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Mastheads, afloat and in print

Q: I was reading The Egoist, George Meredith’s 1879 novel, the other day when I came upon a passage that imagines a sailor “blown from the masthead in a gale.” Am I right in assuming that the nautical “masthead” gave us its periodical sense?

A: Yes, it’s likely that the “masthead” on a ship inspired the “masthead” in a newspaper or magazine, though we haven’t found an authoritative source to confirm this.

The terms are clearly related. Both are derived from “mast” and “head,” two old words with roots in Anglo-Saxon times. And an early masthead from the 19th-century American journal Gleason’s Weekly features an image of a sailing ship.

However, the word “head” had been used figuratively for hundreds to years to refer to the top of a page when the term “masthead” first appeared in its journalistic sense in the 1800s.

Both “mast” (spelled mæst) and “head” (spelled heafdu, heafod, or heafde,) showed up early Old English, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

King Alfred uses both terms in his Old English translation of the Roman philosopher Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiæ (circa 888).

The term “mast” originally meant pretty much what it means now: an upright pole to support the sails of a sailing ship. And “head” originally had the principal meaning it has today: the upper part of a human or animal body.

In the 1500s, the word “head” took on a new sense: the top of a page or the title at the top of a page. The OED’s earliest citation for this usage is from the Geneva Bible of 1560:

“We haue set ouer the head of euery page some notable worde or sentence which may greatly further aswel for memorie, as for the chief point of the page.”

The combined term “masthead” showed up in the late 1400s in the nautical sense, meaning the top of a mast. The OED says it usually referred to a place for observation or flying a flag, though it was once a place for punishment.

The earliest citation for “masthead” in the OED is from a 1495 entry in the naval accounts and inventories of King Henry VII: “A parell for the mayne Toppe maste ffeble j Garlandes of yron abought the mast hede j.”

The word took on a journalistic sense in the early 1800s, when it referred to “the title, motto, or similar device, of a newspaper or journal, printed in a conspicuous place, usually at the top of the first page or front cover,” according to the dictionary.

The first Oxford citation for the usage is from the Dec. 22, 1838, issue of the Hennepin (Illinois) Journal: “Many of our Whig friends … were anxious that the Journal should … carry Whig colors at the mast-head.

In the early 1900s, according to OED citations, the word took on a new journalistic sense: “a section in a newspaper or journal (usually on the editorial page or next to the table of contents) giving information relating to the publication, such as the owner’s name, a list of the editors, etc.”

The dictionary’s first example for this usage is from a 1934 entry in Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition:

Masthead, the matter printed in every issue of a newspaper or journal, stating the title, ownership, and management, subscription and advertising rates, etc.”

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Tosser & Twee LLP

Q: American here;  I am never sure that I understand the source, meaning, and cultural nuances of British vernacular, most recently the gist of two words, “tosser” and “twee.” Where are they on the incendiary scale?

A: “Tosser” and “twee”—sounds like a UK law firm. Well, both of these British terms are derisive, but to varying degrees.

The slang noun “tosser,” dating from the 1970s, is pretty high on the incendiary scale. It’s defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a term of contempt or abuse for a person; a ‘jerk.’ ” (A “jerk-off” is closer to its etymological roots.)

The colloquial adjective “twee,” dating from the early 1900s, isn’t nearly as insulting. British speakers use it the way Americans use “precious” in its negative sense of overly nice or affected.

“Tosser,” the OED says, is probably derived from the verbal phrase “toss off,” meaning to masturbate. This phrase can be transitive (as in “he tossed himself off”) or intransitive (“he tossed off”).

The OED’s earliest recorded use of this phrase is from a poem in The Pearl, a journal of Victorian erotica that was briefly published in 1879 and ’80: “I don’t like to see, though at me you might scoff, / An old woman trying to toss herself off.”

Oxford also describes an earlier noun usage, in which “toss-off” was “coarse slang” for “an act of masturbation.” This usage was recorded as far back as 1735 in The Rake’s Progress etchings of Hogarth: “And take a Toss-off in the Porch.”

Suffice it to say that the underlying sense of “tosser,” a term first used in the 1970s, is masturbator—or, to use a slightly earlier British vernacular term, “wanker.” (On the source of the mid-20th-century verb “wank,” the OED has only “origin unknown.”)

But despite its underlying sense, “tosser” is generally (though not always) used loosely to mean, as the Collins English Dictionary says, “a stupid or despicable person.” 

The OED’s earliest published example is from a 1977 issue of the British music magazine ZigZag: “She came on in a big mac and flashed her legs like an old tosser before throwing it off.”

This milder example is from the British mystery writer Peter Inchbald’s novel Short Break in Venice (1983): “Poor little tosser. As if he wasn’t suffering enough already.”

As for “twee,” it represents “an infantile pronunciation of sweet,” the OED says. And originally “twee” simply meant “sweet,” as in this 1905 example from Punch: “ ‘I call him perfectly twee!’ persisted Phyllis.”

But today, Oxford says, the adjective is seen “only in depreciatory use,” and means “affectedly dainty or quaint; over-nice, over-refined, precious, mawkish.”

Standard dictionaries agree.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), defines “twee” as chiefly British and meaning “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.”

The Macmillan Dictionary puts it this way: “something that is twee is intended to be attractive but seems too perfect to be real.”

The OED gives this example from a 1983 issue of a former BBC publication, the Listener: “Mike Nichols’s thriller-fantasy about dolphins should be as nauseatingly twee as the worst Disney—but it isn’t.”

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Pardon my French, revisited

Q: Have you ever looked into “pardon my French”? I think it would make an interesting, and perhaps titillating, item for the blog.

A: As a matter of fact, we ran a post about “pardon my French” back in 2008, but we think it’s time for an update.

Robert A. Simon, a novelist, librettist, and New Yorker critic, seems to have been the first person to use “pardon my French” in writing to excuse swearing or other questionable language.

The earliest example of the usage we’ve found in a search of Google Books is from Simon’s 1923 novel Our Little Girl:

“ ‘Hell, you don’t want anybody to impress you!’

“Mrs. Loamford stiffened. Harper noted the reaction.

“ ‘Pardon my French, Mrs. Loamford,’ he apologized.”

However, similar expressions have been used since the mid-1800s, soon after English speakers began using the term “French” euphemistically for bad language, according to written examples in the OED.

We’ve found even earlier examples of “pardon my French” used literally to excuse the use of a French expression in conversation, either because the listener might not understand or because the usage might be taken as pretentious.

Here’s an example from Randolph, an 1823 novel by John Neal: “I do not believe that I am yet ‘une fille perdue!’ Pardon my French. You know that I am not very ostentatious of such things.”

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary of “French” used for bad language is from Adventures in New Zealand, an 1845 book by Edward Wakefield: “The enraged headsman spares no ‘bad French’ in explaining his motives.”

The dictionary’s first citation for an expression similar to “pardon my French” used to excuse questionable language is from Marian Rooke, an 1865 novel by Henry Sedley: “Excuse my French.”

The latest Oxford example uses “pardon my French” to excuse an attack on another kind of bad English—academese.

In the May 12, 2005, issue of the New York Times Book Review, a book is described as “a welcome change from theory-infected academic discourse, pardon my French.”

The adjective “French,” of course, has been used in a negative way in English for hundreds of years.

A 1503 citation in the OED, for instance, refers to venereal disease as the “Frenche pox.” The French, naturally, referred to it as the mal des Anglais. Touché!

And “French” has been used since the mid-18th century to describe racy novels and pictures. As an example, here’s an excerpt from Robert Browning’s Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister (1842):

Or, my scrofulous French novel
On gray paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe.

Belial was the personification of evil in the Old Testament and a fallen angel in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

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Thready or not

Q: Having a grammar insurrection in a non-grammar thread on the Lost Des Moines Facebook site. Hence a question about etymology. How did “thread” come to be used in this way?

A: The word “thread” has been used this way in writing since the 1980s, according examples in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says this use of “thread” means “a linked sequence of posts or messages relating to the same subject on a newsgroup or (now more usually) an Internet forum.”

The earliest examples in the dictionary are, naturally, from newsgroup postings.

The first appeared on May 30, 1984, in a Usenet group, net.news, under the heading “Beta Testers for Readnews Replacem. Wanted.” The relevant sentence reads:

“When following subject threads, the next article with the same subject is located while the last page of the previous article is being read.”

Later that same year, a second example appeared in another Usenet group, fa.info-mac, under the heading “Re: Macintosh Devel. Techniques.”

The message, posted on Dec. 4, 1984, reads: “This would be a very interesting thread for experienced Mac programmers on info-mac.”

The term was so useful that it was bound to catch on. Here’s another example from the OED: “A self-described ‘overpackaholic’ started a thread in the Travel Forum.” (From CompuServe Magazine, 1994.)

We should note that “thread” had an earlier and much more technical meaning in the terminology of computer programming.

The OED says this sense of the word, which dates to the early 1970s, means “a programming structure or sequence of operations formed by linking a number of separate elements or subroutines; esp. each of the parts of a program executed concurrently in multithreading.” (Got that?)

Here’s the dictionary’s earliest example, from Proceedings of the First European Seminar on Computing With Real-Time Systems (1972):

“The present research is aimed at investigating the costs of using a common program for different machines, and this leads to the concept of ‘single-thread programming.’ ”

The less technical sense of “thread”—a linked series of messages on the same subject—is just the latest figurative use of an extremely old noun.

“Thread” came from old Germanic sources and was first recorded around the year 725 in a Latin-Old English glossary.

Nearly 1,300 years later, its literal meaning remains basically unchanged—a fine cord of fibers of some material spun or twisted together.

Figurative usages have abounded over the centuries, Oxford says, with “thread” used metaphorically to mean “something figured as being spun or continuously drawn out like a thread.”

The figurative spinning out can refer to the course of a life, a conversation or argument, one’s thoughts, a persistent or recurring theme, and so on.

Finally, on a less poetic note, “threads” has been American slang for “clothes” since the Roaring Twenties.

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A senior moment

Q: When did “seniors” take over the playing field as a replacement for “the elderly” or “the aging” or “retirees”? And why? Can’t stand that usage. Never have, even during my working years. Seems condescending when it isn’t applied to students.

A: The noun “senior” was used to mean an old person or an elder long before it was applied to students. In fact, this was the original sense of the word, but 600 years ago it didn’t have quite as broad a meaning as it has today. 

Back in the Middle Ages, when “senior” was first recorded in writing, it was a noun meaning an elderly person of a particular kind—someone who was not merely aged, but respected or venerated for that reason.

The noun’s original sense, the Oxford English Dictionary says, was “one superior or worthy of deference and reverence by reason of age; one having pre-eminence in dignity by priority of election, appointment, etc.”

The term, according to OED citations, first appeared in writing in the works of the 14th-century theologian and philosopher John Wycliffe. In a religious tract from around 1380, Wycliffe used “seniours” to mean church elders.

We found a few examples that are more secular. In his Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden wrote: “Arriv’d, he first enquir’d the founder’s name / Of this new colony; and whence he came. / Then thus a senior of the place replies.”

Another poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, used the term in a similar way in his Threnody (1842-44): “Each village senior paused to scan, / And speak the lovely caravan.”

But it appears that “senior” wasn’t used much as a general noun for any elderly person until fairly recently. Our guess is that the wider usage has become popular because of the ubiquitous “senior citizen,” a euphemism born in pre-World War II America.

