Tag: Phrase origin

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English language Etymology Phrase origin Slang Usage

Side effects

Q: I was reading a description of Lord Bingham, a British judge who died two years ago, and came across this sentence: “He had no side to him at all, and he would be surprised to hear me saying these things about him.” I’m thinking this means he was not haughty or pompous, but I’d like to hear it from you!

A: In British usage, “to put on side” is to give oneself airs, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And someone who has “no side” is modest and unpretentious.

Here, the OED adds, “side” is a slang term meaning “pretentiousness, swagger, conceit.”

Oxford’s earliest citation for this sense of the word is from the Nov. 26, 1870, issue of Punch: “Swagger a bit, and put on ‘side’ in the streets of the gay Versailles.”

Another citation, from Joseph Hatton’s novel Cruel London (1878), uses “side” the same way: “Cool, downy cove, who puts side on.” (In British slang, a “downy cove” is a knowing fellow.)

We’ve found this sense of “side” in only one American dictionary, the unabridged Webster’s Third New International, which defines it as “swaggering manner” or “arrogant behavior.”

But British dictionaries know the usage well. They define it as meaning insolence, arrogance, a proud attitude, pretentiousness, and so on.

Where does it come from? “Origin unceetain,”  the OED says. But it does mention a possible connection with the game of billiards, in which “side” means the spin or “direction given to a ball by striking it at a point not directly in the middle.” (An American would say such a stroke puts “English” on the ball.)

The OED’s earliest example of this sense comes from Billiards (1858), a book written by Walter White: “I do not feel satisfied of any writer being able to convey in diagrams the amount of side to put on a ball for canons when the side stroke is required” 

On the other hand, the OED invites readers to look at another use of “side”—an old adjective meaning haughty or proud. This usage dates to the 1600s and perhaps to the early 1500s.

Among the OED’s citations is this one from Sidney Oldall Addy’s A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield (1888): “I met Mrs. —— in the town, and she was very side.”

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When Ireland was Scotland

Q: In a recent posting, you cite a study entitled “The Scotch-Irish Element in Appalachian English.” There is no such thing as “Scotch-Irish”! There is Ireland and Scotland. The inhabitants of the former are Irish whilst the inhabitants of the latter are Scots or Scottish, not scotch, a variety of whiskey. I submit these observations for your comment. Full disclosure: I am a Canadian of English birth.

A: No such thing as Scotch-Irish? We beg to differ. The linguist who wrote the study we cited in our post about “everwhat” and “everwhere” was perfectly correct to use the term “Scotch-Irish” in his title.

In fact, we briefly mentioned this term in a blog item we wrote a couple of years ago about the use of the adjectives “Scot,” “Scotch,” and “Scottish.”

In that posting, we noted that “Scotch-Irish” is commonly used on this side of the Atlantic to refer to the descendants of Scots who migrated to Ireland, and later to North America.

These people are also sometimes referred to as “Scots-Irish” or “Ulster Scots.” But in the US and Canada, the preferred term is “Scotch-Irish.”

You needn’t take our word for it. You’ll find “Scotch-Irish” defined similarly in standard dictionaries as well as the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says the term “Scotch-Irish,” when used in this sense, is “chiefly” North American. It has citations for the published use of the term from Colonial documents dating back to the late 1600s.

The OED defines “Scotch-Irish,” which is both a noun and an adjective, as “designating Ulster Scots settlers in North America; of, belonging to, or descended from these settlers; (occas.) designating the Ulster Scots themselves. Also: of mixed Scottish and Irish ancestry.”

The term “Scotch-Irish,” the OED adds, is “usually preferred in the United States and Canada over Scots-Irish. Historically, the term was sometimes used more widely in North America to designate any Irish Protestant immigrants, as well as those from southern Scotland and the English-Scottish borderlands.”

The OED has many citations for this sense of the term. We’ll quote one each from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

This example is from a colorful affidavit—”sworn,” you might say, in more senses than one—found in the judicial records of Somerset County, Maryland (1690): “I will give you full satisfaction to your own Content. You Scotch Irish dogg it was you.”

From the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society comes this entry in the journal of Witham Marshe (1744): “The inhabitants [of Lancaster, Pa.] are chiefly High-Dutch, Scotch-Irish, some few English families, and unbelieving Israelites.”

And this example is from George Bancroft’s A History of the United States (1876): “Its convenient proximity to the border counties of Pennsylvania and Virginia had been observed by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and other bold and industrious men.”

Besides those US and Canadian senses of “Scotch-Irish,” the phrase has had several earlier meanings in Celtic history, according to the OED.

For instance, the terms “Scotch-Irish,” “Scots-Irish,” “Scoto-Irish,” and “Irish-Scots” have been used at various periods—though rarely today except in history books—to refer to Irish settlers in what is now western Scotland.

And “Scotch-Irish” has been used to mean the “Gaelic-speaking inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands and Islands considered collectively,” Oxford says.

In fact, in very early Old English the term “Scot” itself, both the noun and the adjective, referred to the Gaelic people of early medieval Ireland. Yes, Ireland!

As the OED explains, this Old English term applied to “a member of the Gaelic people inhabiting early medieval Ireland; spec. a member of the people of Dalriada who began settling in what is now the west of Scotland from about the 5th cent. a.d.”

This modern citation, from William Ferguson’s The Identity of the Scottish Nation (1998), refers to “Scot” in this sense: “Buchanan meant the ancient Scots of Dalriada, who were … the root stock from which the Scottish nation developed.”

(Dalriada was an ancient kingdom “originally located in the far north-east of Ireland,” the OED says. This kingdom “expanded into parts of what is now western Scotland (esp. Argyll) from at least the 5th cent. a.d. During the 9th cent., alliances between Dalriada and the Pictish kingdoms led to the formation of the kingdom of Alba, the forerunner of the medieval kingdom of Scotland.”)

The ultimate origin of the word “Scot” is something of a mystery. It comes from a post-classical Latin word, Scottus, which in the late 4th century denoted the inhabitants of Ireland. The word Scot in Early Irish is probably from the Latin Scottus.

But the origin of the Latin term is described by the OED as uncertain: “There is no evidence that it represents the indigenous name of any Irish-speaking people.” (The classical Latin name for Ireland was Hibernia.)

Both the post-classical Latin word Scotia and the English name “Scotland” were first recorded as ancient names for Ireland.

In those days, and until about the 800s, Ireland “was probably understood to include the areas of Irish settlement in northern Britain,” the dictionary adds. And from about this time, the word “Scot” began to appear in reference to inhabitants of Scotland.

“The emergence of Scotland as the name exclusively denoting a part of northern Britain is probably linked to the consolidation of the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th cent.,” Oxford says.

If the ancient Irish (that is, the first “Scots”) hadn’t moved east, what would Scotland be called today? Perhaps “Pictland,” after the Picts who occupied the lands north of the Firth and Clyde rivers and who eventually merged with the immigrants from Dalriada.

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Frankenly speaking

Q: I keep hearing the recent weather disaster on the East Coast referred to as “Frankenstorm.” I assume this just means it was a monster storm. But how does a usage like that get started and spread so fast?

A: The name has caught on because it’s both catchy and appropriate.

Not only was this a monstrous storm, but like Frankenstein’s monster it was cobbled together from disparate parts—an Atlantic hurricane moving up from the tropics, a cold front from the west, a blast of arctic air from the north, and high tides.

We can almost imagine Mother Nature, like the scientist Victor Frankenstein, looking upon her creation and shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

During the recent storm, it was widely reported that “Frankenstorm” was coined on Oct. 25, 2012, by Jim Cisco, a weather forecaster for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as Hurricane Sandy was heading up the coast.

But in fact the term “Frankenstorm” had cropped up a couple of years earlier, in January 2010, when scientists in California were studying the potential impact of a monster storm.

As the Associated Press reported, the scientists at Cal Tech stitched together data from earlier disasters and dubbed their hypothetical model a “Frankenstorm.”

No matter who came up with the name, it’s certain to be resurrected again.

In fact, the combining form “Franken-” has been used for at least several decades to form words for unnatural creations.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example is “Frankenfood,” a term that first showed up in a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1992. Writing in response to an article about genetically engineered crops, Paul Lewis, a professor of English at Boston College, wrote:

“Ever since Mary Shelley’s baron rolled his improved human out of the lab, scientists have been bringing just such good things to life. If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it’s time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.”

A bit of googling, however, finds several earlier examples, including Franken Berry (1971), a monster-themed cereal, Frankenweenie (1984), an animated short about a boy who brings his dog back to life, and Frankenhooker (1990), a film about a medical-school dropout who raises his girlfriend from the dead.

The OED says the word element “Franken-” is used to form nouns that convey the sense of “genetically modified” or “relating to genetic modification.”

Besides “Frankenfood,” the OED cites the use of terms like “Frankenfruit,” “Frankenplants,” and “Frankenscience.” (Sometimes the words are capitalized and sometimes not.)

Oxford notes an earlier usage, “Frankenstein food,” first used in 1989 and meaning food that’s genetically altered or irradiated.

Now, of course, “Franken-” is used more broadly for things put together in odd, unnatural, or monstrous ways. We’ve seen “Frankenbike” (a bicycle made of scavenged parts), “Frankenbite” (a patched-together sound bite), and “Frankenstrat” (Eddie Van Halen’s guitar, a Stratocaster body plus miscellaneous parts).

A contributor to the American Dialect Society’s discussion group recently quipped that if you were to create a senator from Minnesota out of senatorial body parts, you’d get a “Frankenfranken.”

The OED naturally traces all this to the noun “Frankenstein,” which comes from “the name of Victor Frankenstein, the title-character of Mary Shelley’s romance Frankenstein (1818), who constructed a human monster and endowed it with life.”

Shelley’s book didn’t refer to the creature itself as “Frankenstein.” But the name, according to the OED, is “commonly misused allusively as a typical name for a monster who is a terror to his originator and ends by destroying him.”

The  British Prime Minister William Gladstone was the first to use the name for the monster and not its creator, according to Oxford. In speaking of mules, which are a cross between a donkey and a horse, Gladstone was quoted as saying in 1838, “They really seem like Frankensteins of the animal creation.”

The term has been used that way ever since, as in this OED citation from London’s Daily Telegraph (1971): “There are now growing indications that the Nationalists in South Africa have created a political Frankenstein which is pointing the way to a non-White political revival.”

But what’s really kept the wider used of “Frankenstein” and “Franken-” alive are the many films inspired by Shelley’s book, beginning with the Universal Studios original, Frankenstein (1931), starring Boris Karloff.

After that, the deluge. Sequels included Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), and so on for decades to come.

Our favorite adaptation is Mel Brooks’s hilarious Young Frankenstein (1974), in which Gene Wilder, playing a descendant of the original Dr. Frankenstein, has a dance number with the monster and insists that his name be pronounced FRONK-en-steen.

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Like a hole in the head

Q: Do you have an explanation of the saying, “I need this like I need a third armpit”? Where does it come from?

A: The expression is new to us. We couldn’t find that exact wording online, though we came across dozens of references to a website called “I Need This Like a Third Armpit.”

We also found many similar expressions on the Web, including “I need this like I need a tooth pulled,” “I need this like I need another pair of legs,” and “I need this like I need a heart attack.”

All of them are variations on a theme—the old saying “I need this [or whatever] like a hole in the head.” (The expression is often seen with the verb repeated: “I need this like I need a hole in the head.”)

The expression is a jocular way of describing something that you don’t need and don’t want. In fact, you could make up your own variation to describe something useless: “I need [fill in the blank] like a [fill in the blank].”

The Oxford English Dictionary says the phrase “to need (something) like a hole in the head” is “applied to something not desired at all or something useless.”

The OED compares the expression to a similar one in Yiddish, “Ich darf es vi a loch in kop” (I need it like a hole in the head).

