Tag: Language

Q: Twice in The Monuments Men (screenplay by George Clooney), Clooney the actor uses “task” as a verb: “We have been tasked to find and protect art that the Nazis have stolen.” But were people saying that back in the early 1940s?

A: You’re not the first moviegoer to be startled by Clooney’s use of “task” as a verb. Bloggers and contributors to online discussion groups have criticized this usage.

One critic complains, for example, that Clooney is making a noun (“task”) into a verb. Another suggests that the usage emerged in 1980s corporate-speak, so it’s an anachronism in a movie that takes place near the end of World War II. 

Neither complaint is legitimate. Since 1530, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “task” has been used as a verb meaning to impose a task on someone.

The construction followed by “with” or “to” (as in “tasked to find”) has been around since the late 1500s and appears in Shakespeare.

The OED has an example from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (1598), in which Hotspur complains that the King “taskt the whole state.”

But we prefer the scene in Othello (circa 1603) where Iago schemes to get Cassio plastered.

Here Cassio says he can’t hold his liquor and doesn’t want any more to drink: “I am unfortunate in the infirmity, / and dare not task my weakness with any more.”

The OED has only a couple of modern examples, including this Nov. 20, 1980, ad from the Oxford Star, a weekly in England:

“A small engineering team tasked with the design, building and commissioning of high volume production lines.”

However, the usage is alive and well these days. A Google search for “I was tasked to” resulted in more than 1.7 million hits. Example: “I was tasked to look through my old Facebook pics to find a candid photo of myself for a shoot.”

Now for an interesting detour. In Middle English, “task” and “tax” meant the same thing. The two words are etymological twins that went their separate ways over the centuries.

When the noun “task” first appeared around 1300  it meant a payment or a levy—that is, a tax. And when the verb came along in the 1400s, to “task” meant to impose a tax.” 

So why were there two words, “task” and “tax,” one ending in an “sk” sound and the other in a “ks” sound?

As the OED explains, both have their ultimate roots in the Latin taxare (assess, evaluate). It’s been suggested that around the year 800, the consonant sounds were swapped in medieval Latin, resulting in two separate nouns taxa and tasca.

These two Latin words were passed along into Old French, then into Anglo-Norman, and finally into English.

(The transposition of sounds is called metathesis, and it can result in new words. As we’ve written on our blog, something similar happened with the word “ask, which had two forms in medieval English, “ask” and “axe.”)

The words “task” and “tax” began to diverge in the 1500s.

The “task” that originally meant a fixed payment imposed on someone—say, by an overlord—came to mean a fixed quantity of labor imposed on a person or owed as a duty.

From that meaning grew the modern sense of “task”: an assignment or a piece of work. (The verb “task” developed along similar lines.)

While “task” and “tax” have now gone their separate ways in English, they still intersect here and there.

As you know, we sometimes say a difficult task or a hard job is “taxing.” Both “task” and “tax” are occasionally used as verbs meaning to “burden” or “put a strain on,” as in these OED citations:

“It tasked his diplomatic skill to effect his departure in safety” (from John Yeats’s The Growth and Vicissitudes of Commerce, 1872).

“My ingenuity was often taxed for expedients” (from Elisha Kent Kane’s The U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853).

And when we scold or censure a person for doing something, we “take him to task” for it.

In fact, the verbs “task” and “tax” have both been used in this sense of censuring or reproving someone. Here are a couple of examples from the OED:

“Trollope is another offender who is frequently tasked with endangering the wholeness of his novels” (1965, from Kenneth Graham’s English Criticism of the Novel, 1865-1900).

“That Chronicle … which seems to tax the envy and rapaciousness of Clarence as the Causes of the dissention” (1768, from Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third).

And that’s our task for the day. We won’t tax our brains any more!

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Q: How do you assess the state of “facetious” today? Do most people use it to mean humorous or to mean joking, often inappropriately? Do you find this ambiguity problematic or do you think context is usually sufficient for understanding?

A: All in all, “facetious” is a slippery term. Some dictionaries recognize two meanings, some only one. And those that give only one definition differ as to whether “facetious” remarks are biting or benign.

It’s safe to say, however, that both the meanings you mention are in use today.

The word can simply mean humorous—that is, not serious. But “facetious” can also mean waggish or jokey, sometimes in a flippant or inappropriate way.

We generally depend on the context, or the manner of the delivery, to tell us whether a joke or witty comment is merely amusing or has a bite to it.

Obviously, that’s easier when the witticism is spoken (with vocal inflections and perhaps wry facial expressions), than when it’s written.

The different senses of “facetious” can overlap, of course, which is probably why some standard dictionaries mush them together.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says only that “facetious” means “playfully jocular; humorous,” as in “facetious remarks.”

