Tag: Phrase origin

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English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Linguistics Phrase origin Usage

These ones and those ones

Q: “These ones” is never OK. Not here in the US, nor in my native UK. There is no “sometimes.” It’s simply wrong. The “ones” element is redundant. It’s “these” or “those” (for plurals), and “this” or “that” for singular items.

A: We assume your remarks were inspired by our post in 2010 about whether the phrase “these ones” is ever legitimate.

As we said then, we don’t like this usage. But we could find no authoritative evidence against it, and on the contrary there was reliable evidence in its favor.

In the earlier post, we note that the linguist Arnold Zwicky says the use of “these ones” and “those ones” apparently isn’t considered odd or nonstandard in Britain.

Zwicky cites the linguist Nicholas Widdows, who reports finding examples in the British National Corpus of “these” and “these ones” used in different senses. Here’s how Widdows explains the difference:

“Faced with an array of jelly babies I might point to a red one and say, ‘I like these ones.’  The fused head [plain these] could be misinterpreted as referring to all jelly babies; the ‘ones’ says more clearly ‘this type.’ ”

In the US, Zwicky writes on the Language Log, educated people seem to differ about the usage, and their opinions may depend on where they grew up.

”It’s possible that in North America ‘these/those ones’ is a variant in the gray area between standard and nonstandard—fully acceptable to educated middle-class speakers in some areas, but not fully acceptable, though not actually stigmatized, to such people in other areas,” he writes.

The fact that we dislike a usage doesn’t make it incorrect. Nor does the fact that some online language junkies claim it’s wrong, without offering any evidence to support their opinions.

You argue that “ones” is redundant in “these ones,” but do you really find “one” redundant in the phrases “this one” and “that one” for the same reason?

And what about if we add a modifier to “these ones” or “those ones”? Would you object to “these heavy ones,” “those black ones,” and so on?

The Cambridge History of the English Language indicates that “ones” here is an anaphoric pronoun—a pronoun that refers back to another word or phrase. In this case the pronoun is preceded by a determiner, a modifier like “these” or “those.”

Cambridge says “those ones” first showed up in the 19th century, and “these ones” in the 20th. However, we’ve found many formal and informal examples of “those ones” going back to the 1600s, and of “these ones” dating from the 1700s.

Here’s an example of “those ones” from Greenwich Park, a 1691 comedy by the English actor and playwright William Mountfort:

Reveler: “Madam, Men may divert themselves with several Women, but only one can make ’em truly happy.”

Dorinda. “And how many of those ones have you said this to?”

Reveler: “As I never was really in Love till now, I never had occasion for the Expression before.”

Here’s a more formal example from Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries, and Navigation (1805), by David Macpherson and Adam Anderson:

“The mercantile Venetian and Genoese galleys, which formerly resorted to England, were very probably of a more solid structure than those ones which are only fit for summer expeditions within the Mediterranean.”

Another example, from The British Cyclopedia (1836), edited by Charles F. Partington, says that only in Europe and Asia have falcons been trained to help humans “and therefore those ones of which specimens are obtained from remote countries are birds of little or no interest, except to mere collectors.”

And in Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England (Vol. 2, 1807), William Cobbett and Thomas Curson Hansard write about 17th-century reforms in Britain that eased the burdens of taxation:

“The compulsion of the subject to receive the order of Knighthood against his will, paying of fines for not receiving it, and, the vexatious proceedings thereupon for levying of those ones, are, by other beneficial laws, reformed and prevented.”

As for “these ones,” here’s an example from An Exposition of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (1766), by John Brown:

“Our Mediator Christ being so excellent a person, his death was so full a price, and so satisfactory unto justice, for all these ones for which it was offered up, that it needeth not to be repeated, but once for all this sacrifice was offered: He died once.”

And here’s an example from “The Foreigner,” a story published in the June 1895 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine:

“It is not the colour only. It is that the whole room has neither expression nor character about it. You must surely have noticed that our English drawing-rooms were very different from these ones.”

Modern scholars, too, have used this construction. Here’s a recent example from Blooming English, a 2012 collection of observations by the British linguist Kate Burridge:

“These were just some of the nominees for the annual Doublespeak Awards—and these ones didn’t even win a prize.”

This modern example is from Emerging English Modals, a 2000 monograph on English auxiliaries by the linguist Manfred G. Krug: “Like previous maps, these ones too have to be taken with a good deal of caution.”

If you don’t trust the writing of linguists, here’s an example from The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Vol. 3, 2012), edited by David Hopkins and Charles Martindale:

“The effect produced by the epigrams in Rowe’s Lucan is indeed often one of dignity, but this can make them rather un-Lucanian. Take these ones, for instance, about the panic that grips Rome as Caesar approaches the city at the end of Book I.”

(The work is a study of how literary texts from the classical world were received by English writers from the Middle Ages to the present time.)

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Garage sailing, in knots or mph?

Q: A columnist for my local paper in Minnesota wrote that he and his wife went garage sailing. Now I’m wondering how large were his sails, in order to get his garage to move.

A: We’ve also noticed that some people use the term “garage sailing” to mean going to garage sales. We’ve seen “yard sailing,” “estate sailing,” and “tag sailing,” too.

We checked eight standard dictionaries and none of them listed “sail” or “sale” as a verb meaning to go to sales.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary has examples going back to the early 1900s of “sale” used as a verb meaning to shop at sales.

Here’s an example from the July 3, 1901, issue of The Sketch: A Journal of Art and Actuality: “To go ‘saleing’ in Bond Street.”

And here’s an example from the June 19, 1928, issue of the Daily Express: “Men went ‘sale-ing’ at lunch time.”

As you’ve probably noticed, the words “saleing” and “sale-ing” above were enclosed in quotes, indicating that the writers didn’t consider the usage quite up to snuff.

And if “sale” were a verb, the participle would normally be formed without the “e” (“saling,” as with “whaling” and “scaling”).

You won’t find “garage sailing,” “garage saling,” or “garage sale-ing” in standard dictionaries, but all three are in online references that let readers submit new words for consideration.

The Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary, for example, has reader contributions for both “garage sailing” and “garage saling” with these illustrations:

“Let’s go garage-sailing this weekend!” and “I’m going garage saling on Friday so I can’t go to the zoo.”

In Google searches, we’ve found several hundred examples for each of the various spellings of the participial phrase, including this exchange between a reader and the Chicago Manual of Style’s “You Could Look It Up” blog.

Q. For those who make a hobby of cruising garage sales, are they going “garage sale-ing,” “garage saling,” or “garage saleing?” Or are they not permitted this usage?

A. Oh, my. Is garage saleing anything like parasailing? The mind boggles. As you suspected, this phrase would not survive the red pencil at Chicago. (Why can’t you just go to garage sales?) I can tell you that suffixes like “ing” don’t normally take a hyphen. After that, you’re on your own.

We think the Chicago Manual’s blogger should loosen up a bit. There’s something to be said for and against all these phrases, but we’re talking here about going to garage sales, not submitting a paper to the Philological Society.

We rather like “garage sailing.” It may have begun life as a misspelling or as a substitute for the ungainly “saling,” but we imagine that most people who use the phrase now are doing so for humorous effect.

In fact, the “sailing” image has prompted humorous comments online, like “You measure the distance driven in knots, not miles.” (To be precise, knots aren’t a measure of  distance, so the joker should have said, “You figure your driving speed in knots, not miles per hour.”)

Savvy shoppers know very well that they’re going to “sales,” not “sails,” but the notion of sailing from house to house in search of treasure isn’t inappropriate.

As one woman wrote on a shopping forum, “My husband and I are avid garage ‘sailors.’ ”

We’ll end this with a tip we picked up from a garage sailor on the Web: “Bargain with the man on girly items and the woman on power tools.” (In our home, the woman usually mans the power tools.)

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English English language Etymology Grammar Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Is “so fun” ready for prime time?

Q: I often hear people say things like “We went to the circus and it was so fun.” I think the correct usage would be “it was fun” or “it was so much fun.”  I find it strange to see a noun like “fun” used as another part of speech. Help please!

A: As we’ve often said, English usage changes over time and we do our best to stay on top of it. We’re glad you asked us this, since it gives us a chance to review what we last wrote about “so fun,” back in 2008.

Six years ago we noted that “fun” is traditionally considered a noun, as in “We had fun” or  “That was fun.” (In the second example, “fun” can be called a predicate noun—a noun that follows a linking verb and renames or describes the subject).

But the use of “fun” as an adjective has long been regarded as improper (“We had a fun day” … “It was so fun”).

We concluded that the use of “fun” as an adjective “isn’t acceptable, but it’s now so common that someday it just might be.”

Well, perhaps the day has arrived. Almost every dictionary that we’ve consulted now recognizes the adjectival use of “fun,” though not necessarily its use in the phrase “so fun.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, labels “fun” as an “informal” but nevertheless “standard” adjective meaning “enjoyable; amusing.”

Here’s how the dictionary puts it in a usage note:

“The use of fun as an attributive adjective, as in a fun time, a fun place, probably originated in a playful reanalysis of the use of the word in sentences such as It is fun to ski, where fun has the syntactic function of adjectives such as amusing or enjoyable. The usage has become widespread and must be considered standard, though writers may want to avoid it in more formal contexts.”

American Heritage isn’t alone by any means. Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.) and Random House Webster’s College Dictionary also have entries for the adjective “fun”—and both call it “informal.”

By labeling a usage “informal,” dictionaries generally mean it’s widely found in everyday talk and casual writing, but not in formal writing or formal speech.

Two other respected and widely used sources, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and the Cambridge Dictionaries online, go even further.

Both have entries for “fun” as an adjective without reservations of any kind—there’s no label of “informal” or anything else.

But what about “so fun”? Is it, too, regarded as a standard usage?

None of the aforementioned dictionaries indicate as much. In all their examples, “fun” is an attributive adjective (one that precedes the noun): “a real fun guy,” “a fun party,” “a fun person,” “a fun time,” “a fun gift,” and so on.

In the phrase “so fun,” however, the word “fun” is a predicate adjective—one that follows a linking verb (like “be”) and modifies a subject previously mentioned.

It could be that the lexicographers at those dictionaries regard the word’s use after the noun (rather than before) as going too far.

In fact, American Heritage specifically uses the phrase “attributive adjective” in its note about “fun.” And two other sources, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Macmillan Dictionary online, recognize the adjective—but say, “only before noun.”

For another perspective, we turned to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, which raises this very interesting point:

“No commentator has attempted to tackle the question of whether fun is a predicate adjective as well [as an attributive adjective], and probably with good reason, for there is no sure way to prove that fun in ‘That was fun’ is either an adjective or a noun.”

Like you, and like many others, the two of us don’t use “so fun.” A sentence like “The party was so fun” doesn’t sound idiomatic to us. However, the use of “fun” as a predicate adjective isn’t as jarring to us in phrases like “rather fun” or “awfully fun.”

Well then, is “so fun” legit?

The usage is out there, but not as out there as you might think. Although a Google search for “so fun” can get more than 5 million hits, the number drops to a few hundred or a few thousand when you actually call up the results (depending on how you do your search).

We wouldn’t recommend using “so fun” until the editors at a few standard dictionaries clearly indicate that the use of “fun” as a predicate adjective is standard English.

One other problem has to be mentioned. Adjectives generally have comparative and superlative forms, so if “fun” is an adjective, should we also recognize “funner” and “funnest”?