While the dictionary doesn’t actually say the English version is derived from the Yiddish, we’re willing to bet that it is.

Oxford has several written examples of the usage, with the earliest dating from 1951. Here are the first two citations:

“A smart operator needs a dame like he needs a hole in the head.” (From Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, 1951.)

“The Disciples … were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head.” (From J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, 1951.)

However, we found many older references dating from as much as 30 years earlier.

For example, this passage is from The Heritage (1921), a collection of stories by Viola Brothers Shore: “ ‘He needs a car,’ commented her husband, ‘like I need a hole in the back of my head to let out the steam.’ ”

A character in Clifford Odets’s play Awake and Sing! (1933) remarks, “I need a wife like a hole in the head.”

And these lines, spoken by a character named Mrs. Levine, come from Arthur Kober’s story collection Thunder Over the Bronx (1935): “ ‘I need a dug in house like I need a hole in head. I need a hole in head?’ she asked rhetorically.”

Apparently Kober liked that passage. Here’s a reprise from another story collection, My Dear Bella (1941):

“ ‘He needs a britch table like I need a hole in head! I need a hole in head?’ he asked rhetorically.” In fact, Kober uses the expression “like I need a hole in head” at least twice in this book.

Those three writers—Shore, Odets, and Kober—were Jewish.

Shore supposedly descended from the first Kosher butcher in New York. Her stories were about Jewish Americans and their lives.

Odets was the son of Russian and Romanian Jewish immigrants, and Awake and Sing! is about an impoverished Jewish family in the Bronx.

Kober was a humorist known for his comically stereotypical portrayals of Jewish characters, some of whom spoke English haltingly.

It seems likely that these authors were adapting a familiar Yiddish usage, and that the “hole in the head” expression came to America with Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants.

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Ten-dollar words

Q: What is the origin of the phrase “ten-dollar word”? I looked for an answer in your archives and on the Internet, but I didn’t find one.

A: You’re right. We haven’t written about the usage until now and we don’t see much about it online that’s definitive. So thanks for getting us on the case. Here’s what we’ve found.

The linguist Dwight L. Bolinger has written that the word “dollar” is used in many expressions to suggest something important or pretentious. The phrase “ten-dollar word,” for example, refers to a big and pretentious word.

In the October 1942 issue of the journal American Speech, Bolinger says “dollar” is common “as the second element (preceded by a numeral) in combinations ref. to important or pretentious words.”

Writing in the journal’s Among the New Words column, he notes that “cent” and “bit” are used as the second element in similar phrases. And by extension, he says, the “dollar” usage is applied to important things as well as pretentious words.

Bolinger, gives these examples of the usage in action: “two-, four-, five-, ten-; fifteen-dollar, seventy-five-cent, two-bit word; sixty-four-dollar question, problem; five-dollar question.”

So a pretentious word, according to him, can be referred to as a “fifteen-dollar word,” a “seventy-five-cent word,” a “two-bit word,” and so on. And an important problem can be called a “sixty-four-dollar problem.”

Bolinger was writing back in 1942, but we’d argue against the use of “two-bit” today to describe a pretentious word. The term “two-bit” now means cheap, petty, or insignificant. (A bit used to be an eighth of a dollar, so two bits was 25 cents.)

The column includes several citations from the early 1940s for the use of “dollar” to mean pompous, but we’ve found many earlier ones now digitized in Google News and Google Books.

Here’s an example of “ten-dollar word,” the specific phrase you’ve asked about, from the Aug. 31, 1937, issue of the Reading (Penn.) Eagle:

“Some of the best paid Republican propagandists call it ‘totalitarianism,’ a ten-dollar word which is dear to those who argue against responsibility in government.”

And here’s an even earlier example from a 1930 issue of the journal Printers’ Ink: “A public speaker the other day spoke of the word ‘psychology,’ which he said was a ten-dollar word until recent years.”

And here’s a much earlier citation for a pre-inflationary “half-dollar word” from the Jan. 2, 1890, issue of the American Machinist:

“There has been far too much highfalutin by men who, to cover their own ignorance, have used long half-dollar words to express what no fellow could understand.”

As far as we can tell, the usage originated in the US in the late 19th century. Why “ten-dollar word,” rather than “ten-carat word” or “ten-pound word”? Sorry, but we don’t have an answer. For now, as Elvis sang, let’s say, “Just because.”

We’ll end with an inflated example from The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White: “Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.”

We don’t agree with everything in Strunk and White, but we’ll second that opinion.

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Triangulating love

Q: I think it’s a misnomer to use “love triangle” for a situation in which someone has two love interests. Since I’ve never heard of a case where these two interests are in turn in love with each other, this would be a triangle that doesn’t close. Your thoughts?

A: Come now, use your imagination! The triangle here is a figurative one, not a literal one. The word “triangle” has been used this way since the early 20th century.

Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines this figurative sense of the word: “A group or set of three, a triad. Esp. a
love-relationship in which one member of a married couple is involved with a third party; freq. as eternal triangle.”

The OED’s first example of “triangle” used this way is from the Dec. 5, 1907, issue of a London newspaper, the Daily Chronicle: “Mrs. Dudeney’s novel … deals with the eternal triangle, which, in this case, consists of two men and one woman.”

Here are some of the dictionary’s other amorously triangular examples:

1913: “The couples had rearranged themselves or were re-crystallizing in fresh triangles.” (From a story in Rudyard Kipling’s collection A Diversity of Creatures.)

1919: “For the modern drama, with its eternal triangle and so forth, he claims nothing, but that it proves adultery to be the dullest of subjects.” (Frank Harris on George Bernard Shaw, from Contemporary Portraits.)

1938: “He was much more substantial than in the days of our romantic triangle.” (From H. G. Wells’s novel Apropos of Dolores.)

The OED has a separate entry for “love triangle,” which it defines as “a state of affairs in which one person is romantically or sexually involved with two others (one or both of whom may not be aware of or complicit in the situation).”

If someone is involved with two others who are—in Oxford’s words—“complicit in the situation”—we have a ménage à trois. Would the triangle then be closed?

The first OED citation for “love triangle” is from the June 21, 1909, issue of the La Cross Tribune in Wisconsin: “Two yellow men and the pretty 20 year old missionary girl … form the love triangle the police have uncovered.”

Our favorite citation, however, comes from Ira Gershwin’s lyrics for the 1924 song Not So Long Ago:

“If you want my angle on the love triangle, / I’m for no front-headline stunts. / I hope to discover a husband and lover, / But both in the same man at once.”

So there you have it, our angle—and Ira Gershwin’s—on the love triangle.

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Who was the first nosy parker?

Q: I’m curious about the origin of the expression “nosy parker.” Could it be referring to a nosy (or is it a “nosey”?) hotel valet who looks through your glove compartment, etc., after parking your car?

 A: Well, an overly curious parking attendant could be referred to as a “nosy parker,” but the phrase has been around a lot longer than valet parking.

As it turns out, nobody knows how “nosy parker” originated, though there are several dubious theories.

The most often-heard suggestion is that the term is a reference to Matthew Parker, a 16th-century Archbishop of Canterbury who was known for poking his nose into the qualifications and activities of his clergy.

The big problem here is that Parker had been dead for several centuries before the term “nosy parker” appeared in print for the first time.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the May 1890 issue of Belgravia Magazine: “You’re a askin’ too many questions for me, there’s too much of Mr. Nosey Parker about you.”

Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English says the phrase may be a reference to peeping Toms or nose-twitching rabbits at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. But Partridge offers no evidence to support either idea.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has yet another theory—that “nosy parker” evolved from “nose poker” (someone who pokes his nose in other people’s business). But Oxford has no evidence of the term “nose poker.”

The OED, which doesn’t mention any of these theories, says in an etymology note that the phrase is a combination of the adjective “nosy” and the surname “Parker.”

The dictionary adds that a 1907 postcard with the caption “The adventures of Nosey Parker” is apparently using the phrase “with reference to a (probably fictitious) individual taken as the type of someone inquisitive or prying.”

As more and more archives are digitized, we may eventually find out who this “(probably fictitious) individual” was.

How, you ask, is this inquisitive adjective spelled? Most of the dictionaries we’ve checked list “nosy” as the primary spelling, with “nosey” as a variant. The “e”-less version is far more common (twice as many hits on Google).

By the way, the earliest citation for “valet parking” in the OED dates from 1960, though some companies that offer valet parking say the use of attendants to park cars at hotels and restaurants originated in the 1930s.

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At long last

Q: I was wondering if you would address the peculiar phrase “at long last” (as in Joseph Welch’s famous rebuke of Senator Joseph McCarthy). What strikes me is that the phrase is nonsensical on its face: a preposition followed by two adjectives neither of which may be said to modify the other.

A: The phrase is quite old, dating back to the early 1500s, and it isn’t all that nonsensical when considered in light of the English spoken at that time.

The phrase appeared in a somewhat longer version, “at the long last,” when it first showed up, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest published reference for it in the OED is from A Goodly Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, a 1523 work by the poet John Skelton:

“How than lyke a man he wan the barbican / With a sawte of solace at the longe last.” (A barbican is a defensive tower, gate, or bridge.)

Oxford suggests that the word “last” could be a noun here, not an adjective. At the time the phrase showed up, one use of “last” was as a noun meaning a continuance or a duration.

Although this sense of “last” is now rare, here’s an example from Holinshed’s Chronicles, a 1587 history of England, Scotland, and Ireland: “Things memorable, of perpetuitie, fame, and last.”

The OED’s first citation for the shorter phrase, “at long last,” is from Thomas Carlyle’s The History of Friedrich II of Prussia (1864): “At long last, on Sunday.”

And here’s a citation from the Dec. 11, 1936, speech in which the ex-King Edward VIII and future Duke of Windsor announced his abdication to marry Wallis Simpson: “At long last I am able to say a few words of my own.”

He went on to say: “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.”

The dictionary defines the phrase “at long last” as “at the end of all; finally, ultimately.”

Finally we’ll return to that June 9, 1954, comment by Welch, the chief counsel for the Army when it was being investigated by McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

On the 30th day of the Army-McCarthy hearings, as the Senator was attacking a junior attorney at Welch’s law firm, Welch broke in several times.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” he said during one interruption. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

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Doubling down at KFC

Q: I’ve been hearing a lot of “doubling down,” where it seems to connote increased effort. All my long life I’ve used “doubling up” with the same connotation. Are both right, or am I double damned? PS: Why not just “doubling”?

A: You’re right. The verbal phrase “double down” has been showing up a lot lately in a new sense: to increase one’s efforts.

This specific use of “double down” doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary or in any standard dictionary. But Macmillan’s online Open Dictionary, which accepts contributions from the public, has it.

The entry, submitted on Feb. 15, 2012, by an unnamed contributor from the United Kingdom, defines the verbal phrase as to “increase one’s efforts or focus,” and gives this example:

“It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that rarely has been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that never has been more promising.”

Another sense of “double down” has a longer history. The phrase was a gambling term when it first appeared in the 1940s, according to published references in the OED. Although “double up” appeared much earlier in an entirely different sense, it also showed up in the 1940s as a gambling usage.

In blackjack, Oxford says, to “double down” means “to double the bet after one has seen the initial cards, with the requirement that one and only one additional card be drawn.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from John Scarne’s 1949 book Scarne on Cards: “He doubles down on a count of 9 and he draws a deuce.”

The OED adds that the use of the verbal phrase later expanded beyond gambling to mean “to engage in risky behaviour, esp. when one is already in a dangerous situation.”

The dictionary’s first citation for the broader usage is from A Line Out for a Walk, a 1991 essay collection by Joseph Epstein:

“Let me double down … and see if I can’t win some points for being a racist by asserting that, for some while now, black men have worn hats with more flair than anyone else in America.”