And this single definition comes from Cambridge Dictionaries Online: “not seriously meaning what you say, usually in an attempt to be humorous or to trick someone,” as in “I make so much money that we never have to worry – I’m being facetious.”

On the other hand, the Macmillan Dictionary recognizes only the negative meaning of “facetious.” The sole definition is “trying to be funny in a way that is not appropriate.”

Some other dictionaries recognize wider uses for the adjective. 

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has these definitions: (1) “joking or jesting often inappropriately: waggish,” as in “just being facetious”; and (2) “meant to be humorous or funny: not serious,” as in “a facetious remark.”

M-W’s online edition gives longer examples, including this illustration for inappropriate humor: “a facetious and tasteless remark about people in famine-stricken countries being spared the problem of overeating.”

The Oxford English Dictionary also has two broad definitions of “facetious” in modern usage: (1) “characterized by or given to pleasantry or joking, now esp. when inappropriate or flippant”; and (2) “witty, humorous, amusing.”

That “now esp.” comment in the OED suggests that the dictionary’s editors believe that when “facetious” is used in a joking sense today, the flippant side of the word—the one with the bite—is more common.

The OED’s earliest published citation for “facetious” in the modern sense appears to use the word to mean witty and amusing. It’s from A Treatise of the Felicitie of the Life to Come (1594), by the Scottish minister and poet Alexander Hume:

“To heare the merry interloquutors of facetious Dialogues, pretty and quicke conceits, and rancounters of Comediens, in their comedies, and stage plaies.”

In a more contemporary citation, we find “facetious” used to describe an article that’s an extended joke (though a harmless one) about two literary figures who were dead ringers for each other.

“The resemblance between the two is extraordinary,” Robert H. Boyle writes in the New York Times Book Review (2000). “I decided to write a facetious article stating that Joyce and Jennings had been separated at birth.”

The references are to James Joyce and an angler named Preston Jennings, whose volume A Book of Trout Flies was published in 1935, four years before Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

In accompanying photographs, the two authors look nearly identical. Boyle argues, among other things, that the “fin” in Joyce’s title is no coincidence, and that his phrase “speckled trousers” is code for “speckled trout.”

Boyle’s article is hilarious, but not flippant or inappropriate.

(None of the OED’s examples of “facetious,” in our opinion, seem to represent inappropriate humor.)

So far, we’ve been discussing the meanings of “facetious” that have survived in modern usage. But an earlier sense of the word in English was lost long ago.

This “facetious,” first recorded in 1542, meant “polished, elegant, agreeable,” and was used to describe a person’s manners or style, according to the OED.

Oxford has only four examples, concluding with this one from Samuel Mather’s An Apology for the Liberties of the Churches in New England (1738):

“I Have a Letter in my Hands, and the very Original Letter, of the learned and pious and facetious Mr. Charles Morton of Charles-Town in New-England.”

What kind of etymological roots could grow a word meaning both elegant and funny? Slightly different roots, it seems.

The “facetious” that’s now obsolete (“polished, elegant, agreeable”) comes ultimately from the classical Latin facetus (clever, whimsical), which in post-classical Latin came to mean courtly.

And the “facetious” that has survived into modern usage is descended from the classical Latin facetia (a joke or jest).

Finally, an interesting aside: In booksellers’ catalogues the word “facetiae” is a euphemism for pornography, according to Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.). It means “jests” in Latin.

Keep that in mind next time you’re shopping for printed rarities.

Update (March 26, 2014): A reader writes to remind us that “facetious” is one of only two common words that contain all five vowels in order. The other is “abstemious.”

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Q: On WNYC, Brian Lehrer invited “expats” from Seattle and Denver to call in with their opinions on the merits of their ex-cities (music scene, weather, microbrews, etc.). Has the term “expat” been domesticated?

A: We’ve checked a half-dozen standard dictionaries, as well as the Oxford English Dictionary, and all of them define “expat” as an informal shortening of the noun “expatriate.”

As for “expatriate,” all the dictionaries define the noun as someone who’s living in a foreign country—not in a new part of his or her own country.

Although lexicographers haven’t yet recognized the domestication of “expat,” the usage is definitely out there.

A search of online databases suggests that the use of “expats” for people moving within their own country began showing up nearly a dozen years ago.

The website Mountain West News, for example, has this headline on an Oct. 1, 2003, article about Californians moving to the Rocky Mountains region: “California’s expats brought their politics.”

And an Oct. 15, 2003, article on the website City Limits reports that “scores of New York expats have joined lawsuits” against 26 Poconos-area builders, real estate agents, and appraisers.