Oxford’s first citation for “senior citizen” is from a 1938 issue of Time magazine: “Mr. Downey had an inspiration to do something on behalf of what he calls, for campaign purposes, ‘our senior citizens.’ ”

As the OED says, this “term for an elderly person, esp. one who is past the age of retirement,” is frequently used “in official communications and by the media as a euphemism for ‘old-age pensioner.’ ”

(Speaking of euphemisms for the elderly, Pat recalls that back in the 1970s the phrase “super adult” made a brief appearance. Mercifully, it passed away, except in reference to porn movies and disposable diapers.)

Though “senior citizen” originated in the US, it’s established in the UK as well. The examples in the OED include several from British books and periodicals of the 1960s and ’70s.

We can only speculate that, as we said above, the popularity of “senior citizen” may have revived the old use of “senior,” but in a wider sense.

On the other hand, the current use of “senior” as a noun for anyone who’s elderly could be regarded merely as short for “senior citizen.”

We were about to close this post when we remembered that we hadn’t discussed the academic use of the noun “senior.”

(We may have had a “senior moment,” which the OED defines as a humorous colloquialism dating from the mid-1990s and meaning “an instance or short period of forgetfulness or confusion, such as might be experienced by an elderly person.”)

Anyway, the noun “senior” was first used in the early 17th century to mean an upper-level student. Today’s definition, according to the OED, is “one of the more advanced students” or, in American usage, a fourth-year student.

Appropriately, Oxford’s earliest example of this usage is from a schoolmaster. In his book Ludus Literarius; or, The Grammar Schoole (1612), John Brinsley wrote: “That the two or fowre Seniors in each fourme, be as Vshers in that fourme.”

The OED also cites an American example from The Customs of Harvard College, a 1741 manuscript copy of rules for new students. “No Freshman shall be saucy to his Senior.”

By the way, this amusing manuscript was eventually printed as part of A Collection of College Words and Customs, an 1851 book by Benjamin H. Hall. If you have any spare time, the manuscript makes fascinating reading.

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Highest minded

Q: I have a question about this statement: “He’s a bigot of the highest order.” The meaning here is that he’s the worst type of bigot. Shouldn’t the superlative be “lowest”?

A: The phrase “of the highest order” doesn’t always mean “the best of its kind.” It can also mean “the worst of its kind.” The expression can be used to characterize something that’s excessively or surpassingly bad.

For instance, the phrase is emphatically negative in these recent examples from news websites:

“political malpractice of the highest order” (Washington Post);

“a prickly misfit of the highest order” (New York Times Book Review);

“schemers of the highest order” (Huffington Post);

“a brain explosion of the highest order” (Sidney Morning Herald);

“stupidity of the highest order” (Britain’s Daily Mail);

“a mummy’s boy of the highest order” (the Guardian);

“hypocrisy of the highest order” (the Australian);

“stalemate of the highest order” (NBCSports.com).

Journalists aren’t alone in using the expression this way. Other writers on the Web have described instances of “treason,” “betrayal,” “disgrace,” “arrogance,” “self-abuse,” “tomfoolery,” “insecurity,” “problems,” and “deceit” as being “of the highest order.”

The word “highest” here is an adjective of degree rather than of quality, so it can apply to traits that are highly positive or negative. Think of the phrases “of the highest magnitude” and “to the nth degree,” which can be used with descriptions either good or bad. 

The Macmillan Dictionary defines “of a high/the highest order” as meaning “of the best or worst type,” and gives examples of both: “The job calls for problem-solving skills of a high order. … It was economic lunacy of the highest order.”

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t specifically discuss “of the highest order,” though a search of its files turns up several uses of the phrase.

Here’s a negative example, from Warren St. John’s book Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer (2004): “Finebaum has been a relentless badgerer of Mike Dubose, a man he has adjudged an incompetent of the highest order.”

This expression resembles another that’s used for comparisons—“of the first water,” a phrase that originated in the jewelry trade.

In the early 17th century, when the phrase was first recorded, gems of the finest transparency and luster were described as being “of the first water,” the OED says.

“The three highest grades of quality in diamonds were formerly known as the first water, second water, and third water,” the OED explains. This use of “water” in the sense of luster or splendor may have come from Arabic, Oxford notes.

In the late 18th century, people began using “of the first (or finest, purest, rarest) water” in a figurative sense.

Originally, these figurative usages were positive, since the implied comparison was to a fine jewel, but by the early 19th century, negative uses also crept in.

Today, as Oxford says, the expression is used “following a personal designation (often of reproach) with the sense ‘out-and-out,’ ‘thorough-paced.’” 

The dictionary quotes this out-and-out condemnation from an 1826 entry in Sir Walter Scott’s journal: “He was a … swindler of the first water.”

It also cites this one from William B. Boulton’s Thomas Gainsborough (1905), a biography of the painter: “He … assumed the airs of a beau and lady-killer of the first water.”

No, the reference isn’t to Gainsborough, but to his landlord, John Astley, who by all accounts was a womanizer, a fortune-hunter, and a rogue of the highest order.

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How fast is Godspeed?

Q: When Phil Everly died the other day, Nancy Sinatra tweeted, “I love you Phillip–Godspeed.” I’ve always assumed “Godspeed” is short for something like “May God speed you on your way.” But why speed? Why the hurry?

A: The “speed” in “Godspeed” has nothing to do with quickness. In fact, the word “speed” itself didn’t mean quickness when it first showed up in Anglo-Saxon times almost 1,300 years ago.

The noun “speed” (spelled spoed in Old English) originally meant “success, prosperity, good fortune; profit, advancement, furtherance,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED cites this early example from a glossary, written around the year 725, of Latin and Old English terms: “Successus, spoed.”

Similarly, the verb “speed,” which showed up in the late 900s, meant to succeed or prosper. The dictionary’s earliest citation is from The Battle of Maldon, an Old English poem dating from 993.

Here’s the citation in Modern English: “No need to slaughter each other if you speed [are generous with] us.”

Although the “success” sense of “speed” is now considered obsolete or archaic except in Scottish English, according to the OED, the usage lives in the term “Godspeed” (also written “God-speed” and “God speed”).

The “Godspeed” usage first showed up in the 1300s in verbal phrases like “God spede me” and “God spede thee,” meaning “May God give you success” (or “prosperity” or “good fortune”).

The OED’s earliest citation is from Sir Tristrem, a Middle English romance dating from around 1330: “He may bidde god me spede.”

And here’s an example from around 1385 in the “The Knight’s Tale,” the first story in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: “God spede yow go forth and ley on faste.”

In the 1500s, according to the OED, people began bidding one another “God speed,” especially “to express a wish for the success of one who is setting out on some journey or enterprise.”

The dictionary’s first example of this usage is from the Tyndale Bible of 1526: Yf ther come eny vnto you and bringe not this learninge him receave not to housse: neither bid him God spede.”

And here’s a 1597 example from Shakespeare’s Richard II: “A brace of draimen bid, God speed him wel.”

By the way, don’t confuse “Godspeed” with the old phrase “good speed.” (The word “good” was sometimes spelled “god” in Old English and Middle English.)

The expression “good speed” is a separate usage, in which “speed” in the old sense of success was coupled with adjectives like “good” or “evil.”

Among the OED citations is this line from Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720): “The King wished us good Speed.”

So when, you’re probably wondering, did “speed” get its speedy sense?

The noun “speed” took on its sense of quickness a few hundred years after it showed up in Old English meaning success, prosperity or good fortune.

The OED’s earliest example of “speed” used in the sense of quickness is from an Old English manuscript of Genesis believed to have been written sometime around the year 1000.

The citation begins after God promises the elderly Abraham and Sarah that they will soon have a son. Here it is in modern English: “Then at once after the speech they departed with speed, eager to be gone.”

Oxford‘s earliest example of the verb “speed” used in this sense (Egipte folc hem hauen ut sped) is from a manuscript of Exodus, dating from around 1250, in which the Egyptians speed the Israelites—that is, force them to flee in haste.

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On smarm and snark

Q: The commentariat can’t seem to stop talking about “smarm” and “snark.” Where did these two words come from?

A: Yes, there has been a lot of talk in the media about “smarm” and “snark,” especially since Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly appointed book editor of BuzzFeed, told Poynter.org in November that he wouldn’t publish negative reviews.

We won’t contribute to the cultural finger-waggery in the “smarm”-versus-“snark” debate, but we’re happy to discuss the evolution of these terms.

The latest incarnations of these words are still works in progress, taking on different shades and spins and tones each time they’re used.

In general, though, “smarm” is being used now to mean smug, disapproving self-righteousness and “snark” to mean scornful, dismissive nastiness.

You won’t find the latest senses of these shifty words in most standard dictionaries, but “smarm” and “snark” have etymological roots that date from the 19th century.

The noun “smarm” is derived from a colloquial verb that showed up in the mid-1800s and meant to smear or bedaub, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary says the verb “smarm” first showed up (spelled “smawm”) as an entry in A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847), by James Orchard Halliwell: “Smawm, to smear. Dorset.”

By the early 1900s, according to OED citations, “smarm” was being used to mean “treat in a wheedling, flattering way” or “behave in a fulsomely flattering or toadying manner.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of this Uriah Heepish sense is from the March 1902 issue of Little Folks, a magazine for children: “You can go and smarm him over if you want to.”

And here’s an example from Widdershins, a 1911 collection of ghost stories by the English novelist Oliver Onions: “It had been the usual thing, usual in those days, twenty years ago—smarming about Art and the Arts.”

In the 1920s, according to OED citations, the adjective “smarmy” showed up, meaning “ingratiating, obsequious; smug, unctuous.”

Here’s an example from The Deductions of Colonel Gore (1924), a mystery by Lynn Brock: “Don’t you be taken in by that smarmy swine.”

The noun “smarm” appeared in the 1930s, meaning “an unctuous bearing; fulsome flattery; flattering or toadying behaviour,” according to the OED.

Oxford’s first example is from Clunk’s Claimant, a 1937 detective story by the English author Henry Christopher Bailey: “That smarm of holiness … was pretty near the ruddy limit.”

The dictionary’s latest example, from the Feb. 19, 1978, issue of the Guardian Weekly, uses “smarm” in that same toadying sense: ‘George’ did this, ‘George’ did that, all the way through. ‘George’ is the victim of bonhomie and smarm.”

Most standard dictionaries still define “smarmy” and “smarm” in terms of obsequious flattery or excessively ingratiating behavior, though the Cambridge Dictionaries Online website includes “disapproving” as an informal sense of “smarmy.”

The disapproving, self-righteous sense of “smarm” is a relatively recent phenomenon. We haven’t pinned down exactly when the obsequious “smarm” got its disapproving sense, but the usage took off after BuzzFeed’s declaration that negative reviews were a no-no.

In an article last month entitled “On Smarm,” for example, Tom Scocca, the features editor at Gawker, offered this definition of the term:

“What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

“Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?”

The noun “snark” first showed up as an imaginary creature in Lewis Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876), but the word we’re talking about here is derived from a verb that appeared a decade earlier.

The OED describes the verb “snark” as a dialectal term “of imitative nature” that means to snore or snort.

The earliest citation for the verb in Oxford is from an 1866 issue of the journal Notes and Queries: “I will not quite compare it [a sound] to a certain kind of snarking or gnashing.”

In the early 1880s, according to the dictionary, the verb took on a new sense: to find fault with or to nag.

The OED’s first example of the new usage is from an 1882 edition of Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, which defines “snark” as “to fret, grumble, or find fault with one.”

In the early 1900s, this fault-finding sense of the verb “snark” gave us the adjective “snarky,” which Oxford defines as “irritable, short-tempered, ‘narky.’ ” (“Narky” is a British and Australian term for being irritable or sarcastic.)

The OED’s first example of “snarky” is from The Railway Children (1906), a children’s book by the English author Edith Nesbit: “Don’t be snarky, Peter. It isn’t our fault.”