However, the OED doesn’t mention the more general newer usage (to increase one’s effort) noticed by you as well as the contributor to Macmillan’s Open Dictionary. Here’s an example from the Oct. 27, 2011, issue of the Wall Street Journal:

“After moving its apparel office to New York in 2009 with great fanfare about fashion, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is packing up the operation and moving it back to its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters, where it will double-down on basics.”

This new use of “double down” hasn’t escaped the notice of word junkies. It was recently discussed on the American Dialect Society’s mailing list, and the linguist Ben Zimmer wrote about it in his Sept. 14 Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus website.

As for “double up,” it entered English in the 18th century with the sense of two people joining together to share lodgings. But it took on a gambling sense in the first half of the 20th century—to double the stakes.

The OED’s first citation for the gambling usage is from Eggs, Beans & Crumpets, a 1940 collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse: “You doubled up when you won, thus increasing your profits by leaps and bounds.”

Can the verb “double” be used in place of the verbal phrase “double down” in either of the newer usages?

We don’t think so. It’s too precise to mean merely increasing one’s effort. And it doesn’t suggest responding to a risky situation with more risky behavior.

Speaking of risky behavior, how about Kentucky Fried Chicken’s breadless Double Down sandwich: bacon, two kinds of melted cheese, and the Colonel’s secret sauce, all between two Original Recipe chicken fillets.

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The whole nine yards, continued

[Note: An updated post about “the whole nine yards” appeared on Dec. 14, 2016.]

We interrupt our regular programming for this special report.

Hundreds of you (well, dozens anyway) have written us over the years about the expression “the whole nine yards,” either to ask about its origin (nine yards of what?) or to suggest one.

Some common theories about the source of the expression are that it refers to a nine-yard length fabric (for a sari, a maharaja’s sash, a burial shroud, a three-piece suit, a nun’s habit, or a Scottish kilt).

Other notions are that the “nine yards” refers to a hangman’s noose, a continuous computer printout, or the cubic-yard capacity of a cement mixer.

But perhaps the most popular theory of all is that it’s a reference to the length of a machine-gun ammunition belt in World War II.

Unfortunately, no published evidence has been found that would back up any of these suggested etymologies.

All researchers can do is track down the earliest dates when the expression appeared in print, in hopes of finding the elusive explanation.

We last reported on the blog that the phrase in its popular sense (the whole thing, the full extent of something) first appeared in a short story published in the fall of 1962.

But we promised to keep you updated, so here’s the latest. New sightings have now  pushed the date back to the mid-1950s. 

Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a frequent contributor to the American Dialect Society mailing list, reported over the summer that she had ferreted out examples of “the whole nine yards” in articles published in 1956 and ’57.

And that’s not all. As she told ADS list subscribers, she even tracked down the author of the articles and interviewed him. Now that’s dedication!

The articles appeared in two issues of Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground, a Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife publication that’s only recently been added to searchable databases.

In July 1956, the journal ran a story about fishing derbies being held around the state.  After describing the prizes (including an Evinrude motor and a 14-foot boat trailer), the writer concluded:

“So that’s the whole nine-yards. The rules are simple. You’ll find them and everything you need to know on the inside page of every entry blank. Entry blanks have been placed at docks on the major lakes and in at least one sporting goods store in every county.”

Another story in the January 1957 issue, this time about hunters, said, “These guys go the whole nine yards—no halfway stuff for them.”

Taylor-Blake managed to find the author of both articles, Ron Rhody. But alas, he had no clues to offer about the source of “the whole nine yards” (and he said he had no particular reason for hyphenating “nine-yards” in the 1956 story).

Rhody told her he believed it was a common expression back then, but had no inside information as to its source.

What’s interesting here—especially in light of the popular ammunition-belt theory—is that the sightings are inching closer and closer to World War II.

We’re not the only language junkies to have that thought. The linguist Ben Zimmer, for example, made a similar comment about this ammunition-belt business last month in his Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus website:

“That, or some related military origin, could be the ultimate source, and as the documented sources for ‘the whole nine yards’ creep ever closer back to the World War II era we may eventually find an authoritative explanation for the phrase. For now, though, such an explanation remains tantalizingly out of reach.”

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time on Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012, to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: an update on “the whole nine yards.” If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.

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Back in the day, revisited

Q: When and why did “back in the day” come into popular use in reference to a cool time in the past? I don’t remember hearing it at all in the ’70s.

A: You don’t remember hearing this use of “back in the day” in the 1970s because it wasn’t heard much until the ’80s. However, it was around in the ’60s and ’70s. And similar phrases date back to the early 1800s.

We wrote a posting in 2007 about the use of the expression to refer, often nostalgically, to a period in the past. But five years is a long time in popular usage, so this calls for an update.

Let’s begin by pointing out that the phrase “back in the day” has been around since at least the 1940s, and the phrase “back in the days” has been around a lot longer, since the 18th century.

But in those earlier usages, “back in the day” and “back in the days” were part of larger phrases that referred literally to specific periods in the past.

Here’s an example of this earlier use of “back in the day” from The Blood Remembers, a 1941 novel by Helen Hedricks, wife of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf:

“I was back in the day when his father was buried, and the bright sun was killing the purple asters in Sam’s bent hands.”

And here’s a much earlier example of “back in the days” from an 1816 biography of Eudoxia Lopukhina, the first consort of Peter the Great, by Carl Theodor von Unlanski:

“The human race had learned to write—to make impressions with objects which are the equivalents of writer’s tools — away back in the days when the cuneiform folk put their marks into stones, and the cave men of prehistoric France daubed colored hieroglyphics.”

We found an even earlier example (“back in the days of Hezekiah”) in an undated sermon among the collected writings of the Rev. Ebenezer Erskine, a Scottish minister who lived from 1680 to 1754.

But the modern usage you’re asking about, plain “back in the day,” is a different sense of the phrase, one in which it stands alone and refers to an unspecified time in the past.

This clipped phrase has popped up all over the place in the last couple of decades. It’s done so much popping, in fact, that the phrase has got the attention of lexicographers at standard dictionaries.

The Cambridge Dictionaries Online, for example, defines the expression this way: “used for talking about a time in the past, usually when you are remembering nice things about that time.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says “back in the day” (occasionally “days”), especially in African-American usage, means “in the past” or “some time ago.”

The OED has four citations for the published use of the expression. The earliest example is a lyric from a hip-hop song, “Girls,” recorded by the Beastie Boys in 1986: “Back in the day / There was this girl around the way.”

The phrase also cropped up in a 1994 issue of the magazine Vibe: “Back in the day there were Josephine Baker, Billie Holliday, Sarah Vaughan, and Lena Horne.”

And the novelist Richard Price used it in his mystery Freedomland (1998): “Jesse had known one of them from back in the day.”

The OED’s most recent example is from The Nannie Diaries (2003), by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus: “One drunken night when your buddies from ‘back in the day’ called me a ho.”

You say you don’t remember hearing “back in the day” in the 1970s. We’ve done a bit of poking around in Google Books and found some examples from the ’70s, including this one from Joseph Wambaugh’s 1972 crime novel The Blue Knight:

“Around the LAPD it was said that mobbed-up former Soviets were more dangerous and cruel than the Sicilian gangsters ever were back in the day.”

In fact, our spot check of Google Books even found a couple of examples from the ’60s, including this one from Ruth Dickson’s 1967 advice book Married Men Make the Best Lovers:

“Yep, that’s all the IRS thought a spouse was worth back in the day.”

The earliest examples of the clipped usage that we could find are from white writers like Wambaugh and Dickson. And the first use of the phrase in hip-hop music seems to be from the song mentioned above by the Beastie Boys, a white band.

But some linguists and language writers have suggested that the phrase may have originated among African Americans.

The linguist Margaret G. Lee, for example, said in a 2001 comment on the Linguist List, the mailing list of the American Dialect Society, that “Back in the day originated in the African-American community.”

Geneva Smitherman, author of Black Talk and a distinguished professor of English at Michigan State University, told the language columnist William Safire in 2007 that the expression is used differently by different groups of African Americans.

“When used by middle-aged and older members of the black speech community,” she said, “ ‘back in the day’ refers to the 1960s and often reflects a kind of nostalgic longing for a historical moment when there was a very strong black unity.”

But when “used by members of the Hip Hop Generation,” Smitherman said, “it generally refers to the beginning phase of Hip Hop Music and Culture, in the ’70s in the South Bronx.”

H. Samy Alim, an anthropologist and sociolinguist at UCLA, suggested to Safire that the expression may have been popularized by the rapper Ahmad’s 1994 album (and title song) Back in the Day.

A bit of googling, however, indicates that the expression in its new sense was well established by the late 1980s, years before Ahmad’s album was released.

Interestingly, Ahmad (Ahmad Ali Lewis) uses “back in the day” and “back in the days” in the three versions of the title song on the album. And he uses them in the old as well as the new sense. Here’s an example of the plural phrase used both ways:

Back in the days when I was young I’m not a kid anymore
But some days I sit and wish I was a kid again
Back in the days when I was young I’m not a kid anymore
But some days I sit and wish I was a kid again
Back in the days

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A horse of another color

Q: I don’t get it. What, if anything, does a horse have to do with the expression “horse of another color”?

A: For centuries, English speakers have viewed the horse as some kind of standard against which to draw comparisons. And why not?

Horses have strength (“he’s as strong as a horse”), energy (“you work like a horse”), and big appetites (“she eats like a horse”).

The Oxford English Dictionary cites several such “proverbial phrases and locutions” in which “horse” is used for making comparisons.

In fact, horses may once have been considered models of sanctity, since the OED’s earliest example of a horsey comparison is “as holy as a horse,” from 1530.

The equine expression you ask about is another kind of comparison, one for saying that something is like or unlike something else. The two things being compared are imagined as horses, either the same or different in color.

As the OED explains, the expression “a horse of another (the same, etc.) colour” means “a thing or matter of a different (etc.) complexion.”

Oxford’s earliest example of this kind of expression comes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, written sometime around 1600: “My purpose is indeed a horse of that colour.”

This early American example comes from a Philadelphia newspaper, the Aurora (1798): “Whether any of them may be induced … to enter into the pay of King John I. is ‘a horse of another colour.’ ” (The reference here is to President John Adams.)

And since we always like to quote Anthony Trollope, a favorite of ours, here’s a citation from The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867): “What did you think of his wife? That’s a horse of another colour altogether.”

The OED also has examples with “different color” instead of “another color.”

This quotation is from John Carter’s Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting (1949): “Buxton Forman’s A Shelley Library, however, was a horse of a different colour: no mere handlist but a fully annotated and richly informative study of Shelley’s original editions.”

And this one is from the BBC’s former magazine, The Listener (1966): “A horse of a somewhat different colour is that tycoon of the brush, pop-man Salvador Dali.”

Why a horse, rather than a pumpkin, an armadillo, or a ranch house of another color? We don’t know. We’ve read speculation that the expression may have originated in racing, but we haven’t seen any evidence to support this.

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Lies, damn lies, and the 1500s

Q: My dad has sent me an email about life in the 1500s. It includes the origins of many sayings. Are they true? Just curious, as there are a lot of urban legends out there.

A: This list of so-called “Facts About the 1500s,” sometimes called “Life in the 1500s,” is a hoax that’s been floating around in cyberspace since 1999.

It claims to explain the origins of many common words and phrases, and occasionally a reader forwards it to us and asks whether there’s any truth in it.

The answer is no.

These “facts” are merely folk etymologies. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a folk etymology as a “popular perversion” intended to make a word or phrase “apparently significant.”

Some common phrases (like “raining cats and dogs”) are simply idioms that can’t be interpreted literally. Nature abhors a vacuum, which is why people like to invent explanations for what can’t be explained.

“Raining cats and dogs” has nothing to do with domestic animals falling through thatched roofs. It’s merely a hyperbolic, semi-humorous idiom that has no literal meaning. We’ve written before on our blog about such idioms.