Although this new use of “expat” seems to have originated in the US, American dictionaries say the original use of the term as a shortened form of “expatriate” is “chiefly British.”

The OED, which considers “expat” a colloquialism, has only two examples for the usage—from 1962 and 1968.

The latest citation is from the Jan. 25, 1968, issue of the now-defunct BBC magazine The Listener: “The ‘expats,’ as the expatriate British refer to themselves, are understandably fond of Ghana.”

Interestingly, the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has four citations from US publications for this supposedly British usage, though some of the cites refer to British expatriates.

Here’s an example from the May 21, 1961, issue of the New York Times: “The easygoing Malays still maintain many Britons, whom they call expatriates, or ‘expats,’ in key positions.”

When the noun “expatriate” entered English in the early 1800s, it referred to someone “expatriated”—that is, forced into exile.

The OED’s earliest example of the usage is from an 1818 issue of the Quarterly Review: “Patriots and expatriates are alike the children of circumstances.”

The English noun (as well as the verb) “expatriate” is ultimately derived from the classical Latin prefix ex- (out) and noun patria (native land).

Getting back to your question, we like the new informal use of “expat” for someone living in a different part of his own country.

It’s similar to the extended use of the newspaper term “column” for a website “column,” a subject we’ve discussed on our blog.

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Q: I am a physician who blogs and strives to improve his style. But I stumble when I see a statement like this one on an NY Times blog: “it betrays a surprising lack of awareness of some critical aspects of the medical profession.” What is being betrayed here? A lack of awareness? Or the medical profession? I would think the latter.

A: The verb “betray” has several meanings that concern disloyalty: one can betray a country, a cause, a confidence, or a spouse.

But you’re asking about a different sense of the word: to make known unintentionally (as in, “The snicker betrayed his true feelings”).

The comment that got your attention—by Lawrence K. Altman, a Times medical writer and professor of medicine at NYU—is about an article in the New York Review of Books by a doctor who was seriously injured in an accident.

In the article, Arnold Relman, a doctor with six decades of experience, writes that he “had never before understood how much good nursing care contributes to patients’ safety and comfort.”

In commenting on that, Altman writes that Relman’s sudden realization of the importance of nursing “betrays a surprising lack of awareness of some critical aspects of the medical profession and the nation’s fragmented health care system.”

Altman is using the word “betrays” here to mean “unintentionally reveals.” What is being revealed? Relman’s former cluelessness about the importance of nursing.

The verb “betray” entered English in the 1200s with the sense of “to give up to, or place in the power of an enemy, by treachery or disloyalty,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

English adopted the word from Old French, but it’s ultimately derived from the Latin verb tradere, meaning to deliver or hand over.

The sense of the word you’re asking about showed up in the late 16th century. The OED defines it this way: “To reveal or disclose against one’s will or intention the existence, identity, real character of (a person or thing desired to be kept secret).”

The earliest citation in the dictionary for the usage is from Shakespeare’s comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598): “I do betray my selfe with blushing.”

And here’s an example from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Ire, envie and despair … betraid Him counterfet.”

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Q: In The Pioneers, a book from Time-Life’s The Old West series, a pioneer woman uses “ditto” to mean something like “I agree with what you just said.” I thought the term had its origins in the Xerox copy machine, which created “dittos” of documents.

A: No, the word “ditto” had been around for hundreds of years before Xerox made its first copying machine in the mid-20th century. And Xerox wasn’t even responsible for the use of “ditto” in the copy-machine sense.

We wrote briefly in 2007 about the history of the word “ditto,” but your question gives us a chance to expand on our original post.

English borrowed the word “ditto” in the early 1600s from Italian, where detto (ditto in the Tuscan dialect) was the past participle of dire (to say).

At the time, the Oxford English Dictionary says, detto was used adjectivally in the sense of “aforesaid” to modify dates in Italian “to avoid repetition of the name of a month.”

In an Italian sentence, the OED explains, “December 22” and “December 26” might have been written as 22 di dicembre and 26 detto. And the phrase il detto libro would have meant “the said [or aforesaid] book.”

In the dictionary’s earliest English example of the usage, “ditto” appears in the date sense and means “in or of the month already named; said month.”

Here’s the citation, from a 1625 collection of travel writing by the English cleric Samuel Purchas: “The eight and twentieth ditto, I went … to the Generals Tent.”

This monthly use of “ditto” soon expanded in English to include other senses of “aforesaid” and “the same,” the OED says, such as in accounts and lists “in commercial, office, and colloquial language.”

Oxford’s first example of this expanded use of “ditto” is from The New World of Words (4th ed.), a 1678 dictionary by Edward Phillips:

“Ditto (Italian, said) a word used much in Merchants Accompts, and relation of Foreign news; and signifieth the same place with that immediately beforementioned.”

