like “because he was in Toronto at the time, and someone else’s fingerprints are on the weapon.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, defines the philosophical sense of “beg the question” as “to take for granted the matter in dispute, to assume without proof.”

The earliest known use, cited by the OED and other references, is from an account of the 1581 interrogation of Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest who refused to accept Anglican doctrine despite being tortured on the rack:

“I say this is still to begge the question” (from a comment by an Anglican interrogator in A True Report of the Disputation or Rather Priuate Conference Had in the Tower of London, with Ed. Campion Iesuite). Campion, convicted of treason, was drawn and quartered.

Although the original sense of the expression is still alive, linguists and lexicographers say that it’s no longer the predominant meaning and hasn’t been since the mid-18th century.

Merriam-Webster, a standard dictionary, labels the original meaning “formal,” and says on its website that the expression “is only very rarely used this way.”

Today, nine of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult, both American and British, offer additional definitions like these: “raise a question or point that has not been dealt with”; “invite an obvious question”; “avoid the question”; “evade the issue”; “ignore a question by assuming it to be established or settled”; “avoid giving a direct answer by posing another question.”

All those differing uses of “beg the question”—especially the first two—are treated as standard English today and are found in even the most elevated writing and speech. Unless the expression is found in context, there’s no way to tell what it means.

So what happened to the original “beg the question”? You might say that it carried the seeds of its own destruction, because it didn’t use either “beg” or “question” in its ordinary meaning. The linguist Mark Liberman, writing on the Language Log, has called its history “a cavalcade of misleading translations.” Here’s the story.

The fallacy in logic here was first identified by Aristotle in the fourth century BC. He referred to it in several different works, calling it τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι and τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ λαμβάνειν, ancient Greek for “asking at the beginning” and “assuming the initial thing.” In other words, using premises that assume at the outset the truth of what you’re trying to prove.

Many centuries later, in the 1100s, the Greek term was translated into medieval Latin as petitio principii, “a postulate (or a postulating) at the beginning.”

The Latin version began appearing in British manuscripts written in Latin in the 1300s, the OED says. And since the 1530s petitio principii has regularly appeared, often italicized, in English writing about philosophy and logic, where it’s so familiar that it’s sometimes called petitio for short.

A mid-16th-century writer defined it this way in a treatise on the mass: “Petitio principii, that is when a ma[n] wyl proue [prove] a thynge to be true, by the same thinge, or wyth an other, that is as doubtfull as that is, which is called into questio[n].” From A New Dialogue Wherin Is Conteyned the Examinatio[n] of the Messe (1548), by William Turner.

In the late 1500s, petitio principii was translated into English for wider audiences, people who weren’t educated at the elite universities and didn’t know Latin. Unfortunately, it was awkwardly rendered as “beg the question”—a puzzling usage that was doomed to confuse ordinary readers and was worse than no translation at all.

In the first place, “beg” was inappropriate. The classical Latin petitio might indeed have been translated as a begging or a pleading. But in medieval  Latin, the noun as used in logic meant “a postulate” or “a postulating”—that is, something taken for granted as a basis for reasoning.

In the second place, “question” was inappropriate. As used in logic, the Latin principii meant at the beginning or starting point (of an argument). It’s true that one meaning of “question” is something being argued, but that’s not what “question” means to most people.

Since the Middle Ages, “question” has more commonly meant a request for information, like a sentence ending with a question mark, not a statement being defended in an argument.

The linguist Carol Lynn Moder, who has written extensively on the history and development of “beg the question,” has shown that subtle shifts in the meaning of the phrase began to set in at the very beginning.

Even when using “beg the question” in its Aristotelian sense, Moder writes, 16th-century writers were shifting the sense of “beg” away from its postulating meaning: “Authors in this period regularly invoked the common ‘requesting alms’ meaning of beg to suggest the unseemly characteristics of those committing this fallacy.”