But some other common phrases are no mystery, since their true etymologies are well established. Yet the hoaxer who came up with this fictitious list has even invented fake etymologies for those.

An example is “saved by the bell,” which originated not in 16th-century graveyards but in 1930s boxing.

We won’t bother to go through the list and refute each point, since researchers at Snopes.com, the Phrase Finder, and elsewhere have already done so.

But we’ll address one of the folksier of the folk etymologies, the claim that “piss poor” originated in the practice of collecting urine to tan hides.

It’s true that urine was used in tanning in olden times, but the phrase “piss poor” wasn’t recorded until the 20th century, according to the OED, and tanning had nothing to do with it.

As the OED explains, the word “piss” is sometimes “prefixed to an adjective (occas. to a noun) as an intensifier, usually implying excess or undesirability.” This usage originated in the United States in the 1940s, Oxford says.

The dictionary defines “piss-poor” as meaning “of an extremely poor quality or standard,” and its written examples begin in 1946 with “piss-poor outfit” and “piss-poor job.”

The OED also cites more general uses of “piss” prefixed to adjectives, including “piss-rotten” (1940); “piss-elegant” (1947); “piss-bad” (1970); “piss-chic” (1977); and “piss-easy” (1998).

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Thanks for asking

Q: Why do so many people respond to a “Thank you” with an answering “Thank you”? Whatever happened to the traditional “You’re welcome”?

A: “You’re welcome,” the polite response to an expression of thanks, isn’t as traditional as you might think. It apparently didn’t show up in English until the 20th century, though the word “welcome” has been used this way since Elizabethan times.

We’ll get to “You’re welcome” in a bit, but first let’s discuss this business of a thankee thanking a thanker.

You’d be amazed at how many people write us about it. Saying “Thank YOU” in response to a “Thank you” is perhaps a small thing, but some people find it annoying or puzzling.

If it’s a sin, Pat is a sinner. Many readers of the blog have been bugged by her thanking Leonard Lopate in response to his thanking her for appearing on his WNYC show.

Pat now tries to avoid doing it. Why? Not because she sees anything wrong with the usage. Just because it brings in so many complaints!

Why thank Leonard? Pat says “You’re welcome” seems to imply that she’s doing Leonard a kindness by being on his show. But she feels the kindness is on his part, for inviting her.

These days Pat tries to say, “My pleasure,” or perhaps “Thank you for having me” (but some people object even to that).

She gladly says “You’re welcome” when someone thanks her for passing the salt, holding a door, picking up something that was dropped, and so on.

In cases like that, “You’re welcome” acknowledges that she did in fact do someone a favor, one she was happy to do.

We’ve had several postings about thanking a thanker, including one in 2007 and another in 2010. But your question gives us a chance to look at the history of “Thank you.”

The phrase “Thank you” (short for “I thank you”) first showed up in English in the 1400s. The earliest written example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the poem Why I Can’t Be a Nun:

“Thanke yow, lady,” quod I than,
“And thereof hertely I yow pray;
And I, as lowly as I can,
Wolle do yow servyse nyght and day;
And what ye byd me do or say.”

As we’re sure you know, the phrase hasn’t always been used thankfully. From the early 1900s, for example, it’s been used to mean pretty much the opposite, according to OED citations.

In The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), a children’s story by Edith Nesbit, a fire breaks out in a London theater, and the audience races for the doors. “No boys on burning decks for me, thank you,” one of the fleeing characters says.

The OED defines this sense of the phrase as “used to add emphasis to a preceding expression of a wish or opinion (usu. one implying a denial or refusal).”

And since the 1700s, Oxford says, the expression “Thank you for nothing” has been used ironically to indicate “that the speaker thinks he has got or been offered nothing worth thanks.”

Here’s an example from  William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair: “It’s you who want to introduce beggars into my family? Thank you for nothing, Captain.”

Interestingly, the polite answering phrase “You’re welcome” didn’t show up until the 20th century, according to published references in the OED. We touched on this in a posting in 2008.

The earliest reference in the OED is from a 1960 newspaper article, though the dictionary has one from a 1907 short story that’s quite close: “ ‘Thank you,’ said the girl, with a pleasant smile. ‘You’re quite welcome,’ said the skipper.”

Although the expression “You’re welcome” is relatively recent, the language sleuth Barry Popik has traced the use of the word “welcome” in this sense back at least to Shakespeare’s day. Here’s an exchange from Othello (circa 1603):

“Lodovico: Madam, good night; I humbly thank your ladyship.
“Desdemona: Your honour is most welcome.”

As with “Thank you,” the phrase “You’re welcome” has also been used ironically to refer to something that’s not welcome. This usage, however, is not in response to an expression of thanks.

Here’s an example from Summer Half, a 1937 novel by Angela Thirkell, one of our favorite writers: “ ‘Fine Old English Gentleman,’ said the applicant enthusiastically. ‘You are welcome to him.’ ”

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Favored treatment

Q: A recent headline caught my eye: “Obama Favors Gay Marriage.” Can a person “favor” something without being partial to it? For example, “Obama favors gay marriage over straight marriage.”

A: To “favor” something isn’t necessarily to prefer it over something else, though the word can have that meaning. In the case of that headline, the verb simply means to approve of or sanction.

The word “favor” has been a flexible addition to English since it showed up more than 700 years ago.

The noun “favor” arrived before the verb, and was first recorded around 1300, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It came into Middle English from Old French, but ultimately comes from the Latin verb favere, defined by the OED as “to regard with goodwill, side with, show kindness to, protect.”

Originally, the noun “favor” meant good will or friendly regard, but very soon it also came to mean patronage, approval, partiality, support, kindness, and the like. (This is how a “favor” came to mean an act of kindness.)

The verb “favor” came along in the mid-1300s, and in early usage it had three related senses (we’ll quote the OED definitions):

(1) “To regard with favour, look kindly upon; to be inclined to, have a liking or preference for; to approve.”

(2) “To show favour to; to treat kindly; to countenance, encourage, patronize.”

(3) “To treat with partiality. Also, to side with, take the part of.”

All of those 14th-century usages are still with us today.

As you can see, “favor,” like its Latin ancestor, is a wide-ranging verb. It can mean to take sides, but it can simply mean to approve.

For instance, when you say you “favor” a certain political party, you mean you prefer it over the other. But when you say you “favor” an idea, you mean you approve of it or regard it in a positive light.

This latter sense of the word—simple approval—is what that headline writer meant to convey. In other words, President Obama sanctions gay marriage; he doesn’t prefer it over the heterosexual variety.

This discussion gives us a chance to favor a phrase that’s the result of a misunderstanding: “to curry favor.”

The expression, says the OED, is in fact a corruption of an old 15th-century phrase, “to curry favel,” which meant to use insincere flattery to gain advantage.

(On a more literal level, to “curry” means to prepare or make ready, and “favel” is a defunct noun that once meant cunning or duplicity.)

Sometime in the 16th century, people began substituting “to curry favor,” probably because “favor” was a better-known word and the two versions have kindred meanings.

In case you’re wondering, this sense of “curry” is unrelated to the curry in Indian, Pakistani, and other Asian cuisines. This spicy “curry” is derived from kari, a Tamil word for sauce or relish for rice, according to the OED.

By the way, we’ve written on our blog about another meaning of the verb “favor,” as when we say someone “favors” an injured leg or a sore foot. Here, to “favor” means to go easy on or to treat gently.

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Amphibian transportation

Q: Your recent discussion about “tadpoles” and “pollywogs” reminded me of another amphibian usage, “frog march.” Can you enlighten me?

A: When “frog march” first showed up in Britain in the 19th century, it was a noun phrase that referred to a way of moving recalcitrant prisoners.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes this usage as historical (that is, it’s used now in referring to a practice of the past) and defines the noun phrase this way:

“A method of moving a resistant person (such as a prisoner), in which he or she is lifted by the arms and legs and carried in a prone position with the face pointing towards the ground; the action or an act of moving a person using this method, or an instance of being moved in this way.”

The earliest example of the phrase in the OED is from an 1871 issue of the Evening Standard in London: “They did not give the defendant the ‘Frog’s March.’ ”

The phrase soon crossed the Atlantic and showed up in American usage in an 1874 issue of the Daily Evening Bulletin in San Francisco:

“The London method is called the ‘frog’s march’; in which the prisoner is carried to the station, with the face downwards and the whole weight of the body dependent on the limbs.”

In the 20th century, however, “frog-march” evolved into a verbal phrase for an action that’s not quite that extreme or uncomfortable.

The OED says “to frog-march,” which came along in the 1930s, means “to hustle forwards (a reluctant or resisting person), typically by seizing the collar or pinning the arms behind the back.”

Here’s a recent example, from Stephen Brown’s Free Gift Inside! (2003), a book about marketing : “I failed to wait behind the yellow line, as instructed, and was promptly frog-marched … to a welcoming interrogation room.”

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The elephant in the room

Q: I’m trying to track down the origin of “elephant in the room.” My fading memory recalls something about a play from the first half of the 20th century in which the curtain opens on a living room with a body on the floor. Ring a bell?

A: When we use the expression “elephant in the room” today, the elephant we’re usually talking about is something that’s too obvious to go unnoticed but uncomfortable to mention.

For example, all the relatives attending the wake for filthy-rich Great Aunt Beatrice wonder what’s in her unopened will, but none of them bring it up. It’s the elephant in the room.

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition for this sense of “elephant in the room” and variants thereof:

“A significant problem or controversial issue which is obviously present but ignored or avoided as a subject for discussion, usually because it is more comfortable to do so.”

The OED’s first published reference for this usage is the title of a 1984 book, An Elephant in the Living Room: A Leader’s Guide for Helping Children of Alcoholics, by Marion H. Typpo and Jill M. Hastings.

Here’s a more illustrative citation, from a 2004 issue of the New York Times: “When it comes to the rising price of oil, the elephant in the room is the ever-weakening United States dollar.”

In short, the OED’s citations for this use of the phrase go back only about 30 years. And we haven’t found any evidence of a connection to an earlier “body in the room,” in either a theatrical or a real crime scene.

However, there’s an older “elephant in the room” with a different meaning—roughly, something huge yet irrelevant, or perhaps unprovable. Here’s the OED’s definition of this one:

“The type of something obvious and incongruous, esp. (in Logic and Philos.) in discussions of statements which may or may not correspond to observable facts.”

The OED credits the philosopher Harry Todd Costello with the first recorded use of this sense of the phrase.

In an essay published in 1935, Costello wrote: “It is going beyond observation to assert there is not an elephant in the room, for I cannot observe what is not.” (The essay was published that year in American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, by Horace Meyer Kallen and Sidney Hook.)

Did the philosophical use of the phrase lead to the more familiar usage that’s common today? Perhaps, but before committing ourselves we did a bit more searching. And we came across yet other kinds of elephants.

For example, here’s a quotation in which the elephant is too big to ignore, but not necessarily off-limits in conversation. It comes from a 1961 issue of the Appraisal Journal, a real-estate industry publication:

“To continue to pretend that the American economy is thriving in an isolated vacuum would be like trying to ignore the presence of an elephant in the living room.”

And in a 1969 essay entitled “Elephants in the Living Room,” David Aspy used the term “elephant experience” to mean one that’s just too much to cope with—like coming home to find a you-know-what standing you-know-where.

We’ve also found the phrase “pink elephant in the room,” an apparent reference to hallucinating or waking up with a hangover.

This example is from a collection of anecdotes called Gridiron Nights (1915), by Arthur Wallace Dunn: “ ‘It reminds me of the fellow who woke up in the night and found a pink elephant in the room.’ ‘How did he get rid of it?’ ‘Oh, it backed slowly out through the keyhole.’ ”

Even before that, Mark Twain wrote a very funny story, “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882), about something too big to miss yet impossible to find.

