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Cheeseparings from the moon

Q: In Can You Forgive Her (1864-65), one of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, a character complains about the “wretched cheeseparing Whig government.” How did “cheeseparing” come to mean penny-pinching?

A: When the term first appeared in the 16th century, it literally meant a paring, or shaving, from a rind of cheese.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an Anglican religious treatise that compares Roman Catholic relics to cheeseparings from the moon:

“Ye abused those that beleeued you, making them beleeue the Moone was made of a greene cheese, as they say: but were those blessed relikes so good as the cheese paring?” From The Supremacie of Christian Princes (1573), by John Bridges.

(Another treatise by Bridges, Defence of the Gouernment Established in the Church of Englande, 1587, includes an early version of a common proverb: “a foole and his money is soone parted.”)

The OED’s next “cheeseparing” citation is from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, believed written in the late 1590s. In the play, Falstaff says the thin, vain Justice Shallow looks “like a man made after supper of a cheese paring.”

In the 19th century, Oxford says, “cheeseparing” came to mean “saving money by making numerous small cuts or adjustments; rigorous economizing, esp. of a mean or parsimonious kind.”

Merriam-Webster online has this explanation: “Presumably, the practice of paring off the rind so as to waste the minimum of cheese was viewed as an excessive form of frugality.”

The first OED citation for the parsimonious sense is from an article in The Parliamentary Review (July 19, 1834) on the retirement of Charles Grey, second Earl Grey, as Prime Minister.

During his four years in office, the article says, “There has been much cheeseparing concerning poor clerks, and small offices.”

In case you’re curious, the second Earl Grey is apparently the source of the name of the bergamot-flavored tea blend, though the earliest known evidence for the name dates from several decades after his death, according to the OED.

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‘We’-ism in fact and fiction

Q: When did using the “royal we” become popular among writers of fiction and nonfiction?

A: Writers have been using the pronoun “we” to refer to themselves since Anglo-Saxon days. But the usage was primarily seen in nonfiction until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, and others began using it in fiction.

In Old English, the singular “we” was used by writers as well as sovereigns and other leaders. The earliest sovereign example in the Oxford English Dictionary describes the third-century Roman Emperor Decius speaking to Pope Sixtus II:

 “Witodlice we beorgað þinre ylde, gehyrsuma urum bebodum & geoffra þam undeadlicum godum” (“Verily we have regard for thy age: obey our commands, and offer to the immortal gods”). From The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, written around 990 by the Benedictine Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham.

The next example, which we’ve expanded here, is from the Old English epic Beowulf, believed to date from the early 700s, though the earliest surviving manuscript is from around 1000. Beowulf, a battle leader, not a sovereign, speaks here after singlehandedly killing the monster Grendel:

“We þæt ellenweorc estum miclum, feohtan fremedon, frecne geneðdon eafoð uncuþes” (“We have engaged in a noble endeavor and have been greatly favored in this battle we dared to face against the unknown”).

Writers of nonfiction have regularly used the pronoun “we” in reference to themselves since the usage first appeared in Old English. The first OED example is from the Old English Orosius, a late 9th- or early 10th-century translation of  Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Pagano Libri VII (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans):

“Nu hæbbe we scortlice gesæd ymbe Asia londgemæro” (“Now we have briefly spoken about the boundaries of Asia”).

As for fiction, the earliest examples we’ve found are from the 18th century. We especially like this one from The History of Tom Jones (1749), a novel by Henry Fielding:

“As we do not disdain to borrow wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending us either, we have condescended to take a hint from these honest victuallers, and shall prefix not only a general bill of fare to our whole entertainment, but shall likewise give the reader particular bills to every course which is to be served up in this and the ensuing volumes.”

The earliest fiction example cited in the OED is from Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): “We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect, with which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy days.”

And we found this example in The History of Pendennis (1848–50), by William Makepeace Thackeray: “Arthur was about sixteen years old, we have said, when he began to reign.”

The practice of referring to oneself in the plural is called “nosism.” The word comes from the Latin nos (“we”), so it literally means we-ism.

We wrote a post in 2011 about the history of the term as well as its usage, which in various senses is referred to as “the royal we,” “the editorial we,” “the authorial we,” “the corporate we,” and so on.

We also published a post in 2017 on the use of “we” in the sense of “you,” as in a nurse asking a patient, “How are we feeling today?” or a primary-school teacher telling a student, “Now we won’t talk in class, will we?” These practices are known as “the hospital we” and the “kindergarten we.

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Is a scaredy-cat scary?

Q: Halloween being just around the corner, I am curious about the history of the word “scary.” In standard American English, it means inspiring fear, but I often hear African-Americans and white Americans from the South use it to mean easily frightened.

A: Those two senses of the adjective “scary” (fearsome and fearful) have been around for hundreds of years. Both are accepted without reservation in all current standard American dictionaries and at least one standard British dictionary.

Merriam-Webster, an online American dictionary, defines “scary” as (1) “causing fright,” (2) “easily scared,” and (3) “feeling alarm or fright.” It has these two examples: “a scary movie that gave the child nightmares for weeks afterwards,” and “a scary horse who spooked and kicked at its own shadow.”

Collins, an online British dictionary, lists both senses in British English, defining them as (1) “causing fear or alarm; frightening” and (2) “easily roused to fear; timid.” All the other standard British dictionaries we’ve checked list only the first sense.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, defines “scary” as (1) “terrifying, frightful” and (2) “frightened, timorous.” It describes the second meaning as “originally and chiefly North American.”

The first sense appeared in the 16th century. The earliest OED citation (with the adjective spelled “skearye”) is from an English translation of the Aeneid, a Latin epic by the Roman poet Virgil:

“But toe the, poore Dido, this sight so skearye beholding, What feeling creepeth?” (from Thee First Foure Bookes of Virgil His Æneis, 1582, translated by Richard Stanyhurst, an Anglo-Irish literary scholar, poet, and translator).

The second sense was first recorded in the 18th century. The earliest Oxford example is from correspondence by an American merchant in London to his partners in Maryland:

“If you are scary, we never shall cut any figure in the business” (from a letter dated Nov. 29, 1773, in Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook, published in 1979). Johnson left England during the American Revolutionary War and returned after the war.

The most recent OED citation for the second sense is from a children’s book by an English writer: “He was as scary of being seen as a wild deer” (from Thursday’s Child, 1970, by  Noel Streatfeild).

As for the etymology of “scary,” the dictionary says it was “formed within English, by derivation”—that is, by adding the suffix “y” to the noun “scare.” In Middle English, the noun (spelled “skere”) had the now obsolete sense of fear or dread.

The noun was derived from the use of the verb “scare” (“skerre” in Middle English) to mean frighten or terrify. The OED’s earliest citation for the verb is from the Ormulum (circa 1175), a collection of early Middle English homilies:

“He wile himm færenn ȝiff he maȝȝ & skerrenn mare. & mare” (“He [the devil] will frighten him if he can and scare him more and more”).

Middle English borrowed the verb “scare” from early Scandinavian. In Old Norse, skirra meant to terrify, avoid strife, or shrink from, similar to the adjectival senses of “scary” in Modern English.

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Why is the ‘w’ silent in ‘write’?

Q: I am wondering why one pronounces “w” at the beginning of some words and not others. Those not pronounced seem to be paired with “r” (“write,” “wrong,” “wrist,” “wry,” etc.). And then there are pronunciation pairs like “wrap”/“rap,” “wrest”/“rest,” “wrote”/“rote,” and “wring”/“ring.” I assume they are unrelated.

A: The short answer is that the spelling and pronunciation of English have evolved a lot since Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—migrants from what is now Germany and Scandinavia—brought the language to England in the fifth century. And the evolution has been quite messy.

In our 2023 post about why a “w” is called a double-u, we discuss the origin and pronunciation of the letter, and we note that in Old English, the “w” sound was pronounced before the letters “l,” “r,” and “n,” a usage that died out in Middle English. The silent “w” in “wr-” spellings is a survivor of that usage.

Why, you ask, do we no longer pronounce “w” in the words “wrong,” “wrist,” “write,” “wry,” and so on? Probably because speakers of Old English and Middle English found the “wr” pronunciation difficult.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “Some 130 words in wr- are recorded from the Old English period, and a number of these survive in the later language, while others have been added from Dutch and Low German.”

In early use, the dictionary says, “wr is a consonantal combination occurring initially in a number of words (frequently implying twisting or distortion).”

However, the “early difficulty in pronouncing the combination may be indicated by the Old Northumbrian spellings with wur-,” the OED notes, and by the spelling of “writ” as “weritt” and “wrongous” (wrongful) as “werangus” by the 14th to 15th century.

In Middle English, Oxford says, the letter “r” is sometimes separated from the “w” by metathesis, the transposition of sounds or letters, as in “wræð” (wroth) becoming “wærð,” “wrech” (wretch) becoming “werch,” and “written” becoming “wirten.” (The letter “ð,” or eth, was pronounced “th.”)

“Signs of the dropping of the w begin to appear about the middle of the 15th cent.,” the dictionary says, citing such spellings as “ringe” for the verb “wring” and “rong” for the adjective “wrong,” and the “w”-dropping “becomes common in the 16th.”

The OED adds that “reduction of the sound is also indicated by the converse practice of writing wr- for r-, which similarly appears in the 15th cent. (in wrath for rathe), and becomes common in the 16th.” (The archaic “rathe” means  prompt and eager.) In standard English, Oxford says, the extra “w” was dropped from these words in the 17th century.

As for those pronunciation pairs, you’re right in assuming that they’re unrelated etymologically. But two of the pairs might be described as acquaintances. Because of the short-lived practice of writing “wr-” for “r-,” the word “rap” was briefly spelled “wrap,” and “ring” was briefly “wring.”

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Is this an odd use of ‘even’?

Q: I’m curious about the use of “even” here: “Bill knows it’s the right thing to do. Even Tom knows it’s the right thing to do.” It seems that “even” suggests our expectations for Tom are lower than for Bill. How does “even” do that?

A: The adverb “even” here indicates a special or exceptional instance of a more typical one. In your examples, “Bill knows it’s the right thing to do” is the typical occurrence, and “Even Tom knows it’s the right thing to do” is the special one.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “even” is used as an adverb “to convey that what is being referred to is an extreme case in comparison with a weaker or more general one which is stated or implied in the adjacent context.”

The earliest OED example of “even” used this way is from The Obedience of a Christen Man (1528), by the Protestant biblical translator and reformer William Tyndale:

 “All secretes knowe they [the Roman Catholic hierarchy], even the very thoughtes of mennes hertes.” Tyndale is apparently referring to secrets heard in the confessional.

(Tyndale’s book is said to have influenced Henry VIII’s decision in 1534 to break with Rome and become the supreme head of the Church of England. Tyndale, arrested in the Netherlands, was executed for heresy in 1536.)

The dictionary’s most recent citation for “even” used in the special sense is from Time Out New York (Jan. 18, 2007): “Even the newest New Yorker knows that the furthest eastern border of Greenwich Village is Fourth Avenue.”

Although English is believed to have inherited “even” from prehistoric Germanic, the OED says, the use of the term for an exceptional occurrence “is not attested in other Germanic languages.”

When “even” was first recorded in Old English it was an adjective, emn, meaning “level, smooth, uniform,” according to the OED. It appears in the dictionary’s first citation as emnum, the dative (or indirect object) form of emn:

“Seo burg wæs getimbred an fildum lande & on swiþe emnum” (“The city was built in a field and on very level ground”). From the Old English Orosius, a late 9th- or early 10th-century translation from the Latin of Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Pagano Libri VII (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans).

When the adverb “even” showed up in Old English as efnast, the OED says, it similarly meant “steadily, smoothly; uniformly, regularly.” The first citation is from Psalm 118:77 in the Paris Psalter:

“Me is metegung on modsefan, hu ic æ þine efnast healde” (“For me a modest mind is how I faithfully [i.e., regularly] keep your commandments”).

The adverb still has those senses today, but how did it come to describe something special—in other words, something that’s odd as well as something that’s even?

The OED says the usage is “a natural development” from a now-obsolete Old English use of “even” (spelled efne) to introduce, among other things, “a qualifying circumstance,” with the sense of “namely,” “that is to say,” or “truly.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from Guthlac B, an Old English poem about the death of St. Guthlac of Croyland, a hermit in the Anglian Kingdom of Mercia. The poem is based on Vita Sancti Guthlaci (Life of Guthlac), an 8th-century Latin work by Felix of Crowland, an East Anglian monk:

“He fyrngewyrht fyllan sceolde þurh deaðes cyme, domes hleotan, efne þæs ilcan þe ussa yldran fyrn frecne onfengon” (“He must accept his fate to gain glory through the coming of death, even [that is to say] the same fate our parents of old accepted”).

Although the OED traces the use of “even” to introduce an exceptional occurrence to that Old English usage, the dictionary notes that the exceptional sense of the adverb “seems not to have arisen before the 16th cent., and took time to become fully established.”

If you’d like to read more, we wrote posts in 2017 and 2020 that discuss some of the other senses of the word “even.”

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Keep your pecker up

Q: In Confusion (1993), a novel set in the early ’40s and part of her “Cazalet Chronicle,” Elizabeth Jane Howard uses “keep your pecker up” to mean keep your spirits up. “Pecker”? I’ve always thought that was slang for a penis.

A: In colloquial British English, “pecker” has meant courage or fortitude since the mid-19th century, decades before it came to mean penis, chiefly in colloquial American English. Here’s the story.