(The OED notes that a 1696 edition of the dictionary changes “same place” to “the same Commodity or Place,” and that a 1706 edition adds “the aforesaid or the same” to the meaning of ditto in Italian.)

In the 1770s, the usage expanded further, with several other senses of “ditto” showing up.

In a 1775 example in the OED, the verbal phrase “to say ditto to” is used in the sense of “to acquiesce in or express agreement with what has been said by (another).”

The citation, from a biography of Edmund Burke by James Pryor, describes a Parliamentary candidate as using “the language of the counting-house” in support of remarks by Burke: “I say ditto to Mr. Burke.”

In an Aug. 12, 1776, letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail, during the Revolutionary War, “ditto” is used as a noun meaning “a duplicate or copy; an exact resemblance; a similar thing,” according to the OED:

“Here they wait untill We grow very angry, about them, for Canteens, Camp Kettles, Blanketts, Tents, Shoes, Hose, Arms, Flints, and other Dittoes, while We are under a very critical Solicitude for our Army at New York, on Account of the Insufficiency of Men.”

(We’ve expanded on the Oxford citation to add context.)

The OED doesn’t have any examples of “ditto” used as a noun to mean a duplicate produced by a copying machine. However, it has several citations for the term used to mean a copying machine.

The dictionary describes “Ditto” (with a capital “D”) as “a proprietary name in the U.S. for a kind of duplicating machine that reproduces copies from a master.”

The OED’s earliest citation for the usage is from a July 1, 1919, notice in the Official Gazette of the US Patent Office: “Duplicator Manufacturing Company, Chicago, Ill. … Ditto … Claims use since Dec. 16, 1918.”

The Duplicator Manufacturing Company produced a copier called a Ditto that was somewhat similar to a mimeograph machine. The process involved creating a master copy that would be transferred to a hand-rotated printing cylinder.

The July 28, 1921, issue of the trade magazine Printers’ Ink reported that Duplicator, a Chicago company, “has found it expedient to change its corporate name to that of its advertised product, ‘Ditto.’ The corporate name is now Ditto, Incorporated.”

Although Ditto, Inc., is now defunct, a company called the Ink Technology Corp. has sold ink for the few ditto machines still functioning, according to a Jan. 16, 2007, article by Eric Zorn in the Chicago Tribune.

Finally, we should mention that the word “ditto” ultimately comes from the Latin dicere (to say). And as John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes, dicere is the source of many other English words, including one we use a lot: “dictionary.”

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Q: I know you’ve discussed the plural of “octopus” on the blog, but there’s one point I’ve never seen addressed anywhere. The word was adopted into English in the mid-18th century. So what did English speakers call the octopus before then?

A: While the creature itself has been known since ancient times, the word “octopus” didn’t exist until it was coined in the scientific Latin of 16th-century taxonomy. It was adopted into English two centuries later.

But long before the scientific term became common usage, the leggy mollusk had other names.

In ancient Greek, the octopus was called polypous or polupous (many-footed), a word  used by Pliny and Aristotle and later borrowed into Latin as polypus.

Beginning in the early 1500s, “polypus” was also used in English (as well as Dutch) as a name for the octopus.

Other nouns used in English over the centuries have included “polypus-fish,” “preke,” “poor-cuttle,” “pourcontrel,” “polyp,” “eight-armed cuttle,” “devilfish,” and “poulp”—a word with counterparts in French (poulpe), Italian (polpo), and Spanish (pulpo).

The first English example of “octopus” recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the year 1758: “The Polypus, particularly so called, the Octopus, Preke, or Pour-contrel.”

But in fact the word was around much earlier, as we said, in scientific Latin.

For example, in De Piscibus Marinus (1554), a book about aquatic creatures, the 16th-century French naturalist Guillaume Rondelet gave the poulpe commun (common poulpe) the scientific name “polypus octopus.”

But the scientist who is probably most responsible for standardizing the name in common usage was the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who used “octopus” in his monumental work on taxonomy, Systema Naturae (10th ed., 1758).

Linnaeus, who devised the now familiar system for classifying living things by giving them Latin names, established “Octopus” as the name for the genus and “Octopodia” (later “Octopoda”) as the name for the order of cephalopod mollusks with eight sucker-bearing arms.

In the 10th edition of his book, Linnaeus credits his student Fredrik Hasselquist for the name “Octopodia.” Hasselquist had used the term in letters written to Linnaeus from Smyrna in 1749, where he was doing field research. Linnaeus also credits his predecessor Rondelet for using “polypus octopus.” 