In the story, which caricatures detective fiction, a large white elephant, freshly imported from Siam, disappears while quarantined in Jersey City.

But if the Twain story inspired the phrase “elephant in the room,” why did it take so long?

As you can see, in searching for the roots of the expression that’s popular today, it’s hard to determine which of these elephants might have suggested it.

But we suspect that white elephants and pink elephants are mere red herrings in this case. The clue to the origin of our particular “elephant in the room” probably lies with Harry Costello, the philosopher mentioned a few paragraphs ago.

Elephants are familiar presences in philosophy and logic. For instance, many philosophers have commented on the Indian parable of the blind men who attempt to describe an elephant by touch, each “seeing” and hence defining it differently. The fable is often used to make a point about language, experience, and deniability.

The fable would have been familiar to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. The two had an argument at Cambridge University in 1911 about the certainty of knowing that there is no rhinoceros in the room (in some versions of the story, it was a hippopotamus).

Their argument was much discussed and long influential in philosophical circles. It was probably what Costello had in mind in his 1935 comment on the assertion that “there is not an elephant in the room.”

So can we trace the popular sense of the phrase back to Wittgenstein in the days before World War I? That’s our guess. But, as Wittgenstein would caution, we can’t know it with empirical certainty.

Finally, we should mention that there are earlier “elephant” expressions in other languages, but none of them have the usual metaphorical meaning of “elephant in the room” in English. And we’ve seen no etymological evidence that any of them influenced the English usage.

For example, “The Inquisitive Man” (1814), a seven-paragraph short story by the Russian writer Ivan Krylov, describes a man who looks at the beasts, birds, and bugs in a museum of natural history, and tells a friend, “I saw everything there was to see and examined it carefully.”

When the friend asks if he saw the elephant, the man says: “Elephant? Are you quite sure that they have an elephant?” When told that there was one, he adds “Well, old man, don’t tell anybody—but the fact is that I didn’t notice the elephant!”

Dostoevsky, in his novel Demons (1871-72), refers to Krylov’s elephant with a literal, not metaphorical, expression: “Belinsky was just like Krylov’s Inquisitive Man, who didn’t notice the elephant in the museum, but gave all his attention to French socialist bugs.”

[Note: This post was updated on April 27, 2020.]

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An etymological valentine

Q: I wished a colleague happy Valentine’s Day earlier in the month and was told there is no apostrophe plus “s” in the name of the holiday. There is, isn’t there?

A: Yes, there is an apostrophe + “s” in “Valentine’s Day.” The longer form of the name for the holiday is “St. Valentine’s Day.”

And in case you’re wondering, the word “Valentine’s” in the name of the holiday is a possessive proper noun, while the word “valentines” (for the cards we get on Feb. 14) is a plural common noun.

“Valentine’s Day” has the possessive apostrophe because it’s a saint’s day. In Latin, Valentinus was the name of two early Italian saints commemorated on Feb. 14.

Published references in the Oxford English Dictionary indicate that the phrase “Valentine’s Day” was first recorded in about 1381 in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English poem The Parlement of Foules:

“For this was on seynt Volantynys day / Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.” (In Middle English, possessive apostrophes were not used.)

Chaucer’s lines would be translated this way in modern English: “For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day / When every bird comes here to choose his mate.” (The title means a parliament or assembly of fowls—that is, birds.)

As a common noun, “valentine” was first used to mean a lover, sweetheart, or special friend. This sense of the word was first recorded in writing in 1477, according to OED citations.

In February of that year, a young woman named Margery Brews wrote two love letters to her husband-to-be, John Paston, calling him “Voluntyn” (Valentine).

As rendered into modern English, one of the letters begins “Right reverend and well-beloved Valentine” and ends “By your Valentine.” (We’re quoting from The Paston Letters, edited by Norman Davis, 1963.)

In the mid-1500s, the OED says, the noun “valentine” was first used to mean “a folded paper inscribed with the name of a person to be drawn as a valentine.”

It wasn’t until the 19th century, adds Oxford, that “valentine” came to have its modern meaning: “a written or printed letter or missive, a card of dainty design with verses or other words, esp. of an amorous or sentimental nature, sent on St. Valentine’s day.”

Here’s the OED’s first citation, from Mary Russell Mitford’s book Our Village (1824), a collection of sketches: “A fine sheet of flourishing writing, something between a valentine and a sampler.”

This later example is from Albert R. Smith’s The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his Friend Jack Johnson (1844): “He had that morning received … a valentine, in a lady’s hand-writing, and perfectly anonymous.”

What could be more intriguing than that?

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On holy days and holidays

Q: Happy holidays! Apropos of the holiday season, when did “holiday” become a word and when did it lose its holiness? I assume it was originally “holy day,” but I’ve never looked into it.

A: The word “holiday” was first recorded in English around the year 950, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but it looked a lot different back then.

In Old English, it was written haligdæg or hali-dægh (literally “holy day’). And later, in Middle English, the first vowel was also an “a”: halidei, halidai , halliday, haliday, etc.

A bit later in the Middle English period (12th to 15th centuries) the “a” became an “o,” and eventually the usual forms of the word became “holy day,” “holy-day,” or “holiday” (a spelling first recorded in 1460).

The different forms of the word—that is, whether it was written as one word or two—had something to do with its different meanings.

Originally, the word meant a consecrated day or a religious festival. But in the 1400s, it acquired another, more secular meaning.

The OED defines this sense of the word as “a day on which ordinary occupations (of an individual or a community) are suspended; a day of exemption or cessation from work; a day of festivity, recreation, or amusement.”

That’s how the single word “holiday” came to include the secular side of life and became identified with vacations. But the two–word versions (“holy day,” “holy-day”) retained the original meaning—a day set aside for religious observance.

Today we still recognize these different senses and spellings.

Now here’s an aside. In the Middle English period, people sometimes observed holy days by eating a large flatfish called butte. Thus this fish became known as “halibut” (“hali” for holy and “but” for flatfish).

And happy holidays to you!

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Sleeping with the fishes

Q: During Pat’s WNYC discussion of euphemisms for death, a caller mentioned the expression “sleep with the fishes.” I believe it originated with the first Godfather movie. After Luca Brasi is thrown into the sea, Tessio carries in Brasi’s bullet-proof vest with a fish inside. Sonny says, “What the hell is this?” Tessio says: “It’s a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”

A: That line from the 1972 movie undoubtedly helped popularize the expression, but it didn’t originate with The Godfather or even with the Mafia, which arose in Sicily in the 1860s.

A search of books digitized by Google suggests that the expression was alive and well in English at least as far back as the 1830s and probably earlier.

In Sketches of Germany and the Germans (1836), Edmund Spencer describes a trip by a British angler to an area occupied by superstitious villagers who considered fly fishing a form of black magic:

“This terrible apprehension was soon circulated from village to village: the deluded peasants broke in pieces the pretty painted magic wand, and forcibly put to flight the magician himself, vowing, with imprecations, if he repeated his visit, they would send him to sleep with the fishes.”

Here’s one more fishy example. An article from the July 15, 1905, issue of The Search-Light, a magazine specializing in international affairs, describes an attempt by the Russian fleet to capture a pirate ship:

“After her at full speed hurried the torpedo boat ‘Smetilvy,’ manned by a crew of officers and faithful blue jackets, and pledged to send the rebels to sleep with the fishes.”

We couldn’t find any citations for “sleep with the fishes” in the Oxford English Dictionary, but the OED does have an entry from an 1891 slang dictionary of “feed the fishes” used figuratively to mean “to be drowned.”

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Is government the issue?

Q: I’m a reporter in the Midwest. The other day I did a story about local people in the military. I wanted to say the term “GI” is short for “government issue,” but the copy editor insisted it’s an abbreviation of “galvanized iron.” In the end, we took it out. Who’s right?

A: Both of you, depending on how the abbreviation is used. Here’s the story.

In the early 20th century, “GI” was a semiofficial US Army abbreviation for “galvanized iron.”

The term, dating back to 1907, was used in military inventories to describe iron cans, buckets, and so on, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

By 1917, however, “GI” began to take on a wider meaning.

In World War I, it was used to refer to all things Army, so military bricks became GI bricks and military Christmases became GI Christmases. Before long, we had GI soap and GI shoes and, eventually, plain old GIs.

A lot of people apparently felt this new usage needed a new family tree. So in the minds of many, “galvanized iron” became “government issue” or “general issue.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says “GI” can be an abbreviation for all three, depending on how it’s used:

It stands for “galvanized iron” when used in a phrase like “GI can” (an iron trash can or a World War I German artillery shell). It’s short for “government issue” or “general issue” when referring to American soldiers or things associated with them.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) also list all three as as the longer forms of “GI.”

The entry for “GI” in American Heritage sums up the etymology this way: “From abbreviation of galvanized iron (applied to trash cans, etc.), later reinterpreted as government issue.”

[Note: This post was updated on Nov. 11, 2018.]

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Why is ‘she’ the cat’s mother?

[Note: This post was updated on April 28, 2020.]

Q: You must be catted out by now, but I have one more feline inquiry. My mother would not allow us children to refer to her in the third person while she was in front of us. Any infraction of this rule would cause her immediate response: “Don’t call me ‘she’!  ‘She’ is the cat’s mother!” What the heck does this mean?

A: Well, we’ve answered two catty questions lately—one in March and one in April—so why not one more?

There was a time when a child could get a scolding for using the word “she” instead of a name, especially if the “she” (often an older person, like one’s mother) was present.

And the scolding might have consisted of  “Who’s ‘she’—the cat’s mother?”

We can see why “she” is sometimes rude. And we can see why “she” might be equated with “the cat’s mother.”

After all, a cat’s mother is probably some nameless, unknown feline. But people have names—“Mom,” for example.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the catchphrase “Who’s she—the cat’s mother?” (or some variation thereof) is “said to one (esp. a child) who uses the pronoun of the third person singular impolitely or with inadequate reference.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from the May 25, 1878, issue of the journal Notes and Queries. We’ll expand the quotation here:

“I cannot find any mention of this saying … in books of proverbial expressions, but it is one with which I have been acquainted from my youth. … For example, a little girl runs in to her mother, and says excitedly, ‘O mamma, we met her just as we were coming home from our walk, and she was so glad to see us!’ Upon which the mamma says, ‘Who is “she”? the cat’s mother?’ ” Thus, adds the writer, Cuthbert Bede, the expression is used “to enjoin perspicuity of speech and precision  in reference.”

In our own searches, we found an earlier example, from a burlesque play in which the characters are people, fairies, and cats. Here’s the exchange:

“Prince Lardi-Dardi: Who’s she? … Miss McTabby: His nurse would tell him, ‘she’ is the cat’s mother; / A lesson learnt by every little baby” (The White Cat! by Francis Cowley Burnand, first produced Dec. 26, 1870).

We’ve also found a few examples, from the late 1870s and afterwards, of “the cat’s grandmother” and “the cat’s aunt” used in the same way—as a retort to someone who uses “she” in uncertain reference.

Here are some later examples of the reprimand, cited in the the OED:

“Don’t call your mamma ‘she.’ ‘She’ is a cat” (from The Beth Book, by Frances Macfall, writing as Sarah Grand, 1897).

“ ‘Who’s She?’ demanded Nurse. ‘She’s the cat’s
mother’ ” (from Compton Mackenzie’s novel Sinister Street, 1913).

“To one who keeps saying ‘she’ in an impolite manner the reproof is: ‘Who’s she, the cat’s mother?’ ” (from The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, by Iona and Peter Opie, 1959).

“Who’s she? The cat’s grandmother?” (from Nanny Says, by Sir Hugh Casson and Joyce Grenfell, 1972).

“ ‘Who’s she, the cat’s mother?’ Lindy said, not looking up from the magazine” (from Helen Cross’s My Summer of Love, a novel set in Yorkshire in the 1980s and published in 2001).