That depends on the dictionary you consult. Most don’t comment on the extended forms, but two do.

This is from the American Heritage usage note: “The inflection of the adjective (as funner, funnest) is another matter, however. Although this practice goes back to the 1950s, the inflected forms are almost never used in edited prose aside from direct quotations, usually of children.”

And this is from the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate entry for “fun” as an adjective: “sometimes funner; sometimes funnest.”

It’s true that we “sometimes” hear people use “funner” and “funnest,” but we have to agree with American Heritage that the speakers are usually children—or adults quoting them.

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

Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: how World War I changed the English language. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

In the nick of time

Q: In regard to your recent article about the criminal uses of “nick,” what about its use in the expression “nick of time”?

A: The noun “nick,” which referred to a notch or groove when it showed up in the 1500s, soon took on an additional meaning: the exact point of time when something takes place or needs to be done.

The earliest example of this usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Arthur Golding’s 1565 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “there commeth in the nicke.”

The OED says this use of “nick” alone is “now somewhat rare,” but notes the longer form you’ve asked about.

When the expression “nick of time” showed up in the early 1600s, it meant pretty much the same thing as “nick”—that is, a crucial moment when something occurs or has to occur.

The OED’s first citation for the full version of the expression is from a 1610 sermon by the English clergyman John Day: “Even in this nicke of time, this very, very instant.”

Another example, from a 1757 letter by George Washington, refers to a sweet-scented tobacco crop that “must if the Ship arriv’d Safe get to Market in the Nick of time.”

And here’s an example from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables: “If Mr. Andrews hadn’t caught her by her sash just in the nick of time she’d have fallen in.”

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Business agnostic?

Q: In a recent conference call, three people described themselves as “business agnostic.” By this they meant they had skills useful in many business sectors, not just one. Is this use of “agnostic” correct? If so, will you please explain the rationale?

A: We can’t find this sense of “agnostic” in the Oxford English Dictionary or the half-dozen standard dictionaries we regularly check.

But English has taken a lot of liberties with “agnostic” since it first showed up in the mid-1800s. The usage you’ve noticed seems to be yet another extension of the many extended uses of the word.

The OED says “agnostic” first showed up as a noun for “a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of immaterial things, especially of the existence or nature of God.”

The dictionary’s earliest written example is from the May 29, 1869, issue of the Spectator:

“All these considerations, and the great controversies which suggest them, are in the highest degree cultivating, and will be admitted to be so even by those Agnostics who think them profitless of any practical result.”

The OED says the term “agnostic” was “apparently coined” by the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.

The dictionary probably qualifies the attribution because the chronology is a bit fuzzy.

In “Agnosticism,” an 1889 essay, Huxley says he invented the term at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in London in 1869.

However, the society didn’t hold its first formal meeting until June 2, 1869, four days after the word “Agnostics” appeared in the Spectator.

It’s possible, though, that Huxley may have used the term at an organizational meeting of the Metaphysical Society that he attended on April 21.

In his essay, Huxley says he saw the word “agnostic” as “suggestively antithetic to the ‘gnostic’ of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant.”

The Gnostics (from gnosis, Greek for knowledge) were early Christians who used the term for people with spiritual knowledge.

Soon after “agnostic” appeared in print, the OED says, people were using the noun loosely to refer to “a person who is not persuaded by or committed to a particular point of view; a sceptic. Also: person of indeterminate ideology or conviction; an equivocator.”

The first Oxford citation for this new sense is from the Dec. 15, 1885, issue of the Western Druggist: “Judge Chipman is clearly an agnostic on the subject of pills.”

When the adjective showed up in the 1870s, the dictionary says, it referred to “the belief that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (as far as can be judged) unknowable.”

The first OED citation for the adjective is from the Oct. 1, 1870, issue of the Spectator: “Are not his favourite ‘agnostic’ creeds … absolutely hostile to that enthusiasm of love to God and faith in God which are the simplest and most universal elements of a ‘religious spirit’ ”?

But like the noun, the adjective soon took on extended uses: “not committed to or persuaded by a particular point of view; sceptical. Also: politically or ideologically unaligned; non-partisan, equivocal.”

The first Oxford citation for this sense is from the June 23, 1884, issue of the Syracuse (NY) Standard: “Many worthy young persons who have been brought up on the sincere milk of agnostic politics.”

More recently, the OED says, the adjective has taken on a new sense in computing: developing, working with, or compatible with more than one type of computer system or operating system.

Is it legitimate to describe a versatile business person as “business agnostic”? It’s a bit of a stretch, but we think so.

If it’s OK to use “agnostic” to describe an open-minded politician, it’s not all that much of a leap to use it for an adaptable business type.

If you’d like to read more, we ran a post back in 2006 about the differences between an atheist and an agnostic.

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Pulling one’s leg

Q: Where does the expression “to pull one’s leg” come from? Could it have anything to do with pirates or smugglers hiding things in wooden legs? I just wonder.

A: The expression, which means to deceive or tease a person humorously or playfully, first showed up in print in the 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest citation in the OED is from the Feb. 20, 1883, issue of a Pennsylvania newspaper, the Wellsboro Agitator: “The Chinese giant once told me he had half a dozen wives at home, but I think he was pulling my leg.”

However, we’ve found earlier examples going back to the mid-1800s, including this one from Always Ready; or Every One in His Pride, an anonymous 1859 novel about the British Merchant Navy:

“In reply to which both brothers commenced ‘pulling his leg’ by criticising his rig, asking him ‘Who his hatter was?’ and politely wishing those present to ‘twig his heels.’ ” (The expression “twig his heels” is apparently obsolete slang for tease or criticize.)

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has an even earlier example, an 1821 entry from the Diary of James Gallatin, but it may be fraudulent. Historians have questioned the legitimacy of the diary and have suggested it’s a hoax.

For example, Raymond Walters Jr., writing in the July 1957 issue of The American Historical Review, says “the diary must be considered historical romance” and libraries “that own copies of it should transfer them to their fiction shelves.”

We can’t find any evidence that the expression “to pull one’s leg” ever had anything to do with pirates, smugglers, or peg legs. Nor with pulling the legs of prisoners on the gallows to speed up executions—a common theory.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms says the usage “is thought to allude to tripping someone by so holding a stick or other object that one of his legs is pulled back.”

Why trip someone? The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins suggests that by tripping a person “you can throw him into a state of confusion and make him look very foolish indeed.”

We’ve also seen speculation that the usage originated with muggers who tripped their victims with a stick to make it easier to rob them, but we haven’t seen any evidence to support this idea.

Our theory? We’ll file the expression away in our “Origin Unknown” folder.

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Translated from the …

Q: Your article about “the dead” reminded me of a recent essay in the New York Times by the novelist Jo Nesbo. There was a note at the bottom that said it was translated “from the Norwegian.” What’s with the article “the” here?

A: It used to be quite common in English to use the definite article before the name of a language, though the usage is now “obsolete except in contexts that indicate translation from an original language,” according to Merriam-Webster Unabridged.

The Oxford English Dictionary has examples of the usage from the late 1500s to the mid-1960s. The earliest is from Strange Newes, a 1593 work by the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe: “To borrowe some lesser quarry of elocution from the Latine.”

And here’s an example from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, written in the late 1590s: “You will come into the court and sweare that I haue a poore pennie-worth in the English.” (We’ve expanded the OED citation.)

Oxford also cites references to “the French,” “the Hebrew,” “the Arabic,” “the Spanish,” and “the Portuguese.”

The dictionary says the usage is seen “now only in consciously elliptical phrases” in which words like “language” and “original” are omitted.

For instance, these phrases show the ellipses (that is, omissions) in brackets: “the French [language]” … “the German [original].” Sometimes, the OED notes, “The degree of ellipsis is not easy to determine.”

The most recent example of the usage in the dictionary is from The Northern Fiddler, a collection of poetry by Brian Higgins that was published posthumously in 1966: “ ‘I’m corrupt’ he said to me in the French, ‘I think I live in corruption’s stench.’ ”

If you’d like to read more, we had a post six years ago about the idiomatic use of “the” with the names of things that don’t seem to need an article (or that could use the article “a” instead).

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Punctuation Word origin

Are scare quotes scary?

Q: Is there any legitimate reason for using single quotation marks, other than when a quote appears within another quote? I often see single quotation marks used to warn readers about a questionable term or simply to highlight a term.

A: In American usage, single quotation marks are generally used in prose for one purpose only: to surround a quotation nested within a larger quotation: “Was it Linus who said, ‘Get lost’?” asked Lucy.

There are exceptions in certain kinds of specialized writing, which we’ll get to later. And single quotation marks are generally used in headlines.

But the warning quotes you’re referring to, sometimes called “scare quotes,” should always be double quotes, not singletons, in American writing.

Here’s how The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) explains the legitimate use of scare quotes:

“Quotation marks are often used to alert readers that a term is used in a nonstandard (or slang), ironic, or other special sense. Nicknamed scare quotes, they imply ‘This is not my term’ or ‘This is not how the term is usually applied.’ Like any such device, scare quotes lose their force and irritate readers if overused.”

Here are the examples given (we’ll put them in italics to avoid confusing things with our own punctuation):

On a digital music player, a “track” is really just a separately encoded file in a directory.

“Child protection” sometimes fails to protect.

Another respected authority, the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.), has these examples:

A silver dome concealed the robot’s “brain.”

Their “friend” brought about their downfall. 

All of those are perfectly justifiable uses of quotation marks, because the term in quotes is highlighted for a good reason—to warn the reader to be wary of it.

But sometimes writers (particularly sign painters!) use quotes merely to highlight terms, as in these examples:

“Fast” and “friendly” service! … Our bread is baked “fresh” daily … Employees must “wash hands.” … “Delivery” available.

We think a writer who wants to boast about a word or merely emphasize it should find another way—italics, perhaps, or a different size type. The quote marks imply that the words aren’t meant literally.

However, the lexicographer Grant Barrett defends the use of quotes for emphasis—a usage he refers to as “shout quotes.” In a May 14, 2008, post on his blog, he argues that it’s unlikely readers would misunderstand them.

By the way, the use of the phrase “scare quotes” in this sense is relatively recent, showing up in the mid-20th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest example in the OED is from a 1956 issue of the journal Mind: “The ‘scare-quotes’ are mine; Aristotle is not overtly discussing the expression ‘whichever happens.’ ”

An earlier use of the phrase, from Southern California: An Island on the Land, a 1946 book by Carey McWilliams, refers to quotations that can be used against a political candidate.

McWilliams writes that “the best advertising brains in California were put to work culling scare-quotes” from the candidate’s writings.

But let’s get back to single quotation marks. As we’ve said above and as we’ve written before on our blog, they’re sometimes used in a couple of specialized fields.

Horticultural writing is one of them. Some publications in the field, like the magazine Horticulture, use single quotation marks around the names of cultivars, the Chicago Manual says.

And in another horticultural exception to normal American usage, Chicago adds, “any following punctuation is placed after the closing quotation mark.” Here’s the example given (we’ll use boldface here, since the illustration includes italics):

The hybrid Agastache ‘Apricot Sunrise’, best grown in zone 6, mingles with sheaves of cape fuchsia (Phygelius ‘Salmon Leap’).

There’s another kind of specialized writing in which single quotation marks appear.