She cites these examples from 1579-80, even before “beg the question” became the usual form of the expression: “Alas, this is such a poore begginge of that in question” … “a shamefull petition or begging of that which is in question” … “a shamefull begging of that which is questioned.”

The “beg the question” wording, which first appeared in writing in 1581, had become the usual form of the expression by the mid-17th century, Moder says. And well into the 18th century, the expression was regularly used it in its narrow, logical sense—but this was soon to change.

In the mid-18th century, she writes, the expression began “to move out of its Aristotelian niche, appearing more widely in magazines, plays, travel writing and memoirs in contexts less clearly concerning logical disputations.”

Furthermore, Moder says, literacy spread, and as printed materials became more widely available the expression was read and interpreted by readers unfamiliar with formal logic.

From the mid-18th century onward, she adds, “beg the question” began acquiring meanings that had little or nothing to do with that Aristotelian fallacy.

This could have been predicted. If the parts of a formulaic expression don’t make sense together—like “beg” and “question”—people will find a sensible meaning for themselves. As far as we can tell, the expression now usually means to “raise a question that begs to be answered”—and it’s then followed by an actual question.

(Moder’s paper “Begging the Question: Chunking, Compositionality and Language Change” was first published in 2016 and later as a chapter in Formulaicity and Creativity in Language and Literature, 2018, edited by Ian MacKenzie and Martin A. Kayman.)

Incidentally, we were surprised to find that despite the wider definitions in standard dictionaries, the OED’s sole definition of “beg the question” is that original one: “to take for granted the matter in dispute, to assume without proof.”

The OED is behind the curve here. It has no citations later than 1870, a century and a half ago, and cites no examples of the wider uses that have existed from the mid-1600s onward.

The dictionary’s earliest citation, as we mentioned above, is the one from 1581. And this is the latest: “The vulgar equivalent for petitio principii is begging the question” (A Treatise on Logic, 1870, by Francis Bowen). We can only assume that the OED will eventually record the many other uses of the expression.

So how are modern speakers and writers supposed to use “beg the question”? Our advice is don’t; use either “raise the question” or “evade the issue,” depending on what you mean. As Mark Liberman says in that Language Log post:

“If you use the phrase to mean ‘raise the question,’ some pedants will silently dismiss you as a dunce, while others will complain loudly, thus distracting everyone else from whatever you wanted to say. If you complain about others’ ‘misuse,’ you come across as an annoying pedant. And if you use the phrase to mean ‘assume the conclusion,’ almost no one will understand you.

“My recommendation: Never use the phrase yourself … and cultivate an attitude of serene detachment in the face of its use by others.”

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A weighty look at gravitas

Q: What are your thoughts about “gravitas” and its overuse in recent election cycles?

A: This pompous word for “seriousness” or “solemnity” sounds ancient, but “gravitas” has only been an English word since the late 19th century. As you’ve noticed, though, it’s become ubiquitous lately.

In fact, “gravitas” has been worked to death. You might say that among certain classes of writers, “gravitas” carries a lot of weight. It seems especially popular in criticism (literary, artistic, etc.) as well as in writing about politics and culture.

A search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books, shows that its use has shot up steeply since the mid-1980s, charting an almost vertical climb.

But there are signs that the word is showing some wear. In the last couple of years, the chart shows, its use has leveled off and may have peaked.

What’s more, writers have started giving it modifiers—“epic gravitas,” “monumental gravitas,” “enormous gravitas,” “great gravitas,” “tremendous gravitas”—as if mere “gravitas” alone is losing its cachet. Our suspicion is that “gravitas” will eventually sink of its own weight.

The word as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary means “weighty dignity; reverend seriousness; serious or solemn conduct or demeanour befitting a ceremony, an office, etc.; staidness.” But by the mid-20th century it was used more widely to mean “seriousness or sobriety (of conduct, bearing, speech, temperament, etc.); opposed to levity and gaiety.”