The related noun “snarkiness” showed up in the 1960s, according to Oxford, but we’ve found only one passing reference to it in eight standard dictionaries. The abbreviated noun “snark” hasn’t made it into the OED or standard dictionaries.

Like “smarm,” the noun “snark” is a relative newcomer. One of the earliest examples we’ve seen is from an essay on book reviewing by the author and editor Heidi Julavits.

In the March 2003 issue of The Believer, a literary magazine she co-edits, Julavits discusses reviews that display “wit for wit’s sake,” “hostility for hostility’s sake,” and a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.”

“I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community,” she writes.

In the article, she uses the terms “snark,” “snarkiness,” or “snarky” 15 times (no “smarm,” however).

Yes, that’s a lot of snark. But David Denby has written a whole book about it, Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal and It’s Ruining Our Conversation (2009).

The New Yorker writer considers snark “a nasty, knowing strain of abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation.”

“It’s the bad kind of invective—low, teasing, snide, condescending, knowing; in brief, snark—that I hate,” he writes.

Enough “snark” hunting! We’ll let Charles Dodgson and his Snark hunters have the last word:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

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Words of passage

Q: Why was Ectopistes migratorius called a “passenger pigeon”? Was the “passenger” a message like those carried by homing pigeons?

A: No, the word “passenger” here has nothing to do with carrying messages. It’s an old term (originally spelled “passager”) for a migratory bird—that is, a bird of passage.

English adapted the word “passenger” in the 1300s from passager and several similar “n”-less terms in Anglo-Norman and Middle French for a ferry, a ferryman, or a passenger on a ferry or other vessel.

Why an “n” in the English version of the word? The Oxford English Dictionary explains that it’s an example of “the development of an intrusive n before g found chiefly in loanwords from the late Middle English period onwards.”

The OED cites several similar words of French origin, including “messenger” and “harbinger,” in which an “n” was inserted during the Middle English period (from the late 12th to the late 15th centuries).

From the 1300s to the 1500s, the English term “passenger” developed several senses: a pilot of a ferry, a ferry or ship that carries passengers, a passenger, and a traveler.

In the late 1500s, “passenger” came to mean a migratory bird. The earliest OED citation for this usage, minus the “n,” is from Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives:

“Which hathe geuen some occasion to holde … that the vulters are passagers, and come into these partes out of straunge countryes.”

The intrusive “n” shows up in the next OED citation, from The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), by John Smith:

“Sometimes are also seene Falcons … but because they come seldome, they are held but as passengers.”

The OED says the use of the word “passenger” in the migratory sense is now obsolete, but the usage lives on in the terms “bird of passage” and “passenger pigeon.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of “bird of passage” used to mean a migratory bird is from a 1717 entry in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

In the citation, flamingos are said to “sometimes visit us here in Europe, and so may be accounted amongst the Migratory Kind, or Birds of Passage.”

Oxford suggests that the use of “bird of passage” in this sense may have been influenced by the Middle French term oiseau de passage, which dates from 1549.

The dictionary’s first citation for “passenger pigeon” is from a 1772 entry in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: “Passenger Pigeon, Faun. Am. Sept. 11. Severn River, No 63.”

The term “passenger pigeon” is defined in the OED as “a long-tailed North American pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, noted for its former abundance, rapid and sustained flight, and mass migrations.”

The dictionary adds that the passenger pigeon (once commonly known as the wild pigeon) “was relentlessly hunted to extinction, the last individual dying in captivity in 1914.”

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On naming names

Q: The New York Times Book Review says former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates “is naming names” in his new memoir. I’ve always thought that to “name names” is strangely redundant, but you hear it all the time. Does anyone question it nowadays?

A: Is the verb phrase “name names” redundant? No, though a lot of people online seem to think so.

Just because a verb and a noun sound the same doesn’t make using them together redundant. A redundant word is superfluous. The phrase “name names” would lose its meaning if you eliminated either word.

The fact that the phrase has an interior rhyme is probably responsible, at least in part, for its popularity.

Many people believe “name names” is a 20th-century creation, perhaps inspired by crackdowns on organized crime or even the McCarthy hearings.

But in fact this verb phrase is more than 300 years old.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that “name names” means “to specify the names of people, esp. those involved in a discreditable or illegal incident, etc.; to incriminate or implicate people.”

Frequently, the OED says, the phrase is used “in negative contexts, as to name no names, without naming names, etc.”

“It may often be the case,” Oxford notes, “that only one person is alluded to, despite the use of the plural names.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of the usage is from a comic play by Thomas Sotherne, The Wives’ Excuse (1692): “No naming Names, good Wellvile.”

However, our own searches turned up an earlier example. In a treatise entitled The Case of Kneeling at the Holy Sacrament, Stated and Resolved, published in London in 1685, the English rector John Evans wrote: “but it’s uncivil to name names.”

The expression (along with its variants) certainly has staying power, since it’s been used steadily ever since. The OED has many other examples, including these:

1696: “Don’t press me then to name Names” (from John Vanbrugh’s comedy The Relapse);

1763: “without naming any names” (a letter in The Gentleman’s Magazine);

1792: “She desired he would name no names” (from the novelist Fanny Burney’s journal);

1843: “Naming no names, and therefore hurting nobody” (from Charles Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit);

1888: “I will name no names” (from Rudyard Kipling’s story collection Soldiers Three);

1908: “I name no names” (from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows).

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Hairsplitting: blonde vs. brunette

Q:   Why do we say a blonde has blonde hair, but we never say a brunette has brunette hair? It’s always brown. Also, most nouns that describe people by hair color, certainly blonde and brunette, apply to women exclusively.

A: In answer to your first question, each of these words—“blond” (or “blonde”) and “brunet” (or “brunette”)—is both a noun and an adjective, according to standard dictionaries.

So it’s legitimate to say a person has “brunet” (or “brunette”) hair, although the word is used mostly as a noun (“She is a brunette”), and less often as an adjective (“She has brunette hair”).

Why isn’t “brunet” or “brunette” used more often as an adjective? Probably because “brown,” a good old Anglo-Saxon word, does a better job (“She has brown hair”). It’s a simpler, more familiar adjective, so there’s little need for “brunet” or “brunette.”

“Blond” or “blonde,” on the other hand, is an indispensable adjective, since there’s no better substitute.

Besides, it covers a lot of territory, from platinum to light chestnut, unlike some of the wordier alternatives: “yellow-haired,” “golden-haired,” “flaxen-haired,” “sandy-haired,” etc.

Now, about those spellings. The pairs are pronounced alike, but the different endings reflect the masculine and feminine forms in French.

In American English, according to dictionaries and usage guides, the nouns “blond” and “brunet” are used in reference to boys and men, while “blonde” and “brunette” are applied to girls and women.

The adjectives may or may not reflect gender—some guides recommend “blond” and “brunet” for both sexes, while some call for gendered adjectives.

 In modern British usage, the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “the form blonde is now preferred in all senses.”

As we hinted above, these words came into English from French, but their earlier sources were not Gallic.

The French blond (feminine blonde) can be traced to the medieval Latin blondus or blundus (yellow).

The origin of the medieval Latin is uncertain, according to the OED, but other etymological sources suggest convincingly that it’s ultimately Germanic.

The French brunet (feminine brunette) is a diminutive of brun (brown), a word that came into French around 1100 from Germanic sources—“brown” was brun in Old English.

So when modern English borrowed “brunet” and “brunette” from French, it was simply borrowing a form of a word it already had—at least as an adjective.

In English, “blond”/“blonde” was first on the scene, and “brunet”/“brunette” came later.

An adjective spelled “blounde” was recorded a couple of times in the 1480s, but it soon disappeared. The adjective was re-introduced into English from modern French in the 17th century in masculine and feminine forms.

The noun first showed up in the 1820s in the feminine form. The earliest OED citation, from an 1822 issue of the Edinburgh Review, refers to “Brenda, the laughing blue-eyed blonde.”

The dictionary defines the term as “a person with blond hair; one with light or ‘fair’ hair and the corresponding complexion; esp. a woman, in which case spelt blonde.”

The adjective “brunette” was first recorded in English in 1712, the noun in 1713. But the masculine “brunet” wasn’t recorded until the late 19th century, Oxford says, the adjective in 1887 and the noun in 1890.

Those dates should tell you something. Even in olden times, a woman was more likely to be called a “blonde” or “brunette” than a man was to be called a “blond” or a “brunet.”

And today, as you suggest, when we hear those nouns we assume that a woman is being referred to, not a man.

We’ve seen some scholarly studies on hair-color stereotypes, but nothing on this specific subject. However, we assume that sexual stereotyping is responsible for the tendency to characterize women, but generally not men, in terms of hair color.

Seldom do we hear a short man with red hair described as “a petite redhead,” or a tall man with brown hair called “a leggy brunet,” or a buff, light-haired guy characterized as “a shapely blond.” 

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Pedal to the mettle?

Q: A recent mini-review of a film on the New York Times television page used the expression “pedal to the mettle.” I’ve always thought it was “pedal to the metal.” Is the former a proper usage?

A: The recent TV brief that caught your attention quotes the first sentence of an Aug. 23, 2012, review in the Times of the movie Premium Rush, a screwball thriller about a New York City bicycle messenger:

“Pushing pedal to the mettle and its breezily thin, goofy story to the breaking point, ‘Premium Rush’ provides just about all the late summer air-conditioned relief you could hope for.”

You’re right that the correct expression is “pedal to the metal,” but the Times reviewer may have deliberately taken creative liberties here, inspired by the mettle of the biker, who runs “a gantlet of darting cars, buses, trucks and pedestrians” while dodging a crooked cop.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the colloquial expression “pedal to the metal,” which originated in the United States in the 1970s, was used first “in the context of driving, later also in extended use.”

In a literal sense, the “pedal” in the expression is a vehicle’s gas pedal, and the “metal” is the floorboard. (Putting the pedal to the metal is the same as “flooring” it.)

This may have started as a Citizens Band radio term used by truckers. We found the expression in a glossary of CB lingo published in the July 1976 issue of Popular Mechanics: “Pedal to the metal: Accelerator to the floor.” 

It also appears in books on CB radio published that year, and we found one mention from the year before, suggesting that the usage was well established in the CB world by the mid-70s. 

The phrase is used both literally and figuratively as an adjective, an adverb, and a verb.

The OED defines the adjective phrase—usually hyphenated, “pedal-to-the-metal”—as meaning “high-speed, fast-paced; reckless, unrestrained.”

The adverbial phrase—often worded as “with the pedal to the metal”—means “at top speed; headlong, recklessly,” according to Oxford.

And the OED defines the verb phrase (“to put the pedal to the metal”) as meaning “to accelerate, to drive at top speed; (in extended use) to proceed very rapidly or recklessly; to perform to one’s full capacity.”

The OED’s earliest published citation for the phrase is from a 1976 issue of Time magazine: “Up to 3,500 fans will … watch these two ‘pedal-to-the-metal’ drivers bump fenders as they scream around the track.”

Another 1976 citation, this one from the National Lampoon, uses the phrase as a verb: “Once again D.D. puts the pedal to the metal.”

This 1987 quotation, from Jon Franklin’s book Molecules of the Mind, uses the phrase as an adverb: “Our world was an eighteen-wheeler full of dynamite, careening down the highway with the pedal to the metal.”

This more figurative sense of the phrase comes from the Chicago Tribune (1998): “[He] is heading pedal-to-the-metal into matrimony.”

When expressions are used figuratively, people sometimes lose sight of the original meaning of the words, which accounts for phrases like “pedal to the mettle” used mistakenly—not in jest.