“In linguistic and phonetic studies,” the Chicago Manual says, “a definition is often enclosed in single quotation marks,” and here again, “any following punctuation is placed after the closing quotation mark.” This is the example given:

The gap is narrow between mead ‘a beverage’ and mead ‘a meadow’.

But unless you’re writing about horticulture, linguistics, or phonetics, the convention in American usage is to use double quotation marks (except for internal quotes) and to keep commas and periods inside final quote marks. The Chicago Manual gives this example of the normal usage:

“Admit it,” she said. “You haven’t read ‘The Simple Art of Murder.’ ”

Keep in mind that so far we’ve been discussing American-style punctuation. In British usage, single quotation marks are  more widely used.

As the Chicago Manual says, “The practice in the United Kingdom and elsewhere is often the reverse” of that found in American usage. Single quotation marks may come first, with double marks used for quotations within quotations.

For example, if Lucy and Linus had been characters in a British novel, that quote we cited above (from Pat’s grammar book Woe Is I, 3rd ed.) might have looked like this:

‘Was it Linus who said, “Get lost”?’ asked Lucy.

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

When “I’m good” is “no, thanks”

Q: I frequently hear the expression “I’m good” in the South when a server offers a refill on coffee, iced tea, water, etc. Is this use of “I’m good” to mean “No, thank you” a regionalism or is it common now?

A: You hear the expression in the South, we hear it in New England, and we’ve seen comments about it online from people in other parts of the US as well as in the UK and Australia.

It’s definitely out there, but we wouldn’t say it’s common. The usage isn’t in the Oxford English Dictionary or the standard dictionaries we usually check. And we couldn’t find comments about it, pro or con, in usage guides.

The use of “I’m good” to mean “no, thanks” or “no more” is relatively new. As far as we can tell, it first showed up in the mid-1950s among poker players.

The earliest example we’ve found is from a game of five-card draw played in “The Reforming of Parlor Davis,” a short story by Peerce Platt in the May 13, 1955, issue of Collier’s magazine:

“ ‘I’m good,’ Parlor said.

“ ‘I’ll take one,’ Ed said. He took the card, put it with his other four, and shuffled them nervously. ‘Three hundred,’ Ed said, pushing in the remainder of his chips.

“ ‘I raise you one thousand dollars,’ Parlor said.”

The next example we’ve found, from Slaughter Island, a 1991 novel by Herb Fisher, uses the expression in the drinking sense:

“ ‘Nah, I’m good, Terry,’ said Manny, waving the bottle of beer as the houseboy moved toward him along the deck of the pool.”

In this more recent example, from Close Knit Killer, a 2013 mystery by Maggie Sefton, the phrase “I’m good” is used in the restaurant sense you’ve asked about:

“ ‘I bet you want a refill,’ Julie said, walking up to Hal. ‘You need any more, Kelly?’

“ ‘No, thanks, I’m good.’ Kelly held up her hand.”

Is this colloquial use of “I’m good” legit? We see nothing wrong with it in casual speech or informal writing.

And as we’ve written before on the blog, there’s nothing wrong with responding “I’m good” when someone asks you how you are or how you’re feeling.

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Habitus forming

Q: The reference to the “habitus of the gluteus” in your “booty camp” article caught my eye. My girlfriend, a professor of radiology, notes that radiologists must not tell patients they are fat. The politically correct term for obesity is “increased body habitus.” Since none of the radiologists worry about  “decreased body habitus,” the phrase is often shortened to “body habitus.”

A: The expression “increased body habitus” is new to us. In fact, it appears to be a relatively new usage even among radiologists—at least in published writing.

The earliest example of the phrase we’ve found is from a June 20, 2013, opinion in the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court.

In ruling that a plaintiff wasn’t seriously injured in a motor-vehicle accident, the court cited “reports of a radiologist who found that the MRIs revealed injuries that were degenerative in nature, consistent with her age and increased body habitus.”

The slimmed-down phrase “body habitus” has been around since the early 1900s, though it usually refers to just a physique or body type, not necessarily an obese physique.

For example, an April 24, 1915, article in the Medical Record, a weekly journal, says life insurance medicine deals with clinically important subjects “such as body habitus in its relationship with heredity.”

The word “habitus” was occasionally used in the late 1800s to mean a bodily condition or constitution, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s an example from the Jan. 22, 1886, issue of the journal Science: “The disposition to the disease—the consumptive habitus.”

The Latin noun habitus (a condition or state) also gave English the more common noun “habit,” which etymologically means “what one has,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

As Ayto explains, habitus was originally the past participle of the verb habere, which meant “to have” but came to be used reflexively for “to be.”

The past participle habitus, he says, “came to be used as a noun for ‘how one is’—one’s ‘state’ or ‘condition.’ ”

As habitus evolved in Latin, Ayto adds, it could refer to either an outward condition (such as clothing) or an inner condition (one’s character or way of behaving).

Those Latin senses, he says, were “taken over lock, stock, and barrel  by English, although the clothing sense now survives only in relation to monks, nuns, and horseriders.”

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Memento mori

Q: You might be able to save me from a Google failure to find a linguistic reason for the expression “brought back from the dead.” Why does it have a definite article? Wondering about this is making my arm twitch.

A: Since Anglo-Saxon times, the definite article has been used before an adjective to create a noun phrase with a plural sense, as in “the poor,” “the rich,” “the lame,” “the sick,” “the naked,” and “the dead.”

In such phrases, “the poor” means “the people who are poor” or “those who are poor,” while “the rich” means “the people who are rich” or “those who are rich.”

The earliest example of this usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference to ð worold-wisan (the worldly wise) from Pastoral Care (c. 897), King Aelfred’s Old English translation of a Latin treatise by Pope Gregory I.

Here’s a modern English example from Shelley’s 1819 poem Rosalind and Helen: “He was a coward to the strong: / He was a tyrant to the weak.”

The OED’s earliest example for “the dead,” the specific phrase you’ve asked about, is a reference to þe deade (the dead) in a document from around 1175 in the Lambeth Manuscript, a collection of late Old English sermons.

Finally, here’s an Oxford example from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (c. 1599): “I will not do them wrong; I rather choose / To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you.” (We’ve expanded Antony’s lines.)

If you’d like to read more, we had a post six years ago about the idiomatic use of “the” with the names of things that wouldn’t appear to need an article (or that could use the article “a” instead).

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A trash “chute” or “shoot”?

Q: In one of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum mysteries, Stephanie refers to a trash “chute” in her apartment building as a “shoot.” Was the copy editor asleep at the wheel? Or did I doze off while the spelling changed?

A: The usual spelling for the shaft down which garbage, laundry, and other stuff drops is “chute.” However, some standard dictionaries, including Oxford Dictionaries online, list “shoot” as an acceptable variant.

In fact, “shoot” (actually, “shoote”) was the original spelling of the noun, which showed up in the early 1500s and has roots in Anglo-Saxon days, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The “chute” spelling, Chambers says, first appeared in the US in the late 1700s and was influenced by chute, a French term for the fall of water.

“The French form came into American English through contact with early French-speaking explorers and settlers in North America,” the etymology guide adds, noting that the ultimate source of the French term is cadere, the Latin verb meaning to fall.

This story begins with the verb “shoot,” which meant “to go swiftly and suddenly” when it showed up in Old English (spelled sceote) in the late writings of King Aelfred (849-899), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When the noun “shoot” first appeared in the early 1500s, the OED says, it referred to “an act of shooting (with firearms, a bow, etc.); a discharge of arrows, bullets, etc.”

But by the early 1600s, Oxford reports, the noun was being used to mean “a heavy and sudden rush of water down a steep channel; a place in a river where this occurs, a rapid.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of this sense is from The Secrets of Angling, a book by John Dennys published in 1613:

“At the Tayles, of Mills and Arches small, / Whereas the shoote is swift and not too cleare.” (The OED dates the citation from sometime before 1609.)

In the early 1700s, Oxford says, the noun “shoot” took on a new sense: “an artificial channel for conveying water by gravity to a low level; or for the escape of overflow water from a reservoir, etc.”

By the 1800s, according to OED citations, a “shoot” could convey coal, ore, wheat, timber, cattle, rubbish, and so on. Here’s a trash example from London Labour and the London Poor, an 1851 work by Henry Mayhew:

“Each particular district appears to have its own special ‘shoot,’ as it is called, for rubbish.”

The word “chute,” which first showed up in the 1700s, originally referred to “a fall of water; a rapid descent in a river, or steep channel by which water escapes from a higher to a lower level.”

The OED’s earliest example is from a 1793 diary entry in Five Fur Traders of the Northwest, a book edited by Charles M. Gates and published in 1933: “[We] slept at the chute a Blondeau.”

Chambers cites this diary entry example as evidence that the “chute” spelling entered American English through contact with French-speaking explorers and settlers.

By the early 1800s, the term “chute” was being used in the US to mean “a steep channel or enclosed passage down which ore, coal, grain, or the like is ‘shot,’ so as to reach a receptacle, wagon, etc. below.”

The OED says the term is “usually shoot” in England. However, all the British standard dictionaries we’ve checked list “chute” as either the only or the more common spelling.

The OED doesn’t have any citations for the terms “garbage chute” or “trash chute” used in the sense of a refuse disposal shaft in an apartment building.

However, we’ve found several late-19th-century examples for “garbage chute” in Google Books, including this one from an 1895 collection of documents from the New York State Assembly:

“We recommend for new tenements an airtight ash and garbage chute, as the best solution of the removal of garbage during the day. Without this the tenants will persist in throwing rubbish out of the windows or storing it on the fire escapes.”

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The Kardashians of the world

Q: Here’s a construction that’s widely used by radio hosts, though it’s not yet epidemic: “the (insert plural name of a singular individual) of the world.” For example, “the Babe Ruths of the world.” My complaint is that there are no multiple Babe Ruths. I get the intention, but it bugs me to hear a big internal contradiction in such a little phrase.

A: Like many idiomatic usages, this one isn’t meant to be taken literally. We’d never make our beds if we actually had to build them from scratch.

You seem to think the idiom you’ve heard on talk radio is a relatively new phenomenon, but the construction first showed up in the mid-1800s, well before Marconi got his first patent for transmitting radio waves.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the usage as colloquial (that is, more common in speech than written English), and defines it this way:

“With a personal name, in the plural. the — — of this world: people considered to represent or be like the type specified. Also in extended use with other proper names. Freq. somewhat derogatory.”

The earliest example of the usage in the OED is from the September 1897 issue of the North American Review: “The Mrs. Siddons’ or Rachels of the world have gained a fame to which even Garrick and Booth cannot approach.”

(The references are to British and American actors: Sarah Siddons, Elisabeth Rachel Félix, David Garrick, and Edwin Booth.)

We’ve found several earlier examples dating from the 1850s.

An article in the January 1854 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, for example, calls for “bringing prominently forward the peaceful heroes of art and meditation, the Newtons, the Shakespeares, the Miltons of the world.”

The most recent citation in the OED is from Do You Remember the First Time, a 2004 novel by Jenny Colgan: “Why should fashion belong only to the Britneys of this world, goddamit?”

As you’ve noticed, the usage is still around. We got more than 50,000 hits when we googled “the Kardashians of the world,” including this one from the May 17, 2013, issue of the Washington Times:

“These days, tabloid sales are fueled by persistent paparazzi and their photos of the Kardashians of the world in compromising situations.”