And it doesn’t always refer to people and their behavior. Here’s the current definition in Merriam-Webster: “high seriousness (as in a person’s bearing or in the treatment of a subject).”

As for its etymology, the noun was borrowed in the late 1800s from the Latin gravitas, which primarily meant weight in its physical sense, but was also used figuratively to mean weightiness or seriousness. The noun comes from the Latin adjective gravis (heavy, important).

It’s interesting that the word “gravity” itself, which came into English in 1509, first meant seriousness or solemnity. It was “introduced in figurative senses, corresponding generally to the English senses of the adjective [grave],” the OED says. “The primary physical sense of the Latin word came into English first in the 17th cent.”

Similarly, when “gravitas” first appeared in English writing in the late 19th century (usually italicized), it had the figurative rather than the literal meaning of its Latin ancestor.

Initially, English speakers may have used “gravitas” as a substitute for the serious meaning of “gravity,” which by then was commonly used in its scientific sense.

In its earliest uses, both American and British, “gravitas” referred to a character trait admired by the Romans.

The oldest use we’ve found is from a humorous poem: “The gravitas that marked a Roman / Methinks will never find a home in / Our versatile and jovial Harry” (from The Epitome, 1887, an annual publication by students at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA).

The next appeared in London: “He is a man exceptionally endowed with that gravitas which the Romans used so much to desiderate in character” (St James’s Gazette, March 18, 1897).

And this early 20th-century example is from an American magazine: “But many of these have what President Roosevelt has not—namely, that noble old Roman virtue, gravitas” (Current Literature, November 1904).

The OED’s earliest citation is mid-1920s British: “He never sheds a certain Roman gravitas” (The Manchester Guardian Weekly, Oct. 20, 1924).

And we found this example from that same year in an Australian newspaper’s eulogy for a headmaster: “When, indeed, did anyone … embody such gravitas, such dignity, such fortitude, such independence, such justice, such contempt for all that is unworthy and dishonourable? Temperamentally he was more an antique Roman than an Englishman” (The Morning Bulletin, Rockhampton, Queensland, Dec. 30, 1924).

Only since the mid-20th century has “gravitas” been applied to serious things and ideas rather than to people. These two OED citations illustrate the wider use of the term:

“A certain gravitas in the atmosphere of the Scottish universities” (The Spectator, May 30, 1958) … “Its leading articles, and even its news coverage, will have a superb Victorian gravitas” (The Times, London, Aug. 2, 1961).

The noun, which is almost never italicized today, is only the latest in a long list of English words derived from the Latin adjective gravis and its prehistoric source—an ancient Indo-European root reconstructed as gwerə– (heavy).

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (2nd ed.), by Calvert Watkins, says the root gwerə– produced not only the Latin gravis but also the Sanskrit element guru- (heavy, venerable), the Greek words βαρύς (barus, heavy) and βάρος (baros, weight), the Latin brutus (heavy, cumbersome), and the Celtic elements brig-o- (strength) and brig-a- (strife).

These eventually gave English the words “grief,” “grieve,” “gravid,” “guru,” “aggravate,” “aggrieve,” “baritone,” “barium,” “isobar,” “brio,” “brigade,” “brigand,” and “brigantine,” in addition to “gravity,” “gravitas,” and the adjective “grave.”

And by the way, the noun “grave,” for a burial place, has entirely different origins. Its prehistoric source is an Indo-European root reconstructed as ghrebh- (dig, bury, scratch), according to Watkins. Ancient Germanic descendants of this root ultimately gave English not only the noun “grave” but also “engrave,” “gravure,” “groove,” the adjective “graven,” and the verb “grub.”

Thus the two English words “grave,” both of which have an air or solemnity, came into the language from different directions.

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On ‘pent’ and ‘spent’

Q: I came across the following passage in the The New Yorker from a 1949 diary entry by Patricia Highsmith:  “I came home in a silent, pent fury.”  It made me wonder if “spent” and “pent” are related—a letting go and a holding in. Thoughts?