The noun “pecker” has meant all sorts of things since it first appeared in the late 16th century, when it was a small hoe-like tool used to break up compacted soil.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, which we’ve expanded, is from A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), by the English writer Thomas Hariot:

“The women with short peckers or parers, because they use them sitting, of a foote long and about fiue inches in breadth: doe onely breake the vpper part of the ground to rayse vp the weedes, grasse, & old stubbes of corne stalkes with their rootes.”

The OED says the use of “pecker” for a tool was derived from the avian sense of the verb “peck” (to strike with a beak), a usage that appeared in the 14th century.

Getting back to the expression you ask about, the OED says “pecker” here means “courage, resolution,” and is used “chiefly in to keep one’s pecker up: to remain cheerful or steadfast.”

The earliest example we’ve found is from Portraits of Children of the Mobility (1841), by Percival Leigh and John Leech, anecdotes and illustrations about working-class children in England.

One illustration shows two boys, Tater Sam and Young Spicey, fighting while other boys cheer them on. One bystander shouts, “Tater, keep your pecker up, old chap!”

The first OED citation for “pecker” used in this sense is from a Sept. 15, 1845, letter to The Times, London: “Come, old chap, keep your pecker up.”

The earliest examples we’ve seen for “pecker” used to mean “penis” are cited in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which labels the usage as “orig. US.”

Green’s quotes “The Joy of the Brave,” a bawdy poem intended to be sung to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The slang dictionary dates it at “c. 1864.”

Here’s an expanded version of the citation: “She gave me to feel that nought would suffice / But stiff sturdy pecker, so proud with desire / To stifle that longing, her fierce amorous fire.”

However, we should add that we’ve been unable to find the original source of that poem. Green’s cites a collection published in Britain in 1917, The Rakish Rhymer, which reprints it with no attribution.

Green’s cites another rhyming example from The Stag Party (1888), an American collection of bawdy songs, toasts, and jokes: “My pecker got hard behind the tree … And I found I had no inclination to pee.”

The OED’s earliest example for “pecker” used to mean “penis” is from Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present (1902), by John Stephen Farmer and William Ernest Henley.

In their entry for “pecker,” the authors list various senses, including “1. The penis; and (2) a butcher’s skewer (see quot. 1622, with a pun on both senses of the word).”

The pun is in this comment by “Hircius, a whoremaster,” in The Virgin Martyr (1622), a play by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger:

“Bawdy Priapus, the first schoolmaster that taught butchers to stick PRICKS in flesh, and make it swell, thou know’st, was the only ningle that I cared for under the moon.” (A “ningle” is an old term for a male friend, especially a homosexual.)

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On books and bribery

Q: Online, The New York Times posted this headline: “I Paid My Kid $100 to Read a Book. You Should, Too.” It could be read as saying I should join the mother in bribing her daughter, though the intended meaning is to do something parallel. Up your alley?

A: In our opinion, there’s no ambiguity in that Times headline. “You Should, Too” is simply an elliptical version of “You Should [Pay Your Kid $100 to Read a Book], Too.”

We doubt that any Times readers would think the writer was urging them to bribe her child. Like you, they would realize “You Should, Too” was short for the clunky full version above. It’s similar to someone saying, “I brush my teeth with Ipana. You should too.”

Elliptical constructions have been common in English since Anglo-Saxon days. Here’s an example from King Alfred’s late ninth-century translation of Liber Regulae Pastoralis (Pastoral Care), a sixth-century Latin treatise by Pope Gregory:

“We magon monnum bemiðan urne geðonc & urne willan, ac we ne magon Gode” (“We can hide our thoughts and desires from men, but we cannot [hide them] from God”).

And these constructions can often be read two ways, with the intended one clear in context. For instance, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth fails to persuade Mr. Bennet to curb Lydia, “and she left him disappointed and sorry” (short for “and [when] she left him [she was] disappointed and sorry”).

As for that Times article, we were struck by something else—the writer’s insistence that her 14-year-old child read only a print book, the kind stacked in “teetering towers” on nightstands. We wonder if she’d have needed a bribe to persuade the girl to read an ebook.

Although print books are still dominant in the US, ebooks are growing in popularity and 30 percent of Americans read them, according to a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center.

We used to feel about print books much as the writer of the Times article. We have a library of several thousand that we’ve read and reread over the years.

However, the small type in many of the books has become a challenge to our aging eyes. Cataract surgery and new reading glasses have helped, but not enough. With ebooks, we can select the most comfortable type size, typeface, background, margins, line spacing, and so on.

And one unexpected delight of ebooks is the ability to click on an unknown word, place, poem, song, or person’s name to learn more. In reading print books, we often skip over such things rather than run to a dictionary or a computer, leaving blanks in our understanding and enjoyment.

We’d argue that an ebook, with its ability to fill in those blanks, may often provide a deeper, more satisfying experience than what the Times writer refers to as “classic deep reading—with two eyes in front of paper, and nothing else going on.”

The truth is that books have had many forms over the centuries, and “book” hasn’t always meant one printed on paper and held between covers.

In Old English, spoken from around 450 to 1150, a “book” (boc or bec) could refer to a literary work in portable form written on vellum, parchment, papyrus, wood, metal, or other material, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In fact, it wasn’t until the late Middle English of the 15th century that the first printed book appeared in English—Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473-74), William Caxton’s translation of a French romance written by Raoul Lefèvre in 1464. (A “recueil” is a literary compilation or collection.)

Today when we want to reread a print book in our home library, we’re more likely to borrow a copy from one of the online digital libraries affiliated with our local public libraries: Cloud Library, Hoopla, and Libby.

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Cuddle, huddle, snuggle

Q: Is there a reason why “cuddle” and “huddle” have the same “-uddle” ending, and  “snuggle” has the slightly similar “-uggle”?

A: As far as we can tell, “cuddle,” “huddle,” and “snuggle” aren’t related. They got their “-uddle” and “-uggle” spellings in different ways.

“Cuddle,” for example, is “a dialectal or nursery word of uncertain derivation,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says it may have come from the Old English cúð, meaning snug or cosy (the letter ð was pronounced “th”). An unrecorded form, cúðle, may have become “cuddle,” as fiðele became “fiddle.”

Oxford says “huddle” is also “of uncertain origin” but may ultimately be a “diminutive and iterative” form of the prehistoric Germanic root hud- (to cover). An iterative, or frequentive, is a verb expressing repeated, frequent action (like “slither” and “slide”).

And “snuggle,” the OED says, was “formed within English, by derivation,” combining the verb “snug” (once spelled with a double “g”) and the suffix “-le.”

As the dictionary explains, one function of the suffix “-le” is to form verbs from other parts of speech, like adjectives, or to create a diminutive or frequentive version of an earlier verb.

Examples formed in Old English, the dictionary says, include “nestle, twinkle, wrestle.” In Middle and early modern English such words included “crackle, crumple, dazzle, hobble, niggle, paddle, sparkle, topple, wriggle, etc.”

And some, the OED adds, come “from echoic roots, as babble, cackle, gabble, giggle, guggle, mumble, etc.” (Usually, a consonant that follows a vowel is doubled when it appears before an “-le” suffix.)

Of the three words you mention, the first to appear was “cuddle,” which Oxford defines as “to press or draw close within the arms, so as to make warm and ‘cosy’; to hug or embrace affectionately, to fondle.”

The cuddling involved a farm animal in the earliest OED citation: “Cudlyng of my cowe.” From a song, written around 1520, cited in Reliquiæ Antiquæ (1845), a collection of medieval and Renaissance writing, edited by Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell.

The next word, “huddle,” originally meant “to put or keep out of sight; to conceal or hide, as among a crowd or under a heap; to hush up,” a usage that’s now obsolete, the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from an English translation of a Latin epistle defending the Church of England. It’s a response to epistles by Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca, Bishop of Silves, Portugal, urging Queen Elizabeth I to embrace Roman Catholicism:

“To chop of the head of the sentence, and slyly huddle the rest [Latin: qui sententiæ caput abscindens astute reliqua subtices].” From Against Ierome Osorius Byshopp of Siluane (1581), James Bell’s translation of an epistle by Walter Haddon and John Foxe.

The OED defines the last of the three, “snuggle,” as “to lie snug or close, esp. for warmth or comfort; to settle down cosily or comfortably; to get or press close to a person, esp. as a mark of affection; to nestle.”

The dictionary’s first example is from an entry in an English-French dictionary: “To Snuggle, or to snuggle together, se serrer dans un Lit.” From The Great French Dictionary (1688), by the author and lexicographer Guy Miege.

A final note: The earliest version of “when pigs fly,” an expression used to say something will never happen, appeared in the translation of the Latin epistle mentioned above:

“This is a great promise, my good Lord: But when will this be done? when pigges flye with their tayles foreward.”

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People who look like me

Q: I often hear Blacks speak of “people who look like me” in referring to opportunities or possibilities. When I hear the expression, I think of doppelgangers or lookalikes. Any thoughts about this?

A: As far as we can tell, the expression “people who look like me” first appeared in the late 19th century and did indeed refer to a doppelgänger—in this case, an imagined rather than a ghostly counterpart of a living person.

The earliest example we’ve found is from “The Chain of Destiny,” a short story by Edith Robinson in the August 1894 issue of Outing, an illustrated monthly magazine in Boston.

A man claims to have seen a woman at a boarding house, but when she denies being there he backs down and says “the figure was merely the result of my own imagination.”

“Then how could you have conjured up a face and figure the counterpart of mine?” the woman asks  “Do you often see people who look like me?”

A similar expression, “someone who looks like me,” showed up in the early 20th century and also referred to a person who looked like another. The earliest example we’ve seen is from A Tax on Bachelors, a 1905 comedy by the playwright Harold Hale.

When a man tells a woman that he’s seen her meeting with a criminal suspect, she replies: “Oh, no, sir. You may have seen someone who looks like me, but I am a stranger in this part of the country.”

In the usage you’re asking about, the two expressions are used figuratively for a racial, ethnic, sexual, or other group, not literally for an individual who looks like someone else.

The usage is an illustration of synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, as in “the American woman” standing for all American women.

In the figurative use of “people who look like me,” the speaker represents an entire group. The usage appears to date from the late 1960s, and the earliest example we’ve seen uses it in a racial sense:

“Most of the islands of the West Indies have a majority of whatever the term is now—I hear Negro and I hear black, but people who look like me.” From remarks by Dr. Karl A. Smith at a conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund, New York, Oct. 28-30, 1969, published the following year in Demographic Aspects of the Black Community, edited by Clyde V. Kiser.

The figurative usage became increasingly more common in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, according a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books. Here are a few examples:

  • “I will be sexist, ageist, and ethnocentric as I decide to accept a ride from a white middle-class woman with two little children. I will overgeneralize that all mothers are trustworthy and that someone who looks like me will indeed behave as I would in a similar situation.” From “ ‘Vive la Difference!’ and Communication Processes,” a paper by Alleen Pace Nilsen in The English Journal (March 1985).
  • “It’s sad to me that the new books of the Nancy Drew series still consist of an all-white world where other people who look like me are still on the fringes of society.” From “Fixing Nancy Drew: African American Strategies for Reading,” a chapter by Njeri Fuller in Rediscovering Nancy Drew (1995), edited by Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tilman Romalov.
  • “It is when the land [Antigua] is completely empty that I and the people who look like me begin to make an appearance.” From My Garden (Book), 1999, by Jamaica Kincaid.
  • “The people who look like me at the conferences I attend are often the ones serving the dinner or the ones cleaning up the room.” From an interview with Pat Mora in A Poet’s Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets (2003), by Bruce Allen Dick.

The writer and educator Ben Yagoda notes that the figurative usage “picked up speed with the election of Barack Obama in 2008.”

In a Jan. 21, 2021, post on his blog, he says Obama “inspired two similarly titled books: The President Looks Like Me & Other Poems, by Tony Medina, and Somebody in the White House Looks Like Me, by Rosetta L. Hopkins.”

“But as with much else,” Yagoda adds, “it was probably Michelle Obama who cemented the phrase in the national consciousness,” with her remarks at the opening of the Whitney Museum’s new building in New York on April 30, 2015:

“You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood.”

We’ll end with the opening lines of “Brown Girl, Brown Girl,” a 2017 poem that Leslé Honoré updated in 2020 after Kamala Harris was elected Vice President:

Brown girl Brown girl
what do you see?
i see a Vice President
that looks like me

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Can ‘difficult’ be a verb?

Q: I found this unusual use of “difficult” in an old account of a Scottish broadsword match: “both gentlemen displayed such equality of proficiency, that the Judges were difficulted to decide betwixt them.”

A: Unusual indeed, but not when The Sun, a now-defunct evening newspaper in London, published that report on the broadsword match in Edinburgh on Dec. 5, 1828.

As it turns out, the use of “difficult” as a verb first appeared in the mid-15th century and is still seen occasionally, though it’s now considered rare or obsolete.

The usage is derived from three sources: the adjective “difficult,” the Middle French verb difficulter (to make difficult), and the post-classical Latin difficultare (to make difficult or obstruct), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When the verb first appeared in late Middle English, it meant “to obscure the sense of; to make difficult to understand,” a meaning that’s now obsolete, the OED says. The present participle “difficultyng” is used in the dictionary’s earliest citation:

“Suche teching is forgid, feynyd and veyn curiosite, difficultyng, harding and derking goddis lawe” (“Such teaching is a forged, fiendish, and vain cleverness, difficulting, hardening and darkening God’s law”). From The Donet, a religious treatise written around 1445 by Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester.