Now for the word’s etymology. “Octopus” combined ancient Greek terms meaning “eight” (okto) and “footed” (pous). If the word had actually existed in ancient Greek it would have been oktopous. 

(There was in fact a Greek word, oktapous, described in the revised 1940 edition of A Greek-English Lexicon, by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, as a “Scythian name for one who possessed two oxen and a cart.” We suppose this was a reference to the eight feet of the oxen. But we digress—back to the octopus!)

As we wrote in our 2010 post, there are three plural forms of the noun: “octopuses,” “octopi,” and “octopodes” (pronounced ok-TOP-uh-deez).

Most standard dictionaries accept the first two as equal variants. But usage authorities prefer “octopuses,” which Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) calls “the only acceptable plural in English.”

Fowler’s calls “octopodes,” the Greek plural, “pedantic,” and says “octopi” is “misconceived” and “a grievous mistake.” Another source, the Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology, says “octopi” is “etymologically fallacious.”

So how did “octopi” come about?

It appears that early in its history, hasty Latinists assumed “octopus” should be pluralized with an –i ending, by analogy with such Latin singular/plural pairs as alumnus/alumni, syllabus/syllabi, and so on.

They were wrong.

The –us ending of octopus doesn’t put it into the same category as those other Latin nouns. The –us ending of octopus is merely part of the Greek element pous (from pod, for “foot”).

As the OED says, the plural form “octopi arises from apprehension of the final -us of the word as the grammatical ending of Latin second declension nouns.” (Latin nouns fall into categories called “declensions,” and this determines how they’re pluralized, made possessive, and so forth.)

As it turns out, a Latin noun borrowed from Greek and ending in a consonant  is treated as a third-declension Latin noun, according to several Latin grammars we consulted, as well as Judith E. Winston’s book Describing Species: Practical Taxonomic Procedure for Biologists (1999). Such third-declension Latin nouns are pluralized with –es, not –i.

Despite its questionable birth, dictionaries now recognize “octopi” as an equal variant of “octopuses.” In other words, both spellings are considered standard English.

In Google searches, the two get roughly the same number of hits, with “octopuses” slightly ahead (it’s preferred in scientific usage). The Greek-inspired plural form “octopodes,” labeled “rare” in the OED, is a distant third.

However, the earliest example we’ve found of the three words is the rare one, “octopodes,” which appears in Richard Chandler’s memoir Travels in Greece (1776).

In enumerating the foods of Athens, Chandler cites “the sea-polypus,” and adds: “The latter called by the Greeks octopodes, from the number of its feet.”

The earliest example we’ve found for “octopi” is from a June 1816 journal entry in Capt. James Kingston Tuckey’s Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire (published posthumously in 1818).

As his ship lies off the shore of western Africa near the mouth of the Zaire, Tuckey writes, “the towing net, however, again afforded us abundance of marine animals, amongst which were many of the paper nautilus (Argonauta sulcata), with the living animals, which, in contradiction to the opinion of the French naturalists, proved to be perfect Octopi.”

The earliest example of “octopuses” in the OED is from Rough Notes on Natural History in Norfolk and the Eastern Counties, an 1884 book by Hill M. Leathes that says “enormous octopuses existed on the western side of Panama, in the Pacific Ocean.”

Of the three plurals, “octopuses” may be the latecomer, but it’s the most natural. And it’s the one we prefer, naturally.

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Q: I see both “jibe” and “jive” used to mean agree, as in “His testimony did not jibe/jive with what he said earlier.” As a sailor, I know “jibe” refers to changing tack while sailing downwind.  “Jive,” on the other hand, refers to deceptive talk. How on earth did we get from point A to point B here?

A: We’re dealing with three similar-sounding words: “jibe,” “gibe,” and “jive.” That’s confusing enough.

To muddle things more, dictionaries recognize “jibe” and “gibe” as variant spellings of each other. And the nautical word for changing tack is spelled “jibe” in the US and “gybe” in the UK.

If you’re still with us, there are two more flies in the ointment. The verb “jibe” has a second meaning, primarily in American English: to agree.

And as you’ve noticed, “jive” is often used for “jibe” in the sense of agreement, though no authoritative dictionary considers this usage standard English.

To get to the bottom of all this, let’s begin with some definitions.

The verb “jibe,” as you say, is a nautical term that refers to changing course by shifting a fore-and-aft sail from side to side while sailing before the wind. (Remember, British dictionaries spell the word “gybe.”)

However, “jibe” has another meaning that’s not etymologically related to the nautical usage: to agree or be consistent with, as in, “Those figures don’t jibe.” The Oxford English Dictionary describes this usage as “chiefly U.S.”