A: No, “spent,” the past tense and past participle of the verb “spend,” isn’t etymologically related to the adjective “pent” (more commonly “pent-up”), which originated as the past participle of the verb “pen” (to enclose or confine).

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says “spend” is ultimately derived from the classical Latin verb expendere (to weigh out or pay out). In Old English, it was aspendan (to spend, spend entirely, squander) or more frequently forspendan (to spend utterly, spend away, exhaust with spending).

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of an Anglo-Saxon version of “spend” is from the Old English Orosius, an anonymous ninth-century translation of a Latin history written in the fifth century. The citation is in the OED’s entry for the obsolete verb “aspend”:

“Hys gestréon béoð þus eall aspended” (“His wealth was thus all spent”). The manuscript is believed to have been written in the late 800s during the reign of King Alfred. The writer took many liberties in translating the Latin of Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII (History Against the Pagans in Seven Books), written in the early 400s by the Roman historian Paulus Orosius.

As for “pent,” Chambers describes it as a variant spelling of “penned,” the past participle of the verb “pen” (to confine someone or something). The verb, in turn, is derived from the noun “pen” (an enclosure), which is of uncertain origin but possibly Germanic.

The noun first appeared in Anglo-Saxon land charters, but it’s often hard to date the early examples because pen in Old English could mean an enclosure or a hill. The earliest OED example “positively identified” as an enclosure is from a 1227 copy of a 1061 land grant:

“Þonne adun onstream oð rean clif, þanon oð hæð pen suþewardne on þone holan stoc” (“then downstream to the cliff, thence to the heath pen and southward to the hollow place”). From Pre-Conquest Charter-Bounds of Devon and Cornwall (1994), by Della Hooke.

The verb “pen” apparently existed in Old English as pennian, but only a negative version has survived in writing, onpennian (to “open,” which etymologically is to un-pen).

The OED’s earliest onpennian example, which we’ve expanded, is from Pastoral Care, King Alfred’s late ninth-century translation of Liber Regulae Pastoralis, a sixth-century Latin treatise by Pope Gregory. The past participle onpennad is used here:

“Ðæt wæter, ðonne hit bið gepynd, hit miclað & uppað & fundað wið ðæs ðe hit ær from com, ðonne hit flowan ne mot ðider hit wolde. Ac gif sio pynding wierð onpennad, oððe sio wering wirð tobrocen, ðonne toflewð hit eall” (“The water, when it is dammed up and cannot flow where it wants, grows and rises and tries to go where it originally intended. But if the dam is opened, or the weir bursts, it all runs off”).

The dictionary’s first written citation for “pen” used as a verb meaning “to enclose, shut in, confine, or trap (a person or thing)” is in Middle English, from a sermon written sometime before 1200:

“Þe pit tineð his muð ouer þe man þe lið on fule synnen … gif ure ani is þus forswolgen and þus penned, clupe we to ure louerd ihesu crist” (“The pit closes its mouth over the man who lies down on foul sins … and if any of us are thus swallowed and penned, let us call upon Our Lord Jesus  Christ”). From Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century (1873), edited by Richard Morris.

The OED’s earliest example for “pent” used as an adjective in the sense of “penned” is from a pseudo-Chaucerian text: “He nas nat alway in cloystre ypent” (“He was not always pent in a cloister”). From the Plowman’s Prologue, added to a 1542 edition of Chaucer’s works.

Finally, the dictionary’s first example for “pent-up” appeared a dozen years later: “Yea as a capon longe pent vp in the caue [cave] / Exiled haue I bene miserably.” From The Resurreccion of the Masse (1554), a collection of religious poems by Hughe Hilarie, thought by some scholars to be a pseudonym for John Bale, an English dramatist and Protestant polemicist.