[The word “donet” in the title of Bishop Pecock’s tract comes from the name of Ælius Donatus, author of Ars Grammatica, a fourth-century introduction to Latin grammar. The now-obsolete term was used for a while to mean an introduction to any subject—in Pecock’s case, theology.]

In the early 17th century, the verb “difficult” took on the sense or “to make (an action or process) difficult; to hinder, impede,” a usage that the OED labels “now rare.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a letter written Dec. 29, 1608, in which Sir Charles Cornwallis, the British ambassador in Spain, complains to the Lords of the Privy Council about his lack of access in Madrid compared to the openness shown to the Spanish ambassador in London:

“Your Lordships will not hold so great an inequallity sufferrable; that the King’s Ambassador there should not only have a free Correspondencye with his Master’s Subjects, but a contynuall Resort and Conference with those of his Majesties; then to me here, that one should be restrayned and the other difficulted.”

In the mid-17th century, the verb came to mean “to cause problems or difficulties for (a person, organization, etc.); to hamper, obstruct; (also) to perplex. Usually in passive.” The OED says the usage was frequently seen in Scottish English, but is “now rare.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from An History of the Civill Warres of England, Betweene the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke (1641), a translation by Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth, of a work by the Italian historian Giovanni Francesco Biondi:

“Being thus difficulted [Italian in tai difficultà], the defendants demanded a truce untill Saint Iohn Baptists-day.”

Finally, here are two 21st-century examples cited by the OED:

“The appearance of the optic disc varies widely among healthy individuals, difficulting the recognition of pathological changes.” From The Optic Nerve in Glaucoma (2006), by Remo Susanna Jr. and Felipe A. Medeiros. (We’ve expanded the citation.)

“It difficulted me greatly that I could think of no way to get Theo into the house.” From Florence and Giles (2010), a Gothic tale by the British novelist John Harding.

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Do let’s have another drink!

Q: I was stopped by this sentence in an Angela Thirkell novel: “Do let’s do this again.” What is the first “do” doing there?

A: That “do” in The Old Bank House (1949) is an auxiliary verb used to give polite encouragement to a command. It’s a very old usage that dates back to Anglo-Saxon days.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the “do” here is used “with an affirmative imperative: adding emphasis or urgency to an entreaty, exhortation, or command.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from the Gospel of John, 8:11, in the West Saxon Gospels, also known as the Wessex Gospels, dating from the late 900s:

“Do ga & ne synga þu næfre ma” (“Do go and not sin thou never more”).

As for the second “do” in your sentence, the one that means to perform an action, the first OED citation is from the Metres of Boethius, an Old English verse translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (“The Consolation of Philosophy”), a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius:

“Hio sceal eft don þæt hio ær dyde” (“It shall do again what it ere did”). Boethius is saying that any living creature will eventually return to the nature it was born with.

In case you’re curious about the imperative “let’s” in the sentence you questioned (“Do let’s do this again”), we wrote a post in 2012 that discusses the history of the contraction “let’s.”

We’ll end now with a recent example from the title of a book by the Northern Irish historian, author, and broadcaster Gareth Russell:

Do Let’s Have Another Drink! The Dry Wit and Fizzy Life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (2022).

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If money were no object

A: How did the phrase “no object” come to mean “not something important” or “not an obstacle” in a sentence like “I’d fly first class if money were no object”?

A: The usage was first recorded in the late 18th century in newspaper advertising copy. It’s derived from the much older use of the noun “object” to mean a goal or purpose. Here’s the story.

When the noun first appeared in English in the late 14th century, it meant “something placed before or presented to the eyes or other senses,” but now more generally means “a material thing that can be seen and touched,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from On the Properties of Things, John Trevisa’s translation, sometime before 1398, of De Proprietatibus Rerum, an encyclopedic Latin work by the 13th-century Franciscan scholar Bartholomaeus Anglicus:

“The obiecte of þe yȝe is al þat may ben seyn, and al þat may ben herd is obiect to þe heringe” (“The object of the eye is all that may be seen, and all that may be heard is the object of the hearing”).

The OED says the usage ultimately comes from the classical Latin noun obiectum (something presented to the senses) and past participle obiectus (offered, presented).

In the early 15th century, the English noun came to mean a “goal, purpose, or aim; the end to which effort is directed; the thing sought, aimed at, or striven for,” according to the dictionary.

The first Oxford citation is from Grande Chirurgie, an anonymous Middle English translation, written sometime before 1425, of Chirurgia Magna (1363), a Latin surgical treatise by the French surgeon Guy de Chauliac:

“Euacuacioun for his obiecte only biheld plectoric concourse” (“The object of evacuation only concerns plethoric accumulation”). The passage refers to the evacuation, or draining, of plethoric concourse, excessive accumulation of blood.

So how did “object,” a noun for a goal or purpose, come to mean something important or achievable when used in the negative phrase “no object” (not important or achievable)?

As an explanation, the OED cites a 1931 paper by the lexicographer C. T. Onions, the dictionary’s fourth editor.

In “Distance No Object” (Tract XXXVI, Society for Pure English), Onions says the expression is derived from a formula commonly used in early newspaper advertisements, “in which the word object had its normal meaning of ‘thing aimed at,’ ‘aim.’ ”

Thus, he writes, “the advertiser states directly what is his object or his principal object.”

Later, Onions says, “object” was used in negative constructions meaning something that’s not an aim—“the first step” in its “shift of meaning.”

Finally, he says, the negative construction came to mean something that “will not be taken into consideration by the advertiser, that it will not be regarded as an obstacle, that it will not matter.”

The earliest OED citation for “no object” used this way is from a newspaper ad by a woman seeking a job: “A Gentlewoman … wishes to superintend the family of a single Gentleman or Lady …  and salary will be no object” (Morning Herald, London, May 20, 1782).

The expression soon escaped its advertising origins. We found an example in Management (1799), a comedy by the English playwright Frederick Reynolds.

A character who wants to be an actor says he’ll work for free. When offered money, he replies, “Pha!—money’s no object.”

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Looking into ‘leaning into’

Q:  The university where I teach is urging the staff to “lean into” the success of our students. Is this trendy use of “lean” legit? So many suits are employing it that I can hear Bill Withers moaning from the great beyond.

A: The phrasal verb “lean into” is indeed legit and means to embrace or commit to. The usage that’s been around since the mid-20th century, but we know of only two standard dictionaries that have embraced it.

The Oxford Dictionary of English and the New Oxford American Dictionary define “lean into” as “commit fully to or embrace something: lean into kindness and community; they’re keys to serving and connecting you and your neighbours well.”

Both are published by Oxford University Press, which produces the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference that says the usage originated in the US and means “to accept and embrace (an experience); to commit to or fully engage with (a role, task, or undertaking).”

The earliest OED citation is from the Princeton Alumni Weekly (Feb. 10, 1941): “Bill D’Arcy is working for the Coco-Cola Co. in Atlanta, Ga. Kent Cooper is leaning into it at Columbia Business.”

The dictionary’s most recent example is from an article in Corn & Soybean Digest (Sept. 29, 2021) about the need for farmers to speak to their children about the future of their farms: “Sometimes it’s a hard subject to get into for many reasons, but you have to lean into it.”

A similar phrasal verb, “lean in,” appeared in the US in the early 21st century and means “to become fully engaged with something; to commit oneself completely to a role, task, or undertaking, esp. in the face of difficulty or resistance,” according to the OED.

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from an article on interactive storytelling: “Kids are being remade to expect to interact, to lean in and make a difference. They do not want to read or watch passively” (“Psst … Wanna Do a Phrontisterion,” by Thom Gillespie, in Future Courses, 2001, edited by Jason Ohler).

[In case you’re curious, a “phrontisterion” or “phrontistery” is a place for thinking or studying. It comes from the post-classical Latin phrontisterium and the ancient Greek ϕροντιστήριον (“thinking shop”), a term that Aristophanes uses in his comedy Νεφέλαι (The Clouds) to ridicule the school of Socrates.]

You can find the term “lean in” in several dictionaries of American and British English. Merriam-Webster online, for example, defines it as “to persevere in spite of risk or difficulty,” and has this example: “Attending college began as a time of ‘leaning in,’ because it took courage to attend a large campus without much parental support and no friends attending with me.”

The OED notes that “lean in” was “popularized by US business executive Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In (2013), in which she encourages women to challenge traditional gender roles and aspire to leadership in the workplace.”

Finally, you mentioned the American singer-songwriter Bill Withers, who used a much older phrasal verb in his 1972 song “Lean on Me.”

The OED says the use of “lean” with “on,” “upon,” or by itself to mean rely on dates from the Middle English of the 12th century.

The OED’s earliest example, with leonie up on, is from the anonymous Ancrene Riwle, or rules for anchoresses, dating from before 1200. Here’s an expanded version:

“ha understonden þet ha ahen to beon of se hali lif þet al hali chirche, þet is cristene folk, leonie & wreoðie up on ham.”

(“they [the anchoresses] understand that they must live so holy a life that all the holy church, that is, the Christian people, may lean and depend upon them.”)

We’ll end with the chorus from the Bill Withers song “Lean on Me”:

Lean on me
When you’re not strong
And I’ll be your friend,
I’ll help you carry on
For it won’t be long
Till I’m gonna need
Somebody to lean on.

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May you always walk in sunshine

Q: I received a greeting card with the message “I hope every day finds you feeling better than the day before.” I liked the sentiment but thought the wording could be improved by changing “I hope every day finds” to “May every day find.” Then I noticed the verb needed to change too, and I could not figure out why.

A: Each of those sentences is grammatically correct: (1) “I hope every day finds you feeling better than the day before,” and (2) “May every day find you feeling better than the day before.”

You’re right—the subject of each is the singular “day,” but the verb changes: “every day finds” vs. “may every day find.” Here’s why this happens.

The word “may” in the second example is a modal auxiliary verb. It adds a dimension of modality to the main verb—such as probability, necessity, permission, or obligation.

And in a construction like this, the main verb is always a bare (or “to”-less) infinitive, whether the subject is singular or plural:

“A typical day may find him at work by 7 a.m.” … “Most days may find him at work by 7 a.m.”

In your second example, the auxiliary “may” and the subject are reversed, but the principle is the same. Instead of “Every day may find,” we have the reverse, “May every day find.”

Here, the Oxford English Dictionary says, the auxiliary “may” is “used (with inversion of verb and subject) in exclamatory expressions of wish.”

A couple of OED examples: “Long may he reigne” (1611); “May your soul never wander and may you find eternal peace” (1986).

We’re reminded of a popular song from the past,  “May You Always” (1958), with words by Larry Markes and music by Dick Charles. It’s most often associated with the McGuire Sisters.

In case you’re interested in knowing more, we’ve written several posts about modal auxiliary verbs, like “may,” “must,” “can,” and “shall.” A 2020 post has links to two others.

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An accommodating detective

Q: In Josephine Tey’s 1950 novel To Love and Be Wise, a character puns on two meanings of “accommodate” (to oblige and to provide lodging). I’d like to know the history here, if you’ll accommodate me.

A: The adjective “accommodating” and the noun “accommodation” are used in that witty conversation between Miss Searle and Detective Inspector Alan Grant:

“You are very accommodating for a policeman,” she remarked.

“Criminals don’t find us that way,” he said.

“I thought providing accommodation for criminals was the end and object of Scotland Yard.”

The verb “accommodate” ultimately comes from the Classical Latin accommodare (to fit on, attach, make agree, make suitable, adapt), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But as the OED explains, some of the English senses, including the obliging and lodging meanings, were influenced by Middle French.

When “accommodate” first appeared in English in the early 16th century, the dictionary says, it meant “to apply, attribute, or ascribe (esp. words) to a person,” a sense that’s now obsolete.

The earliest Oxford citation, which we’ve edited and expanded, is from The Boke Named the Gouernour (1531), a treatise by the English scholar and diplomat Thomas Elyot on how to properly train statesmen.

In referring to the Latin expression nosce te ipsum (“know thyself”), Elyot says it “is of olde writars supposed for to be firste spoken by Chilo [Chilon of Sparta] or some other of the seuen auncient Greekes [the Seven Sages of Greece],” while “Others do accommodate it to Apollo.”

The OED says the English verb soon took on the sense of “to adapt oneself to another thing or person.” The first example cited is from a 1538 Latin dictionary written by Elyot:

Scio vti foro, I knowe what I haue to do, also I can accommodate my selfe to other mens maners, & to the condycions of the tyme and place present.” (A literal translation of the Latin expression would be “I know how to use the forum.”)

In the late 16th century, the verb took on its lodging sense, which the OED defines as “to provide lodging for (a person), esp. as a guest; to house; (also) to receive as an inmate.”

The dictionary’s first example, which we’ve edited and expanded, cites a May 29, 1592, letter from Florence, Italy, by the British author and diplomat Henry Wotton:

“Touching my private self, I continue in the house of Signor Bacchio Boni, in Via Larga, where I am reasonably well accommodated, but for my ten crowns a month” (The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 1907, by Logan Pearsall Smith).

In the early 17th century, the verb took on its obliging sense, which the OED defines as “to oblige, assist, or confer a favour on (a person); to be suitable or convenient for.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from A General History of the Netherlands (1608), Edward Grimeston’s translation of a French work by Jean-François le Petit:

“Laying before them the great benefits which the empire had receiued from the king of Spaine, and the house of Burgoigne; wherefore it was reciprocally bound to serue and accommodate  him therein.”

In the early 17th century, the noun “accommodation” appeared in its lodging sense, which the OED defines as “room and provision for the reception of people.”