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Is “change up” redundant?

Q: I noticed a new usage this week—three times, thus far—that strikes me as peculiar. A radio ad: “Are you ready to change up your furniture?” Isn’t it redundant to use “change up” where simply “change” would suffice?

A: The verbal phrases “change up” and “change down” have been around for more than a century, but with another meaning—to change gears in a motor vehicle. (In a moment, we’ll get to the usage you noticed.)

The online Oxford Dictionaries describes the vehicular usage as British and gives this example: “what you notice with a diesel is the need to change up slightly earlier than in a petrol car.”

The big Oxford English Dictionary has examples going back to 1902. This more recent one is from Life at the Top, a 1962 novel by John Braine: “I changed down into second; then changed up again.”

Americans are of course familiar with the noun “changeup,” which the Dickson Baseball Dictionary (3rd ed.) defines as either “a slow ball thrown after one or more fastballs, or a letup pitch to look like a fastball to upset the batter’s timing.”

The earliest example of the baseball usage in the OED is from J. G. Taylor Spink’s Baseball Guide and Record Book 1943: “Change-up, change of pace, slow ball.”

But we prefer this example, which also appears in Dickson, from the May 7, 1948, issue of the Birmingham News: “He’s got everything—speed, curve, change-up and plenty of heart.”

This brings us back to your question. The verb phrase “change up” in the sense you ask about (to upgrade) is a relative newcomer that doesn’t have an entry yet in the OED or the eight standard dictionaries we regularly check.

It first showed up in the 1970s, according to a search of Google Books, but it was rarely used until the turn of the new century.

The first example we could find is from the 1973 Summer Manual of the American Football Coaches Association:

“You must change up your option defense to both attack and finesse the quarterback.”

A recent example is this Jan. 3., 2014, headline from Runner’s World: “Change Up Your Running Routine / Tweaking your schedule magically produces fast results.”

Is the usage redundant? Well, we’ve found some examples that use “change up” simply to mean “change,” but most people use the phrase in the sense of “change for the better.”

We think that’s how “change up” is being used in that example of yours. The radio ad is appealing to potential customers who are ready to “change up” their furniture (that is, replace it with something better).

Here’s another example, from a May 20, 2013, post on the Shop Smart website: “Change Up Your Furniture, Change Up Your Life.”

If changing your furniture doesn’t improve your life enough, you can change your routine, as a Feb. 19, 2014, article in Elite Daily, a website for generation Y, recommends: “Change Up Your Daily Routine And Change Your Life For The Better.”

In blog posts in 2007 and 2012, we discussed a similar expression, “change out,” which is used in the sense of replacing a broken or outdated part—in a car, a computer, a house, and so on.

We’ll end with a cautionary tale for fellow googlers. In searching for “change up,” we found the phrase in Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a 1998 book by David Pietrusza.

A footnote in the book describes an incident that reportedly took place when Landis, the first baseball commissioner, shared a box at the 1934 World Series with Will Rogers and J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of the Sporting News:

“At one point Spink, a big tipper, gave a vendor a $20 bill for a hot dog. When the boy said he’d be back with Spink’s change, Spink cheerfully yelled out, ‘Stick the change up your behind,’ meaning the lad should keep it.”

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How well of a test taker?

Q: Here’s what an NYC teacher had to say about the recent state English tests for grades 3-8: “I felt like the students really were just being tested on how well of a test-taker they were, not necessarily how great of a reader they were or how great a writer they were.” Am I the classic grump who refuses to surrender what’s left of my tenuous hold on good grammar? Please explain just why “how well of a test taker” and “how great of a reader” don’t make sense. At my advanced age (83), I’m too darned tired to look it up!

A: Grumpy or not, you’re right. That teacher’s sentence is a mess. But let’s not rush to put a dunce cap on his head and stand him in the corner. There are extenuating circumstances here.

We tracked down the sentence in question and found that it was made on WNYC during an interview with several teachers about the tests.

People who usually talk or write in standard English sometimes trip over a few words when speaking off the cuff, especially when they’re nervous about being on the radio.

If that third-grade teacher had been given a few seconds to think before opening his mouth, his English might not have sounded to you like fingernails on a blackboard.

Here are a couple of possible revisions of the sentence, keeping singulars with singulars and plurals with plurals:

“I felt as if a student really was just being tested on how good a test-taker he was, not necessarily how great a reader or how great a writer he was.”

“I felt as if the students really were just being tested on how good they were at test-taking, not necessarily how great they were at reading or writing.”

Now, back to the problem sentence. What bothered you about it was the speaker’s use of “well of a test taker” and “great of a reader,” so we’ll discuss those first.

Let’s say right up front that the speaker’s use of the adverb “well” is a major misdemeanor. We’re fairly broadminded here at Grammarphobia, but in this world a student is a good test taker, not a well test taker (unless you’re talking about his health).

Now on to those “of a” constructions. We ran a blog post last January about what some linguists call the “big of” syndrome—using “of” in phrases like “not that big of a deal” and “too long of a drive.” These generally consist of adjective + “of a” + noun (or noun phrase).

As we pointed out, constructions with a noun described in terms of another noun (like “a devil of a time,” “a prince of a man”) are standard English. The Oxford English Dictionary has examples going back to the 1600s.

However, when an adjective is part of the pattern some usages are considered standard and some aren’t.

In standard English, we commonly use certain adjectives of quantity—“much,” “more,” “less,” “enough”—in this way, as in “enough of a problem” and “too much of a drive.”

But with adjectives of degree—“good/bad,” “big/small,” “long/short,” “old/young,” “hard/easy,” “near/far,” and so on—the “of a” pattern is not considered standard.

With that class of adjectives, the “of”-less versions (“not that big a problem”) are standard, while the “of” versions (“not that big of a problem”) are regarded as dialectal.

While this dialectal usage is nonstandard, it shouldn’t be called incorrect—just inappropriate in formal English.

The Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says the adjectival idiom is “almost entirely oral” and is “rare in print except in reported speech.”

“The only stricture on it suggested by our evidence is that it is a spoken idiom: you will not want to use it much in writing except of the personal kind,” M-W adds.

But again, we’re talking about adjectival usages here. As for the adverbial “how well of a test-taker,” fuggedaboutit!

Yes, “how well of a” is out there in the ether (we got 2.9 million hits when we googled it), but we haven’t found a single language commentator who speaks well of it.

A final note. You didn’t mention it, but some usage authorities would object to that teacher’s use of “like” as a conjunction. They would have recommended that he start his sentence with “I felt as if” instead of “I felt like.”

We don’t use “like” as a conjunction ourselves, but the ground is shifting here and some language authorities see no problem with it. We ran a post on the blog a few years ago about the usage.

As we wrote then, writers have been using “like” as a conjunction since the 14th century. Chaucer did it. Shakespeare, too. So did Keats, Emily Brontë, Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, Kipling, Shaw, and so on.

The Merriam-Webster’s usage guide says that objections to “like” as a conjunction were apparently “a 19th-century reaction to increased conjunctive use at that time.”

Although conservative usage guides and grammar sticklers still object to the use of “like” as a conjunction, that opinion is far from unanimous.

Merriam-Webster’s says “the usage has never been less than standard,” and the “belief that like is a preposition but not a conjunction has entered the folklore of usage.”

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised 3rd ed.) doesn’t go quite so far, but it says “like as a conjunction is struggling towards acceptable standard or neutral ground” and “the long-standing resistance to this omnipresent little word is beginning to crumble.”

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Thank you so much

Q: Have you noticed the use of the inflated “thank you so much”? To me, it has the opposite effect of a simple “thank you.” It sounds condescending. And what’s worse, it has insinuated itself into my speech! Please let me know that I’m not the only one bothered by this.

A: You’re not the only one bothered by “thank you so much,” though most of the botherees seem to think the expression isn’t quite as legit as “thank you very much.”

As it turns out, grateful people have been thanking one another “so much” since the 1800s and “very much” since the 1600s, while plain old “thank you” has been around since the 1400s.

The two of us generally use “thank you” or “thanks,” but we sometimes add “so much” or “very much” or “a lot” or “a heap” or “a million” or “a bunch.”

We don’t think it’s condescending to add a couple of grace notes to our thanking. It may be a bit wordy, but we don’t see anything wrong with going the extra word or two.

And we don’t see any particular difference in meaning between “thank you so much” and “thank you very much.”

The use of “thank you very much” has risen pretty steadily over the last century, according to a search using Google’s Ngram Viewer.

The use of “thank you so much” rose steadily until World War II, then fell during the postwar years. But it’s been rising again over the last four decades, and you’re probably noticing the expression because of its recent increase in popularity.

The earliest example of “thank you very much” that we’ve been able to find is from a 1650 letter by James Usher, the Archbishop of Armagh: “I thank you very much for your large Narrative of the proceedings in the Controversy touching Grace and Free-will.”

(The cleric’s name is sometimes spelled Ussher—he referred to himself in Latin as Jacobus Usserius.)

The earliest example we’ve found for “thank you so much” is from My Daughter Elinor, an 1869 novel by Frank Lee Benedict: “I thank you so much. I am sorry to distress you.”

We’ve written several posts about “thank you,” including one in 2013 that discusses the history of the phrase.

As we said then, “thank you” itself showed up in Middle English as a short form of the expression “I thank you.”

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Why I Can’t Be a Nun, a poem from the 1400s that criticizes religious institutions:

“ ‘Thanke yow, lady,’ quod I than. ‘And thereof hertely I yow pray.’ ” (We’ve expanded the citation.)

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Hue and cry

Q: Is the “hue” in the expression “hue and cry” related to the “hue” that refers to color?

A: No, the “hue” in “hue and cry” is a horse of another color.

In Anglo-Saxon times, the noun “hue” (written hiew, hiw, or heow) referred to the shape of something as well as its color, but the shape sense is now considered obsolete.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest examples of those senses of the word are from the Blickling Homilies, a collection of Old English sermons dating from 971. The first color citation refers to “brunes heowes.”

The other “hue”—the one meaning “outcry, shouting, clamour, esp. that raised by a multitude in war or the chase”—showed up in the 1300s, according to the OED. That sense is now obsolete, surviving only in the expression “hue and cry.”

English borrowed the clamorous “hue” from an Old French noun (written hu, hui, huy, or heu) meaning an outcry, a war cry, or a hunting cry. The Old French verb huer meant to hoot, cry, or shout.

The expression “hue and cry,” which came into English by way of the Anglo-Norman hu e cri, was originally a legal phrase that referred to an outcry by a victim, a constable, or others, calling for the pursuit of a felon.

The OED has two questionable citations from the late 1200s for “hue and cry,” but the first definite example is from a chronicle written in the early 1500s by the London merchant Richard Arnold:

“Ony persone … that wyll not helpe Constable sergeauntis and other officers … when hue and Crye is made.”

The OED says there’s “some ground to think” the words “hue” and “cry” in the expression originally had two distinct meanings, with “hue” referring to an “inarticulate sound, including that of a horn or trumpet as well as of the voice.”

By the late 1500s, according to the OED, “hue and cry” was being used more widely to mean “a clamour or shout of pursuit or assault; a cry of alarm or opposition; outcry.”