Despite that 21st-century example, we suspect that this nostalgic old expression is one more nicety of language that’s gradually fading away.

[Note: A reader wrote us on Dec. 2, 2015, to say the “cat’s mother” reprimand is alive and well in his family. “My wife is using it on our child as her Mom did unto her,” he said. “In our household, it is being handed down to the next generation as I type.”]

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Can one make a concerted effort?

[Note: This post was updated on June 10, 2020.]

Q: Can a single person make a concerted effort? The dictionaries I’ve checked say a “concerted effort” is something done collectively. But I often hear the phrase being used for an effort by one person.

A: Traditionally, “concerted” has meant done in concert—that is, jointly.

However, the adjective had an earlier meaning of organized, coordinated, or united. And since the 19th century people have used “concerted” without any collective sense to mean purposeful and determined.

The newer usage can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence. The entry for “concerted” (updated September 2015) includes this definition: “Of an effort, attempt, etc.: characterized by purpose and determination.”

Standard dictionaries, too, are now recognizing this more recent sense. So a determined effort can be described as “concerted” whether it’s made by one person or many.

Six of the ten standard American and British dictionaries we usually consult accept this use without reservation.

The definitions in American Heritage, for example, include these senses: #1, “planned or accomplished together,” and #2, “deliberate and determined.” Similarly, Lexico (formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online) includes #1, “jointly arranged or carried out,” and #2, “done with great effort or determination.”

While “concerted” is most often used to modify “effort” or “efforts,” it’s seen with other nouns too. A cursory internet search finds it paired with “movement,” “action,” “approach,” “measure,” “struggle,” and “activity,” as well as plural versions.

The earliest recorded sense of “concerted” dates from the mid-17th century and is defined in the OED as “showing coordination, organized, united.”

In the first citation, the well-organized parts of a sentence are said to have “the insinuating harmony of a well-concerted period.” From Thomas Urquhart’s Εκσκυβαλαυρον, 1652. (The Greek title means “gold from garbage,” but the book is often referred to as The Jewel).

Similar examples of this coordinated sense include “concerted Reasoning” (1659) and “concerted Falshoods” (1716).

By the late 1600s, however, people were also using “concerted” in what are now considered the traditional senses. These are defined by the OED as “united in action or purpose; working or acting in concert,” and “jointly arranged or carried out; agreed upon, prearranged; planned, coordinated.”

This is apparently the first OED example in reference to people working together: “that which opposed the sending the concerted Troops into Tuscany and making further attempts, being the disturbance which rose from the Duke of Parma.” The History of the Republick of Venice (1673), Robert Honywood’s translation from the Italian of Battista Nani.

Later OED examples that imply more than one person or force working together include “the concerted powers” (i.e., sovereigns of Europe, 1793); “a concerted scheme” (1785); “a concerted opposition” (1834); “a concerted front” (1948); “concerted attack” (1968); “concerted practices” (1999), and “a concerted group” (2009).

Finally, the more recent sense of “concerted”—determined, purposeful, strenuous—emerged in the 19th century. It can involve one person or more than one. In the dictionary’s first example, many people are involved:

“We have but to make a vigorous and concerted effort throughout the State to effect a complete overthrow of Locofocoism in Alabama.” (The Locofocos were a faction of the Democratic Party of the 1830s and ’40s.) From the Mobile Daily Advertiser, July 23, 1844.

In this OED example, from the late 19th century, a single country is involved:

“He says that Germany should make a concerted effort to have an exhibit that would photograph the magnitude of its manufacturing industries.” From the Anglo-American Times, London, Oct. 9, 1891.

And in this example, the effort is made by a single person:

“When Horace Abbott … was chairman of this committee he made a concerted effort to get some graduate schools to work out a plan for study in absentia.” From the Extension Service Review, Washington, June 1938.

As for its etymology, the OED says the adjective “concerted” was formed within English, derived partly from the verb “concert” (to work jointly; to mutually agree or arrange) and partly from the noun “concert” (agreement or harmony; a working together; a public performance).

The verb “concert” (accented, like the adjective, on the first syllable) was first recorded in 1581 and came into English through several routes. As the dictionary explains, it was borrowed partly from Spanish (concertar), partly from French (concerter), and partly from the ultimate source of them all, Latin (concertare).

The noun “concert” was first recorded in 1578, the OED says, borrowed partly from French (concert, originally an agreement, accord, or pact), and partly from Italian (concerto, a group of musicians performing together).

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A gazeeka box and a green-fedora guy

Q: I’m reading Gypsy Rose Lee’s The G-String Murders. She uses the phrase “a green-fedora guy.” Do you have any idea what that means? And if you want to tackle “gazeeka box,” that would be interesting, too. She peppers this book with quite a bit of showbiz jargon.

A: In The G-String Murders, a 1941 mystery, there are two references to green fedoras.

In describing a guy named Moey, an “ex-racketeer” who runs the concession at the burlesque house where the novel is set, the author writes:

“He wore a white wash coat when he was working, dazzling checks when the show was over. Strictly a green-fedora guy, but he gave us a ten per cent discount on our cokes, so he was popular enough backstage.”

Later in the book, Moey reappears in his street clothes (a suit with “green and yellow threads running through the material”) and begins opening a package: “He pushed his green fedora back on his head and went to work with the scissors.”

None of our slang references (not even the aptly named Green’s Dictionary of Slang) give us a clue to what a “green-fedora guy” might be.

Our guess is that the reference is literal, and Gypsy Rose Lee meant that Moey always wore a green fedora (and perhaps that his taste was a bit over the top).

Green fedoras were more common in those days—now we see them chiefly on St. Patrick’s Day.

A 1934 song called “I’m Wearin’ My Green Fedora,” by Al Sherman, Al Lewis, and Joseph Meyer, was featured in several cartoons of the 1930s.

A line from refrain: “I’M WEARIN’ MY GREEN FEDORA, FEDORA, not Alice, not Annie, Not Daisy but FEDORA.” And the finale: “That’s why I’M WEARIN’ MY GREEN FEDORA, FEDORA, FEDORA, FEDORA is the girl I love!” (Thanks to the Levy Collection at the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, for providing us with the sheet music.)

The song was a takeoff on the comic routines of Joe Penner, a popular stage, radio, and film actor of the ’30s whose trademark was a fedora perched on the back of his head.

And here’s an interesting aside. While the song appears to pun on the phrase “for Dora,” in fact the word “fedora” was originally a woman’s name. The term for the hat was inspired by a French play entitled Fédora, written by Victorien Sardou in 1882. Its heroine is a Russian princess named Fédora (the Russian feminine of Fedor), who wears a soft-brimmed hat with a crease in the crown.

When you finish The G-String Murders, you might want to check out Lady of Burlesque, a 1943 film made from it (Barbara Stanwyck is the Gypsy Rose Lee character).

You also asked about “gazeeka box,” a term that turns up many times in The G-String Murders. The gazeeka box in the novel is a coffin-like prop used in the burlesque house. (Naturally, a body is discovered in it!)

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang describes “gazeeka box” (origin unknown) as a burlesque term for “a stage prop used in comedy acts which takes the form of a large box from which beautiful girls emerge, supposedly endlessly.”

Random House’s first citation for the use of the term is from Gypsy Rose Lee’s 1941 novel. But the term is much older. It’s mentioned, for instance, in Archibald Haddon’s book Green Room Gossip (1922).

In at least one old burlesque sketch we found online, the showgirls who magically emerge from the gazeeka box are called “gazeekas.”

But gazeeka boxes, with their false backs, could also be used to make a showgirl magically disappear.

And they weren’t always coffin-like, as in Gypsy Rose Lee’s novel. They were generally upright, like phone booths.

And with that, we’ll make our exit.

[Note: This post was updated on March 5, 2015.]

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In stir on the Jersey Shore

Q: Why have I never found anybody from outside New Jersey who knows what “in stir” means? We of NJ have a soft spot for those in the slammer or merely busted, like Snooki and Ronnie on “Jersey Shore.”

A: As we’re sure you realize, New Jersey doesn’t have a monopoly on “in stir” or “in the stir.”

In fact, it doesn’t even come from New Jersey. The phrase was first recorded in England, and has been used with or without the article “the” since the late 1800s. Here’s the story.

The word “stir” has been used as a noun for a prison since the mid-19th century, according to Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang. That much we can be sure about.

The word was sometimes spelled “stur” and originated in the Romany words sturiben (a prison) and staripen (to imprison), Cassell’s says.

A 19th-century source, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant, first published in London in 1889, says “stir” comes from staripen, adding that “stardo in gypsy means ‘imprisoned.’ ”

This dictionary, edited by Albert Barrère and Charles G. Leland, calls “stir” an abbreviation of a longer slang word for a prison, spelled  “sturbin” in the US and “sturiben” in Britain.

The Oxford English Dictionary, however, seems to disagree, saying the origin of the slang term “stir” is unknown. The OED doesn’t say why it rejects the Romany origin.

But the modern verb “stir,” from the Old English verb styrian, has also had negative meanings over the years: to make a disturbance, to cause trouble, to revolt, to provoke, and so on.

Such activities could of course land a person in jail (or “in chokey,” as P. G. Wodehouse liked to say).

But those old meanings are now rare or obscure for the most part, except in the sense of “stir things up,” which isn’t always a bad thing to do.

In the journal Modern Language Notes in 1934, J. Louis Kuethe argued in favor of the Romany etymology.

“Staripen, steripen, and stiraben have all been given as spellings of the Romani word for ’prison,’ ” he writes. “When these variations are taken into account, the Gypsy origin of stir is quite acceptable phonetically.”

Since the slang term originated in the mid-19th century, Kuethe says, “it seems much more plausible that the word should have originated from a contemporary  source such as the Romani, rather than from the Old English styr which disappeared centuries ago.”

Wherever it came from, everyone agrees that the word first showed up in print in 1851.

That’s the year of the OED’s first citation, which comes from a collection of articles and interviews by Henry Mayhew entitled London Labour and the London Poor.

The quotation: “I was in Brummagem, and was seven days in the new ‘stir’ (prison).” The term “Brummagem” was a local nickname for the English city of Birmingham.

Soon, however, the phrase “in stir” (without the article) was the usual slang term for “in prison.”

This OED citation is from A Child of the Jago, Arthur Morrison’s 1896 novel about the slums of London: “A man has time to think things out, in stir.”

And as we all know, someone sitting in prison is likely to go “stir crazy,” a term the OED traces back to 1908.

[Updated May 5, 2017.]

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Bye, baby bunting

Q: I’m curious about the term “baby bunting” in this nursery rhyme: “Bye, baby bunting,  / Father’s gone a-hunting,  / Mother’s gone a-milking, / Sister’s gone a-silking, / Brother’s gone to buy a skin  / To wrap the baby bunting in.” Any idea of the origin?

A: “Bunting” has been a term of endearment since at least as far back as the 1660s. The origins of the word are unknown but it’s had a long association with plumpness, with bottoms, and with “butt” (both the noun and the verb).

In Scottish, according to the OED, the term buntin means short and thick, or plump. A similar term in Welsh, bontin, means the rump.

And in Scottish as well as in dialectal English, both “bunt” and “bun” have been used to refer to the tail of a rabbit or hare.

The verb “bunt” was used in the 1800s to mean the same as “butt” – to strike, knock, or push. (Yes, this is where the baseball term “bunt” comes from, circa 1889.)

And in a 19th-century Sussex dialect, to “bunt” was to rock a cradle with one’s foot (by pushing or “butting” it).

The adjective “bunting” has been used to mean plump, swelling, or filled out since the 1500s.

John Jamieson, in An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808-25), defined buntin as “short and thick; as a buntin brat, a plump child.”

In the phrase “baby bunting,” the Oxford English Dictionary says, “the meaning (if there be any at all) may possibly be” as in Jamieson’s definition.