The word “jive” can be either a noun or a verb, as in “Don’t give me that jive” or “Don’t jive me.” It’s a Jazz Era slang term that usually refers to deceptive or nonsensical talk, though it can also mean jazz music.

A third word that’s often confused with these, “gibe,” is both a noun and a verb referring to teasing, taunting, or caustic remarks, as in “Ignore his rude gibes” or “He tends to gibe when he’s annoyed.”

These three words cover a lot of etymological history, so let’s take a look at their origins. (We’ll discuss them in order of seniority, saving “jive” for last.)

The oldest is the verb “gibe,” first recorded in the mid-16th century. The OED says to “gibe” is “to speak sneeringly; to utter taunts; to jeer, flout, scoff.”

Unfortunately, the source of this verb is unclear. The dictionary says it may come from the Old French verb giber, meaning to shake, perhaps used in the sense of horseplay or roughhousing.

The verb was first recorded in English in George Turberville’s Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567): “Speake fayre, and make the weather cleere to him that gybes with thee.”

The modern spelling “gibe” appears in this citation from Robert Greene’s play The Comicall Historie of Alphonsus King of Arragon, written sometime before 1592: “You shall perceiue Medea did not gibe.”

The verb in turn gave us the noun, defined by the OED as “a scoffing or sneering speech; a taunt, flout, or jeer.” The noun was first recorded in 1573, spelled  “iybes” in the plural.

This example from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1604) has the modern spelling: “Alas poore Yoricke … where be your gibes now?”

The nautical term “jibe” showed up in 17th century. Although the word is now “jibe” in the US and “gybe” in the UK, both spellings have been around since the late 1600s.

Here’s an example from Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe: “The Boom gib’d over the Top of the Cabbin.”

The OED says the English term is apparently derived from gijben, an obsolete Dutch term meaning to jibe.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology suggests that the “jibe” spelling was influenced by the noun “jib,” which appeared in the mid-1600s and refers to a triangular sail in front of the foremast.

Chambers says the noun is of uncertain origin but “perhaps related to gibbet, with reference to the sail’s suspension from the masthead.” (The word “gibbet,” another term for gallows, dates from the early 1200s.)

By the way, a verb “jib” was originally used in the early 19th century in reference to horses. The OED says to “jib” was “to stop and refuse to go on; to move restively backwards or sideways instead of going on; to balk stubbornly.”

The first written reference, according to Oxford, is from a letter written by Jane Austen in 1811: “The horses actually gibbed on this side of Hyde Park Gate.” (All the subsequent OED citations are spelled with a “j.”)

As we’ve said, the nautical “jibe” is not related to the agreeable “jibe,” which first showed up in American English in the early 1800s, meaning “to chime in (with); to be in harmony or accord; to agree,” to quote the OED. 

This word’s origin is also uncertain, though Oxford says it is “perhaps phonetically related to chime.” (One meaning of the verb “chime,” a sense dating from the 1600s, is “to accord harmoniously, harmonize, agree,” Oxford says.)

This example is from Doesticks, What He Says (1855), a collection of comic sketches by Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P.B. (the pen name of Mortimer Thomson):

“I attempting to sing the words of ‘Old Hundred,’ while the lady played the Jenny Lind polka, which didn’t seem to jibe.”

This leaves us with “jive,” a term of unknown origin that showed up—both noun and verb— in American slang in the Roaring Twenties. It has close associations with jazz, Harlem, and Black American English.

The OED defines the verb as meaning “to mislead, to deceive, to ‘kid’; to taunt or sneer at.” To “talk jive,” Oxford adds, is “to talk nonsense, to act foolishly.”

And the noun “jive” is defined similarly: “talk or conversation; spec. talk that is misleading, untrue, empty, or pretentious; hence, anything false, worthless, or unpleasant.”

In Oxford’s citations, the verb first appeared in 1928 in the title of a Louis Armstrong record, “Don’t Jive Me.”

The noun appeared in the same year in The Walls of Jericho, a novel by the Harlem Renaissance figure Rudolph Fisher: “Jive, pursuit in love or any device thereof. Usually flattery with intent to win.”

Additionally, in the ’20s “jive” was used as a musical term to mean “jazz,” and in the ’30s it meant to play or dance to jive music.

Finally, in the late ’30s, the OED says, “jive” came to mean “a variety of American English associated with the Harlem area of New York; slang used by Black Americans, or by jazz musicians and their followers.”

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Q: I enjoyed listening to Pat’s segment on WNYC about “lost” words. I just wanted to toss another one at you: “cordwainer.” It means a shoemaker, but it’s next to unknown now. This I’ve learned since I started to make boots by hand a few years ago. Also, how about “cobbler,” the word for a shoe repair guy?