The first example of this looser usage in the dictionary is from a 1584 English translation of a history of Wales by the cleric Caradoc of Llancarfan: “Set vpon them with great hew and crie.” 

In case you’re curious about the idiom at the beginning of this post, we discussed “a horse of another color” on the blog in 2012.

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Is your foot out of step?

Q: I have always read, and heard, that you “set foot” when you enter a place. Now I seem to hear “step foot” very often. Are both correct?

A: The usual expression is “set foot,” but “step foot” is very popular, and it’s not all that new. In fact, both phrases have been around for centuries.

The Oxford English Dictionary has examples of foot-setting going back to the 1400s and of foot-stepping dating from the 1500s.

However, a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer indicates a sharp rise in the use of “step foot in” since 1980, which may explain why you’ve been noticing the usage.

Are both expressions correct? Well, we don’t use “step foot,” and you won’t find it in standard dictionaries or idiom references.

But we wouldn’t say it’s incorrect—not when the usage has been around for hundreds of years and now has millions of users.

Here’s the result of Google searches for the two expressions: “set foot in,” 35.5 million hits, vs. “step foot in,” nearly 6.7 million.

The older of these two usages—“set foot” in, into, on, at, and so on—showed up in the late 15th century, according to citations in the OED.

The earliest example in the dictionary is from The Foure Sonnes of Aymon, William Caxton’s 1490 translation of a French romance of chivalry: “I shall never sette foote there.”

The first example with a preposition comes from Nicolas Udall’s translation of the Apophthegmes of Erasmus (1542): “It was a foule shame for a phylosophier to sette his foote into any hous where bawderie wer kepte.”

As for “step foot,” the OED has examples going back to the mid-16th century of the phrase used with various prepositions.

The earliest is from John Palsgrave’s 1540 translation of The Comedye of Acolastus, by Gulielmus Gnapheus: “Steppe not one foote forth of this place.”

The first Oxford example of the phrase with the preposition “in” is from a poem, written sometime before 1547, by the Earl of Surrey: “Stepp in your foote, come take a place, and mourne with me awhyle.”

Here’s a 19th-century example, from Richard Burleigh Kimball’s novel Was He Successful? (1864): “When Hiram stepped foot in the metropolis.”

Although nearly all of the OED’s “step foot” citations are from British sources, the dictionary says the usage now shows up only in US English.

If you’d like to see another take on the subject, you might look at our friend Merrill Perlman’s Language Corner column in the Columbia Journalism Review.

We’ll end with an example of the usage from Chronicles (2004), the first volume in Bob Dylan’s planned three-part memoir:

“I had stopped going down to the Café Wha? in the afternoons. Never stepped foot in there again.”

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The skills in your skill set

Q: Have you weighed in on “skill set”? It strikes me as corporate jargon, but it showed up in a recent review of Peniel E. Joseph’s Stokely in the New York Times.

A: Our guess is that “skill set” originated not in the corporate world but in academia, another wellspring of jargon.

The earliest examples we’ve found, dating from the late 1960s and early ’70s, are from books about education and psychology.

The first example we’ve came across is from Peter James Arnold’s Education, Physical Education, and Personality Development (1968):

“For example, the phrase ‘being careful’ meant various things to the participants and this in turn affected their approach in tackling the skill set.” Arnold’s field was kinesiology, the study of human movement.

The next is from a psychology text, Wayne Lee’s Decision Theory and Human Behavior (1971): “Perhaps the skill set was critical here.”

The noun phrase becomes more common in the mid-1970s (it appears twice in the reports of the National Computer Conference and Exposition, published in 1974).

And by the mid-1980s it has become almost routine in many fields—academia, business, computing, aviation, law, and others. 

You won’t have much luck finding “skill set” in standard dictionaries.  Perhaps that’s because lexicographers feel the parts explain the whole—a “skill set” is simply a set of skills, just as a “tool set” is a set of tools.

One of the few sources that includes the phrase is Oxford Dictionaries online, which defines “skill set” as “a person’s range of skills or abilities.”

Examples given include “The jobs are out there; you just need the skill sets,” and “Typically, forces deployed to peace operations use different skill sets to execute required missions.”

By the way, the word “skill” once had very different meanings than it does today.

It came into Middle English in the 1100s from an Old Norse word (skil) meaning distinction or difference, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the 12th through 14th centuries, the OED says, “skill” had such meanings as these:

(1) “that which is reasonable, proper, right, or just”; (2) “reason as a faculty of the mind”; (3) “discrimination or discretion”;  (4) “a sense of what is right or fitting”; (5) “cause, reason, or ground”; and even (6) “a statement made by way of argument or reasoning.”

All those senses are long dead. Only one early meaning has survived—a 13th-century usage defined by the OED this way:

“Capability of accomplishing something with precision and certainty; practical knowledge in combination with ability; cleverness, expertness. Also, an ability to perform a function, acquired or learnt with practice.”

That sense of the word, you might say, has survival in its skill set.

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Voir dire

Q: I recently served on a jury and one of the attorneys explained that jury selection is called “voir dire.” He said the term comes from French and means to look inside and speak up. This didn’t sound accurate to me, so I looked it up and learned it’s a false etymology. So what is the true etymology?

A: The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary defines “voir dire” (pronounced vwahr deer) as “a preliminary examination to determine the competency of a witness or juror.”

The dictionary describes it as an Anglo-French expression derived from Old French, the French spoken in the Middle Ages. The ultimate source of the usage is the Latin verus (truth) and decire (to speak).

So etymologically the phrase doesn’t mean “look and speak,” but “speak the truth.”  

The earliest example of the phrase in the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1676 record from the Office of Clerk of Assize: “Such person so produced for a witness, may be examined upon a Voire Dire.”

An OED citation from White Kennett’s 1701 revision of Cowell’s Interpreter, a 1607 law dictionary written by John Cowell, explains the expression this way:

“When it is pray’d upon a Trial at Law, that a Witness may be sworn upon a Voir dire; the meaning is, he shall upon his Oath speak or declare the truth.”

The online version of Black’s Law Dictionary offers the following definition:

“This phrase denotes the preliminary examination which the court may make of one presented as a witness or juror, where his competency, interest, etc., is objected to.”

We’ll end with an example of voir dire from the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny:

District Attorney Jim Trotter III: “Ms. Vito, what is your current profession?”

Mona Lisa Vito: “I’m an out-of-work hairdresser.”

DA: “An out-of-work hairdresser. In what way does that qualify you as an expert in automobiles?”

Lisa: “It doesn’t.”

DA: “Well in what way are you qualified?”

Lisa: “Well my father was a mechanic. His father was a mechanic. My mother’s father was a mechanic. My three brothers are mechanics. Four uncles on my father’s side are mechanics …”

DA: “Miss Vito, your family is obviously qualified. But have you ever worked as a mechanic?”

Lisa: “Yeah, in my father’s garage, yeah.”

DA: “As a mechanic. What did you do in your father’s garage?”

Lisa: “Tune-ups, oil changes, brake relining, engine rebuilds; rebuilt some trannies, rear end …”

DA: “OK, OK.”

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Booty treatment

Q: My trainer has a group exercise class that she refers to as “booty camp.” I assume the class is intended to reduce the habitus of the gluteus, and thus it’s not another way of referring to a “booty call.”

A: The phrase “booty camp” is relatively new and still a work in progress, according to our searches of literary and news databases.

Since showing up in the late 20th century, it’s been used for a variety of things—an all-male sex party, a video of big-bottomed women, a yoga session (yes, yoga booty camp), toilet training for toddlers, and so on.

The use of “booty camp” for an exercise class, especially one that focuses on the hind quarters, showed up in the early years of the 21st century.

In the Jan. 13, 2003, issue of US News & World Report, for example, an article headlined “Booty Camp” reports that the “fitness biz has bold new ways to trim your butt (and build muscles).”

So how did a word originally used to describe plunder taken from an enemy in war find its way into the battle against flabby abs, hips, calves, and butts?

The noun “booty” (meaning plunder, gain, or profit shared by victors) first showed up in the 15th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest OED example comes from The Game and Playe of Chesse, William Caxton’s 1474 translation of a Latin treatise on morality: “So shold the dispoyll and botye be comune vnto them.”

(In the work, one of the first books printed in English, the chessboard and pieces are used figuratively to represent the king and his subjects.)

By the 16th century, according to the OED citations, the term “booty” was being used loosely to refer to plunder taken by common robbers and thieves as well as warriors.

The word took an unexpected twist in the early 20th century, when it became an African-American slang term for sexual intercourse, a female sex object, or the female genitals. In early examples, it’s spelled “boody.”

Oxford describes the usage as “probably an altered form of botty,” a 19th-century slang term for a baby’s bottom. But the dictionary adds that it might also have been influenced by the plunder sense of “booty.”

The first citation is from Nigger Heaven, a 1926 novel by Carl Van Vechten: “Now … now … that you’ve gone white, do you really want … pinks for boody?” (The ellipses are in the book.)

And here’s an example from a song in Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston’s 1935 collection of folklore: “Go to Ella Wall / Oh, go to Ella Wall / If you want good boody / Oh, go to Ella Wall.” (We’ve expanded the OED citation.)

In the 1950s, the term “booty” took on another meaning, “the buttocks,” according to the OED. Here’s an example from Frank London Brown’s 1959 novel, Trumbull Park: “Getting kicked in the booty would be mighty discouraging too.”

The phrase “booty call,” which showed up in the 1990s, refers to “a visit made to a person for the (sole) purpose of having sexual intercourse; an invitation to have sexual intercourse.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from Dazzey Duks, a 1993 album by the rap duo Duice. The title of one cut is “Booty Call.”

The dictionary’s latest example is from the June 2001 issue of Cosmopolitan: “A guy I’d been seeing made a booty call. Afterward, he said, ‘High five!’ and reached out his hand to slap mine.”

Getting back to “booty camp,” the usage was undoubtedly influenced by the use of the phrase “boot camp” for a base where military recruits are trained, a usage that the OED dates to Word War II.

The dictionary’s first citation is from Boot: A Marine in the Making (1944), by Cpl. Gilbert P. Bailey: “Marine inductees are called ‘Boots’ and it is Marine Corps custom to send them all through a grim process called ‘boot camp.’ “

A final point: One would assume that the plunder sense of “booty” is related to the Old English term “boot,” meaning advantage or profit, but no connection has been proved, according to the OED.

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Mogo on the gogo

Q: What in God’s name is “mogo on the gogo”? I heard it the other day while watching Spellbound. Did Hitchcock (or, rather, his screenwriter) coin the phrase?

A: The expression “mogo on the gogo” didn’t originate with Alfred Hitchcock or with Ben Hecht, the main screenwriter on the 1945 film Spellbound.

It was apparently a catchphrase in certain Hollywood circles in the 1930s and ’40s, though it had much earlier show-biz origins in vaudeville, burlesque, and minstrel shows.

The expression is hard to define since it isn’t in any of our slang dictionaries. But it’s generally used as a comic phrase for a mental or physical malady, like lovesickness or an exotic fictional disease.

The expression crops up several times in the works of Hecht, who wrote the screenplay along with Angus MacPhail.

In the script, the man posing as Dr. Edwardes (actually an amnesia patient played by Gregory Peck), delivers the “mogo on the gogo” line to a psychologist, Dr. Petersen (played by Ingrid Bergman).