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from Shakespeare’s Othello, believed written around 1603:

“I craue fit disposition for my wife, / Due reuerence of place and exhibition, / Which such accomodation and besort [suitable company] / As leuels with her breeding.”

The adjective “accommodating” appeared in the mid-17th century, the OED says, and describes something “that accommodates (in various senses), esp. obliging, pliant, conciliatory; easy to deal with.”

The first obliging citation is from a treatise on marriage: “An accomodating, plyable and acceptable spirit to traffique with others” (Matrimoniall Honovr, 1642, by the Anglican cleric Daniel Rogers).

Finally, the latest Oxford citation for the verb “accommodate” used in its obliging sense is from Two in Bed: The Social System of Couple Bed Sharing (2006), by Paul C. Rosenblatt:

“An important part of getting along with someone in a long term, intimate relationship is learning how to accommodate and tolerate.”

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We thank you kindly

Q: In “The Dig,” a movie set in England in the 1930s, the characters express gratitude by saying, “Thank you kindly,” and concern for the lady of the manor by asking, “Is she doing poorly?” Are these usages dated?

A: These expressions sound old-fashioned to us too, but they’re still in use and have had somewhat of a revival lately.

“Thank you kindly” first appeared in Middle English in the 16th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines “to thank kindly and variants” as “to thank (someone) very much; (also) to thank politely.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from an anonymous interlude, or light theatrical work: “Now I thanke you both full kindly” (An Enterlude of Welth, and Helth, Very Mery and Full of Pastyme, first performed in the mid-1550s).

The most recent OED citation is from the Daily Mail (London, Oct. 14, 2002):  “Bernstein … offered me a job as a documentary producer. I thanked him kindly but indicated that my ambitions lay in other directions.”

A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books, shows that the expression began falling out of favor in the late 19th century but had a comeback in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

When the verb “thank” first appeared in Old English as þancian or ðoncian, it meant “to give thanks.” The runic letters þ, or thorn, and ð, or eth, were pronounced as “th.”

In this early OED example, ðoncade is the past tense of þancian: “genimmende calic ðoncunco dyde vel ðoncade & sealde him” (“taking the cup, he gave thanks and gave it to them”). From Matthew 26:27 in the Lindisfarne Gospels.

As for “poorly,” it first appeared in Middle English as povreliche, an adverb meaning “inadequately, imperfectly, unsatisfactorily.” The earliest Oxford citation is from Ancrene Riwle (also known as Ancrene Wisse), an anonymous guide for monastic women, written sometime before 1200:

“Ant tah min entente beo to beten ham her-inne, ich hit do se povreliche, ant sunegi in othre dei-hwamliche seoththen ich wes nest i-schriven” (“And though my intent is to atone for them [sins] in this, I do it so poorly and sin in other [matters] daily since I was last confessed”).

We’ve expanded the example above and used a more recently edited version of the manuscript. The OED’s passage is from The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (1962), edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and Neil Ripley Ker. Ours is from Ancrene Wisse (2000), edited by Robert Hasenfratz.

The form of the word you’re asking about, the adjective “poorly,” meant “unwell, in ill health” when it first showed up in the 16th century, the OED says. The dictionary describes the usage as “chiefly British,” but all four standard American dictionaries we regularly consult recognize it.

The first Oxford citation, which we’ve expanded, is from a farming guide, written in verse, that refers to the health of cattle:

“From Christmas, till May be wel entered in, / Al cattel wax faint, and looke poorely and thin” (from A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry, 1570, by the English poet-farmer Thomas Tusser).

The earliest OED example for “poorly” used to describe human health is from The Witch, a tragicomedy written in the early 17th century by the English playwright Thomas Middleton: “Why shak’st thy head soe? and look’st so pale, and poorely?”

The dictionary’s most recent citation is from Paper Faces (1991), a children’s novel by the English author Rachel Anderson: “Children couldn’t go into the children’s ward unless they themselves were poorly.”

A search for “feel poorly” in Ngram Viewer indicates that this use of “poorly” fell out of favor in the 20th century, but has come back somewhat in the 21st.

A final note: Thomas Tusser, the author of the farming guide mentioned above, coined an early version of the proverb “a fool and his money are soon parted.”

In an expanded version of his guide, Fiue Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie (1573), Tusser has these lines: “A foole and his monie be soone at debate, / which after with sorrow repents him too late.”

A version closer to the usual wording soon appeared in A Defence of the Gouernment Established in the Church of Englande (1587), by John Bridges: “a foole and his money is soone parted.”

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The stylish origin of ‘tag along’

Q: I’m curious about when the word “tag” became used in “tag along.” Is this an American usage or did it originate earlier than that?

A: Early versions of “tag along” were first recorded in England in the 17th century. But the usage ultimately comes from medieval times, when “tags” referred to the ribbon-like strips of cloth in the decoratively slashed hem of a skirt.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the original “tag” was “one of the narrow, often pointed, laciniæ or pendent pieces made by slashing the skirt of a garment.”

The earliest Oxford citation is from a 1402 entry in Political Poems and Songs Related to English History (1861), edited by Thomas Wright:

“Of suche wide clothing, tateris and tagges, it hirtith myn hert hevyly.”

(Chaucer denounced the fashion as “degise endentynge” [ostentatious notching] and a “wast of clooth in vanitee” in “The Parson’s Tale,” late 1300s.)

The use of “tag” as a verb emerged in the early 16th century. The OED defines “to tag” as “to furnish or mark with or as with a tag.”

The dictionary’s first example, which we’ve expanded here, is from a 1503 entry in the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland (1900), edited by James Balfour Paul:

“For ane curpal and ane tee [one crupper strap and one T attachment] to the harnes sadill, tagging, mending, and stopping [padding] of the samyn.”

In the 17th century, the dictionary says, the verb took on the sense of “to trail or drag behind; to follow closely, follow in one’s train,” and is “frequently const. [constructed with] afteralong(a)roundon.”

The dictionary’s earliest example, which uses “tag on,” is from The Plain-Dealer (1676), a comedy of manners by the English playwright William Wycherley: “I hate a harness, and will not tag on in a faction, kissing my leader behind, that another slave may do the like to me.”

The earliest use of “tag along” that we’ve found is from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884): “Tom thought it would be a first-rate surprise for him to come here to the house first, and for me to by and by tag along and drop in, and let on to be a stranger.”

Oxford’s first citation is from More Fables (1900), a collection of short stories by the American humorist George Ade: “The men Volunteered to help, and two or three wanted to Tag along, but Clara drove them back.”

In the mid-20th century, “tag-along” (later “tagalong”) appeared as an adjective describing “that which is towed or trailed behind something else,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s first example appeared during World War II: “Evidence of trailed, or ‘tag-along,’ bombs still is scanty” (The Baltimore Sun, Jan. 21, 1944).

The adjective was later “applied to an uninvited follower,” as in this Oxford example from a Canadian newspaper: “The small trailer snug beside it like a tagalong pup” (The Islander, Victoria, BC, June 10, 1973).

When the noun “tagalong” first appeared, the OED says, it referred to “an unwelcome, uninvited, or neglected companion.” It cites the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961), which has this example: “felt honored to be a tagalong tolerated by the older boys.”

Standard dictionaries now define the noun as someone who follows the lead of another. In British English, it can also mean something that’s attached to and pulled behind something else, like a child’s bicycle attached to an adult’s.

Here’s an example of the follower sense from Merriam-Webster: “His little sister was sometimes a tagalong on his outings with his friends.” And here’s a bicycle example from Longman: “The tagalong attaches to an adult’s bicycle.”

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Rhyme and reason in Shakespeare

Q: Did “word” once rhyme with “afford” and “sword,” as it seems to do in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 79 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

A: Yes, the noun “word” rhymes with the verb “afford” and the noun “sword” in those two works. Here are the relevant passages:

He lends thee virtue and he stole that word
From thy behavior; beauty doth he give
And found it in thy cheek; he can afford
No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.
     —Sonnet 79

Where is Demetrius? O, how fit a word
Is that vile name to perish on my sword!
     —A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016), the linguist David Crystal uses the International Phonetic Alphabet for the  pronunciations of the three words: wɔːɹd, əˈfɔːɹd, and sɔːɹd.

The ɔː in Original Pronunciation represents the “aw” sound of “thought” in modern English while the ɹ denotes the “r” sound of “bard” in standard American dictionaries. This “r” isn’t pronounced in standard British dictionaries.

So “afford” and “sword” in the early modern English of Shakespeare sounded much like their pronunciations in contemporary American dictionaries, while “word” sounded like the standard American pronunciation of “ward.”

Crystal writes that “historical phonologists use several types of data to reconstruct the sound system from a period before the advent of audio-recording.”

“For the Elizabethan period,” he says, “chief among them are spellings and rhymes, which—judiciously interpreted, and supplemented by the observations of contemporary writers on language—provide most of the information we need in order to reconstruct OP.”

According to Crystal, Shakespeare spelled the noun “word” variously as “word,” “worde,” “ ’ord,” and “ ’ort.”  In addition to “afford” and “sword,” it rhymed with “board,” “ford,” “Ford,” and “lord” in various Shakespearean works.

In a  2012 post about OP, we note that Ben Jonson, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, said the proper pronunciation of “r” after a vowel, as in “far” or “heart,” sounded “growly.”

Crystal points out that Elizabethan speakers used various regional accents in OP, just as speakers today use various accents in speaking contemporary English.

“OP is a phonology—a sound system—which would have been realized in a variety of accents, all of which were different in certain respects from the variety we find in present-day English,” he says.

So how did Shakespeare sound when he spoke OP? “We know nothing about how Shakespeare himself spoke,” Crystal writes, “though we can conjecture that his accent would have been a mixture of Warwickshire and London.”

When “word” first appeared In Old English, spoken from around 450 to 1150, it had many senses, including an utterance, a statement, a speech, lyrics, news, gossip, fame, a command or request, a promise or pledge, and a maxim or proverb.

In the late 10th or early 11th century, the noun took on its usual modern sense: a meaningful element of speech or writing used by itself or with others to form sentences.

The OED defines this sense more expansively. Here’s the first half of its definition: “Any of the sequences of one or more sounds or morphemes (intuitively recognized by native speakers as) constituting the basic units of meaningful speech used in forming a sentence or utterance in a language (and in most writing systems normally separated by spaces).”

The dictionary’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, is from an Old English and Latin passage in a grammar book written by the Benedictine abbot and scholar Ælfric of Eynsham (circa 950 to 1010):

“Of ðam syndon fif VOCALES, þæt synd clypiendlice: a, e, i, o, u. das fif stafas seteowjad heora naman purh hi sylfe and biitan dam stafum ne maeg nan word beon awriten.”

(“Of these [the letters of the alphabet] are five VOWELS, which are called: a, e, i, o, u. These five letters are named for their sounds, and no word can be written without them.”)

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On the truckling arts

Q: After watching the Manhunt TV series about the search for Lincoln’s assassin, I looked for further details online. Some articles used the phrase “truckling arts,” but I wasn’t able to find it in dictionaries. Can you help me understand what those particular “arts” are all about?

A: Someone skilled in the “truckling arts” is a sycophant, like Uriah Heep in the Dickens novel David Copperfield (1850) or Mr. Collins in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813).

The expression comes from the verb “truckle,” meaning to act in a subservient manner. But when the verb first appeared in the early 17th century it had a much different sense. To “truckle” was to sleep in a truckle bed, one rolled or slid under another when not in use.

As Merriam-Webster online explains, “the fact that truckle beds were pushed under larger standard beds had inspired a figurative sense of truckle: ‘to yield to the wishes of another’ or ‘to bend obsequiously.’ ”

The figurative usage is derived from an early 15th-century noun, “truckle,” which meant “a small wheel with a groove in its circumference round which a cord passes,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation is from a 1417 entry in the accounts of King Henry V of England: “j apparaille ix pullifs vj Trokles” (“I furnished 9 pulleys and 6 truckles”).

The term “truckle bed” appeared in the mid-15th century. The OED defines it as “a low bed running on truckles or castors, usually pushed beneath a high or ‘standing’ bed when not in use; a trundle-bed.”

The dictionary’s first citation, in Latin and Middle English, is from the Statutes of Magdalen College, University of Oxford (1459):

“Sint duo lecti principales, et duo lecti rotales, Trookyll beddys vulgariter nuncupati” (“There shall be two main beds and two wheeled beds, commonly called ‘truckle beds’ ”).

When the verb “truckle” appeared a century and a half later, it meant “to sleep in a truckle-bed,” the OED says, and was construed as being “under (beneath) the person occupying the high bed.”

The first Oxford example is from The Coxcomb, a comedy by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, believed written in the early 1600s: “I’le truckle heere Boy, give me another pillow.”

In the mid-1600s, the dictionary says, the adjective “truckling” appeared and meant “subordinate or inferior” or “meanly submissive, servile.”

The OED’s first citation is from a poem, “The Publique Faith,” in a collection of translations and poetry by the English writer Robert Fletcher:

“The elf dares peep abroad, the pretty foole / Can wag [move around] without a truckling standing-stoole [baby walker]” (from Ex Otio Negotium. Or, Martiall His Epigrams Translated: With Sundry Poems and Fancies, 1656, described by Fletcher as “the scattered Papers of my Youth”).

A decade later, Oxford says, the verb took on the figurative sense of  “to take a subordinate or inferior position; to be subservient, to submit, to give precedence.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a Sept. 2, 1667, entry in The Diary of Samuel Pepys: “[Sir Willam Coventry says] he will never, while he lives, truckle under anybody or any faction, but do just as his own reason and judgment directs.”