A: “Cordwainer,” what a wonderful word—once quite common, but now little more than a historical footnote (no pun intended!).

Like some of the other words Pat discussed on that program—“loophole,” “dashboard,” “tenterhooks,” and others—“cordwainer” is rarely seen in its original sense.

Literally, a “cordwainer” is someone who works in “cordwain,” an archaic word for cordovan leather.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “cordwain,” a noun first recorded in English in the 14th century, as “Spanish leather made originally at Cordova, of goat-skins tanned and dressed, but afterwards frequently of split horse-hides.”

Such leather, the OED adds, was “much used for shoes, etc., by the higher classes during the Middle Ages.” In fact, the dictionary’s earliest citation for “cordwain” shows just what a luxury item this was in medieval times.

In a religious treatise written about 1380, John Wycliffe wrote that although Christ and his disciples went barefoot, “the pope and other bishops will keep their feet full clean with scarlet and cordwain, and sometime with sandals, with gold, with silver, and silk preciously dight.” (We’ve expanded the quotation for context, and translated the Middle English.)

The related word “cordwainer” meant “a worker in cordwain or cordovan leather,” or more simply “a shoemaker,” the OED says.

Interestingly, the word “cordwainer” was recorded in English long before “cordwain” itself. The OED’s earliest citation for “cordwainer” is from a book of land charters in the 11th century.

Both words—“cordwain” and “cordwainer”—came into English by way of Old French.

“Originally in Spanish, Italian, and Old French,” the OED explains, a cordwainer was “a maker of or dealer in cordovan leather; thence in later French and the Germanic languages, a worker in this leather, a shoemaker.”

While “cordwainer” is now obsolete as an ordinary word for a shoemaker, Oxford says, it still exists “as the name of the trade-guild or company of shoemakers” and is “sometimes used by modern trades unions to include all branches of the trade.”

Several of the OED’s later citations, in fact, are about trade unions.

For example, a 1633 edition of The Survey of London says: “The Company of Shoomakers or Cordwainers, as they stile themselves … were first incorporated in the seventeenth yeere of King Henry the sixth.”

And an 1814 entry from the dispatches of the Duke of Wellington refers to “the unanimous resolution of the incorporated Company of Cordwainers of Newcastle upon Tyne.”

So a union or guild that has “cordwainer” in its name today can trace its lineage—at least etymologically—to the leatherworkers of a thousand years ago.

Another old word, “cobbler,” is still used as an ordinary term for someone who repairs shoes.

“Cobbler” is at least as old as 1362, when it appeared in William Langland’s medieval poem Piers Plowman: “Clement the Cobelere caste of his cloke.” (“Clement the cobbler cast off his cloak.”)

The OED suggests that the noun “cobbler” is evidently derived from the verb “cobble,” meaning to mend, patch, or put together in a rough or clumsy way. The source of the verb is unknown, the OED says.

However, the noun “cobbler” was recorded in the 14th century, although its supposed parent, the verb “cobble,” hasn’t yet been found in any written documents older than the 15th.

This leads John Ayto, in his Dictionary of Word Origins, to a different conclusion: “The verb cobble is a back-formation from cobbler,” a noun he describes as being “of unknown origin.” (A back-formation is a new word formed by dropping part of an older one.)

While we’re on the subject, the verb “cobble” and the noun “cobblestone” are unrelated.

An old noun, “cob,” once used in the sense of a roundish lump, is thought to have yielded two nouns meaning rounded stones suitable for paving—“cobble” and “cobblestone.”

Finally, we should mention that the noun “shoemaker” itself first showed up in the late 1300s.  Here’s an OED example from Charles Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864): “His expression and stoop are like those of a shoemaker.”  

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Q: Is there a difference between “discriminating” and “discriminatory”?  Does the latter word imply disapproval of the discrimination?

A: Each of these adjectives, “discriminating” and “discriminatory,” can be used in both positive and negative ways. 

Like the verb they come from, “discriminate,” they have to do with making distinctions, which is not a bad thing in itself. Making distinctions is unjust only when it’s done for unjust purposes.

But although the adjectives overlap, it’s our feeling that “discriminating” (used as an adjective and not as a participle) is a less loaded word than “discriminatory.”

Of the two, “discriminating” is more likely to be used in a positive way. You might say, for example, that a connoisseur of wines has “discriminating tastes” (not “discriminatory tastes”).

“Discriminatory” seems to be the choice when the meaning is negative—as in “discriminatory housing practices” (not “discriminating housing practices”).

We aren’t the only ones to perceive a difference here. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines “discriminating” in mostly positive terms and “discriminatory”  in largely negative ones.

The dictionary’s leading definition of “discriminating” is positive: “able to recognize or draw fine distinctions or judgments: a discriminating collector of fine books.”