At bottom, if you’ll pardon the expression, the phrase in the nursery rhyme seems to be an affectionate reference to an infant’s plumpness or to its rosy rump.

The earliest version of the nursery rhyme dates from the 1780s, and the longer version you quote has been traced to 1805.

Surprisingly, the OED has no reference to the garment known as a “bunting” – an infant’s cuddly, cocoon-like, hooded outerwear. This sense of the word dates from 1922, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

The name of the garment, according to our old Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary  (the unabridged second edition), is a reference to the “baby bunting” in the nursery rhyme.

In case you’re wondering, the noun “bunting” has been used for another kind of cloth – the open-weave kind used to make flags – as well as for a family of birds (possibly because of their plumpness.)

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Black (or African) American?

Q: I was reading an article in the New York Times that used “Black American” and “African American” interchangeably. Is there a proper time for using one term or the other?

A: In general the terms “Black American” and “African American” are synonymous.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), for example, defines “African American” as a “Black American of African ancestry.”

The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) have similar definitions.

Definitions aside, debates about the nomenclature of race are nothing new. How accurate, or appropriate, is the term “African American”? How meaningfully connected to Africa are most Black Americans anyway?

The linguist John McWhorter, for instance, has argued in The New Republic that the “African” part should be dropped. He is, he says, a Black American.

But you don’t have to look hard to find other opinions. Keith Boykin of The Daily Voice, a Black news organization, has this to say:

“I don’t care if you call yourself Negro, colored, African American or black (in lower case or upper case). … The true diversity of our people cannot be fully represented by any one term.”

We recently came across an interesting and fairly exhaustive analysis of this subject by Tom W. Smith, whose article “Changing Racial Labels: From ‘Colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ to ‘African American’ ” ran in The Public Opinion Quarterly in 1992.

Smith (who, by the way, capitalizes all racial terms throughout his article) sets out to discuss “changes in the acceptance of various labels, not the creation of new terms.”

He notes that “colored,” “Negro,” “Black,” and “African” were all “established English terms for Blacks when America was first settled. ‘African American’ was in use at least as early as the late 1700s.”

The dominant label in the mid- to late-19th century, he writes, was “colored,” which was accepted by both Whites and Blacks. But “colored” was too inclusive, because it covered “not only Blacks but Asians and other non-White races.”

Consequently “Negro” began to replace “colored” as the favored term in the late 19th century, in a movement that Smith says was “led by such influential Black leaders as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.”

By the 1930s, he says, “Negro” had supplanted “colored,” which had begun to seem antiquated.

“But as the civil rights movement began making tangible progress in the late 1950s and early 1960s,” Smith writes, “the term ‘Negro’ itself eventually fell under attack.”

Thus “Black,” like “Negro” before it, according to Smith, was seen as “forward-looking” and “progressive,” besides appearing to promote “racial pride, militancy, power, and rejection of the status quo.”

So “Black” became ascendant in the 1970s, though it briefly competed with “Afro-American,” which was popular among academics.

But for the most part, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, “the position of ‘Black’ was virtually unchallenged,” Smith writes.

This all changed in December 1988, when the National Urban Coalition proposed that “African American” replace “Black” as the preferred term.

The goal “was to give Blacks a cultural identification with their heritage and ancestral homeland,” Smith writes.

“Furthermore,” he says, “it was seen as putting Blacks on a parallel with White ethnic groups.” By using a term based on culture and homeland, Blacks were redefined “as an ethnic group rather than a race.”

This distinction – race versus ethnic group – is important, because “racial differences are viewed as genetically based and thus as beyond the ability of society to change,” Smith writes.

“Racial prejudice and discrimination have greatly exceeded ethnic intolerance,” he adds. “On balance, America has a better record of accepting and fairly treating ethnic groups than it does racial groups.”

Smith also touches on the criticisms of the “African American” label, which many people feel “calls for identification with a culture to which almost no actual ties exist.”

In addition, the term “has the classic ‘hyphenated American’ problem.” Whether or not there’s an actual hyphen, he notes, ethnic compounds like “German-American” sometimes have been “regarded as symbolizing divided loyalties.”

Smith, who was writing in 1992, says that “among those with a preference, ‘African American’ has grown in acceptance although ‘Black’ still is preferred by more Blacks.”

A usage note in American Heritage (the fourth edition was published in 2000) points out that “African American,” despite its popularity, “has shown little sign of displacing or discrediting black, which remains both popular and positive.”

[Update, Sept. 5, 2021: American Heritage dropped the usage note from later editions. “African American” is now overwhelmingly more popular than “Black American,” according to our searches of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the News on the Web corpus, a database of articles from online newspapers and magazines. Furthermore, the capitalization of “Black” has now become widely established.]

Does  any of this really matter? Smith quotes DuBois as saying: “The feeling of inferiority is in you, not in a name. The name merely evokes what is already there. Exorcise the hateful complex and no name can ever make you hang your head.”

“Yet names do matter,” Smith says. “Blacks have successively changed their preferred term of address from ‘Colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ and now, perhaps, to ‘African American’ in order to assert their group standing and aid in their struggle for racial equality.”

“While symbolic, these changes have not been inconsequential,” he adds. “For symbols are part and parcel of reality itself.”

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Is she a master or a mistress?

Q: Isn’t “mistress of ceremonies” misleading or just plain wrong? If a woman is hosting an event, isn’t she still a “master of ceremonies”?

A: No, “mistress of ceremonies” is not misleading or wrong. But it’s not strictly necessary, since there’s no rule that says a “master of ceremonies” has to be a guy.

The three dictionaries I consult the most—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and the Oxford English Dictionary—all define “master of ceremonies” as a person who hosts an event. That’s “a person,” not necessarily a man.

The OED says the word “master” was “originally applied almost exclusively to men,” but “its meaning has been extended to include women (either potentially or in fact) in many of the senses illustrated.”

American Heritage, in a usage note with its entry for “master,” cites many compounds that use the word in a gender-neutral way: “masterpiece,” “mastermind,” “master plan,” and so on.

Although the term “mistress of ceremonies” isn’t uncommon (I got about 350,000 hits for it on Google), only one of the three dictionaries mentioned above has an entry for it.

Merriam-Webster’s defines “mistress of ceremonies” as a woman who presides at a public ceremony or entertainment, and it  dates the phrase to 1952.

However, the expression is much older—it was alive and well in the early 1800s. For instance, Sir Walter Scott used it in his novel Rob Roy (1817): “ ‘In that case, sir,’ she rejoined, ‘as my kinsman’s politeness seems to be still slumbering, you will permit me (though I suppose it is highly improper) to stand mistress of ceremonies.’ ”

A search of digital databases turns up slightly later examples from the 1820s. On May 20, 1823, the Rev. Charles S. Stewart, an American missionary to the Sandwich Islands, used the phrase in a diary entry  describing a “great feast” conducted annually to commemorate the death of King Tameamea:

“Kamehamaru appeared to remarkable advantage, as mistress of ceremonies; and, personally, saw that no one of the large company was, in any degree, neglected.” (Extracts from Stewart’s private diaries were printed in the May 1825 issue of the Christian Advocate,  a journal of the Presbyterian church.)

And both “mistress of ceremonies” and “mistresses of ceremonies” appear several times in  Henry Dana Ward’s book Free Masonry (1828). Here’s one example, from a  passage describing a ceremony in a Masonic temple: “The mistress of ceremonies allowed to enter only the number necessary to fill the empty places.”

So the expression has a venerable history. Its older brother, “master of ceremonies” (originally “master of the ceremonies”), first showed up in print in the early 17th century, according to the OED.

Initially it referred to “an officer of the British royal household who superintended state ceremonies and was responsible for the enforcement of court etiquette,” Oxford says.

An early citation for the expression used in its modern sense comes from Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (written around 1798-99): “The master of the ceremonies introduced to her a very gentlemanlike young man as a partner.”

[Note: This post was updated on Jan. 1, 2015.]

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In search of the wild kudo

[NOTE: This post was updated on Aug. 25, 2020.]

Q: What is the source of the word “kudos”? Is there such a thing as a “kudo” in the wild?

A: The word “kudo” arose as a mistake, and the majority opinion is that it’s still a mistake.

The correct word, “kudos,” is a singular noun and takes a singular verb, say most usage guides, including the new fourth edition of Pat’s book Woe Is I. “Show me one kudo and I’ll eat it,” she says.

That’s the short answer, the one to follow when your English should be at its best. But English is a living language, and the singular “kudo” and the plural “kudos” are out there kicking up their heels, never mind the word mavens.

Where did “kudo” come from? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s a back formation resulting from the erroneous belief that “kudos” is plural. (A back formation is a word formed by dropping a real or imagined part from another word.)

Pronunciation may have played a part here. Originally “kudos”—like its singular Greek cousins “chaos,” “pathos,” and “bathos”—was pronounced as if the second syllable were “-oss” (rhymes with “loss”). A later pronunciation, “-oze” (rhymes with “doze”), probably influenced the perception that the word was a plural.

Now for some etymology. “Kudos” comes from the ancient Greek word κῦδος (kydos), a singular noun meaning praise or renown. And it was a relative latecomer to English.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says the Greek term “was dragged into English as British university slang in the 19th century.” The first published reference for “kudos” in the OED dates from 1831, when it meant glory or fame.

Although “kudos” was officially singular, it was often used in a general way without a direct or indirect article, which may have blurred its sense of singularity.

In a typical early citation in the OED, for instance, Charles Darwin writes in an 1859 letter that the geologist Charles Lyell read about half the manuscript of On the Origin of Species “and gives me very great kudos.”

In its earliest uses, according to Merriam-Webster’s, “kudos” referred to the prestige or glory of having done something noteworthy. But by the 1920s, it had developed a second sense, praise for an accomplishment.

And it was during the ’20s, the usage guide says, that “the ‘praise’ sense of kudos came to be understood as a plural count noun, much like awards or honors. Time magazine, according to M-W, may have helped popularize the usage.

Here’s a 1927 example from Time that suggests plurality: “They were the recipients of honorary degrees—kudos conferred because of their wealth, position, or service to humanity.”

And the usage guide also cites a 1941 citation from the magazine that’s clearly plural: “There is no other weekly newspaper which in one short year has achieved so many kudos.”

Once “kudos” was seen in Time and other publications as a plural, M-W’s usage guide says, “it was inevitable that somebody would prune the s from the end and create a singular.”

The OED’s earliest sighting of “kudo” shorn of its “s” dates from a book of slang: “Kudo, good standing with the management” (Jack Smiley’s Hash House Lingo, 1941).

Oxford also cites a 1950 letter from Fred Allen to Groucho Marx, in which Allen hyperbolically describes approval for a TV show expressed by customers at the Stage Delicatessen in New York: “A man sitting on a toilet bowl swung open the men’s room door and added his kudo to the acclaim.”

Merriam-Webster’s includes quite a few examples of the singular “kudo” and the plural use of “kudos.” Here are a couple from mainstream publications:

Saturday Review (1971): “All these kudos spread around the country.”

Women’s Wear Daily (1978): “She added a kudo for HUD’s Patricia Harris.”

OK, the singular “kudo” and the plural use of “kudos” are the result of mistakes. But a lot of legitimate words began life in error. Are “kudo” and “kudos” becoming legit as they spread like kudzu?

Merriam-Webster’s thinks so—sort of. The usage guides says the two usages “are by now well established,” though “they have not yet penetrated the highest range of scholarly writing or literature.”

Other usage commentators aren’t so open minded. In its entry for “kudos,” Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4th ed.) says that “in standard usage it has no plural nor is it used with the indefinite article a.”

Jeremy Butterfield, editor of Fowler’s, says “the final -s is sometimes misinterpreted as marking a plural.” But “kudo as a singular,” he writes, is not “desirable or elegant.”

“No other word of Greek origin,” Butterfield adds, “has suffered such an undignified fate.”