The two are discussing the psychological aspects of love, and Dr. Petersen is tossing around psychoanalytic theories on the subject. Below the surface, a mild flirtation is developing. 

So when Edwardes says, “Professor, you’re suffering from mogo on the gogo,” the line can be read in two ways: (1) he’s poking fun at all the psychobabble, or (2) Dr. Petersen has sex on the brain.

In his other works, Hecht seems to have regarded “mogo on the gogo” as meaning infatuation of one kind or another.

The expression apparently means lovesickness in The Great Magoo (1933), a play Hecht wrote with Gene Fowler.

In one scene, a character says: “You meet some guy—get mogo-on-the-gogo. Finis! Listen, Julie, this is just a friendly tip. Lay off that stumblebum if you wanna get somewhere. He’s just a lot of dog-meat.”

Hecht used the phrase again in his novel I Hate Actors! (1944): “You’re just a typical half-baked artistic goop—with nothing but mogo on the gogo. You’re a sweet kid in many ways but as an artist you’re still wet behind the ears.”

It appears yet again in Hecht’s memoir A Child of the Century (1954). Here Hecht recalls a dinner conversation with John Barrymore near the end of the actor’s life:

“ ‘In my early years,’ said Barrymore, ‘when I was still callow and confused, and still a-suckle on moonlight—I used to prefer Romeo and Juliet to all the other plays. But, as my ears dried, I began to detest the fellow, Romeo. A sickly, mawkish amateur, suffering from Mogo on the Gogo. He should be played only by a boy of fifteen with pimples and a piping voice. The truth about him is he grew up and became Hamlet.’ ”

Where did the expression come from? As we said, it probably came from the touring burlesque and minstrel shows of the previous century.

For example, Al Jolson, who played the minstrel circuit early in his career, was known to use the phrase.

“Al had a vocabulary all his own,” Herbert G. Goldman writes in his book Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life (1988). “Anything bad was ‘mogo on the gogo.’ ”

And W. C. Fields used variations on the phrase too. Fields got his start at the turn of the century as a vaudeville juggler on the Keith and Orpheum circuits, both of which booked minstrel acts at the time.

Later, in his films, Fields used “mogo on the gogogo” to mean a fictitious disease.

In The Bank Dick (1940), where he plays the immortal Egbert Sousè, Fields warns another character about “Malta fever, beriberi and that dreaded of all diseases—mogo on the gogogo.”

Fields himself wrote the screenplay for The Bank Dick, under the alias Mahatma Kane Jeeves—as in “My hat, my cane, Jeeves.”

He probably got “mogo on the gogogo” from the stage musical that gave him his Broadway debut, The Ham Tree (1905).

The three-act show, which ran on Broadway for two seasons, is about the adventures of a touring vaudeville troupe and contains a minstrel act as a sort of show within the show. 

In Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields (1997), Simon Louvish writes that the minstrel routine included this passage:

“If we come across a ham tree don’t touch a ham without it’s got the cover [wrapper] on. If you do you’ll get that disease called more-go on the go-go.”

The lines, Louvish writes, came directly from the 19th-century minstrel sketch that was the basis for the musical. 

He goes on to explain that the original sketch, also called  “The Ham Tree,” was developed around 1874 by a famous 19th-century vaudeville partnership, James McIntyre and Tom Heath.

The pair, portraying tramps in blackface, performed their act on the minstrel circuit for more than 50 years, touring virtually every part of the country until well into the early 1900s.  

It’s possible that a phrase sounding like “more-go on the go-go” was an African-American expression. McIntyre and Heath, according to Louvish, claimed that “their stories and dances were taken from genuine black sources.”

But as historians have written, many white minstrel performers made similar claims. Until further evidence crops up, a black origin for this phrase can only be conjectured.

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A canine ripple effect

Q: I breed Golden Retrievers and have a question about the proper use of a word in a puppy’s name. Should it be “Ripple Affect (or Effect) of Kindness”? I have had so much input on this that I am no longer sure. HELP please!

A: The usual phrase is “ripple effect,” and it refers to the spreading influence of an action or event—in this case, the spreading (or rippling) influence of kindness.

The noun “effect” refers to a result, while the less-common noun “affect” is a psychological term that refers to feeling or emotion.

So the traditional way of referring to the puppy would be “Ripple Effect of Kindness.” However, people often take liberties in the use of language when naming dogs.

We suppose that “Ripple Affect of Kindness” could be seen as a creative play on words that refers to the rippling or spreading feeling of kindness.

But the use of “ripple affect” in this sense would undoubtedly raise a few eyebrows among sticklers. They would assume it was a mistake.

Another negative is that “affect” is often used in an unfavorable sense, as in “The psychiatrist says the suspect displays a lack of affect.”

And don’t forget that the two nouns are pronounced differently: “affect” is AFF-ect, while “effect” is ih-FECT (the “i” sounds like the one in “pit”).

When the term “ripple effect” first showed up in the late 1800s, it referred to physical rippling, such as the effect of moonlight on water or the movement of a skirt.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary of the phrase used in the usual modern sense is from the Feb. 14, 1966, issue of the Wall Street Journal:

“Price-boosting already is producing a ‘ripple effect’ in which companies pass on increased costs in higher price tags on their own products.”

In case you’d like to read more, we ran a post on our blog a few years ago about the use of the words “affect” and “effect.”

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Few and far between

Q: In Jane Smiley’s novel Duplicate Keys, Alice muses about the “fewness” of the friends in her social circle. I drew a blank when I looked up “fewness” in my dictionary. Did this “Pulitzer Prize-winning author” have a copy editor who was asleep at the switch, or is my dictionary inferior?

A: “Fewness” is a very old noun that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, but you have to search a bit to find it in many modern dictionaries.

The two dictionaries we consult the most, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) list “fewness” as a noun form under their entries for the adjective “few.”

Only a handful of standard dictionaries—Merriam-Webster Unabridged, Random House Unabridged, and Collins—have separate entries for “fewness,” which they define as the state of being small or few in quantity.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which describes “fewness” as “the quality or fact of being few,” dates it from the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (circa 900), where the word is feanis in Old English.

The word “few” is even older, first recorded in the Vespasian Psalter (c. 825), an Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscript, where it’s fea in Old English.

Similar words are found in other Germanic languages, but the original source of “few” is believed to be the Indo-European root pau-, denoting smallness of quantity or number, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Although “few” is spelled with an “f” in English and other Germanic languages, Ayto notes, the p of pau survives in French (peu), Spanish (poco), and Italian (poco).

In fact, Ayto adds, the Indo-European root can still be seen in the English words “paucity,” “pauper,” “poor,” and “poverty.”

The expression “few and far between,” meaning few in number and seldom found, showed up in the mid-1600s.

The OED’s earliest citation is from a July 13, 1668, letter by Sir Ralph Verney: “Hedges are few and far between.” The letter is cited in Margaret M. Verney’s Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Civil War, published in 1899.

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Did “ta” beget “ta-ta”?

Q: Years ago, I read somewhere that the Cockney “ta” actually stood for “thanks awfully.” It then evolved into “ta-ta” as an exit term because humans love to play around with (and repeat) sounds. Just wanted to offer that theory.

A: No, “ta” is not an acronym for “thanks awfully,” it’s not Cockney, and it didn’t beget “ta-ta” (more on this later). However, it does have a connection with “thank you.”

The interjection “ta,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, originated as “an infantile form of ‘thank-you’ ” that was first recorded in the late 18th century.

We expect that since the word was used as intimate nursery babble, it was around for many years before it was recorded for posterity in writing.

It got its start in British usage and is still more common in the UK than in the US.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) identifies “ta” as a British expression. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) labels it “chiefly British,” and describes it as a “baby-talk alteration of thank you.”  

The OED’s earliest example is from a letter written in 1772 by Mary Granville, better known as Mrs. Delany: “You would not say ‘Ta’ to me for my congratulation.” (It appears in her memoir, Life & Correspondence, which wasn’t published until 1861.)

Mrs. Delany’s note was written to her one-year-old great-niece on the occasion of her first birthday, so the “ta” here was intended to echo a babyish version of “thank you.”

Here’s another childish example, from Israel Zangwill’s novel Children of the Ghetto 1892): “Give it me. I’ll say ‘ta’ so nicely.” (In this party scene, adults use baby-talk jokingly while a man teases his lover with an engagement ring.)

As the OED says, this infantile “ta” has passed into colloquial use among adults. Oxford gives a few modern examples, including these:

“ ‘Ta,’ he said, slipping the card into the back pocket of his jeans.” (From Richard Gordon’s novel Doctor on the Boil, 1970.)

“ ‘You know your way, don’t you?’ ‘Ta, love.’ ” (From Douglas Clark’s mystery The Longest Pleasure, 1981.)

So while “ta” isn’t an acronym for “thanks awfully,” it’s close in meaning.

As for “ta-ta,” the other expression you’ve asked about, it’s another adult usage to graduate from nursery school. 

As we’ve written before on our blog, “ta-ta” originated as an infantile form of “goodbye.” It was first recorded in the 1820s, and soon passed into colloquial (that is, spoken) adult usage.

An expanded version, “ta-ta for now,” became a popular British catchphrase in the 1940s, and was shortened in the later ’40s to the initialism “TTFN.”

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Graduate school

Q: In the recent New Yorker piece about the father of the Sandy Hook killer, Andrew Solomon writes that Adam Lanza’s older brother “moved to New Jersey after graduating college.” GRADUATING COLLEGE?  Shouldn’t that be FROM college?

A: We read the same article in the March 17 issue and had the same thought: How did “graduating college” make it through the New Yorker’s copydesk?

Pat’s feeling was that copy-editing standards at the New Yorker might have slipped a notch. But Stewart wondered if the construction had passed into standard English usage since we discussed the issue on the blog eight years ago.

We decided that we ought to reexamine this subject. So in the interest of open-mindedness, here goes.

Back in 2006, we said the verb “graduate” had evolved over the last two centuries, but not enough for this sentence to be considered standard English: “He graduated Stanford in 1986.”

Traditionally, according to our original post, there would be three proper ways to express that sentence:

● “Stanford graduated him in 1986.”

● “He was graduated from Stanford in 1986.”

● “He graduated from Stanford in 1986.”

Most of the usage guides we’ve consulted still object to a sentence like “He graduated Stanford in 1986.”

Why? Because the verb “graduate” originally meant to award a degree, not to receive one. The school graduated the student, not the other way around.

Over the years, the verb “graduate” has evolved, but usage authorities generally believe that the use of “graduate” in that disputed sentence strays too far from the original meaning of the verb. Here’s the scoop.

When the word first showed up in the late 1500s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “graduate” was a transitive verb meaning to confer a university degree.

(A transitive verb is one that needs an object to make sense: “Stanford graduated him.” An intransitive verb is one that can make sense without an object: “He graduated.”)

The OED’s earliest example is from Robert Parke’s translation of The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China (1588), by Juan González de Mendoza: “To commence or graduate such students as haue finished their course.”

And here’s a passive construction of the same transitive verb, from an 1884 issue of Harper’s Magazine: “The class of ’76 was graduated with six men.”

So in the earliest, transitive uses of “graduate,” it was standard to say either (1) that the school “graduated” the student, or (2) that the student “was graduated” by the school.

But in the early 1800s, the OED says, “graduate” underwent a significant change. It acquired an intransitive sense, meaning to take a degree or diploma.