Although “mettle” is sometimes misused for “metal,” the opposite is true too, as when we read of someone “on his metal” or “showing his metal.”

The proper phrases are “on his mettle” (prepared to do his best) and “testing his mettle” (showing his best qualities).

The noun “mettle” means a combination of qualities—spirit, determination, courage, strength of character, and so on. As the OED says, it’s “the ‘stuff’ of which one is made, regarded as an indication of one’s character.”

Interestingly, “metal” and “mettle” have separate meanings now, but they began life as different spellings of the same word.

“Mettle” first showed up in the 16th century as a variant spelling of the much older term “metal,” which English borrowed from Old French in the 1200s.

But by the early 18th century “mettle” had become established as the proper spelling for the metaphorical sense of “metal,” meaning “the material from which a person is made,” to quote the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

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Is fun infectious or contagious?

Q: A mentor of mine, an MD, taught me that a contagious disease spreads by contact between people while an infectious one doesn’t need contact. This would suggest that laughter or fun is “contagious,” not “infectious.” Other usage gurus are a bit vague, but I hope to find your usual precision on this one.  

A: Medline Plus, the online medical dictionary from the National Institutes of Health, generally agrees with your mentor. It defines “contagious” as “communicable by contact,” and “infectious” as “capable of causing infection.”

Of course the two terms aren’t mutually exclusive. As William Arthur Hagan explains in The Infectious Diseases of Domestic Animals (1943), “All contagious diseases are also infectious, but it does not follow that all infectious diseases are contagious.”

Although many people use the two terms interchangeably, the definitions for “contagious” and “infectious” in standard dictionaries are similar to those in medical references.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, defines “contagious” as “transmissible by direct or indirect contact,” and “infectious” as “capable of causing infection.”

However, both terms have strayed from those senses when used figuratively, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.).

The lexicographer R. W. Burchfield, writing in Fowler’s, discusses the figurative evolution of “contagious” and “infectious”:

“In figurative uses, contagious tends to be used of both pleasant and unpleasant things (in the OED and OED files of corruption, folly, guilt, panic, and suffering, but also laughter, shyness, and vigour), whereas infectious is mainly restricted to pleasant things (enthusiasm, good humour, laughter, sense of fun, simple delight, virtue, and zeal).”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage agrees that in recent figurative usage “contagious can be used of pleasant and unpleasant things, but infectious is almost always used of pleasant things.”

So, “laughter” and “fun” can be described as either “contagious” or “infectious,” though they’re more likely to be called “infectious.”

Now, let’s look at the history of these two adjectives.

English adapted the word “contagious” from the Old French contagieus in the 1300s, but the ultimate source is the Latin noun contagion, which refers to touching and contact as well as contagion.

In the OED’s earliest example, from Chaucer’s 1374 translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiæ, “contagious” is used to describe the corruption of the soul by being in contact with the body:

“Whan I lost my memorie by the contagious coniunccioun of the body with the soule.” (We’ve replaced the runic letter thorn with “th” throughout.) 

By the early 1400s, the adjective was being used in its medical sense. in Lanfranc’s Science of Cirurgie (circa 1400), leprosy is referred to as “oon of the syknessis that ben contagious.” (We’ve replaced a thorn here with “th.”)

In the 1600s, according to OED citations, people began using “contagious” figuratively to describe all sorts of things “communicated from one to another or to others.”

The dictionary’s first example is from A Treatise of Seraphic Love (1660), by Robert Boyle: “If our Friends do not allay our Love or Affection by unwelcome Actions, or their contagious Sufferings.”

The next citation is from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Well understood Of Eve, whose Eye darted contagious Fire.”

As for “infectious,” English adapted the term from Anglo-Norman and Middle French in the 1500s, but the ultimate source is inficere, Latin for to dye, stain, infect, imbue, or corrupt.

Originally, according to the OED, the English term referred to “causing or spreading disease, esp. of an epidemic nature.” Later, it came to be used more widely to mean capable of “causing or transmitting infection.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “infectious” is from a 1534 treatise on epidemic disease by Thomas Paynell, an English friar who wrote on literary and medical subjects:

“For from suche infected bodies commethe infectious and venemous fumes and vapours, the whiche do infecte and corrupte the aire.”

Soon, according to OED citations, the term was being used figuratively to mean “tending or liable to infect or contaminate character, morals,” but that sense is now considered rare.

By the early 1600s, the adjective took on its modern figurative sense of “having the quality of spreading from one to another; easily communicable.”

The earliest Oxford example is from The Maid’s Tragedy, a 1619 play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher: “She carries with her an infectious griefe, / That strikes all her beholders.”

The next citation, from John Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), uses the term positively: “Through the bright Quire th’ infectious Vertue ran. All dropp’d their Tears.”

We’ll end with a more recent example from a 1988 issue of Rugby News: He’s very infectious and the sort of guy people want to follow.”

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: “lost” words—words that once had a literal meaning but are now used only in their metaphorical senses.  If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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A foregone conclusion

Q: Here’s a quickie query. What’s the past tense of “forego”?

A: The past tense of “forego” is “forewent.” But do you mean “forego” or “forgo”?

These are two different verbs. Traditionally, “forego” means to precede, while “forgo” means to do without.

However, some dictionaries now list “forego” as an alternate or variant spelling of “forgo,” and “forgo” as an alternate or variant spelling of “forego.” Yikes!

Life is complicated enough, so we’ll stick to the traditional spellings.

The two verbs have separate histories dating back to Anglo-Saxon days. And as Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) puts it, “their meanings are so different that it’s worth preserving the distinction.”

We’ll return to the history of these verbs later, but first let’s get back to your question. Here’s the quickie answer, with the traditional spellings:

● “forego” (to go before): past tense, “forewent”; past participle, “foregone.”

● “forgo” (to do without): past tense, “forwent”; past participle, “forgone.”

Obviously, the past tenses aren’t exactly household words. We’d forgo using either one, and go with something like “preceded” or “went before” for the first verb and “did without” or “abstained” for the second.

The past participles aren’t seen much either, except for the first one, “foregone.” It’s  used adjectivally in the familiar expression “foregone conclusion,” meaning an inevitable result or a conclusion formed in advance.

(The OEDs earliest example of “foregone conclusion” is from Shakespeare’s Othello, circa 1603: “But this denoted a fore-gone conclusion.”)

Now, on to the history of “forego” and “forgo.”

Both appeared in Old English religious writing: “forego” in The Vespasian Psalter (circa 825) and “forgo” in The Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 950), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In Old English, the OED says, “forego” was written as foregán, a combination of the prefix “fore-” and the verb gán (go), while “forgo” was forgán, the prefix “for-” plus gán.

The two prefixes are entirely different: “fore-” means “before” or “in front,” while “for-” (a prefix that’s now obsolete) implies a sense of “off” or “away.” (This is the same prefix that survives in “forlorn,” “forget,” “forbid,” and “forbear.”)

The word “forego” has meant to precede since its early days, but “forgo” has had a few twists and turns before arriving at its modern meaning of to do without.

When “forgo” appeared in The Lindisfarne Gospels, an illuminated manuscript from an English monastery, it meant “to go away, go past, pass away,” according to the OED.

Over the next few centuries, it came to mean to go by, pass over, leave alone, neglect, overlook, avoid, overreach, forsake, and deceive, but all those senses are now considered obsolete, archaic, or rare.

In the 1100s, according to Oxford, “forgo” (sometimes spelled “forgoo” or “forgoe”) took on its modern meaning of “to abstain from, go without, deny to oneself,” and so on.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the new usage is from The Cotton Homilies (a manuscript from sometime before 1175), but we’ll skip ahead to this exchange between Achilles and Hector in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1609):

Achilles: Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set; / How ugly night comes breathing at his heels: / Even with the vail and darking of the sun, / To close the day up, Hector’s life is done.

Hector: I am unarm’d; forgoe this vantage, Greek.

Achilles: Strike, fellows, strike; this is the man I seek.

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How canny are canines?

Q: Sometimes I feel as if my dog (a canine pet) is exceptionally canny. Is there any chance that the term “canny” has an etymological relationship to “canine”?

A: Daisy and Willy, our two Golden Retrievers, are pretty canny too, but the terms “canine” and “canny” aren’t related.

The word “canine” is derived from canis, Latin for “dog,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, while “canny” ultimately comes from a now obsolete sense of the verb “can,” which once meant to know.

The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that “canine” entered English in the early 1600s as an adjective meaning doglike as well as an adjective describing pointed teeth.

It wasn’t until the 1800s that “canine” came to be a noun meaning a dog. Of course we already had a couple of common canine nouns, “dog” and “hound,” with roots dating back to the days of Old English.

The word “hound” (hund in Old English) first showed up in Beowulf, which may date from as early as 725, according to Chambers. The dictionary says it’s derived from the proto-Germanic root hundas.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that “hound” was the main word in English for a dog “until superseded around the 16th century by dog.”

Although “hound” now has a more specific sense in English, Ayto says, its relatives in other Germanic languages (hund in German, Swedish, and Danish, for example) still refer to a dog in general.

As for “dog,” Ayto describes it as “one of the celebrated mystery words of English etymology.”

He points out that “dog” appeared only once in Old English (spelled docgena), “but its use does not seem to have proliferated until the 13th century.”

“It has no known relatives of equal antiquity in other European languages, although several borrowed it in the 16th and 17th centuries for particular sorts of ‘dog,’ ” Ayto says.

In French, for example, a dogue is a mastiff, while in Swedish a dogg is a bulldog, according to Ayto.

Getting back to the other part of your question, “canny” first appeared in Scottish English in the 1600s, meaning knowing, prudent, cunning, or wily, according to citations in the OED.

The earliest example of the usage in the OED is from a 1637 letter by the Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford: “Men’s canny wisdom, who, in this storm, take the nearest shore and go to the lee and calm side of the Gospel.”

The ultimate source of the word, Ayto says, is probably the “know” sense of the verb “can.” As he explains, “can” and “know” share the same Indo-European root: gn-.

“The underlying etymological meaning of can is thus ‘know’ or more specifically ‘come to know,’ which survived in English until comparatively recently,” he writes.

Ayto offers this relatively late example of “could” (the past of “can”) used in the sense of “knew” or “came to know,” from Ben Jonson’s 1632 comedy The Magnetick Lady: “She could the Bible in the holy tongue.”

Finally, we can’t discuss “canny” without mentioning “uncanny,” which has had many negative meanings over the years—malicious, careless, unreliable, untrustworthy.

The spooky sense can be traced to the late 18th century, when an “uncanny” person was someone “not quite safe to trust to, or have dealings with, as being associated with supernatural arts or powers,” the OED says.

By about 1850, Oxford says, the current meaning of “uncanny” was established: “Partaking of a supernatural character; mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar.”

So you might call the legendary hound of the Baskervilles an uncanny canine.

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Are you in our wheelhouse?

Q: I’ve noticed the term “wheelhouse” used (or misused) in strange ways. For example, a boxer is said to be within his opponent’s “wheelhouse” or reach. And a politician’s sphere of influence is his “wheelhouse.” Thanks for any information you can render.

A: The noun “wheelhouse” has had quite a few meanings over the last 200 years. You’ve noticed a couple of recent, figurative usages that emerged in the 20th century.

Are they misuses? No, just idioms, or peculiarities of language, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.).

The Oxford English Dictionary says “wheel-house” (spelled “wheelhouse” in most American dictionaries) was first recorded in the early 19th century when it meant a building for storing cart wheels.

The dictionary’s only citation for this sense of the word appeared in an 1808 book about agriculture in the English county of Devon: “The wheel-house under the barn, 25 feet square.”