Next in order is “serving to distinguish; distinctive: a discriminating characteristic.”

Last comes the meaning associated with injustice: “marked by or showing prejudice; discriminatory.”

As for “discriminatory,” the negative sense predominates. American Heritage’s first definition is “marked by or showing prejudice; biased.” The last is more neutral: “making distinctions.”

(We’re citing American Heritage here because this dictionary lists a word’s central meaning first. Merriam-Webster’s lists the various meanings in their historical order.)

As we’ll explain later, there seems to some historical foundation for the difference between “discriminating” and “discriminatory.” But first let’s look into the verb that gave us these adjectives.  

“Discriminate” came into English in the early 1600s from the Latin discriminare, which means not only to distinguish or differentiate but also to divide or separate.

The first written use of “discriminate,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, appeared in a book on anatomy published in 1615.

The author, the English physician Helkiah Crooke, describes ligaments that serve “to discriminate or separate the right muscles from the left.”

This later usage appeared in a religious treatise published in 1637 by Bishop Joseph Hall: “The differences whereby we may discriminate counterfeit vertues from true.”

And William Penn used the word in his Perswasive to Moderation to Dissenting Christians (1685): “He sees the Where and What of Persons and Things: He discriminates, and makes that a rule of conduct.”

So in early usages, one who could “discriminate” was a person of discernment, and the ability to “discriminate” was an intellectual and spiritual asset.

Similarly, the 17th-century derivations “discriminating” and “discrimination” were positive or neutral when they first appeared. Negative senses of these words came along later, at about the time that “discriminatory” was introduced.

In post-Revolutionary American economics, the verb “discriminate” began to take on pejorative overtones when it was used to describe trading policies. 

The OED defines this sense of “discriminate” as meaning “to treat goods, trading partners, etc., more or less favourably according to circumstances.” In this sense, Oxford adds, “discriminate” is frequently used “with against (also in favour of).”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for this use of the verb is from a letter written in 1786 by the American political economist Tench Coxe: “They do not discriminate against ships belonging to the other states, in any charge whatever.”

Finally, in mid-19th century America, “discriminate” acquired the familiar negative meaning it has today: “to treat a person or group in an unjust or prejudicial manner, esp. on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.,” in the words of the OED.

This sense of the word, the dictionary notes, is frequently used with “against,” but it can also be used with “in favor of.”

Not surprisingly, the OED’s earliest citation is about racial discrimination. It’s from an anonymous novel about slavery published in Philadelphia in 1857, The Olive-Branch: or, White Oak Farm:

“The African race is placed under disabilities in every State in the Union but one. … As a race, the laws discriminate against them.” (In case you’re curious, the character being quoted refers to Maine as the exception.)

This later example comes from a 1913 issue of the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News: “Civil service rules barred him from discriminating in favor of the jobless and against men who worked on the streets.”

 Oxford cites a more recent example from Helena Kennedy’s book Just Law (2005): “I have frequently criticised judges for their hidebound attitudes to women or their unwillingness to see how the system discriminates.”

In short, “discriminate” was generally used as a positive or neutral term until it added negative social connotations in 19th-century American usage. And words derived from “discriminate” show the same pattern.

In the mid-1600s, the adjective “discriminating” meant “distinctive” or “distinguishing” when applied to things and “discerning” when applied to people.

Then in the 1780s, “discriminating” acquired its neutral economic meaning (favorable or unfavorable taxes, tariffs, etc.). 

It wasn’t until the mid-19th century, according to the OED, that it added the negative sense of treating “a person or group in an unjust or prejudicial manner, esp. on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.”

Here are two of the negative 19th-century American examples cited in the dictionary:

“They [former slaves] will … be made the unhappy objects of ungodly, discriminating laws.” (From the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper, 1865.)

“The section gives the Chinese the same rights as other citizens, and prohibits discriminating legislation by any State against immigrants from one foreign country over those from another.” (From the San Francisco Chronicle, 1870.)

While the other adjective, “discriminatory,” was neutral when first used in 1745, it added both positive and negative meanings in 19th-century America.

In the early 1800s, it was used to describe favorable or unfavorable trading policies. And in the late 1800s, it took on its principal meaning today: unjust or prejudicial, based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and so on.

The OED’s earliest citation for this latter sense of the word is from an 1896 issue of the Galveston Daily News: “Discriminatory and repressionary restrictions.”

In summary, it seems clear that “discriminatory” is more closely associated with prejudicial treatment than “discriminating.”

This could be because “discriminatory” was the latecomer, arriving not long before “discriminate” and its other derivatives were beginning to take on negative meanings in American usage.

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