In the intransitive sense (in which the verb has no direct object), the student is the one doing the graduating—that is, taking a degree or diploma.

Oxford has a several examples, starting with one from the poet Robert Southey’s Letters From England (1807): “Four years are then to be passed at college before the student can graduate.”

Late in the 19th century, we see intransitive examples with the institution added in a prepositional phrase (“from Stanford,” “from college,” etc.). The OED, which finds nothing objectionable in this construction, gives a couple of examples:

“In 1837 he graduated from Yale College” (the Times of London, 1892), and “Dwight was … able to graduate from High School at the premature age of fourteen” (Harold Nicolson’s biography Dwight Morrow, 1935).

About the time when people started adding “from” plus the institution, some usage commentators started to object that “graduate” was moving too far from its transitive roots.

In fact, the critics wanted to take a step back and abandon the intransitive usage altogether. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains:

“The critics argued that since the college conferred the degree on the student, graduate should only be used transitively with the student as its object or in the passive construction ‘He was graduated from college.’ ”

But as we know, “graduate” was already firmly established as an intransitive verb (as in Southey’s “before the student can graduate”). In hindsight, it was only natural that people would start adding prepositional phrases: “from college,” “from high school,” etc.

Despite the critics, this use of “graduate” was soon accepted and the criticism has long since disappeared. Today nobody thinks twice about a sentence like “Spot graduated from obedience school.”

But in the 20th century, the use of “graduate” shifted once again and a fourth usage emerged. This is the one we’re reexamining here, in which “from” is dropped (“he graduated college”).

What do the experts say about this newest wrinkle? So far, the disputed usage isn’t yet recorded in the OED, so we find no opinion there one way or the other. But most of the other sources we checked are holding the line against it. 

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), says the use of “graduate” in the sense “to receive an academic degree from” is a “usage problem.” It gives this example “How many chemists graduated the Institute last year?”

The dictionary notes that this newest use of the verb, “in which the student is the subject and the institution is the object, as in She graduated Yale in 2010,”  was rejected by 77 percent of the American Heritage usage panel.

Another source, Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.), includes this use of the verb (with the example “to graduate college”), but labels it “informal.”

Looking further, we find that Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), says the “newish” transitive use in American English, as in “he graduated Yale in 1984,” is “much more controversial and is best avoided.”

Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) seems to agree with Fowler’s. “In the mid-20th century,” Garner’s says, “usage began to shift further toward an even shorter transitive form: students were said to graduate college (omitting the from after graduate). This poor wording is increasingly common.”

On Garner’s “Language-Change Index,” this new use of “graduate” is rated Stage 3, for “widespread but ….” (A rating of Stage 1 means “rejected”; Stage 5 is “fully accepted.”)

We found only a couple of clear votes in favor of “graduated college.”

The Random House Webster’s College Dictionary lists this among its definitions: “to receive a degree or diploma from: to graduate college.”

A usage note in Random House adds that “although condemned by some as nonstandard,” this sense of the verb “is increasing in both speech and writing: to graduate high school.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) finds no problem with the disputed usage either and labels it standard English.

Merriam-Webster’s accepts, without qualification, the use of “graduate” in the sense “to earn a degree or diploma from (a school, college, or university).” It gives the example “she graduated high school.”

The editors at M-W provide their own usage note on the subject. They note the historical shifts in the uses of the verb, then go on to say that it’s the “newer transitive sense,” as in “she graduated high school,” that’s now condemned by some critics.

The dictionary says the newer usage remains “the least common,” while the one with “from” is the most common. But all of them “are standard,” M-W concludes.

Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “This use of graduate without from has been cited as an error” by usage commentators since 1957.

Nevertheless, it’s “probably established by now,” the guide continues, though “it appears to be more frequent in speech than in writing and is not nearly as frequent as the longer established intransitive”—the one with “from.”

 A rough Google search—“graduated college” versus “graduated from college”—confirms this. The version without “from” got 1.5 million hits, compared with 24.3 million for the version with “from.”

A search of Google Books is perhaps more significant in terms of written usage: 35,500 hits for the “from”-less version versus 3.6 million for the one with “from.” 

Our feeling is that “graduated college” still hasn’t made it into the Ivy League, though it may get there one of these days.

We’d call it informal. It’s OK in conversation, but until the usage is more established, we’d recommend tossing in a “from” when writing.

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In the catbird seat

Q: Why is it such a good thing to be “in the catbird seat”? And where did Red Barber get the expression?

A: The Oxford English Dictionary describes “the catbird seat” as American slang for “a superior or advantageous position.”

The OED’s earliest published example of the usage is from “The Catbird Seat,” a 1942 story by James Thurber in the New Yorker: “ ‘Sitting in the catbird seat’ meant sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him.”

One of the characters in the story is said to have picked up “sitting in the catbird seat” and other colorful expressions while listening to Red Barber do play-by-play for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

“Red Barber announces the Dodger games over the radio and he uses those expressions—picked ’em up down South,” the story explains. (We’ve added to the OED citation.)

The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms describes the usage as “a Southern Americanism dating back to the 19th century,” but popularized by Barber and Thurber.

The earliest example we could find in a search of digitized books and newspapers does indeed come from the South, but it dates from the early 20th century, not the 19th.

One of the speakers at the 1916 annual meeting of the Georgia Bar Association says the frustrations of the legal profession make it hard for a lawyer to act like a card player “in the catbird seat as he squeezes an ace-high flush.”

The use of the term “catbird” (for the gray catbird, Dumetella carolinensis) dates from the early 1700s, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English.

The first DARE citation is from John Lawson’s New Voyage to Carolina (1709): “The Cat-Bird … makes a Noise exactly like young Cats.”

The regional dictionary says the phrase “catbird seat” probably refers to the gray catbird’s habit “of delivering its song from a high, exposed position.”

We’ve seen a lot of gray catbirds where we live in New England, and from our experience the birds don’t deliver their cat-like call from a particularly high or exposed position. But maybe Southern catbirds are more uppity.

Where, you ask, did Red Barber get the expression? In Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat, his 1968 biography, the Old Redhead says he first heard it while playing poker with friends in Cincinnati.

Barber describes one hand in which he raised repeatedly, but ended up losing when another player “turned over his hole cards, showed a pair of aces, and won the pot.”

“Thank you, Red,” the winner said. “I had those aces from the start. I was sitting in the catbird seat.”

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A euphemism of a certain age

Q: How old are women of “a certain age”? Are only French women of that age? Can men be of “a certain age” too?

A: The expression “a certain age” is generally used now (often tongue in cheek) as a euphemism to avoid saying a woman is middle-aged or older.

However, masculine and unisex versions are not all that unusual. In fact, the earliest example we’ve found refers to “men of a certain age.”

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “a certain age” as a time “when one is no longer young, but which politeness forbids to be specified too minutely: usually, referring to some age between forty and sixty (mostly said of women).”

The OED’s earliest example of the usage is from a 1754 issue of the Connoisseur, a short-lived satirical weekly in London, edited by the essayists George Colman and Bonnell Thornton:

“I could not help wishing on this occasion that some middle term was invented between Miss and Mrs. to be adopted, at a certain age, by all females not inclined to matrimony.”

The expression is used there to describe an older, unmarried woman, similar to the terms “maiden lady” (1700), “spinster” (1617), and “old maid” (1530). “Spinster,” which dates from the 1300s, originally referred to someone who spins thread or yarn.

The phrase “a certain age” was a work in progress during the 1700s and 1800s, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, sometimes referring to women, sometimes men, and sometimes children, animals, or things.

A search of literary databases indicates that the usage first showed up in English in the early 1700s and in French (as d’un certain âge) in the late 1600s.

The earliest English example we could find, from a 1709 book written by a London midwife, refers to “men of a certain age.”

In A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery, Elizabeth Nihell argues against “the utter impropriety” of men, especially young men, examining the “sexual parts” of women:

“It may perhaps be granted that men of a certain age, men past the slippery season of youth, may claim the benefit of exemption from impressions of sensuality, by objects to which custom has familiarized them.”

In the 1700s and 1800s, the expression was generally positive when used to describe men. The Earl of Chesterfield, for example, used it in a June 13, 1751, letter to his son, Philip Stanhope, to refer to men of substance and refinement:

“You would not talk of your pleasures to men of a certain age, gravity, and dignity; they justly expect, from young people, a degree of deference and regard.”

The phrase was sometimes used positively and sometimes negatively to describe women.

In Amatory Tales (1810), Honoria Scott uses it positively: “Mrs. Cleveland was a woman of a certain age, and handsome person; her understanding intelligent and cultivated; she had moved much in the circles of fashionable life.”

But in The Lady of the Manor (1831), Mary Martha Sherwood uses the term to describe “a vain woman who cannot condescend to grow old” and who needs a lot of help to keep up appearances:

“The Comtesse de V was a woman of a certain age, and she therefore owed to her perruquier, her perfumer (who supplied the various washes for her complexion), her milliner, and her femme de chambre, that juvenile appearance which she still had in the eyes of those who beheld her only for the first time.”

In Barnaby Rudge (1841), Dickens does a riff on the expression to describe a house: “A very old house, perhaps as old as it claimed to be, and perhaps older, which will sometimes happen with houses of an uncertain, as with ladies of a certain age.”

The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms, edited by John Ayto, says “of a certain age” may have been inspired by the French expression d’un certain âge.

We suspect that Ayto is less than definitive here because the French expression showed up only a few decades before the English version.

Ayto offers this contemporary unisex example of the usage from a 2003 issue of Architectural Review: “Text … is in readable white sans-serif type … and happily for clients of a certain age, it’s adjustable with the browser’s View/Text Size command.”

William Safire suggests in his July 2, 1995, language column in the New York Times Magazine that the phrase was “repopularized” for modern readers by Women of a Certain Age, a 1979 book by the psychotherapist Lillian B. Rubin.

“When I wrote the book in 1979,” she told Safire, “the ‘women of a certain age’ were in their late 30’s and early 40’s. I think that has changed with the baby boomers and the lengthening of the life span. I’d say the ‘certain age’ has now moved to the age of 50 or 55.”

Safire’s column was prompted by a reader who’d been surprised by this headline in the paper: “3 Explorers of a Certain Age, Scaling Mountains and More.” The explorers were three men in their 80s.

It’s comforting to think that we may still be of a certain age when we’re in our 80s.

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“I’m afraid” (aka “I’m sorry”)

Q: What’s the origin of the use of “afraid” in sentences like “I’m afraid I can’t help you” or  “I’m afraid that is the case”? Is this apologetic sense considered old-fashioned today?

A: When the adjective “afraid” showed up in the 1300s (as affred or afreyd in Middle English), it meant alarmed or frightened.

But by the early 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression “I am afraid” (or “I’m afraid”) was being used in the apologetic sense you’re asking about.

The OED says “I’m afraid” here means “I regret to say,” “I apologetically report,” “I suspect,” “I am inclined to think,” and so on.

Oxford’s earliest example is from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (circa 1590): “I am affraid sir, doe what you can / Yours will not be entreated.”

In this citation from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Miss Bingley’s offer of help is rebuffed by Darcy:

“I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well.”

“Thank you—but I always mend my own.”

(We’ve expanded on the OED citation to savor Miss Bingley’s comeuppance.)