The word’s principal sense emerged in the mid-19th century, when it meant “a structure enclosing a large wheel,” like a steering wheel, water wheel, or paddle wheel.

Thus, a “wheelhouse” could be a pilothouse on a boat or ship, a part of a mill, or “the paddle-box of a steam-boat,” the OED says.

Oxford has several citations for these uses of the word. The earliest is from the American writer Joseph Holt Ingraham’s travel memoir The South-west (1835):

“The pilot (as the helms-man is here termed) stands in his lonely wheel-house.”

In his book When Charles I Was King (1896), Joseph Smith Fletcher uses the term in reference to a structure for a water wheel: “The mill at Wentbridge, where the stream was pouring through the wheel-house like a cataract.”

The OED’s most recent example is this 1976 citation from a newspaper in Southampton, England, the Southern Evening Echo: “On the roof of the main building is a full size replica of a ship’s wheelhouse which is used for training.”

But “wheelhouse” didn’t stop there. December 2013 draft additions to the OED record a pair of 20th-century meanings.  

The first originated in baseball, where “wheelhouse” means “the area of the strike zone where a particular batter is able to hit the ball most forcefully or successfully.” The dictionary describes this usage as North American.

 The OED’s earliest citation is from a 1959 sports story in the San Francisco Chronicle: “He had a couple that came right into the wheelhouse—the kind he used to knock out of sight—and he fouled ’em off.”

Another newspaper, the Portland (Maine) Press-Herald, provided this 1998 example: “It was a great play. … I just gave him a yell and he put it in my wheelhouse and I got a good shot off.”

And H. G. (Buzz) Bissinger used the word in his baseball book Three Nights in August (2006): “He’ll pound any pitch that ventures into his wheelhouse.”

The term leapt from sportswriting to everyday language in the 1980s. In this new, figurative sense, “wheelhouse” means “the field in which a person excels; one’s strongest interest or ability,” the OED says.

Oxford has several colorful examples of this new sense of the word:

1987:  “He told me he … couldn’t play reggae. Of course he could, but it wasn’t his wheelhouse, and he wanted to keep his playing honest” (from the magazine Musician).

1998: “Here was Brooklyn congressman Chuck Schumer speaking at NYU about gun control, his wheelhouse issue” (from New York Magazine).

2004: “When you’re doing a romantic comedy, you’re in Meg Ryan’s wheelhouse” (from Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures).

2010: “ ‘This is right in our wheelhouse,’ said … Apache’s chairman and chief executive, in an interview. ‘This is what we do for a living’ ” (from the Wall Street Journal).

This seems like a logical progression for “wheelhouse”—from a captain’s domain to a hitter’s sweet spot to anyone’s strong suit or chief interest.

As for your examples, the reference to a boxer’s “wheelhouse” seems to be an expansion of baseball’s sweet-spot sense while the use of the term for a politician’s sphere of influence seems to fall under the strong-suit sense.

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When a mess wasn’t messy

Q: How did the word “mess” evolve from a cluttered, untidy condition to a place where the military eats?

A: You’ve got things backwards. The food sense of “mess” came before its untidy sense. Here’s the story.

When “mess” first showed up around 1300 (spelled mes in Middle English), it meant a serving of food or a meal, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Although English borrowed the word from Anglo-Norman and Old French, the ultimate source is the Latin verb mittere (to send or let go).

What, you’re probably asking, does sending or letting go have to do with food? Here’s how the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology explains it.

In Late Latin, which dates from the third to the sixth centuries, mittere came to mean to put or place. And missus, Late Latin for a course of dinner, referred to the putting of food on a table.

The OED says the original meaning of “mess” as a serving or a meal is now seen only in regional dialects or historical references.

However, the dictionary notes that another culinary sense of “mess” arose in the 1300s: “A portion or serving of liquid or pulpy food such as milk, broth, porridge, boiled vegetables, etc.”

Oxford points out that “a mess of pottage” appears in some 16th-century versions of the Bible “alluding to the biblical story of Esau’s sale of his birthright (Genesis 25:29–34).”

Here’s a secular example of the usage, from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602): “I had as leeue you should tel me of a messe of poredge.”

And this is a more recent example from Tooth and Claw (1983), by the Australian mystery writer Gabrielle Lord: “She stirred the mess of lentils.”

Let’s back up a bit now for a new twist in the history of “mess.” In the 1400s, the word came to mean a small group of people who sat together at a banquet and were served the same dishes.

This usage evolved a century later into the military sense—at first referring to a group of soldiers, sailors, or marines who take their meals together.

The OED’s earliest example of the military usage, from a 1536 entry in the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, refers to expenses for the “meis of marineris, gunnaris, and utheris.”

Later, the term “mess” also came to mean the place where such groups took their meals, especially groups of similar rank. Here’s an 1822 example in the OED from British military regulations:

“Commanding Officers are enjoined, when practicable, to form a Serjeants’ Mess, as the means of supporting their consequence and respectability in the Corps.”

So how did “mess” get its messy sense?

The Chambers etymology dictionary says Alexander Pope’s use of the term “in the sense of a kind of liquid or mixed food for an animal” led to “the contemptuous use of a concoction, jumble, mixed mass.”

In Epilogue to the Satires (1738), Pope refers to hogs eating each other’s excretions: “From him the next receives it, thick or thin, / As pure a Mess almost as it came in.”

It wasn’t until the early 1800s, according to the OED, that “mess” took on the sense of “a dirty or untidy state of things or of a place; a collection of disordered things, producing such a state.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from the 19th-century English theatrical producer William Thomas Moncreiff. In Tom and Jerry (1826), a character says he doesn’t use chalk because it “makes such a mess all over the walls.”

We’ll end with a more dramatic example from The Old Front Line (1917), a prose description of the Battle of the Somme by the English poet John Masefield:

“All this mess of heaps and hillocks is strung and filthied over with broken bodies and ruined gear.”

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Why is a blond kid a towhead?

Q: I just caught the tail end of Pat’s comments on WNYC about the term “towhead.” I was at a colonial mill in Tarrytown, NY, when the docent explained that the term comes from the light color of flax, which was used to make “towrope” for canal barges.

A: The “tow” in “towhead,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “the fibre of flax, hemp, or jute prepared for spinning.”

Since flax is light in color, blond people (especially children) are sometimes referred to as “towheads” or “towheaded,” expressions first recorded in the 19th century.

The “tow” in the “towrope” (or “towline”) used to pull a canal barge is a horse of another color. The OED says it’s derived from togian, an Old English word meaning to pull or drag.

As for “towhead” (also spelled “tow head” or “tow-head”) and “towheaded” (also “tow-headed”), Oxford has several citations, including an 1884 reference in Harper’s Magazine to “tow-headed children rolling about in the orchards.”

If you remember, Pat mentioned on the air that mistaken spellings (or hearings) of these “tow” terms can be humorous. She once read of “a cute little two-headed boy.”

A caller to the program said she used to think the expression was “toe headed,” and couldn’t imagine what such a phrase meant. 

The noun “tow” used in the fiber sense came into English in the 14th century, but its earlier sources remain uncertain.

The word is “perhaps related” to the Old Norse noun , which meant “uncleansed wool or flax, unworked fibre of thread,” the OED says.

“The original sense may have been ‘textile fibre’ generally,” Oxford adds.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins ventures another suggestion—that “tow” was borrowed from a word in Middle Low German, touw.

Ayto says the term “probably went back to the pre-historic Germanic base tow-, taw-,” meaning to make or prepare “in the specialized sense ‘make yarn from wool, spin.’ ”

The “towrope” mentioned by the docent at the mill may once have been made of tow fiber, but its name comes from the verb “tow” (to pull), which dates back to about the year 1000.

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An Aramaean at the bar

Q: I’m curious if anybody has discovered a link between the English word “barring” and the Aramaic bar. I believe the Aramaic term, which means outside, is the source of the English word. The “bar” in “bar mitzvah” technically means “son of,” which refers to the son being outside the father (bar is the Aramaic form of the Hebrew ben).

A: We’ve discussed the word “barring” on our blog in connection with phrases like “barring fire or flood” and “barring unforeseen circumstances.”

But we didn’t consider the etymology of “barring,” which in the phrases above is a preposition meaning “excluding from consideration, leaving out of account, omitting, excepting, except,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The usage was first recorded in the late 15th century. Three centuries later, people began using the shorter form “bar” in a similar way, as in the common phrase “bar none.”

The OED suggests that this shortening of “barring” to “bar” was influenced by two other prepositions— “save” and “except,” which are shortened versions of “saving” and “excepting.”

The prepositions “bar” and “barring” developed from a similar sense of the verb “bar,” meaning “to exclude from consideration, set aside,” according to the OED.

This sense of the word, dating from the late 15th century, is descended from the original, 13th-century meaning of the verb—to make fast with bars.

The verb “bar” came from the earlier, 12-century noun, which originally meant “a stake or rod of iron or wood used to fasten a gate, door, hatch, etc.,” the OED says.

Today, the noun has three principal meanings: (1) something, like a rod or band, that’s longer than it is thick or wide; (2) something that obstructs or confines, like the related word “barrier”; and (3) a place enclosed by a rail or barrier, which explains the use of “bar” in reference to courts of law.

That third meaning, according to the OED, also led to the use of “bar” for “an inn, or other place of refreshment.” Initially, the dictionary says, the term referred to a “barrier or counter, over which drink (or food) is served out to customers, in an inn, hotel, or tavern.”

The etymology of the English noun “bar” is a bit skimpy.

The OED says the word (first spelled “barre”) came into Middle English in the 1100s from the Old French barre, which acquired it from the Late Latin barra.

The big question here is, where did the Late Latin barra come from? The OED says it’s “of unknown origin.” And with that, unfortunately, the trail goes cold.

It may be true, as you suggest, that the English “bar” comes from Aramaic (a wide family of related Semitic languages and dialects). But we can’t find any evidence of a definitive connection.

The noun pronounced “bar” in Aramaic means “son” or “son of” and is common in names. Though it appears in Hebrew names and in the phrase “bar mitzvah”—“son of the commandment”—the normal Hebrew equivalent of “son” is ben (the Arabic is ibn).

However, it’s interesting to note that there is a preposition in Aramaic, pronounced “bar min,” and meaning “except for,”  “aside from,” or “outside of.”

You can find the Aramaic preposition (transliterated as br mn), along with citations from ancient texts, in the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, which has been a work in progress at the Hebrew Union College since 1986.

Certainly the existence of that Aramaic preposition raises enticing possibilities. But, as we’ve said before, mere similarity is not proof of an etymological connection.

Ancient texts are always being rediscovered, though, and perhaps one of them will someday offer evidence that Aramaic is indeed the source of the Late Latin noun barra. We could then claim an ultimate Aramaic ancestor for the English “bar” and “barring.”

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On the shambolic side

Q: All of a sudden, I’m seeing the word “shambolic” nearly every day in the NY Times. It’s being used to mean messy or disorganized, apparently as an adjectival version of “shambles.” What’s going on here?

A: You’re right. The word “shambolic” has shown up a lot lately in the Times—in recent weeks, for example, to describe the messy starts of both Obamacare and the Brooklyn Nets’ basketball season.

But this usage is nothing new. A search of the Times archive indicates that the word has appeared in the paper hundreds of times since William Safire first mentioned it in a March 4, 1984, On Language column.

“Of late,” Safire noted in the Times Magazine column, “our British cousins have taken to using an adjective: shambolic.”

At the time, he said, the word hadn’t appeared in any standard dictionaries. Since then, a half-dozen dictionaries in the US and the UK have included it as a slang, colloquial, or informal usage.