The OED doesn’t mention the phrase “truckling arts,” but the usage was apparently first recorded in the 19th century. The earliest example we’ve found is from the Secret History of the Court of England (1832), by Lady Anne Hamilton.

In this passage, she criticizes the actions of George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister:

“But, to anyone acquainted with the truckling arts of Mr. Canning, such conduct was no more than might have been expected.”

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Whence the silent ‘c’ in ‘indict’?

Q: Why isn’t the letter “c” pronounced in “indict”?

A: Interestingly, the verb “indict” wasn’t spelled or pronounced with a “c” when it first appeared in Middle English in the early 14th century. In fact it wasn’t even spelled with a “c” in Anglo-Norman or Old French, the sources of the English word.

The “c” crept into the spelling in the early 17th century when scholars apparently decided to make the verb look more like indictare, an Anglo-Latin term for “indict” that developed in medieval legal writing in England.

As it happens, indictare didn’t exist in Classical Latin, where a “t”-less version, indicare, meant “to give evidence against,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The medieval legal term combined the prefix “in-” with the Classical Latin dictare (“to say, declare, dictate”).

As the OED explains, the medieval legal term “seems to be merely the latinized form of the Anglo-Norman and Middle English verb.” In other words, it was apparently a misconceived scholarly attempt to make the Anglo-Norman and Old French look more Latin.

When “indict” first appeared in Middle English in the early 14th century as endyte or enditeOxford says, it meant “to bring a charge” against someone or “to accuse (a person)” of a crime.

The earliest OED example, which we’ve expanded, is from Handlyng Synne (1303), a devotional work by the English historian and poet Robert Mannyng:

what shul we sey of þys dytours,
Þys fals men, þat beyn sysours,
Þat, for hate, a trewman wyl endyte,
And a þefe for syluer quyte?

(What shall we say of these accusers,
These false men that be jurymen,
But for hate will indict a true man,
And for silver acquit a thief?)

The first OED citation for “indict” spelled with a “c” is from a legal textbook: “If he bee indicted of Felonie, or Treason.” From The Lawyers LightOr, a Due Direction for the Study of the Law for Methode (1629), by John Doddridge, an English lawyer, judge, and legislator.

In a post we wrote in 2022 about the silent “b” in English, we quote the classicist J. D. Sadler as saying, “There are many words borrowed from Latin through French where we have gone back to the Latin root to replace a letter lost in transit. Most involve the initial consonant in the groups btctlt, and pt.”

In his article, “Popular Etymology” (The Classical Journal, February-March 1971), Sadler gives “debt,” “doubt,” and “subtle” as examples, along with “arctic,” “perfect,” “subject,” “verdict,” “victuals,” “assault,” “fault,” “somersault,” and “receipt.”

In some of these words, he notes, the initial letter of the consonant cluster is mute, while in others “we have recovered the sound.” He adds that “perhaps words of this sort [those latinized retroactively] should be termed examples of scholarly etymology, rather than of popular etymology.”

We’ve written several other posts on silent letters, including one in 2024 about the final “e” in “dote,” “fate,” “hate,” and “note,” as well as one in 2009 on the “gh” in “caught,” “ought,” “thought,” and “bought.”

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Playing the etymology card

Q: How did the word “card” end up in expressions like “play the race card” and “play the gender card”?

A: The “card” in those expressions ultimately comes from the use of the word in card playing. Think of it as a metaphorical use of a valuable playing card, like an ace that completes a royal flush in poker.

Middle English borrowed the word “card” from Middle French, where the plural cartes referred to a game of cards, as in jouer aux cartes (to play cards).

When the English term first appeared in the 15th century, it was also used in the plural to mean such a game. The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the “Code of Laws” for the town of Walsall in the West Midlands of England.

A statute, believed written around 1422, sets penalties for “plaiyng at eny unlawefull games,” including “dyce, tables [backgammon], cardes.” (From A History of Walsall and Its Neighbourhood, 1887, edited by Frederic W. Willmore.)

The noun soon came to be used for the cards themselves. The term “cardes for pleiyng” appears in a 1463-64 law prohibiting the importation of playing cards. (From The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, edited by Chris Given-Wilson in 2005.)

A century later, the OED says, “card” took on “various figurative uses arising from card games, esp. denoting something that may be useful in obtaining one’s objective, or a person who can be called upon to support one’s case.”

The dictionary says the noun was used “chiefly with modifying adjective, as goodsafestrong, etc.” The first OED citation uses “sure card” to mean someone or something “that can be relied on to attain an intended end” or success:

“Nowe thys is a sure carde, nowe I maye well saye That a cowarde crakinge here I dyd fynde.” (From Thersytes, an anonymous play, sometimes attributed to Nicholas Udall, first published in the early 1560s. Thersytes was a Greek warrior slain by Achilles for mocking him.)

In the 19th century, according to Oxford citations, the noun when used with a “modifying adjective (as knowingrum, etc.)” took on the sense of “a person (esp. a man) regarded as having the specified character or quality.”

The earliest citation is from a short piece by Dickens that was originally published as “Scenes and Characters, No. 4, Making a Night of It” in the magazine Bell’s Life in London (Oct. 18, 1835) and later as “Making a Night of It” in Sketches by Boz (1836):

“But Mr. Thomas Potter, whose great aim it was to be considered as a ‘knowing card,’ a ‘fast-goer,’ and so forth, conducted himself in a very different manner.” We’ve expanded the citation.

Two decades later, the OED says, “card” by itself took on the sense of “an ingenious, clever, or audacious person.”

The earliest example cited is in Dickens’s novel Bleak House (1853): “You know what a card Krook was for buying all manner of old pieces of furniter.”

In the early 20th century, according to OED citations, the term took on the sense of “an odd or eccentric person, esp. one in whom these qualities are regarded as entertaining or comical; a joker.”

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from “His Worship the Goosedriver,” a short story by the English author Arnold Bennett in Tales of the Five Towns (1905):

“It would be an immense, an unparalleled farce; a wonder, a topic for years, the crown of his reputation as a card.” In the story, a jokester buys 12 geese and 2 ganders from a gooseherd and tries to herd them to his home. The geese have other plans!

Finally we come to the usage you ask about. Like the use of “card” for a person, this one also emerged in the first half of the 19th century.

The OED says “to play the —— card” means “to introduce a specified issue or topic in the hope of gaining sympathy or political advantage, by appealing to the sentiments or prejudices of one’s audience.”

In the dictionary’s first citation, the word “card” precedes the hot topic: “The Tories will doubtless play the card of ‘Irish misgovernment’ against Ministers” (The Scotsman, June 1, 1839).

The next Oxford example reverses the order in referring to “Liberal friends in Ulster, who wish to play the land purchase card at the elections” (The Times, London, May 22, 1885).

The next citation uses “Orange card” in the sense of an appeal to Northern Irish Protestants:

“I decided some time ago that if the G.O.M. [Grand Old Man, a reference to Gladstone] went for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play” (from a letter written Feb. 16, 1886, by Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s father).

The earliest Oxford example of “race card” uses it to mean an appeal to anti-Black voters: “the Tory leadership declined to play the race card” (The Observer, March 3, 1974).

The OED doesn’t have an example of  “gender card,” but Merriam-Webster online says it showed up in the US more than a dozen years later.

M-W cites an analysis by Gary Orren, a professor of public policy at Harvard, about the unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign of Evelyn Murphy, Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts:

“But Orren thinks if Murphy plays the gender card in her ads she will lose the broader coalition of votes needed to win the election” (The Boston Globe, Aug. 9,1990).

The OED says “play the race card” and similar expressions can now be “depreciative, and chiefly used in accusations of others,” when they mean “to exploit one’s membership of a specified minority or marginalized group as a means of gaining sympathy or an unfair advantage.”

A recent Oxford example cites a Black soldier who appeared in recruitment posters and was “attacked on social media by white colleagues for ‘playing the race card’ to secure career advancement” (Morning Star, London, Sept. 25, 2020).

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‘Ever more,’ ‘ever-more,’ ‘evermore’

Q: I’ve seen “becoming ever-more Prussian” and “studied the ever more frequent engravings.” For me the hyphen is incorrect in the first example, but admissible in the second because of the determiner “the.” What are your thoughts?

A: The short answer is that the modifying phrase “ever more,” meaning “increasingly more,” now needs no hyphen in either of those examples, though the usage was sometimes hyphenated in the past.

Taking a closer look, the adverbs “ever” + “more” form a phrase that modifies an adjective (“Prussian” … “frequent”). The result is an adjectival phrase: “ever more Prussian” … “ever more frequent.” The first is a post-modifying complement; the second pre-modifies a noun.

Note that no hyphens are used in these examples from  the Collins English Dictionary: “He grew ever more fierce in his demands” … “He was deluged by ever more plaintive epistles from his devoted admirer” … “It will become ever more complex.”

The presence or absence of a determiner like “an,” “the,” “some,” etc., is irrelevant, as in this example from the Oxford English Dictionary:

“In an ever more brutal, if technically sleek, world where the skies are filled with killer drones” (New York Magazine, Nov. 2, 2015).

A similar usage combines the adverbs “ever” + “so” to modify an adjective, resulting in an adjectival phrase. Here the sense of the adverbial modifier is “extremely” or “very.”

Merriam-Webster online has these examples: “I’m ever so glad that you got better” … “In the back seat was a Chinese American woman looking ever so chic and glamorous.”

Getting back to “ever more,” it’s also used by itself to modify a noun, as in “ever more Prussians” … “ever more engravings.” In this case, “more” is an adjective, and “ever more” is an adjectival phrase. A pair of examples found in the Oxford English Dictionary: “ever more gadgets in hand” … “ever more artists.”

No hyphens there either. But with an adjective other than “more,” that type of “ever” phrase usually has a hyphen. Some examples from the Cambridge Dictionary: “ever-decreasing profits” … “ever-increasing demand” … “an ever-present threat.”

(We should add that “ever more” and “ever so” can also be used with adverbs, resulting in adverbial phrases: “the price fell ever more steeply” … “he ran ever so quietly.”)

As for the term “evermore” (one word, no hyphen), it means “forever” or “always.” This example is from Merriam-Webster: “he promised to love her evermore, if only she would consent to be his wife.”

When “evermore,” the oldest of these terms, first appeared in Old English as æfre ma, it meant “for all future time,” according to the OED.

We’ve expanded the dictionary’s earliest citation, which is from King Alfred’s late ninth-century translation of Liber Regulae Pastoralis (Pastoral Care), a sixth-century Latin treatise by Pope Gregory:

Gif hwelc wif forlæt hiere ceorl, & nimð hire oderne, wenestu recce he hire æfre ma, ode mæg hio æfre eft cuman to him swa clænu swa hio ær was?

(If a wife leaves her husband and takes another man for herself, do you think her husband will evermore consider her, or can she ever return to him as pure as she e’er was?)

The earliest written use of the phrase “ever more,” as far as we can tell, is from Middle English, where it’s hyphenated. Here’s the OED citation:

“Pitous and Iust, and ever-more y-liche, Sooth of his word, benigne and honurable” (“Compassionate and just, and ever more constant, True to his word, kind and honorable”). From “The Squire’s Tale,” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (circa 1386).

And we found this early unhyphenated example: “Praye God that he will wyte [keep you] safe to worke fayth ī thyne herte / or else shalt thou remayne ever more faythelesse.” From William Tyndale’s A Compendious Introduccion, Prologe or Preface vn to the Pistle off Paul to the Romayns (1526).

And this is the earliest use we’ve found for “ever more” used adjectivally to modify a noun: “there is ever more paine in keeping, then in getting of mony.” From the essays of Montaigne, translated from French by John Florio (1613).

We’ll end with the early use of “ever so” to mean “very” or “extremely” or, in the words of the OED, “in any conceivable degree.”

The dictionary cites a Nov. 5, 1686, letter by Gilbert Burnet, a Scottish historian and Anglican bishop of Salisbury, written from Florence during a trip to Italy:

“When it hath rained ever so little … the Carts go deep, and are hardly drawn” (from An Account of What Seemed Most Remarkable in Travelling Through Switzerland, Italy, Some Parts of Germany, &c. in the Years 1685 and 1686, by Burnet, published in 1687).

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On ‘as such’ and its ‘as-suchness’  

Q: I’m accustomed to seeing “as such” refer back to a specific word or phrase. Lately, I’ve noticed it where the referent is unspecified or absent. Example: “He broke his leg, and as such he missed work.” I’m curious about the history of this term and its changing usage.

A: Yes, “as such” traditionally refers to a word or phrase already mentioned. But the referent is often obscure in a colloquial use of “as such” that’s almost as old as the original.

Traditionally, “as such” means “in itself” (intelligence as such won’t make you rich), “in that capacity” (a judge as such deserves respect), or “in its exact meaning” (she wasn’t a vegetarian as such).

However, the phrase has been used colloquially for three centuries to mean “consequently,” “subsequently,” or “thereupon,” a usage that’s not recognized by standard dictionaries.

The principal definition of “as such” in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference based on historical evidence, is “as being what the name or description implies; in that capacity.”

The earliest example in the OED is from an essay by Richard Steele in The Spectator (April 17, 1711): “When she observed Will. irrevocably her Slave, she began to use him as such.”

(An earlier, longer version of the phrase, “as it is such” or “as they are such,” appeared in The History of England, 1670, by John Milton: “True fortitude glories not in the feats of War, as they are such, but as they serve to end War soonest by a victorious Peace.”)