Lexicographers are also skeptical for the most part. Of the ten standard dictionaries we usually consul, only three (two of them published by the same company) accept the singular “kudo.”

Reflecting the majority opinion is Lexico (the former Oxford Dictionaries online), which says this in its entry for “kudos”:

“Despite appearances, it is not a plural form. This means that there is no singular form kudo and that the use of kudos as a plural … is incorrect.” Lexico provides an incorrect example (“he received many kudos”) and a corrected one (“he received much kudos”).

The three that accept the singular word “kudo” and the plural use of “kudos” are Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster Unabrided, and Dictionary.com (which is based on the former Random House Unabridged).

Dictionary.com, for instance, accepts word in two senses: (1) meaning “honor; glory; acclaim,” as in “No greater kudo could have been bestowed”; and (2) meaning “a statement of praise or approval; accolade; compliment,” as in “one kudo after another.”

For now, we still don’t recommend the usage.

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Is there a cat in the corner?

Q: What is the origin of the expression “catty-corner” and does it have anything to do with cats?

A: The phrase, originally seen as “catty-cornered” or “cater-cornered” in 19th-century America, has no relationship at all to cats.

Although the “catty” version appeared first in print, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, the “cater” version is closer to the phrase’s etymological roots.

The OED traces both of them back to a 16th-century verb, “cater,” meaning “to place or set rhomboidally; to cut, move, go, etc., diagonally.” So to move in a “cater-cornered” way is to go diagonally from corner to corner.

The English verb came from the French quatre (four). Since the early 1500s, the word “cater” has also meant the number four in games of dice or cards, though this usage is not common today.

The dictionary’s first citation for the verb “cater” is from Barnaby Googe’s 1577 translation of Conrad Heresbach’s Foure Bookes of Husbandry: “The trees are set checkerwise, and so catred, as looke which way ye wyl, they lye leuel [level].”

And this OED citation,  written four centuries later, describes the motion of a wagon at a level railroad crossing: “ ‘Cater’ across the rails ever so cleverly, you cannot escape jolt and jar” (from an 1873 travel memoir, Silverland, by the British writer George Alfred Lawrence).

As for “catty-cornered,” the phrase has been spelled a number of ways over the years: “catacornered,” “katterkorner’d,” “cat-a-cornered,” etc. Since the early 20th century, it has often been seen without the “-ed” ending.

John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945) has two examples in one sentence: “Lee Chongs’s grocery was on its catty-corner right and Dora’s Bear Flag Restaurant was on its catty-corner left.”

The feline-sounding version of the expression probably began with a mispronunciation of the relatively rare word “cater.” Through a process that language types call folk etymology, a cat ended up in the corner.

Both “cater-corner” and “catty-corner” are still used today and can be found in contemporary dictionaries. But a latecomer, “kitty-corner,” which first showed up at the end of the 19th century, is the most popular one these days, according to Google.

And in some versions, the “corner” element disappears, as in the mid-19th-century “catawampous” or “catawampus.” The OED calls  this “a humorous formation” that meant not only ferocious (perhaps derived from “catamount,” the mountain lion) but also askew or awry.

Slang dictionaries also have the spelling “catter-wompus” (1851) for the askew or diagonal sense of the word, followed by “cattywampus” in the first decade of the 1900s.

And naturally there’s a “kitty” version too. The Dictionary of American Regional English has examples of “kittywampus” dating from the 1940s.

[Note: This post was updated on March 22, 2020.]

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Sympathy strike

Q: An FAQ on Dictionary.com says “sympathy” is compassion for another person while “empathy” is imagining oneself in another person’s position. That’s backward from how I understand the two words. Who’s right?

A: Sorry to disappoint you, but we’re with Dictionary.com here. The new third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage nicely differentiates the two terms, so we’ll pass along the definitions:

“Empathy is the ability to imagine oneself in another person’s position and to experience all the sensations connected with it. Sympathy is compassion for or commiseration with another.”

“Sympathy,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, entered English from Late Latin (sympathia), but comes ultimately from the classical Greek συμπάθεια (sympatheia), or “fellow feeling.” The roots literally mean “together” + “feeling.”

The word was first recorded in English in the mid-16th century, and its earliest meanings had to do with affinity, conformity, harmony, and the like. It came to mean feelings of compassion or commiseration in 1600, the OED citations suggest.

The noun has cousins in French (sympathie), Italian (simpatia), Spanish (simpatia), and Portuguese (sympathia).

“Empathy” is the English version of a German word, einfühlung (“in” + “feeling”), which the Germans adapted in 1903 from the Hellenistic Greek word for “passion” or “physical affection,” ἐμπάθεια (empatheia), also literally “in” + “feeling.” (In modern Greek, the word has the opposite meaning—hatred, malice, and so on.)

The OED defines “empathy,” which entered English in 1909, as “the power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.”

In the 1940s the word acquired a meaning in the field of psychology, the OED says: “The ability to understand and appreciate another person’s feelings, experience, etc.”

The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English gives these examples of the two words at work: (1) “I have a lot of sympathy for her; she had to bring up the children on her own.” (2) “She had great empathy with people.”

Again, sorry to disappoint you. We sympathize with you over the disappointment, and we empathize with what you’re feeling.

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Vice isn’t nice!

Q: At my place of employment, management has circulated a memo requiring employees to use the word “vice” instead of “versus.” So a company document might read: “Consider performing maintenance vice replacing the faulty part.” I would appreciate any insight you can provide.

A: Your bosses are recommending a term that’s not common, except perhaps in the military. This is the use of the preposition “vice,” a Latin borrowing, to mean “instead of” or “in place of.” 

(Think of the related term “vice versa,” which is also from Latin and means “conversely,” or “in reversed order.”)

This “vice” can be pronounced as one syllable (rhyming with “nice”) or as two (VYE-see), according to standard dictionaries.

A Google search finds that your bosses aren’t alone in using “vice” instead of “versus,” though this is certainly not common in ordinary English. These days, the “instead of” sense of the word is more common in prefixes and adjectival nouns in titles.

For example, we use it (pronounced as a single syllable) in terms like “vice president” and “vice consul,” where it means someone who represents or serves in place of a superior. A  “viceroy,” to use another example, rules a province or country as the representative of his sovereign.

The preposition “vice” as used by your bosses first showed up in written English in a military usage in the 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s the OED citation: “6th reg. of foot: Capt. Mathew Derenzy to be Major, vice John Forrest; by purchase.” (From a 1770 issue of the Scots Magazine.)

[Note: The military use is still alive. Two readers of the blog report that “vice” is used for “in place of” in armed-forces documents.]

Later OED citations include uses in sports, diplomacy, and music. Here’s one from a book Pat is currently reading:

“He was gardener and out-door man, vice Upton, resigned.” (From William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Pendennis, 1849.) 

As a noun, of course, “vice” can mean a lot of nasty things: depravity, corruption, evil, and so on. The OED says the noun, first recorded in English in 1297, is from a different Latin source: vitium (“fault, defect, failing, etc.”).  

But getting back to your company’s memo, we see nothing wrong with “versus,” a preposition meaning “against” that’s been in steady since the 15th century. Like the prepositional “vice” and its derivatives, “versus” is from Latin, in which it means “against.”

As you’re probably aware, “versus” may have inspired a popular colloquial usage: the word “verse” as a verb meaning to compete against. We recently wrote on the blog about  this use of “verse.”

[Note: This post was updated on Oct. 13, 2016.]

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Bigger than the both of us

Q: I pricked up my ears when I heard Pat say “the both of us” on WNYC. I have always thought that one says either “the two of us” or “both of us.” I grew up in Norway and was taught British English. I also had an English grandmother who would never have said “the both of us.” Please let me know your thoughts.

A: “The both of” is an extremely common idiom, especially in the United States. But it’s not unheard-of in Britain and Ireland.

When the usage showed up in the mid-19th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first two examples were from Irish writers

In fact, the phrase “the both” was first used to mean “the two” in the 1500s, according to the OED, though the usage is now considered colloquial or regional.

Speakers in Ireland (and, in some of the following cases, Wales and elsewhere) often insert the definite article (“the”) in contexts where it’s not commonly found in standard British English.

Examples: “the both of” … “the half of” … “the whooping cough [mumps, etc.]” … “in the hospital” … “the cold [heat, etc.]” … “on the bus [plane, etc.]” instead of “by bus [plane, etc.]” … “in the summer [winter, etc.],” and others.

Some of these are also found in certain dialects in England as well. This information comes from The Grammar of Irish English, by Markku Filppula.

Americans are familiar with every one of these constructions. We commonly say “the both of us” (especially in the expression “bigger than the both of us”), “you don’t know the half of it,” “he has the measles [flu, etc.],” “she’s in the hospital,” “he can’t take the cold [heat, etc.],” “we go there in the summer.”

The use of the definite article is a complex subject, and in practice very idiomatic. Of the above-mentioned uses, only “the both” and “the half” would not be appropriate in formal written English in the US, though they’re acceptable in speech and informal writing. All the rest are considered standard in American English.

(We’ve revised our opinion on this use of “the half” and now consider it standard English. We discuss our change of heart in an April 21, 2011, posting on the blog.)

As for the usage experts, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage isn’t worried about “the both of us [you, etc.].” The conclusion: “There is no reason you should avoid it if it is your normal idiom.”

The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage includes some British examples: “In spoken English, the use of both preceded by the is not uncommon: Good Morning from the both of us – BBC Radio 4, 1977. It is more frequently encountered in regional speech, as, for example, the both of you heard on The Archers (BBC Radio 4, 1976). The both should not be used in formal prose.”

If you’re interested in reading more, a blog item a while back on UK-vs.-US English touches on the subject of the use (or non-use) of articles .

Was it OK for Pat to use “the both of us” on the air? Well, she does misspeak once in a while during her impromptu exchanges in the broadcast booth. But not in this case.

There’s nothing wrong with using this idiomatic expression in conversation, even on public radio. However, we wouldn’t use it in formal writing.

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On heroes, edible and otherwise

Q: Am I wrong to be irritated at the overuse of the term “hero”? I think of a hero as someone who does something heroic – say, running into a burning building to rescue a child. Instead, I’ve seen newspapers call Super Bowl champions “heroes.” If we cheapen the term, what do we use for true heroism?

A: We think you’re right. In fact, here’s what Pat says on the subject in her grammar and usage book Woe Is I:

“hero. There was a time when this word was reserved for people who were … well … heroic. People who performed great acts of physical, moral, or spiritual courage, often risking their lives or livelihoods. But lately, hero has lost its luster. It’s applied indiscriminately to professional athletes, lottery winners, and kids who clean up at spelling bees. There’s no other word quite like hero, so let’s not bestow it too freely. It would be a pity to lose it. Sergeant York was a hero.”

[Note: This passage was updated to reflect the entry in the 4th edition of Woe Is I, published in 2019.]

So here we’re on your side, though we suspect it’s the losing side.

We might add, however, that the word “hero” has long been used to describe heroic acts that aren’t quite as dramatic as running into a burning building to rescue a child. Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing, or standing up for what you believe in, can also be heroic.

In Homer’s day, the Greek word heros referred to a man “of superhuman strength, courage, ability favoured by the gods,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word had that sense when it entered English in the 14th century, but by the 16th century it came to mean an illustrious warrior, one who does brave or noble martial deeds.

In the mid-17th century, however, the term was already being used more loosely to describe not only a brave warrior but a man who exhibits firmness, fortitude, or greatness of soul “in any course of action, or in connexion with any pursuit, work, or enterprise,” according to the OED.

A 1661 citation, for example, refers to Galileo and other astronomers as “illustrious Heroes.”

More recently, of course, the usage has become even looser. A 1955 citation refers to “an Italian hero sandwich,” which the OED describes as “U.S. slang, a very large sandwich.” Some might consider eating one a heroic act.

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