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A prohibitive favorite

Q: I came across another editing miss at the NY Times. A few weeks before this month’s mayoral election, Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee, was described as “the prohibitive favorite.” I can’t imagine what “prohibitive” means here. Perhaps “presumptive” was intended.

A: Although “prohibitive” usually refers to something that prohibits or that costs too much, the adjective has a third sense in American English, where it’s also used to describe an overwhelming favorite in politics, sports, business, and so on.

Of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult, three of the five American dictionaries (American  Heritage, Merriam-Webster, and Dictionary.com) say “prohibitive” may refer to someone or something with a near-certain chance of winning.

Is the usage legit? We think so, since the three US dictionaries treat it as standard English. (So far, all five British and two American dictionaries list only the older and more common meanings of the word.)

The wording of the “prohibitive” entry in American Heritage suggests that the overwhelming sense may have evolved in a roundabout way from the prohibiting and costly senses:

“1. Prohibiting; forbidding: took prohibitive measures. 2. So high or burdensome as to discourage purchase or use: prohibitive prices. 3. So likely to win as to discourage competition: the prohibitive favorite to win the nomination.”

As far as we can tell, the overwhelming sense began appearing in American sportswriting in the late 19th century. The earliest examples we’ve found are from newspaper reports on horse races:

“Lucky Baldwin’s Los Angeles won the rich Pocahontas Stakes with some ease by half a length from Pee Weep. Los Angeles was a prohibitive favorite, and all the betting was on the place 5 to 1 against Pee Weep” (The Sun, New York, Aug. 26, 1888).

This example showed up a couple of months later: “In the next race, Banner Bearer was a prohibitive favorite, as he only had Haggin’s Prose as a competitor” (St. Paul Daily Globe, Oct. 11, 1888).

The usage increased sharply in the second half of the 20th century, though it seems to have fallen off a bit in recent years, according to a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books. Here are some recent examples:

“With a prohibitive favorite at No. 1 in the 2021 NBA draft, the real betting intrigue starts after Cade Cunningham” (Philadelphia Inquirer, July 27, 2021).

“The winner of the Democratic primary will be a prohibitive favorite to win, all else held equal” (Boston.com, Jan. 24, 2018).

“The Wisconsin native came in as a prohibitive favorite and showed why, dusting the 25-car field in the $6,000-to-win event” (Chicago Tribune, Sept. 22, 2021).

“On the sitcom side, ‘Ted Lasso’ is considered the prohibitive [Emmy] favorite among fellow Outstanding Comedy Series nominees” (Yahoo News, Sept. 19, 2021).

“If Vegas posted odds on the next winner of the Kennedys’ Profiles in Courage award, [Gen. Mark] Milley would be a prohibitive favorite” (Boston Herald, Sept. 16, 2021).

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, doesn’t include this sense of “prohibitive.” And it isn’t discussed in any of the usage manuals we’ve checked.

When the adjective showed up in Middle English in the early 15th century, it referred to something that prevents, forbids, restricts, and so on, according to the OED. The dictionary’s earliest examples use the term to describe medical preventatives.

A treatise on surgery, for example, says Hippocrates counsels that using three bandages to bind a fracture is “prohibitif or defensyf,” preventing movement and strengthening the area (Grande Chirurgie, an anonymous early 15th-century translation of Chirurgia Magna, 1363, a Latin work by the French physician Guy de Chauliac).

Another medical work cited by the OED says the herb rue is “prohibityue of cursez of humours [discharge of pus]” (Treatises of Fistula in Ano, circa 1425, by the English surgeon John Arderne). “Fistula in ano” is an old term for a painful lump between the spine and anus, caused by long periods on horseback. Today the ailment, now called a pilonidal cyst, is more likely to affect truck drivers than horseback riders.