The colloquial sense of “as such” was first recorded a decade after the phrase appeared in The Spectator. As the OED explains, the original sense “passes contextually into: ‘Accordingly, consequently, thereupon.’ ” The dictionary describes the usage as “colloquial or informal.”

The first colloquial Oxford citation, which we’ve edited and expanded, is from a Feb. 25, 1721, entry in the church warden’s accounts for a parish in Salisbury, England:

“he [the curate] had chosen the said William Clemens to be his parish Clerk … And bid the Congregation to take notice thereof and accept him—as such Witness Henry Biggs, F. Barber [and others].” From Churchwardens’ Accounts of S. Edmund & S. Thomas, Sarum (1896), edited by Henry James Fowle Swayne.

The next two Oxford citations are from letters written in England in the early 1800s and published in The Correspondence of William Fowler of Winterton, in the County of Lincoln (1907), edited by Joseph Thomas Fowler:

“I very much longed to hear from you … and as such I did not the least esteem it for its having been delayed for the reasons assigned” (from an 1800 letter by John King).

“H. R. H. Princess Augusta … motioned for me to come to her Highness. As such she addressed me in the most pleasant manner possible” (from an 1814 letter by William Fowler).

Although “as such” in those colloquial examples doesn’t refer to a specific word or phrase mentioned previously, it does concern an earlier occurrence or situation. But as we’ve said, the colloquial usage isn’t recognized by standard dictionaries. And we find it vague and sometimes confusing.

We’ll end with the noun “as-suchness,” a derivative of “as such” that’s defined in the OED as the “absolute existence or possession of qualities, independently of all other things whatever.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from A Pluralistic Universe (1909), by the American philosopher and psychologist William James. In this passage, the “it” at the beginning refers to “Bradley’s Absolute,” the British philosopher F. H. Bradley’s concept of ultimate reality:

“It is us, and all other appearances, but none of us as such, for in it we are all ‘transmuted,’ and its own as-suchness is of another denomination altogether.”

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A wussy pronunciation

Q: A post of yours says “wuss” was first recorded in 1976. However, I just found this example in A Tangled Web (1931), by L. L. Montgomery: “If he’s a fool—and wuss—is that any reason why you should be?”

A: The “wuss” in that passage from A Tangled Web is a dialectal pronunciation of “worse.” If it were spelled the usual way, Big Sam Dark would be telling Little Sam Dark, “If he’s a fool—and worse—is that any reason why you should be?”

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the “wuss” pronunciation of the adjective, noun, and adverb “worse” as “colloquial or regional.” The OED has examples that date back to the mid-19th century. Here are a few:

“That’s wuss than a day’s work, that is.” From Munby, Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby (1862), by Derek Hudson. Munby was a British poet, barrister, and civil servant.

“She’ll tell you that, wuss luck, I’ve got in co. with some bad uns.” From The Seven Curses of London (1869), by the British journalist and social critic James Greenwood.

“Nobody’s none the wuss for me knowin’ about ’em.” From A Child of the Jago (1896), by the British writer and journalist Arthur Morrison.

As we say in a 2020 post, the earliest examples in the Oxford English Dictionary for the use of “wuss” to mean a weak or ineffectual person are from a 20th-century collection of college slang:

“Come on you wuss, hit a basket” and “John’s a wuss.” From “Campus Slang,” a Nov. 6, 1976, typescript of slang terms collected by Connie C. Eble, a linguist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Eble had asked her students to contribute current slang terms on index cards.

When “wussy” showed up in print the following year, it was an adjective meaning effeminate: “Soccer! … What kind of wussy sport is that!” From the Harvard Crimson, Sept. 12, 1977.

The OED says “wussy” originated with the addition of the suffix “-y” to the noun “wuss.” And it suggests that “wuss” may have originally been a blend of “wimp” and “pussy” used to mean a cat.

However, the evidence we’ve found indicates that “wussy” originated as a rhyming term for “pussy,” and that “wuss” is simply a short form of “wussy.” In fact, as a rhyming term “wussy” showed up in English dozens of years before the first OED sighting of “wimp” used to mean a weak or ineffectual person (1920).

You can read more about the history of these terms in our 2020 post as well as in a post that we wrote in 2016.

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Beholden to a schedule?

Q: I keep hearing “beholden” used in terms of having to go by a schedule, and even caught myself doing it once. Is this usage becoming more common and considered correct?

A: Traditionally, “beholden” has meant obligated or indebted to someone or something, especially for a gift or favor.

Although “beholden” has also been used for figurative debts or obligations, standard dictionaries don’t recognize its use in the sense of restricted to or bound by something, such as a schedule.

You’re right, however, that the sense of bound by is out there and has appeared in some major publications. This use of “beholden” may very well make its way into standard dictionaries, but it’s not there yet. Here’s the story.

When the verb “behold” appeared in Old English writing as bihaldan, it meant “to hold by, keep, observe, regard, look,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s an expanded OED example from the Blickling Homilies, believed written in the late 10th century, of “behold” used in the sense of to look upon someone or something, the usual modern sense:

englas hie georne beheoldan of þæm dæge þe hie wiston þæt heo seo eadige maria geeacnod wæs of þæm halgan gasten.

(The angels earnestly beheld her from the day they knew that the blessed Mary had been conceived by the Holy Spirit.)

Note that in Old English, the past tense of “behold” was beheoldan (“beholden”), a verb form that was later replaced by “beheld.”

In Middle English, “beholden” became a past participle, and later a predicate adjective.

In this adjectival use, which first appeared in the late 14th century, “beholden” was used with a form of the verb “be” (as in “I am beholden,” “he was beholden,” etc.) and came to mean obligated or indebted.

The two earliest OED citations are from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a chivalric romance written around 1390:

“I am derely to yow biholde” (“I am dearly beholden to you”) … “I am hyȝly bihalden, & euer-more wylle Be seruaunt to your-seluen” (“I am highly beholden and evermore will be servant to yourself”).

As for the modern use of “beholden,” Merriam-Webster online says it describes “people who are obligated to others (often for a favor or gift), as well as people or things that are in figurative debt due to aid or inspiration, as in ‘many contemporary books and films are beholden to old Arthurian legends.’ ”

The OED has this 19th-century figurative example, which we’ve expanded, from Modern English (1873), by the American philologist Fitzedward Hall:

 “As to ourselves, a student must be exceedingly inobservant, not to have perceived how deeply we are beholden to the happy daring of translators for the amplitude and variety of our diction, and for the flexibility of our constructions.”

Finally, here are a few examples we’ve found for the as yet unrecognized sense of “beholden” that you’ve asked about—the use of the adjective to mean restricted to or bound by a schedule:

“He maintains the same workout routine he had in his prime, and he still rises at 4 a.m., restless and beholden to a schedule he no longer has to keep” (a comment about the boxer Joe Frazier from a review of Thrilla in Manila, a documentary about his third match with Muhammad Ali, Sports Illustrated, April 22, 2009).

Motown mitigated some of the risk by making Broadway the final stop. It wasn’t beholden to a schedule that would keep it there if things went south, and producer Kevin McCollum made the right (if tough) call to cut losses and wrap up the show early” (Forbes, July 31, 2016).

“But anytime they left the city—which they frequently did—traveling was a challenge, as they usually took the train and were beholden to a schedule” (from an article about a carless Manhattan couple, New York Times, Feb. 1, 2018).

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Like hell, like mad, like stink

Q: What is the origin of the phrase “like stink” (as in “run like stink”)? I know what it means, but not why it means that.

A: “Like stink” has been used colloquially in British English since the early 20th century to mean furiously or intensely. It’s similar to “like hell,” “like mad,” and “like crazy,” intensifiers of a type that dates back to the early 16th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest “like stink” example, which we’ve expanded, is from a play set in the trenches of a British Army infantry company during World War I:

“If you see a Minnie coming—that’s a big trench mortar shell, you know—short for Minnywerfe—you see ’em come right out of the Boche trenches, right up in the air, then down, down, down; and you have to judge it and run like stink sometimes.”

(From Journey’s End, by the English playwright R. C. Sherriff. Laurence Olivier starred in the play when it first opened at the Apollo Theatre in London on Dec. 9, 1928.)

The word “like” is used similarly in American as well as British English in many other colloquial expressions that indicate doing something intensely: “run like blazes,” “fight like the dickens,” “write like a house on fire,” and so on.

As the OED explains, “like” is “now typically analysed as a preposition” when used “in proverbial similes,” specifically “in phrases describing an action carried out rapidly, with great vigour or energy, or without restraint or limitation.”

In these colloquial phrases, according to the dictionary, “the complement of like is taken as expressive of vigour, energy, etc., rather than being obviously similative.” You might say that they look like similes and act like adverbs.

The usage dates from at least the early 1500s, as in this OED example about somebody who devours food without restraint, leaving little for his companions to eat:

“One doth another tell / Se how he fedeth, lyke the deuyll of hell / Our parte he eteth nought good shall we tast” (from Egloges, a collection of eclogues, or short poems, written around 1530 by the Anglican priest and poet Alexander Barclay).

The dictionary has two older examples in which “as” is used instead of “like.” The oldest is from The Romance of William of Palerne (circa 1350), an anonymous Middle English translation of Guillaume de Palerme, a French tale written around 1200.

In the part of the tale cited, the Holy Roman Emperor wonders where his daughter is. When told that she isn’t in her chamber, he goes to see for himself and “driues in at þat dore as a deuel of helle” (“rushes in through the door as a devil of hell”).

Finally, we should mention that the energetic sense of “stink” may perhaps have been influenced by the use of the word in the early 19th century for a commotion or a fuss. The first Oxford example for the earlier sense is from a glossary of underworld slang:

“When any robbery of moment has been committed, which causes much alarm, or of which much is said in the daily papers, the family people will say, there is a great stink about it” (New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language, 1812, by James Hardy Vaux).

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Oh, dear! Oh, deer!

Q: I’ve just begun The Age of Deer, a book by Erika Howsare that explores the connections between deer and humans. Are the words “dear” and “deer” also related, or merely two different words with the same pronunciation?

A: The short answer is that “dear” and “deer” may very well be etymologically related, not just homonyms, but the evidence isn’t conclusive.

In Old English, the language spoken from roughly 450 to 1150, the noun “deer” (spelled dior or deor, and occasionally dear) meant something like “beast” and referred to wild animals in general, especially four-legged ones. The usual word for the animals with antlered males was heort or heorot, ancestor of “hart.”

Meanwhile, the adjective “dear” came in two versions: deore (beloved or valuable) and deor (brave, ferocious, savage, or wild, an obsolete sense apparently associated with the noun “deer”).

Linguists have disagreed over whether deore and deor were two separate adjectives or one adjective with two senses. If Old English had just one adjective, then the modern words “dear” and “deer” would probably be related.

The Oxford English Dictionary says both deore and deor come from prehistoric Germanic, an ancient language reconstructed by linguists, but it adds that deor is “of uncertain etymology.”

However, the linguist Anatoly Lieberman argues in a May 19, 2021, post on the blog of Oxford University Press, publisher of the OED, that the two terms come from the same ancient source:

“Some good authorities hesitatingly (very hesitatingly!) admit that Old English dēor(e) and dēor are two senses of the same word. In my opinion, both their hesitation and the common statement ‘origin unknown,’ applied to dēor ‘savage, fierce,’ are groundless.”

Liberman says, “it is probably reasonable to assume that the most ancient meaning of the adjective dear was ‘requiring a strong effort’; hence ‘fierce, wild; hard to obtain; costly; precious,’ and of course ‘dear,’ whether ‘expensive’ or ‘priceless.’ ”

“According to what we know about the Old Germanic ethos,” he adds, “monsters and heroes were believed to be endowed with similar qualities, but what was ‘noble, valorous, praiseworthy’ in the hero was ‘ferocious, deadly’ in his enemy.”

If Lieberman is right—and we hesitantly agree with him—then “dear” and “deer” are related.

In the first OED citation for the noun “deer,” it’s spelled dear and means a large beast: “Se camal þæt micla dear” (“The camel that great deer”). From an interlinear Old English gloss, or translation, of the Latin in the Lindisfarne Gospels, Luke 18:25.

Here’s a full version of the verse, in Early Modern English, from the King James Version: “For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for the noun “deer” used in its modern sense (as the horned animal that’s often hunted) is from Layamon’s Brut, a chronicle of Britain written in Middle English sometime before 1200: “To huntien after deoren.”

The OED notes an earlier Old English passage that mentions hrana (reindeer) among a large group of wild animals: “syx hund. Þa deor” (“those 600 hundred deer”).

As for the adjective “dear,” the dictionary says the affectionate sense gradually evolved in Old English from “esteemed” to “beloved,” but “the  passage of the one notion into the other is too gradual to admit of their separation.”

The OED’s first citation (with “dear” describing Jesus) is from Juliana, an Old English poem by Cynewulf about the martyrdom of Saint Juliana of Nicomedia. In this passage, Juliana asks all of humankind to pray for her:

“meotud bidde þæt me heofona helm helpe gefremme, meahta waldend, on þam miclan dæge, fæder, frofre gæst, in þa frecnan tid, dæda demend, ond se deora sunu” (“pray to the creator that the guardian of heaven, the wielder of powers, the father, the holy spirit, the judge of deeds, and his dear son may help me in that time of terror, on that greatest of days”).