Lexicographers usually describe “shambolic” as a chiefly British adjective, and define it as messy, disorganized, or chaotic.

A search of Google News confirms that the word is primarily seen in British publications, though it appears to be catching on among linguistic Anglophiles in the American news media.

The earliest citation for “shambolic” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the June 18, 1970, issue of the Times of London:

“His office in Printing House Square is so impeccably tidy that it is … a standing reproach to the standard image of shambolic newspaper offices.”

Oxford describes “shambolic” as colloquial, and defines it as “chaotic, disorderly, undisciplined.” It suggests that the word may have been influenced by the adjective “symbolic.”

The OED cites a report that the word was “in common use” in 1958, but the dictionary doesn’t identify a source.

In a search of Google Books, we found a 1952 example from The Tank magazine. A description of dancers at a party remarks that “in truth one must admit there were those among us who were somewhat on the shambolic side.”

The word “shambolic,” as you’ve suggested, is derived from the noun “shambles,” which showed up in Old English in the 800s as a singular word for a footstool and later a table for selling goods.

By the early 1300s, according to OED citations, the noun “shamble” (schamil in Middle English) referred to “a table or stall for the sale of meat.”

In the 1400s, English speakers began using the word in the plural for a butcher shop or a meat market. And in the 1500s, the plural was used for a slaughterhouse.

By the late 1500s, Oxford says, the word “shambles” came to mean “a place of carnage or wholesale slaughter; a scene of blood.”

In the early 20th century, according to the OED, the word “shambles” took on its modern sense of “a scene of disorder or devastation; a ruin; a mess.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of this new usage is from Microbe Hunters, a 1926 bestseller by the microbiologist Paul Henry de Kruif: “Once more his laboratory became a shambles of cluttered flasks and hurrying assistants.”

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Using “one” for “a” or “an”

Q: At a drugstore here in Hawaii we often hear over a loudspeaker the word “one” used in place of “a” or “an.” For example, “We need ONE manager in the photo department.” Is this pidgin English or does it have a basis in historical English?

A: It’s not surprising that a person living in Hawaii would hear “one” used in place of the indefinite article “a” or “an.”

This regionalism is characteristic of what linguists call Hawaii Creole English, and at least one scholar has attributed it to the influence of Cantonese.

We should mention that the dialect you’re hearing isn’t properly a pidgin—a dialect that has no native speakers, like a trading jargon used for business purposes.

Instead, linguists call it a creole because it has expanded, stabilized over time, and become a native tongue learned by children. So what was once a pidgin developed into a creole about a century ago. 

The roots of Hawaii Creole English extend back into the late 18th century, as Hawaii began to emerge as a trading and plantation center.

We won’t attempt to explain the development of this dialect, a subject much debated by linguists over the past 40 years.

It’s enough to know that many tongues besides native Hawaiian have been spoken on the islands in the last two centuries—the South Seas jargon of early sailors plus many varieties of pidgin English brought by traders and plantation workers from China, Japan, Europe, and other Pacific islands.

The feature you’ve noticed—the use of “one” as the indefinite article—was first recorded in Hawaii in 1838, according to the Australian linguist Jeff Siegel.

In his paper “Substrate Influence in Hawaii Creole English,” published in the journal Language in Society in 2000, Siegel notes that “the use of one as an ‘indefinite article’ was one of the features of Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) brought to Hawaii.”

“Pidgin Hawaiian, spoken by most Chinese in Hawaii in the 19th century, also used the numeral one (akahi) as an indefinite article (in contrast to Standard Hawaiian),” Siegel writes.

He traces this usage to Cantonese, which “optionally uses the word yat ‘one’ ” in indefinite noun phrases.

“It is likely that this feature of Cantonese accounts for the origin of the corresponding use of one in CPE [Chinese Pidgin English],” he writes, “and it could have been responsible for reinforcing its continued use in Hawaii as well.”

Two earlier scholars, John E. Reinecke and Aiko Tokimasa, have also written about “one” in place of “a” or “an” in Hawaii.

“In careless speech, one is used as the indefinite article,” they wrote in “The English Dialect of Hawaii,” published in the journal American Speech in 1934.

You also asked whether the Hawaiian usage has any basis in historical English.

As a matter of fact, there was a time when “one” served a double purpose in our language, too—it was both the number and the indefinite article.

That changed in the Middle Ages when the uses of the word were separated and the article (“a,” “an”) was split off.

You might even say that English is unusual in this respect.

In many languages the word for “one,” as John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins points out, “is used as the indefinite article, but in English the numeral one has become differentiated from the article a, an.”

“An,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, originated as an unstressed form of “one,” and “a” developed in the 1100s as the form used before a consonant.

But the differentiation between “an” and “a” didn’t become universal for quite some time.

“An” was still used before “y” and “w” (as in “an woman”) until the 1400s, Chambers says. In addition, “an” was “used before h in a stressed syllable (an hundred) down to the 1600s and is still affected occasionally before h today,” Chambers adds.

“One,” meanwhile, has three general senses in modern English:

(1) It’s an adjective meaning either the number or undivided (“one apple” … “with one voice” … “we are one”). 

(2) It’s a pronoun meaning a single person or thing (“one never knows” … “I’ll take that one” … “one of us”).

 3) It’s a noun for the number (“odds of four to one” … “one o’clock” … “chapter one”).

However, the adjective “one” is also sometimes used colloquially, the OED says, “as a more emphatic substitute for the indefinite article.”

Examples of this emphatic usage include “He’s one tough customer” and “It’s one hell of a blizzard.”

But nowadays “one” isn’t used in the ordinary sense of “a” or “an,” except in regional pockets.

The OED says it’s chiefly found in the English spoken in India, the Caribbean, and parts of the United States—namely South Carolina, Georgia, and, as you already know, Hawaii.

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Is the cheese blue or bleu?

Q: I was always a snob and looked down on the poor souls who referred to “bleu cheese” as “blue cheese.”  Now “blue” seems to be the preferred spelling. Did this misspelling become acceptable because “bleu” seemed like a mistake to most Americans?

A: You’ll be dismayed to hear this, but the phrase “blue cheese” showed up in English a century and a half before the Frenchified “bleu cheese” version.

In fact, the phrase “blue cheese” may have appeared in English before fromage bleu made its appearance in French. Here’s the story.

The earliest example of the phrase “blue cheese” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an Aug. 3, 1787, entry in The Torrington Diaries, an account of John Byng Torrington’s travels in England and Wales:

“I eat to day at dinner, and at supper, some excellent blue cheese … which … resembles, both in color and taste, the blue mold of Cheshire cheese.”

It wasn’t until the 20th century that “bleu cheese” showed up. The earliest examples that we could find were from the 1940s.

A 1941 issue of the journal Dairy Industries, for example, notes that “Frenchmen are no longer particularly interested in Argentine bleu cheese.” (Argentine bleu cheese? Who knew?)

Interestingly, the only citation for “bleu cheese” in the OED is from this quip by Ogden Nash in You Can’t Get There From Here (1957): “Every time the menu lists bleu cheese I want to order fromage blue, / Don’t you?”

The earliest example of fromage bleu that we could find in a search of French works in the Google Books database was in Huit Jours d’Absence, an 1821 book by H. Saint-Thomas.

In gushing over a cheesemonger’s creations, the author writes that nous mangeon avec délices (“we eat with delight”) the delicacies from the marchand de fromage bleu (“the blue-cheese merchant”).

But even if it turns out that there are earlier examples of fromage bleu out there, we see no reason why an English speaker should refer to all blue cheeses as “bleu cheeses.”

The three best-known blue cheeses are probably Roquefort (French), Gorgonzola (Italian), and Stilton (English).

It would be just as silly to refer to Gorgonzola as a “bleu cheese” or un fromage bleu as it would be to use either term for Stilton.

As for Roquefort, why shouldn’t an American (good speller or bad) call it a “blue cheese”? After all, the cheese is French, not the speaker.

Update: A French reader of the blog points out that “we rarely say fromage bleu. Instead, we say bleu, du bleu, or bleu de [place where it was made].”

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How Jesus got his name

Q: In preparation for an upcoming lecture, I would be interested in knowing if you have any details about how the name of Jesus came into English. Specifically, how did it come to be pronounced so differently from the original Greek/Latin?

A: Jesus was first referred to in Old English as hǽlend, or “savior” (the word wasn’t capitalized). The name we now spell “Jesus” didn’t come into our language until the early Middle English period (1150-1250).

But even then, it wasn’t spelled “Jesus.”

In its earliest written form, the name didn’t end in “s” and didn’t begin with “j” (the letter “j” didn’t exist at the time). The name was spelled “iesu” (names weren’t capitalized then). 

Before getting any further into how the spelling developed in English, let’s take a little detour into the etymology of “Jesus.”

The name came into English from the Latin Iesus, a Roman transliteration of the Greek Iesous.

It had come into Greek from the late Hebrew or Aramaic Yeshua, which was a common name for Jewish boys at the time of Jesus’s birth.

(We’ve capitalized the names here, though proper nouns were treated the same as common nouns in classical Latin and Greek, as well as in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic.)

Yeshua, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, came from the earlier y’hoshua, which can be translated as “God (Yahweh) is salvation” or “God saves.” (Other forms of this name include Yehoshua, Jehoshua, and Joshua.)

The name was first recorded in English as “iesu” around 1175, as part of “iesu cristes” in a book of homilies. The name was written in lowercase letters then, but we’ll follow the modern convention and capitalize it from now on.  

The absence of a final “s” was an influence of Old French, the OED says. “Iesu” represented the Old French objective form of the Latin Iesus, and that was the form that came into Middle English and was used for some 400 years.

The spelling “Iesus,” representing the Latin nominative form, was rarely used in Middle English but became the regular English spelling in the 16th century, according to Oxford.

As we mentioned above, “Jesus” wasn’t originally spelled with a “j” because the letter didn’t exist at the time. The “j” showed up in English, the OED says, as “a comparatively late modification of the letter I.”

The sound itself—the “j” we hear in words like “judge” and “jail”—is relatively new as these things go. Here’s how it developed.

In the ancient Roman alphabet, the letter “i” had two sounds—it was a vowel, but also a consonant sounding like “y.”

Sometime before the sixth century, as the OED explains, this “y” sound in Latin and other languages using the Roman alphabet began changing into a “consonantal diphthong.”

This blend of the consonant sounds “d” and “y” (similar to the sound heard in the English words “odious” and “hideous”) gradually passed into what we now know as the “j” sound.

The result, Oxford says, was that from the 11th to the 17th centuries the  letter “i” had two extremely different sounds—it was both a vowel and a consonant sounding like “j.”

Meanwhile, according to the OED, the guttural letter “g” was undergoing its own evolution, and began to develop a “softer” sound, similar to that of the modern “j.”

Clearly, European printers needed a new letter for a sound hitherto represented by both “i” and “g.” Thus “j,” looking in its lowercase form like an “i” with a tail, appeared—first in 15th-century Spanish and later in other languages using the Roman alphabet.

The new letter became established in English in the mid-1600s, too late for the 1611 King James Version of the Bible.

The earliest example in the OED of the “Jesus” spelling is from a 1632 case in the Court of High Commission, the supreme ecclesiastic court in England at that time:

“That we are as carefull in printeing the Bible as they are of their Jesus’ psalter.”

We couldn’t find any earlier examples in a search of Google Books, but we did find several others from the 1600s.

Although the “differentiation of I and J, in form and value” was completed by 1640, the OED notes, “the feeling that they were, notwithstanding, merely forms of the same letter continued for many generations.”

By the way, “Christ” is not Jesus’s last name. Jews in his time had only one name.