In the early 19th century, “prohibitive” took on a new sense, one the OED describes as the most common now—too costly to pay, buy, or use. The dictionary’s first two citations refer to taxes:

“Hence the embargo, the Non-Intercourse Act, and the prohibitive duties” (The Times, London, Dec. 20, 1811) … “A tax whose effect will be prohibitive” (The American, Philadelphia, June 5, 1886).

The dictionary’s latest example for the costly sense of the adjective is from the Ottawa Citizen (March 13, 2005): “Working mothers are giving up on careers, either because the cost of child care proves prohibitive or because they can’t tune out the guilt.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Writing

So what’s on offer?

Q: A New Yorker review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, says a preacher’s teen-age son “covertly helps himself to a generous amount of gløgg, the potent Scandinavian drink on offer.” Why “on offer” instead of simply “offered”?

A: “On offer,” a phrase dating from the mid-19th century, is a fairly common expression in modern English. In the Oct. 4, 2021, review you cite, it identifies what’s being offered at a Christmas party.

The phrase originated in Britain, and is more common in British than in American English. But from our experience, it’s not uncommon in the US. And the author probably chose it for reasons of rhythm and style.

None of the five standard US dictionaries we regularly consult have entries for the phrase. Merriam-Webster merely notes, within its entry for the noun “offer,” that “on offer” is a “chiefly British” usage that means “being offered especially for sale.”

By contrast, all five of the standard British dictionaries we consult have entries for “on offer.” They all give similar definitions: available to be bought or used. And the examples they give are from commercial rather than social contexts:

“We were amazed at the range of products on offer” (Cambridge) … “country cottages on offer at bargain prices” (Collins) … “the number of permanent jobs on offer is relatively small” (Lexico) … “Activities on offer include sailing, rowing, and canoeing” (Longman) … “These are just some of the films on offer this week” (Macmillan).

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, defines “on offer” as “available or obtainable” and also “on sale” (that is, discounted). The noun “offer” as used in the phrase means “the condition of being offered,” the OED says.

The earliest uses of “on offer” that we’ve found in searches of old newspaper databases are from mid-19th-century crop and livestock reports. Here are the first few, all from issues of The Farmer’s Magazine, a British journal devoted to agricultural and rural affairs:

“Decidedly the best of this truly excellent breed [of Hereford cattle] were brought forward by Mr. Rowland of Creslow, who had on offer about 40” (January 1843) … “Not a single fresh head of stock was on offer from abroad” (January 1843) … “the above advance [in wheat prices] has been mostly supported, although the quantities on offer have been on a liberal scale” (June 1843).

We’ve also found the expression in issues of The Economist from that same decade: “the supply of hops on offer is more than adequate to meet the demand” (June 26, 1847). The phrase reappears in virtually all The Economist’s subsequent weekly crop and livestock reports of the 1840s.

The earliest example given in the OED is also from a market report: “Old wheat scarce and dear. Very little barley on offer” (The Daily News, London, Aug. 23, 1881).

And this is the OED’s most recent citation, from a very different sort of market: “They are urged to book ‘de-stressing’ treatments such as massage and reflexology, to drink the herbal teas on offer throughout the day [etc.]” (from Business Day, South Africa, Jan. 28, 2000).

While all of the OED’s examples are of a commercial nature, we’ve heard the phrase used at times in casual social situations, like that Christmas party in Franzen’s novel. You can call these figurative uses if you like.

And we’ve seen plenty of uses of “on offer” that are neither commercial nor social. These examples are from literary criticism:

“Immediately striking is the range of continuities and discontinuities on offer” (Americans on Fiction, 1776-1999, by Peter Rawlings, 2002) … “it is clear that Achilles is capitalizing on the erotic potential on offer in Vergil’s epic” (Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels, by Daniel Jolowicz, 2021).

And this one is from politics: “How happy are we with the current vision of political ‘reality’ on offer and the way the major political parties seem to see the future?” (Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life, by Andrew Samuels, 2018).

In fact, “on offer” is used in a wide variety of contexts when a writer wants an alternative to “offered.”

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