Moving on to the costly sense of the adjective, the first OED citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from an entry for the year 1044 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

“On ðisum gere wæs swyðe mycel hunger ofer eall Englaland and corn swa dyre swa nan man ær ne gemunde  swa þæt se sester hwætes eode to LX pen” (“In this year there was very great hunger over all England and corn [grain] so dear as no man remembered before so that a sester [a dry measure] of wheat went for 60 pence”).

Over the years, the adjective has taken on many other uses, including to fondly or respectfully address someone (circa 1250), to mean scarce (before 1330), to address the recipient of a letter (c. 1402), and to describe money that can be borrowed only at a high interest rate (1878).

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Footing the bill

Q: How did “foot” come to be used in “He’ll foot the bill”? And doesn’t it sound awkward to say “He footed the bill”?

A: The use of the verb “foot” in the expression “foot the bill” ultimately comes from the use of “foot” as a noun for the lower part of something—in this case, the total at the bottom of a bill.

When “foot” first appeared in Old English, it referred (as it does now) to the part of the leg below the ankle. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the epic poem Beowulf, dating back to as early as 725:

“Sona hæfde unlyfigendes eal gefeormod fet ond folma” (“Soon he’d devoured the lifeless body, feet and hands”). The passage describes the monster Grendel eating one of his victims.

The noun “foot” soon took on the additional sense of something resembling a foot. The OED’s first citation for this meaning, which we’ve expanded here, is from an Old English riddle that refers to the base of an inkhorn (an inkwell made from an antler) as a foot, spelled fot:

“nu ic blace swelge wuda ⁊ wætre … befæðme þæt mec on fealleð ufan þær ic stonde eorpes nathwæt hæbbe anne fot” (“now I swallow the black wood and water.  … I embrace within me the unknown darkness that falls on me from above. Where I stand on something unknown, I have one foot”). From the Exeter Book, “Riddle 93.”

In the early 15th century, the OED says, the noun “foot” took on the sense of “the sum or total of a column of numbers in an account, typically recorded directly below the final entry in the column.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from a 1433 financial report in the records of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York, a merchant guild:

“First, the saide maister and constables hafe resayved [have received] in mone tolde [money counted], iiijli. ijs. xd., as it profes be [proves by] the fote [foot] of accounte of the yere past” (from The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers 1356–1917, a 1918 work by the British historian Maud Sellers).

A similar use of “foot” as a verb appeared in the late 15th century, according to the OED, which defines the term as “to add up (a column of numbers, or an account, bill, etc., having this) and enter the sum at the bottom.”

The earliest Oxford citation, with “footed” spelled “futit,” is from a record of judicial proceedings in Scotland: “The tyme that his compt [account] wes futit.” From The Acts of the Lords of Council in Civil Causes, 1478–95 (edited by Thomas Thomson, 1839).

The sense of “foot” you’re asking about showed up in the early 19th century. Oxford defines it as “to pay or settle (a bill, esp. one which is large or unreasonable, or which has been run up by another party).”

The first OED citation, which we’ve expanded, is from A Pedestrious Tour, of Four Thousand Miles, Through the Western States and Territories, During the Winter and Spring of 1818, an 1819 memoir of a walking tour by Estwick Evans, a New England lawyer and writer:

“My dogs, knowing no law but that of nature, and having forgotten my lecture to them upon theft, helped themselves to the first repast presented, leaving their master to foot their bills.” (The dogs were later killed by wolves in the Michigan Territory as Evans was on his way to Detroit.)

As for “footed,” it may sound awkward, but it’s the only past tense and past participle listed in the standard dictionaries we regularly consult.

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Mixed marriage: two ways to wed

Q: Should one officiate a wedding or officiate at a wedding? Or is either fine? Using it as a transitive verb sounds odd to me.

A: The verb “officiate” has been used both transitively (with a direct object, as in “officiate the wedding”) and intransitively (without the object, as in “officiate at the wedding”) since it appeared in the 17th century. But the intransitive usage was long considered the traditional form, and was much more common until the late 20th century.

Today, dictionaries of American English recognize both the transitive and intransitive uses of “officiate” as standard. Dictionaries of British English recognize only the intransitive usage.

The transitive usage is especially popular in the US in reference to officiating in sports and in marriages performed by friends or relatives ordained online.

Merriam-Webster.com, an American dictionary, has nearly identical definitions for “officiate” used intransitively and transitively in senses related to performing a ceremony, serving in an official capacity, or acting as an official at a sporting contest.

M-W has “officiate at a wedding” as an intransitive example, and has these transitive examples: “Two referees officiated the hockey game” … “The bishop officiated the memorial Mass.”

The verb is defined similarly in the Oxford New American Dictionary and Dictionary.com, an updated online dictionary based mainly on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. (American Heritage describes the transitive sense as a usage problem, but bases that view on a 1997 survey of the AH usage panel and may not reflect recent developments in American English.)

A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares words and phrases in digitized books, shows that both senses are now equally popular in American English. The intransitive use doesn’t register at all in a search of British English.

Getting back to your question, the transitive usage also sounds unnatural to us, and we don’t use it. But as language commentators, we accept the view of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage:

“Let us assure you that officiate can be used transitively to mean ‘to carry out (an official duty or function),’ ‘to serve as a leader or celebrant of (a ceremony),’ or ‘to administer the rules of (a game or sport) esp. as a referee or umpire.’ ”

As for the verb’s etymology, English adopted “officiate” in the early 17th century from two post-classical Latin terms: officiat-, the past participial stem of officiari (to perform a function), and officiare (to officiate, say mass, to serve a church, and so on), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When the term first appeared in English, it was transitive and meant “to perform the duties of (an office, position, or place),” the OED says. Its first citation is from The Historie and Lives of the Kings of England (1615), by the English lawyer and historian  William Martyn:

“Because the Emperour intended to giue vnto her for her Dowrie, the Provinces of the Low Countries … his desire was, that forthwith shee might be sent thether to officiate the Protectorship of them in his absence.”

The dictionary says “officiate” soon took on the sense of performing a religious service or rite such as marriage, the use you’re asking about. The first Oxford citation for this sense uses “officiate” transitively, with a direct object preceding the verb:

“Deacons had the charge to … helpe the Priest in diuine Seruice (a place officiated now by our Parish Clerkes).” From Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), by the English poet and antiquary John Weever.

The intransitive use of this particular sense of “officiate” appeared a decade later: “There were many Parish Churches … as doth appeare by Epiphanius … who … tells us also who officiated in the same, as Presbyters.” From The Historie of Episcopacie (1642), by the Anglican clergyman and historian Peter Heylyn.

As we’ve said, the intransitive usage was predominant until the transitive form was revived in the late 20th century. Here’s a recent transitive example from a headline in Entertainment Weekly (Jan. 2, 2024): “Susan will officiate Gerry and Theresa’s ‘Golden Wedding.’ ”

And here’s an example from the website of  the Universal Life Church, which offers “Fast, Free, & Easy” ordinations to people who want to marry friends or relatives: “Get Ordained Online, Officiate A Wedding.”

The OED defines the sports sense of the verb “officiate” as “to act as a referee, umpire, or other official in a match or game.” The dictionary says the sports usage first appeared in the late 19th century.

The earliest Oxford citation is from a London newspaper that uses the term intransitively: “Mr. Walker officiated as referee, and Messrs. Davies and Bryan as umpires” (The Times, Sept. 15, 1884).

The transitive use of “officiate” in sports appeared a century later. The dictionary’s first example is from The Washington Post, May 24, 1978 (we’ve corrected the date):

“There was considerable comment when referee-in-chief Scotty Morrison selected Van Hellmond, Newell and Bob Myers to officiate the finals, passing up more senior referees.”

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The earliest English writing

Q: You often quote examples of writing from Anglo-Saxon times to illustrate the history of a usage. What is the earliest example of English writing that you know of?

A: You’ve asked what seems to be a simple question, but the answer is complicated. It depends on what you consider writing and how you determine the date.

The earliest version of the language, Old English, developed in England in the fifth century from the dialects spoken by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—migrants from what is now Germany and Scandinavia.

Old English was originally written with runes, characters in futhark, an ancient Germanic alphabet. Latin letters introduced by Christian missionaries began replacing the runes in the eighth century, but some runes were still being used well into Middle English, the language spoken from around 1100 to 1500.

The earliest surviving examples of Old English are very short runic inscriptions on metal, wood, bone, or stone. A runic inscription runs down the right side of this fifth-century gold pendant found by a farmer in 1984 at Undley Common near Lakenheath in Suffolk:

The pendant, now in the British Museum, shows a helmeted head above a wolf. The runic letters ᚷ‍ᚫᚷ‍ᚩᚷ‍ᚫ ᛗᚫᚷᚫ ᛗᛖᛞᚢ (gaegogae mægæ medu) run along the right edge. As the museum explains, the message may be read as “howling she-wolf” (a reference to the wolf image) and “reward to a relative” (a translation of the runic letters).

The pendant—technically a bracteate, or thin coin of precious metal—is believed to have been produced in the late fifth century, but it’s uncertain whether it originated in England or was brought there by the settlers.

The dating of the pendant is somewhat uncertain, according to Daphne Nash Briggs, an authority on ancient coins at the University of Oxford:

“It is thought, on stylistic grounds, to have been made around AD 475, and I accept this dating whilst bearing in mind that bracteates are stubbornly difficult to date precisely, and it could in principle have been made a generation earlier.” (From “An Emphatic Statement: The Undley-A Gold Bracteate and Its Message in Fifth-Century East Anglia,” a paper by Nash Briggs in Wonders Lost and Found, 2020, edited by Nicholas Sekunda.)

The earliest surviving examples of Old English writing on parchment are from Latin-English glossaries, according to a history of Old English in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED cites several examples from the Glossaire d’Épinal, written in England around 700 and now at the Bibliothèque Municipale in Épinal, France: “anser goos (i.e. ‘goose’)” … “lepus, leporis hara (i.e. ‘hare’)” … “nimbus storm (i.e. ‘storm’)” … “olor suan (i.e. ‘swan’).”

The British Library notes that “the earliest substantial example of English is the lawcode of King Æthelberht of Kent (reigned c. 589–616), but that work survives in just one manuscript (the Textus Roffensis), made in the 1120s.”

Here’s how the manuscript begins: “Þis syndon þa domas þe æðelbirht cyning asette on aGVSTinus dæge” (“These are the laws that King Æthelberht established in the days of Augustine”).

“Cædmon’s Hymn,” which is considered the earliest documented poem in Old English, is said to have been composed in the seventh century by an illiterate cow herder, according to the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede.

It first appeared in writing in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), a church history written in Latin around 731.

In the next few years, scribes inserted Old English versions of the poem in two copies of the Latin manuscript, now known as the Moore Bede (734–737) and the St. Petersburg Bede (732-746).

Here’s a lightly edited version of the hymn in the Moore Bede (MS Kk.5.16 at the Cambridge University Library):

“Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard / metudæs maecti end his modgidanc / uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuaes / eci dryctin or astelidæ” (“Now we must praise the heavenly kingdom’s guardian, / the creator’s might and his conception, / the creation of the glorious father, thus each of the wonders / that he ordained at the beginning”).

The epic poem Beowulf, the first great work of English literature, is believed to have been written around 725, but the oldest surviving manuscript (Cotton MS Vitellius A XV at the British Library) dates from around the year 1000.

We’ll end with the last few lines of the poem, a farewell to Beowulf by his subjects after their king is mortally wounded in battle, his body burned on a pyre, the ashes buried in a barrow:

“cwædon þæt he wære wyruldcyning, / manna mildust ⁊ monðwærust / eodum liðost, ⁊ lofgeornost” (“Of all the world’s kings, they said, / he was the kindest and the gentlest of men, / the most gracious to his people and the most worthy of fame”).

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Left for dead

Q: I’m curious when the phrase “left for dead” became common usage. Why is the phrase not “left to die”? I saw the “for dead” version recently in an article and I began wondering.

A: The expression “leave for dead” first appeared in Anglo-Saxon times and has been used regularly since then to mean abandon someone or something almost dead or certain to die.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, which we’ve expanded here, is from a passage concerning St. Paul in The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, First Series, written around 990 by the Benedictine Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham:

“Æne he wæs gestæned oð deað, swa ðæt þa ehteras hine for deadne leton, ac ðæs on merigen he aras, and ferde ymbe his bodunge” (“Once he was stoned unto death, so much so that the persecutors left him for dead, but on the morrow he arose and went about his preaching”). In Old English, “hine for deadne leton” is literally “him for dead left.”

As the OED explains, the preposition “for” is being used here “with an adjective as complement.” This use of “for,” the dictionary adds, is now found chiefly in “set expressions, as in to give a person up for lost, to leave a person for dead, to take for granted, etc.”

In early Old English, the preposition “for” began being used similarly with a noun to mean “with a view to; with the object or purpose of; as preparatory to,” according to the OED.

Here’s a citation from the Gospel of John, 11:4, in the West Saxon Gospels: “Nys þeos untrumnys na for deaðe, ac for Godes wuldre” (“This sickness is not for death, but for the glory of God”). Jesus is speaking about the ailing Lazarus.

Getting back to your question, one could say “left to die” as well as “left for dead.” Both have been common for centuries. In fact, “left to die” is slightly more popular, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books.

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Linguistics Pronunciation Usage Word origin

Did you warsh behind your ears?

Q:  Can you suss the pronunciation of “wash”?  I’m from central Illinois and I forced myself as an adult to pronounce it “wawsh” instead of the colloquial “warsh.”

A: In American English, the word “wash” is usually pronounced “wawsh” or “wahsh” (wɔʃ or wɑʃ in the International Phonetic Alphabet), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. However, a lot of Americans pronounce it with an “r” before the “sh,” a usage that may be dying out.