As we’ve written before on the blog, “Christ” is a title meaning “anointed one,” an Anglicized version of the Greek Kristos and the Latin Christus. Originally the first vowel had a short “i” sound, as in “mist.”

In another post, we’ve pointed out that the term “Xmas” has been around for hundreds of years. No, it’s not a modern creation that represents the secularization and/or commercialization of Christmas.

In fact, the use of “X” for “Christ” began nearly a thousand years ago. But you can’t blame secularists. Blame the monks in Great Britain who used “X” for “Christ” while transcribing manuscripts in Old English.

Why “X”? Because the Greek word for Christ, ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ, begins with the letters “chi” (or “X”) and “rho” (or “P”). And the monks used either “X” or “XP” in writing as an abbreviation for “Christ.”

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The nowness of “right now”

Q: Whence cometh “right now”?  Our newscasters in Detroit use it all the time and this drives me batty. What’s wrong with just plain old “now”? Any light you can shed would be appreciated.

A: Just about any usage can get on one’s nerves if used too much, but we don’t believe “right” is redundant in the adverbial phrase “right now.”

Here the adverb “right” is an intensifier that emphasizes the nowness—the sense of being in the present—of the adverb “now.”

In fact, the word “right” has been used for emphasis since the earliest days of Old English, the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons.

It’s used in the sense of “exactly” or “precisely” to modify such words as “now,” “then,” “here,” and “there,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the early days, the OED says, the adverb “right” was used as both a “premodifier” (as in “right anon,” “right now,” or “right then”) and a “postmodifier” (as in “anon-right,” “now right,” or “here-right”).   

As it turns out, the word “right” follows “now” in the dictionary’s earliest example of the usage you’re asking about.

In The Lindisfarne Gospels, an illuminated manuscript that may date from as early as the year 700, the phrase is written as nu reht in Old English.

In case you’re interested, the ultimate source of the word “right” is the Indo-European base reg- (to move in a straight line), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

That same prehistoric Indo-European root has given English, via Latin, such words as “regal,” “royal,” “rectangle,” “rectify,” “rectitude,” and “rectum.”

Yes, “rectum.” As Ayto explains, “rectum” is short for rectum intestinum or “straight intestine”—a term “contrasting the rectum with the convolutions of the remainder of the intestines.”

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Pungent Grains of Titillating Dust

Q: Does the expression “up to snuff” come from the stuff people used to stick up their noses? I don’t see the connection.

A: Yes, the expression almost certainly comes from the pinches of powdered tobacco that people used to inhale (or snuff) through their nostrils.

Although we haven’t found a smoking gun that definitely proves tobacco is the source of the expression, the available evidence is pretty conclusive. Here’s the story.

When the word “snuff” entered English in the late 1300s, it was a noun that referred to the burnt part of the wick on a candle, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The first citation in the OED is from the Wycliffe Bible of around 1382: “Candelquenchers, and … where the snoffes ben quenchid.”

In the mid-1400s, a verb “snuff” showed up and meant to cut off the burnt part of the wick with a special tool.

The earliest example in the OED is from a 1465 reference in Manners and Household Expenses of England in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1841): “Item, the same day my master bowt a snoffer to snoffe wyth candeles.”

In the 17th century, the verb “snuff” came to mean to extinguish, as in this citation from a 1687 French-English dictionary by Guy Miege: “To snuff out the Candle.”

And in the 20th century, the verb took on its gangland sense of to kill, as in this cite from When the Gangs Came to London, a 1932 crime novel by Edgar Wallace: “Eddie would have snuffed out Cora.”

The verb “snuff” took on its nasal meaning (“to draw up or in through the nostrils by the action of inhalation”) in the 1500s, according to the OED.

In the late 1600s, the dictionary says, the noun “snuff”  came to mean “a preparation of powdered tobacco for inhaling through the nostrils.”

“The practice of taking snuff appears to have become fashionable about 1680, but prevailed earlier in Ireland and Scotland,” the dictionary notes.

The OED traces the English word to the Dutch and Flemish terms for snuffing tobacco, snuf or snuif, apparently an abbreviation of snuiftabak.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a 1683 issue of the London Gazette: James Norcock, Snuffmaker and Perfumer … sells all sorts of Snuffs, Spanish and Italian.” 

Getting back to your question, when the expression “up to snuff” showed up in English in the early 1800s, it meant “knowing, sharp, not easily deceived.”

The OED’s first citation is from John Poole’s play Hamlet Travestie (1810), a parody on Shakespeare: “Zooks, he’s up to snuff.”

The dictionary’s next citation, from Pierce Egan’s 1823 revision of Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), offers the best clue to the source of the expression: “Up to snuff, and a pinch above it.”

That pinch is clearly alluding to the use of the powdered tobacco. But why would the use of snuff suggest someone who’s “knowing, sharp, not easily deceived”—the original sense of the expression?

Some wordsmiths have offered the explanation that snuff was expensive and used by rich—and presumably wise—people. But we don’t buy that theory.

We think the original sense of the expression simply referred to the exhilarating feeling one got from a hit of snuff, or, as Alexander Pope referred to it in his poem The Rape of the Lock (1714), the “pungent Grains of titillating Dust.”

It’s not clear from the OED citations when “up to snuff” got its modern sense (“up to the required or usual standard, up to scratch”).

The first clear-cut example in the dictionary is from a Nov. 4, 1931, issue of Punch: “Now Romney painted well enough, / And Reynolds too, they say, / And Gainsborough’s things are up to snuff, / And Lawrence had his day.”

However, we’d suggest that Pierce Egan’s 1823 citation above (“Up to snuff, and a pinch above it”) may have used the expression in its modern sense.

And Charles Dickens may have used it in the modern sense too when he put these words in the mouth of Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers (1836): “Up to snuff and a pinch or two over—eh?”

We’ll let the lexicographer John Ayto have the last word on “snuff.”

In his Dictionary of Word Origins, Ayto says the word “snuff” in all its senses probably goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base “imitative of the sound of drawing air in noisily through the nose.”

How, you may ask, does the word’s candle sense have anything to do with its nasal sense?

It seems that to “snot,” an obsolete verb, once meant to put out a candle as well as to blow one’s nose.

And that, Ayto says, suggests that the candle sense of the word “may ultimately have connections with the inner workings of the nose (possibly a perceived resemblance between an extinguished candlewick and a piece of nasal mucus).”

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“After a while” vs. “in a while”

Q: I recently moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. I have noticed that people out West say, “after a while” in situations where I would say, “in a while.” Which is grammatically correct? This is really bothering me!

A: Bother yourself no longer. There’s very little difference between “in a while” and “after a while,” and for the most part they’re interchangeable.

We’ve never heard of a regional preference for one or the other. English speakers seem to choose one or the other at will. Generally, your ear will choose one for you.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the noun phrase “a while” means “a time, esp. a short or moderate time,” and that it’s used chiefly with the prepositions “after,” “for,” and “in.”

Although the two expressions are generally used the same way, their literal meanings are different.

Here the word “in” means “within limits of space, time, condition, circumstances, etc.,” the OED says. So the literal meaning of “in a while” is within the limits of a short or moderate time.

And “after” in reference to time means “subsequent to, following the interval of, at the conclusion of (a period of time),” the OED says. So “after a while” literally means following a short or moderate time.

But for all practical purposes, the two expressions amount to the same thing, since the time referred to is so nebulous. It’s of little consequence whether something occurs within or following a time that’s general and unspecified.

However, you might prefer one version over the other in certain circumstances—or even for psychological reasons.

For example, agreeing to do a task “in a while” sounds more accommodating than agreeing to do it “after a while.”

And in certain constructions, “in” is more idiomatic—“once in a while” … “see you in a while.” But in others, “after” might seem more natural—“After a while, the pain subsided” …  “After a while, we decided to leave.”

Both “in a while” and “after a while” have been common English phrases for hundreds of years.

“In a while” and the now obsolete “within a while” were first recorded about 1380, the OED says. “After a while” first showed up in 1526.

And after a while, the expressions became almost automatic.

While we’re at it, you might be interested in a post we ran back in 2006 about “a while” versus “awhile,” and a post in 2008 about the use of “while” to mean “although,” “whereas,” or “during the time that.”

In the earlier post, we mention that “while” comes from a prehistoric Indo-European root meaning “rest” or “repose,” and it entered Old English from Germanic sources. It can be a noun, a conjunction, or a verb, as in this sentence:

“For a while, we whiled away our time while answering your question.” 

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Is Brooklyn a brand?

Q: I’m catching up on some WNYC podcasts and just heard Pat and Lennie discuss the affection for (dare I call it the “brand”) Brooklyn. This is nothing new, of course. When I studied Russian poetry, I read “I Love You Brooklyn Bridge” by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930). I can’t find any reference to the poem online, unfortunately.

A: Yes, Pat discussed the expansive use of the term “brand” during her appearance in November on the Leonard Lopate Show. She and Lennie, as you mention, noted that Brooklyn had become a “brand” both here and in Europe.

Parisians, for example, speak of hip things as being très Brooklyn. Swedes in particular seem to love Brooklyn and Brooklyn-made products.

(Business Week reported in October that outside of New York, the biggest market for the craft beer made by Brooklyn Brewery is Sweden.)

By the way, Mayakovsky’s 1925 poem (it’s called simply “Brooklyn Bridge”) is included in Writing New York, a 1998 anthology edited by Lennie’s brother, the essayist and poet Phillip Lopate.

“Mayakovsky, who promoted the legend of himself as a larger-than-life Bolshevik dynamo, salutes the bridge as one outsized force to another,” Phillip writes in his introduction to the poem.

Getting back to the subject of branding, when we say Brooklyn is a brand, we’re using “brand” in the sense of a public image, not just a name or logo that identifies a company or product. In other words, “brand” has jumped the corporate fence.

Today, Brooklyn isn’t alone in being called a “brand.” These days, colleges and universities, sororities and fraternities, hospitals and libraries—even churches!—refer on their web pages to what they call “our brand.”

But perhaps the most ubiquitous new “brands” are people. Celebrities—artists, authors, chefs, architects, entertainers, and athletes—have all been called “brands.”

We’re told, for instance, that Beyoncé is a now a global brand. Oprah is a brand. Madonna is restoring her brand. The tennis star Maria Sharapova is building a brand.

We read about the damage to the Lance Armstrong brand, or the Paula Deen brand, or the Miley Cyrus brand.

Even part of you can become a brand. The Bollywood actor Ram Kapoor, who’s a little portly, has said he doesn’t want to get slimmer because “my physique has become a brand.”

A recent article in the New York Times referred to the “Kardashian brand,” and said Kim Kardashian’s brand may conflict with the brand of her boyfriend Kanye West (though he’s publicly said, “I love her brand”).

“ ‘Brand’ is an overused word,” wrote the Times reporter, Alessandra Stanley, “but it is so imprinted on the ethos of entertainment that those who have one no longer distinguish between a private label and a personal identity.”

What “brand” means in this sense, as we’ve said, is something like public image. It means what pops into people’s minds when they hear your name.

And as one WNYC listener wrote to Pat after the broadcast, the use of “brand” also means you have something to sell.

Clearly, the word “brand” has come a long way in the last millennium or so.

When it first showed up in Beowulf as bronde, as far back as the eight century, it meant fire or destruction by fire, according the Oxford English Dictionary.

At around the same time, the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says, it was used in the sense of a piece of burning wood or a sword, probably because of the glint of light flashing off the blade.

Later, in the 16th century, “brand” came to mean the mark made by burning something with a hot iron, either to cauterize a wound or as a proof of possession.

Because criminals were sometimes branded, the word “brand” took on a figurative sense in the late 16th century—a  mark of disgrace or infamy.