The most recent Oxford example is from Bloodless Shadow, a 2003 detective novel by Victoria Blake: “I’m afraid I can’t discuss my cases.”

You ask if this apologetic sense of “I’m afraid” is now considered old-fashioned. Not as far as we can tell.

It seems as contemporary today as when Shakespeare put those words into the mouth of Petruchio’s friend Hortensio.

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It’s a big ask

Q: When did “ask” become a noun? I first heard “a big ask” used at work for a difficult request. I considered it another annoying bit of industrialese, but I just heard a TV commentator use “a tough ask” this way. Is the usage now an acceptable idiom?

A: You’d better sit down. The word “ask” has been used as both a verb and a noun since Anglo-Saxon days.

The verb, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, first showed up in Old English in Beowulf, which is believed to date from the early 700s.

The noun appeared a couple of hundred years later in the dooms, or laws, of Athelstan, who was King of the Anglo Saxons (924-27) and the King of the English (927-39).

Since it first showed up in Old English, the noun has meant asking, an inquiry, a thing asked, or a request, according to Oxford.

Here’s an OED example in modern English from a Dec. 8, 1781, letter by the scholar Thomas Twining (whose grandfather founded the Twinings tea empire):

“I am not so unreasonable as to desire you to take notice of all the stuff I scribble, or answer all my asks.” (We’ve expanded on the citation.)

And here’s an example from The Laws and Principles of Whist, an 1886 book written by “Cavendish” (the pen name of Henry Jones): “When your three comes down in the next round, it is not an ask for trumps.”

The particular usage you ask about (in expressions like “a big ask” and “a tough ask”) isn’t quite as new as you seem to think—it’s been around since the 1980s.

The OED describes the usage as colloquial (more common in spoken than written English), and says it originated in Australia.

The dictionary defines this “ask” as meaning “something which is a lot to ask of someone; something difficult to achieve or surmount.”

Oxford’s earliest citation is from a May 6, 1987, issue of the Sydney Morning Herald: “Four measly pounds is what the critics say. But according to his trainer, Johnny Lewis, that four pounds is ‘a big ask.’ ”

In a 2005 draft addition to its entry for the noun “ask,” the OED says the usage is chiefly heard in sports. But as you’ve observed, the expression has traveled far afield since then, geographically as well as linguistically.

A Jan. 30, 2014, editorial in the Guardian, for example, wonders whether Ukrainians will get a chance to “to make a free choice about their own government and national direction.”

“It is a big ask,” the paper says, “and none of the steps will be easy.”

And, according to the latest reports from Eastern Europe, it’s still a big ask.

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: sports talk—the language of the broadcasting booth and the bullpen. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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You who, Mrs. Goldberg?

Q: I’m a language arts teacher in Florida who loves your blog—what fun! Now, my question. In these sentences, does the verb agree with “you” or “who”? (1) “You who have/has been so kind, I thank you.” (2) “You who cut/cuts through the veil of this mortal coil, guide us.”

A: The pronoun “who” can be singular or plural in number, so the choice of verb depends on whether “who” refers to one person or more. Examples: “Who are they?” … “Who is she?”

When it’s preceded by a noun or another pronoun, as in the “you who” construction you’re asking about, “who” takes its number (singular or plural) from the antecedent.

(An antecedent, as you know, is a word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to.)

In this case, the verb agrees with the antecedent “you,” as in “you who see me standing before you,” or “you who remember her will recall,” or “this is for you, who were so kind.”

We ran a post a couple of years ago that touches on this subject. But in case you or your class would like to know more, here’s a technical explanation, courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED describes “who” in such constructions as a relative pronoun (similar to “that”) being used to introduce “a clause defining or restricting the antecedent and thus completing the sense.”

As we mentioned, the verb in these constructions agrees with the antecedent. 

The OED cites this example, from an essay written in 1717 by Alexander Pope: “those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.” (By way of illustration, the singular version would be “he moves easiest who has learn’d to dance.”)

We’ll invent a couple more singular and plural examples:

In subject position: “He who betrays you is not to be trusted” … “They who betray you are not to be trusted.”

In object position: “Don’t trust him who betrays you” … “Don’t trust them who betray you.”

We hope this helps, and all the best to your students!

They’re too young to remember this, but your question reminds us of the old TV show The Goldbergs. Molly Goldberg and her neighbors used to holler “Yoo-hoo!” to get one another’s attention.

The expression became the catchphrase of The Goldbergs, which ran on radio from 1929 to 1946, and on TV from 1949 to 1956.

Although the show undoubtedly helped popularize “yoo-hoo,” the usage had been around before The Goldbergs went on the air.

The earliest example in the OED is from a 1924 issue of the journal Dialect Notes: “Yoo-hoo (call).” Oxford describes the usage as “a call made to attract attention,” and notes that a similar nautical expression, “yoho,” showed up in the 1700s.

We’ll end with an example from the Jan. 2, 1926, issue of the New Yorker: “Yoo-hoo! When did your school let out?”

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May I help who’s next?

Q: Regardless of which Starbucks I go to, employees taking orders say, “May I help who’s next?” This may not be technically wrong, but it sounds awful! I’d say “May I help the next customer?” or “May I take your order?” or “Are you ready to order?”

A:You aren’t the first person who’s been startled to hear “May [or “Can”] I help who’s next?”

People waiting in line at a coffee shops, bakeries, bookstores, banks, and ice cream parlors are hearing this query across the United States and in parts of England, according to linguists.

But strictly speaking, this construction isn’t incorrect. As the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has written on the Language Log, it’s merely outdated and no longer common in English usage.

That is, it’s no longer common except at Starbucks and other places where people wait in line. 

Pullum points out that what you’re hearing is “an isolated survival of an extinct construction type” that hasn’t been in common use for the last 50 to 100 years.

What’s happening is that “who” is being used as what linguists call a “fused relative.”

In this construction, the single word “who” represents (or is fused into) the relative noun phrase “the person that.”

In modern usage, though, the pronoun of choice here is “whoever,” not “who.” 

This particular use of “who,” Pullum speculates, “seems to have survived in one very limited contextual environment”—and you heard an example of it at Starbuck’s.

Pullum says he began hearing reports about this usage around 1990, especially from the Upper Midwest. But now, he says, it’s being heard all across the continent (presumably wherever people wait in line to be helped).

And it’s not just American. The linguist Lynne Murphy, who teaches at the University of Sussex, reports on her blog that she’s heard “Can I help who’s next?” from clerks and shop assistants in the south of England. 

Pullum admits that this use of “who” is odd. He calls it “something that is almost grammatical and used to be fully grammatical.”

The use of “who” in this manner “has mostly been extinct for some fifty to a hundred years,” he says. The construction “survived down to the 19th century. But it did not survive down to the present day.”

On the other hand, he says, “whoever” is “freely used” this way in contemporary English.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the relative use of “who” to mean “any one that” or “whoever” is now considered “archaic” or “literary.” The OED’s examples of the usage date from the 1200s to the late 1890s.

The dictionary includes two examples from Shakespeare, probably written about 1600: “Let it be who it is” (Julius Caesar), and “Who steales my purse, steals trash” (Othello). 

Later citations include this line from Robert Browning’s poem Balaustion’s Adventure (1871): “I passionately cried to who would hear.”

And this one is from Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892): “Who rides at the tail of a Border thief, he sits not long at his meat.”

So why are we hearing this old construction again? This is a legitimate question, but there’s no simple answer.

No one’s suggesting that baristas and bank tellers revived the construction after reading Shakespeare or Kipling. But, as Pullum says, this isn’t a matter of ignorance, either:

“It’s about the grammatical possibility of human-referring fused relatives,” he says, “and the complexity of the picture we face when a single language is in use by a billion people with dates of birth spread over about a century.”

It’s also, he adds, “about the odd survivals and exceptions that can lurk in the syntactic patterns found in everyday use.”

By the way, we once wrote a post about a similar, commonly heard expression, “May I help the following customer?”

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Big-time spenders

Q: My wife and I wonder where “last of the big-time spenders” comes from. Our parents (who were born in the 1910s and 1920s) used the expression for someone living high on the hog. Can you enlighten us?

A: In a literal sense, the catch phrase “last of the big (or big-time) spenders” means someone who spends lavish amounts of money. But it’s often used humorously or ironically to describe someone who’s stingy.

The Macmillan Dictionary defines “the last of the big spenders” as meaning “someone who spends a lot of money, often in a way that is designed to impress people.”

But, the dictionary adds, “This expression is often used in a humorous way about someone who spends a very small amount of money.”

Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Catch Phrases (1992) describes “last of the big-time spenders” as a “playfully ironic” expression that “has flourished, in UK, since c. 1945.”

The reference book, edited by Paul Beale, further speculates that it was “very prob. adopted from US servicemen c. 1944 and has almost certainly arisen in US during the early 1930s—during the Great Depression.”

However, no citations are given that would back this up. While the expression may indeed date from World War II or before, the earliest published examples we’ve been able to find are from the late 1950s.

This one, for example, appeared in a profile of the actress Joy Lafleur that ran in a 1957 issue of the Canadian magazine Saturday Night: “If you offer to buy Joy a coffee, she’ll wisecrack, ‘No, I’m the last of the big-time spenders.’ ”

The expression has also been used as a song title. 

In late 1960, a comic song entitled “Last of the Big-Time Spenders,” by Cornbread and the Biscuits, appeared on Billboard magazine’s “Hot Hundred” chart.

More recently, the title was given to a poignant ballad written by Billy Joel and recorded on his album Streetlife Serenade (1974).

The shorter expression “big-time spender” is probably a conflation of two others—the adjective “big-time” and the noun phrase “big spender,” both of which appeared in the early 20th century.

The adjective “big-time,” meaning significant or impressive, may be a coinage from vaudeville days, when the major theater circuits were referred to as “the big time.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the adjectival usage is from 1914: “They buy and sell for all ‘big time’ acts and all ‘big time’ theaters.”

The show-biz newspaper Variety is often credited with this usage. A 1927 article in Vanity Fair, for example, said:

“For the vaudeville branch of the show business Variety coined such famous colloquialisms as ‘Big Time’ and ‘Small Time,’ differentiating the first rate circuits from the second rate.”

As for “big spender,” the earliest example we’ve found is from an article about the gambling industry that ran in the December 1907 issue of the journal the Scrap Book:

“With the typical big spender and plunger, it is either his way of taking his fun or he is well able to take care of himself. The real problem is the poor little piker.”

After this, uses of “big spender” became extremely common.

In 1909, for example, Moody’s Magazine said of the financier Henry Keep: “He was never a big spender according to the Wall Street interpretation of the term, and when he died in 1869, he left his family a fortune of over four million dollars.”

And in June 1910, according to Congressional records, an Illinois cattle farmer named Daniel L. Keleher testified before  a Senate committee on wages and commodities prices:

“I am not what might be called a big spender and have always made it a point to have something, thank God, for a rainy day.”

Today, many people associate the noun phrase “big spender” with the song of that title, in the 1966 musical Sweet Charity, by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields.

Here are a couple of stanzas from the song, which was a hit record for Peggy Lee in 1966 and for Shirley Bassey in 1967:

The minute you walked in the joint
I could see you were a man of distinction,
a real big spender.
Good looking, so refined,
Say, wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on in my mind?

So let me get right to the point.
I don’t pop my cork for every guy I see.
Hey, big spender, spend
A little time with me.

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