The Dictionary of American Regional English describes the dialectal “warsh” or “worsh” pronunciation (wɑrš or wɔrš in DARE’s phonemic system) as widespread in the US but especially frequent in the Midland, a belt that extends roughly from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina across the country to Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska.

The earliest recorded example in the regional dictionary is from the late 19th century, though the pronunciation almost certainly appeared in speech before that. Here’s an expanded version of the citation from “Rubáiyát of Doc Sifers,” a poem about a doctor in Indiana, by James Whitcomb Riley (The Century Magazine, November 1897):

He orders Euby then to split some wood, and take and build
A fire in kitchen-stove, and git a young spring-chicken killed;
And jes whirled in and th’owed his hat and coat there on the bed,
And warshed his hands and sailed in that-air kitchen, Euby said.

DARE has examples from Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. The latest, a 2003 report from Iowa in the dictionary’s own files, uses “wersh” for the pronunciation spelling of the term: “My sister-in-law says ‘I’m going to do the ‘wersh’ (wash as in laundry).”

Pat, who grew up in Iowa, remembers childhood admonitions like “Go warsh your hands” and “Did you warsh behind your ears?”

Interestingly, the dialectal pronunciation of “wash” with an “r” was first recorded in southern England, not in the American Midland. Here’s the earliest example we’ve found:

“I’ve a yeard em zay he don’t make nort of a leg o’ mutton, and half a peck o’ cider to warsh-n down way” (one of two examples in “The Dialect of West Somerset,” a paper by the philologist Frederick Thomas Elworthy, read at a meeting of the Philological Society in London, Jan. 15, 1875).

We’ve seen no evidence that immigrants from southern England brought the usage to the US Midland, but linguists have found indications that  Scotch-Irish immigrants from Ulster may have been the source of the usage.

The authors of the book Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese (2015) maintain that the dialect spoken by the Scotch-Irish, the first Europeans to settle in southwestern Pennsylvania in large numbers, spread from Pennsylvania across the Midland region.

“The English they spoke became the substrate founder dialect for the area (as for much of the U.S. Midland),” write Barbara Johnstone, Daniel Baumgardt, Maeve Eberhardt, and Scott Kiesling. “Although we have very limited evidence about Scotch-Irish phonology, words and morphosyntactic patterns that are indisputably Scotch-Irish are still prevalent in the area.”

The authors refer to the “r” in “warsh” as an “intrusive” or “epenthetic” (inserted) letter before “ʃ” (the IPA symbol for the “sh” digraph, technically a voiceless postalveolar fricative), and say the usage is declining in American English.

“Epenthetic /r/ was once fairly widespread in the U.S. Midwest and the South,” they write, “but it is becoming less common, as it seems to be in southwestern Pennsylvania, as well.”

As for the word “wash,” it first appeared in Old English, the language spoken from around 450 to 1150, as a verb spelled wæscan, wacsan, waxan, wacxan, or waxsan, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Anglo-Saxon versions of “wash,” the dictionary notes, were nearly always used in the sense of cleaning things, not people. A different verb, þwean, was used for washing the human body (the þ, or thorn, at the beginning of þwean was pronounced as “th”).

The OED’s earliest “wash” example, which we’ve expanded here, is from a collection of  Anglo-Saxon charters: “hi sculan waxan sceap and sciran” (“they shall wash and shear the sheep”). From Diplomatarium Anglicum Aevi Saxonici (1865), by Benjamin Thorpe.

The first Oxford citation for the verb “wash” used for people is from a late Old English version of the Gospel of Matthew, 27:24: “þa genam he water, and weosc hys handa beforan þam folce” (“he [Pilate] took water and washed his hands before the people”). From the Hatton Gospels, written around 1160 in the West Saxon dialect.

The earliest OED example for the noun “wash” in the sense of the cleaning of clothes is from an interlinear gloss, or translation, of the Latin vestimentorum ablutio as the Old English reafa wæsc (“garment wash”). From “De Consuetudine Monachorum” (“Concerning the Habit of the Monks”), an article in Anglia, a German journal of English linguistics, Nov. 27, 2009.

However, that sense of the noun doesn’t appear again in the dictionary until the early 18th century: “Wearing Linen from the Wash” (London Gazette, 1704).

When the noun “wash” was first used for people, it referred to the washing away of stains on one’s honor or morality, as in the OED’s first two examples:

  • “The Blemish once received, no Wash is good For stains of Honor, but th’ Offenders blood” (from The Adventures of Five Hours, a 1663 comedy by the English playwright Samuel Tuke).
  • “A Baptism in Reserve, a Wash for all our Sins” (from a 1666 sermon by William Sancroft, dean of St. Paul’s and later Archbishop of Canterbury).

Finally, the first Oxford citation for the noun used in the sense of physically cleaning oneself is from The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1839), by Charles Dickens: “Mind you take care, young man, and get first wash.” (The passage refers to getting to a well first.)

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

‘Dad wouldn’t have a bar of it’

Q: Can you shed any light on the origin of the (mainly) Australian phrase “wouldn’t have a bar of it,” especially what “bar” is doing in there?

A: The expression “not to stand [or “have” or “want”] a bar of something” first appeared in Australian English in the early 20th century, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

The earliest example in the dictionary is from a Sydney newspaper: “He attributes most of his trouble to the fact that he is a married man and father of a grown-up family, but neither wife nor children will stand a bar of him at any price” (Truth, May 21, 1904).

This more recent example, which we’ve expanded, is from Tales of the Honey Badger (2015), a collection of short stories by the Australian rugby star Nick Cummins: “I grabbed a board and paddled straight out, knowing full well Dad wouldn’t have a bar of it.”

Green’s describes the usage as Australian and New Zealand slang meaning “to detest, to reject, to be intolerant of.” However, the dictionary doesn’t explain how “bar” came to be used in the expression.

The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English and The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English also have entries for the usage, but no etymological information.

Three standard English dictionaries—Cambridge, Collins, and Oxford—have entries that label the expression “informal,” but again don’t discuss its history.

The Oxford English Dictionary, our go-to etymological reference, doesn’t have an entry for the expression. However, the OED entries for “bar” used as a verb and as a preposition offer possible clues to its use as a noun in “not to stand a bar of something.”

When “bar” first appeared in Middle English in the 12th century, it was a noun meaning “a stake or rod of iron or wood used to fasten a gate, door, hatch, etc.”

The first OED citation, which we’ve expanded, is from the Lambeth Homilies (circa 1175): “Det is he to-pruste pa stelene gate. and to brec pa irene barren of helle” (“He [Jesus] is the one who will thrust open the steel gate, and break the iron bars of hell”).

When the verb “bar” appeared in the 13th century, it meant “to make fast (a door, etc.) by a bar or bars fixed across it; to fasten up or close (a place) with bars.”

The earliest OED citation is from Cursor Mundi, an anonymous Middle English poem that the dictionary dates at sometime before 1300. In this passage, Lot secures the door of his home in Sodom to keep a mob outside from molesting two angels inside: “faste þe dores gon he bare” (“firmly he did bar the doors”).

In the 15th century, the verb “bar” came to mean “to exclude from consideration.” The earliest Oxford citation, which we’ve edited, uses the gerund form of the verb in referring to one piece of linen set aside from a sale:

“vj.xx yardes, barin one pese, of lynnen cloth” (“six score yards, barring one piece, of linen cloth”). From The Household Books of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, 1462-1471, 1481-1483 (1992), introduction by Anne Crawford.

[Note: Counting in the Middle English of the 15th century was often in scores written in superscript, and the letter “j” often replaced a final “i” in Roman numerals. In the number above, “vj” is six and the superscript xx  is a score, so “vj.xx” is six times 20, or 120.]

And now a numberless example from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, written in the late 16th century. After promising Bassanio to act properly, Gratiano adds, “Nay but I barre [exclude] to night, you shall not gage [judge] me / By what we doe to night.”

In the mid-17th century, “bar” came to be a preposition with the sense of “excluding from consideration” or “leaving out.” The first OED citation is from an epigram in Hesperides (1648), a poetry collection by Robert Herrick. Here’s the epigram in full:

“Last night thou didst invite me home to eate, And shew’st me there much plate, but little meate. Prithee, when next thou do’st invite, barre state [omitting formality], And give me meate, or give me else thy plate.”

Our guess is that the use of the verb to mean “exclude from consideration” and the preposition for “excluding from consideration” may have inspired the use of “bar” in “to not stand a bar of something.” However, we’ve seen no evidence to support this.

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Wanna look like a chumbolone?

Q: Have you come across the word “chumbolone”? It’s a new one for me. I found it on John Kass’s website. He was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and now writes a lot of angry screeds about the state of everything.

A: It was unknown to us, too.

The rare slang term “chumbolone” was first recorded about a decade and a half ago at the federal trial of Anthony Dale, a former Chicago police officer accused of leaking information to the mob.

Here’s the relevant passage: “ ‘I  don’t wanna look like a ‘chumbolone,’ an idiot,’ said Doyle, using street slang” (from a report by Jeff Coen in the Chicago Tribune, Aug. 24, 2007).

In commenting on the trial later that day, the Tribune columnist John Kass had this expanded version of Doyle’s testimony about a conversation in code with the mobster Frank Calabrese:

“ ‘I gave him lip service,’ Doyle said. ‘I didn’t know what he was talking about. I don’t wanna look like a chumbolone, an idiot, stupid.’ ” (It’s “pronounced chum-buh-LOAN,” according to Kass.)

Doyle’s remarks appeared in some newspapers and broadcasts around the country, but the usage didn’t catch on. It’s not in standard dictionaries or in the Oxford English Dictionary, the leading authority on English etymology.

It’s also not in the Dictionary of American Regional English or the updated online edition of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, a three-volume reference compiled by the lexicographer Jonathon Green.

Although the term appears in a few smaller slang dictionaries that aren’t updated regularly, it’s rarely seen outside Chicago, and it’s not all that common in the city.

Most of the “chumbolone” examples we’ve found in searching digitized databases are from one writer, Kass, who has trademarked the term and uses it to sell merchandise on his website, such as this “No Chumbolone Zone Hat”:

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How unnatural is ‘preternatural’?

Q: Why do I see the word “preternatural” all the time, especially in The New York Times? I don’t see it elsewhere. What’s the story?  I had to look it up!

A: The adjective “preternatural” (extraordinary, unnatural, supernatural) dates from the late 16th century. It was quite common in the 1700s and 1800s, then gradually fell out of favor. It was relatively rare by the early 1900s, but rebounded somewhat at the end of the 20th century.

A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books, indicates that the use of “preternatural” began rising in the 1990s. Although the usage appears often in The Times, as both an adjective and an adverb (“preternaturally”), it shows up in many other publications as well.

The term’s first appearance in The Times was in an editorial about the pleasures of journalism, published on March 24, 1860, nine years after the paper’s founding in 1851.

The editorial, entitled “An Oratorical Windfall,” says that despite the occasional weariness of recording commonplace events, journalism can offer “gleams of an almost preternatural absurdity which it is at once a pleasure and a wonder to pursue.”

And this recent use of “preternatural” is from an article in The Times on Dec. 12, 2023, about Shohei Ohtani, a pitcher and designated hitter for the Los Angeles Dodgers and his previous team, the Los Angeles Angels:

“For Angels fans, Ohtani brought more to the ballpark than just his preternatural, comic-book-like talent at swatting home runs and striking out batters.”

Here’s an adverbial example from a Times article on Jan. 2, 2024, about how the American skier Mikaela Shiffrin sees Taylor Swift’s career as a guide for navigating fame and adversity:

“That long-distance tutelage began when the preternaturally gifted Shiffrin, nurtured in the Colorado mountains and at a venerable Vermont ski academy, won three World Cup races and a world championship gold medal as a high school senior.”

As we’ve said, The Times isn’t the only publication to use “preternatural.” Here are a few recent examples from others:

“Martin Scorsese’s career-capping Killers of the Flower Moon likely never would have happened without David Grann, the New Yorker writer with a preternatural knack for unearthing astonishing, dramatic stories from history” (Slate, Oct. 22, 2023).

“Padres Expert Pleads Fans to Not Forget Juan Soto’s Preternatural Talent” (Sports Illustrated, April 29, 2023).

“15 preternatural podcasts to ring in spooky season” (The Boston Globe, Oct. 22, 2021).

As for its etymology, the Oxford English Dictionary says “preternatural” is based on the post-classical Latin praeternaturalis, formed from the classical Latin phrase praeter naturam (beyond or outside nature).

The term first appeared in the early modern English of the late 1500s. The earliest OED citation, which we’ve expanded, is from a letter by the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey to the English poet Edmund Spenser about a 1580 earthquake in the Dover Straits, the narrowest part of the English Channel:

“an Earthquake might as well be supposed a Naturall Motion of the Earth, as a preternaturall, or supernaturall ominous worke of God” (from Three Proper and Witty Familiar Letters, 1580, published anonymously, apparently by Harvey).

A note in Merriam-Webster online about the history of the term says: “unusual things are sometimes considered positive and sometimes negative, and throughout its history preternatural has been used to refer to both exceptionally good things and unnaturally evil ones.”

“In its earliest documented uses in the 1500s, it tended to emphasize the strange, ominous, or foreboding, but by the 1700s, people were using it more benignly to refer to fascinating supernatural (or even heavenly) phenomena. Nowadays, people regularly use it to describe the remarkable abilities of exceptional humans.”

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