The use of “brand” as a verb or noun in reference to the marking of cattle or horses originated in 17th-century colonial America, according to the OED.

The modern sense of “brand” as a trademark emerged in the 18th century. Oxford says this use of “brand” originally meant a mark, imprinted by burning or some other means, on a cask of wine or other product.

Then in 19th century, a brand came to mean a product carrying such a mark or name.  Later in that same century, as an outgrowth of the trademark usage, “brand” was used to mean kind or type, as in a “brand of humor.”

 It wasn’t until the 1950s that advertising companies began selling clients on the idea of the “brand image”—the image their advertising created in the minds of consumers. While this was usually applied to commercial products, it was sometimes also used in reference to people.

Of the standard dictionaries we’ve checked, only The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) recognizes a meaning close to public image.

The AH entry for “brand” has this as one of its senses: “An association of positive qualities with a widely recognized name, as of a product line or celebrity.”

As for the phrase “brand-new,” it doesn’t mean so new that the label is still attached. (It also isn’t written “bran new,” without the “d,” supposedly because new and fragile items were often packed in bran.)

As we’ve written on the blog, “brand-new” is a 16th-century expression that means “as if fresh and glowing from the furnace.” The “brand” referred to was a piece of iron glowing in the flames (Shakespeare used the phrase “fire-new”).

You didn’t ask, but we’ll end with a question of our own: where did English get the word “brand”?

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the ultimate source is the ancient German root bran- or bren-, which has given us such fiery words as “burn,” “brandy,” and perhaps “broil.”

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“Jail” versus “gaol”

Q: I’m a native Polish speaker who’s learning vocabulary by solving English crosswords. During a coffee break at work, the clue “prison” suggested “jail” for these four spaces: “_A_L.” This sparked a debate with a British friend over “gaol” vs. “jail.” Your thoughts?

A: Both spellings have been around for hundreds of years. The traditional spelling has been “gaol” in Britain and “jail” in the United States.

Although “gaol” is still acceptable in Britain, it’s now considered a variant spelling of “jail” on both sides of the Atlantic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and the four standard British dictionaries we’ve checked.

As Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) explains, “gaol, gaoler, the traditional spellings in the UK, are now under severe and probably unstoppable pressure from jail, jailer, which are dominant in most other parts of the English-speaking world.”

Both pairs—“gaol, gaoler” and “jail, jailer”—are pronounced the same way, which leads to this question: why do the British have a “gaol” spelling if the word is pronounced “jail”?

The short answer, according to Oxford Dictionaries online, is that the word “gaol” was “originally pronounced with a hard g, as in goat.” Here’s a fuller answer.

“Etymologically, a jail is a ‘little cage,’ ” John Ayto says in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto explains that the English word is ultimately derived from caveola, a diminutive of cavea, Latin for cage (and the source of the English word “cage”).

Why do we have two spellings? Because Middle English (the language spoken from about 1100 to 1500) adopted two distinct versions of the word from French.

The “gaol” version comes from the Norman French gaiole or gaole, the OED says, while “jail” comes from the Old Parisian French jaiole or jaile.

Early versions of “gaol” (like gayhol and gayhole) first showed up in English in the 1200s, while early versions of “jail” (iaiole and iayll) appeared in the 1300s, according to Oxford citations.

“Until the 17th century,” Ayto writes, “gaol was pronounced with a hard /g/ sound, but then it gradually fell into line with jail.”

The two versions of the word were spelled all sorts of ways in Middle English, when our language had no letter “j”: gayhol, gayhole, gayll, gaylle, gaille, gayole, and so on. The “gaol” and “jail” spellings first showed up in the 1600s.

The OED describes “gaol” as an “archaic spelling” that’s still seen in writing “chiefly due to statutory and official tradition” in Britain. However, the dictionary adds that “this is obsolete in the spoken language, where the surviving word is jail.”

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Does “attendee” bug you?

Q: I hate “attendee,” which I’ve heard for 30 years but see has been noticed since 1937. Not quite sure why I hate it so much, but just do.

A: Well, “attendee” is an odd bird. The “-ee” suffix in English often indicates someone on the receiving end—“payee,” “endorsee,” “lessee,” “legatee,” and so on.

But the suffix sometimes plays a more active role, as in words like “devotee,” “debauchee,” “refugee,” etc. And it’s sometimes used in jest—the victim of a “jokester” may be referred to as a “jokee.”

You may find it annoying, but  we can’t think of a better term than “attendee” for someone who attends a meeting, conference, or other event: “attender”? “attendant”? Nah!

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) cites 1937 as the “first known use of attendee,” but we’ve found quite a few earlier examples of the usage.

For example, the January 1914 diary of the business fraternity Alpha Kappa Psi includes an announcement by its NYU chapter for a dinner dance on Feb. 11:

“The dance is being held on the eve of a holiday, namely, Lincoln’s Birthday. This is an excellent arrangement and permits of the attendees resting late next morn and reviving their tired spirits.”

M-W Collegiate defines “attendee” as “a person who is present on a given occasion or at a given place (attendees at a convention).”

Interestingly, the earliest example of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1961 citation from the granddaddy of M-W dictionaries, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged.

But we’ll skip to the next (and far more entertaining) example, from The Swinging Set (1967), by William Breedlove and Jerrye Breedlove: “The only attendees who bother with clothes.”

The OED says the usage originated in the US and is chiefly American. However, a third of the dictionary’s citations are from British sources, including this one from the April 3, 1980, issue of the Financial Times:

“Some attendees view this flexibility as an opportunity to negotiate favourable terms.”

You may hate the word “attendee,” but you’ll have a hard time avoiding it. We got over four million hits when we googled it. Unless a better word comes along, you’re stuck with it.

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A “thank you” note

Q: I’m designing a client brochure that includes thanks from numerous folks. The heading reads: “Season’s Greeting and thank you’s from our scholars.” Is the use of “thank you’s” OK? Doesn’t this make it possessive, not plural? But without the apostrophe, “thank yous” looks typically “Jersey” to me!

A: We see no reason why “thank you” has to be pluralized here. But if you want to use the plural, a phrase like “thank you” is pluralized by simply adding the letter “s.”

We agree, though, that “thank yous” looks a bit odd. It might look less so if you added a hyphen (“thank-yous”) or capital letters (“Thank Yous”) or perhaps both (“Thank-Yous”).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), which hyphenates “thank-you,” gives this plural example: “said their thank-yous and departed.”

Although you may raise a few eyebrows with the use of “thank yous,” you’ll raise a lot more by using “Season’s Greeting” rather than the more idiomatic “Season’s Greetings.”

If we were writing the heading for that brochure, we’d go with this: “Season’s Greetings and Thank You from our scholars.”

As for the Jerseyism you mentioned, we had an item on our blog some time ago about “yous,” “yinz,” “yez,” “y’all,” and other nonstandard plural forms of “you.”

We also had a post around the same time about why some people respond to “thank you” with a “thank you” of their own instead of “you’re welcome.”

And if you’re not thanked-out by now, you might be interested in our views about the expression “thank you kindly.”

Getting back to “thank you” itself, the Oxford English Dictionary says it showed up in Middle English as a short form of the expression “I thank you.”

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

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

The use of “thank you” as a noun phrase referring to an expression of gratitude appeared in the late 1700s, according to OED citations.

The first citation is from a 1792 journal entry by the English novelist Fanny Burney: “He looked even extremely gratified … & Bowed expressively a thank you.”

The earliest example of the noun phrase used in the plural is from the Aug. 21, 1894, issue of the Westminster Gazette:

“The majority of passengers retreated from the tables regardless of their running fire of ‘thankyous,’ which were thankyous for nothing.”

The phrase is hyphenated in this example from the Sept. 1, 1900, issue of the Westminster Gazette:  “We had not said nearly enough ‘thank-yous.’ ”

As for “season’s greetings,” the earliest references we’ve found in Google Books are from the mid-19th century. We’ll end with this example from a Dec. 29, 1860, item in the Medical and Surgical Reporter, a weekly journal in Philadelphia:

“We offer our readers, far and near, the season’s greetings — of a Christmas gone and the New Year dawning. Much of hope and good cheer we want all; for ourselves, for our profession, for our country.”

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Generally speaking

Q: I’m puzzled by the phrase “in general.” I assume “general” is the object of the preposition “in,” but can an adjective be an object? I looked up “general” but found no noun form that references generality.

A: The adverbial phrase “in general” is an idiom, a peculiarity of language that doesn’t necessarily have to make sense grammatically. In this case, though, it does.

As it turns out, there is a noun form of “general” that refers to generality, as in this example: “Politicians prefer to speak about the general, not the particular.”

Hence, we have the adverbial phrases “in general” and “in particular.”

When the word “general” showed up in English around 1200, it was an adjective describing a whole class of things or people. But by the 1300s, it was also a noun meaning a whole class of things or people.

We won’t comment here on the use of “general” in military and civilian titles. We’ve already had several posts on the subject, including one in 2012 that links to a couple of others.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the word “general” is derived from the Latin generalis, which means all of a whole class, but the ultimate source is a prehistoric Indo-European root that refers to producing—that is, making or creating things.

This Indo European root (gen-, gon-, gn-) was very productive itself, as Ayto points out in his dictionary.

It gave Latin genus, the source of generalis, and English (via Latin or Greek) such words as “gender,” “generate,” “generic,” “genesis,” “genital,” “genocide, and “gonorrhea” (literally, flow of semen).

In its “general” entry, the OED has a section on the use of the noun in various adverbial phrases, including “as to the general” (generally), “for the general” (for the most part), and “in the general” (generally). All those are now considered obsolete.

The adverbial phrase “in general” showed up in the 1300s, when it meant universally as well as generally, but Oxford says the universal sense is now obsolete. (In post-classical Latin, in generale or in generali meant without specific reference.)

Here’s an example of the general sense of “in general” from Thomas More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529): “Somwhat wold I speke of Luther, & his secte ingenerall.”

In the early 1500s, the phrase “in general” took on the meaning of “for the most part; as a general rule; commonly, usually,” according to the OED.

Here’s an example from Pylgrimage of Perfection, a 1526 religious treatise by the monk and author William Bonde:

“I shall in general, gather certayne scrappes & cromes that holy doctors hath left behynde them in writyng.”

In contemporary English, “in general” generally means generally—that is, usually, mainly, or overall.

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Let’s get kinky!

Q: We’ve had the Fierstein-Lauper take on Kinky Boots. How about Grammarphobia’s take on “kinky”?

A: We’re fans of Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper, but we haven’t seen their musical about a drag queen who helps save a struggling shoe factory. From what we’ve read, it’s a lot of fun (though not all that kinky).

As for the adjective “kinky,” it has a twisted history that begins in Old Icelandic nearly a thousand years ago.

The ultimate source of the adjective, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, is kikna, a word in Old Icelandic that meant to bend at the knees.

Chambers says the term passed through Middle Low German (kinke) into Dutch (kink), where it came to mean a twist in a rope.

When English borrowed the term from Dutch in the 1600s, it referred to a twist or curl in thread, rope, hair, and so on, according to the etymology dictionary.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest written example of the noun “kink” in English is from a 1678 edition of The New World of Words, a dictionary compiled by Edward Phillips:

Keenk (in Navigation), is when a Rope which should run smooth in the Block, hath got a little turn, and runs as it were double.”

In the early 1800s, according to the OED, the term took on various figurative meanings, including an odd notion (that is, a mental twist) and an odd but clever way of doing something.

One of the earliest examples of the figurative usage is from a Nov. 24, 1803, letter by Thomas Jefferson:

“Should the judges take a kink in their heads in favor of leaving the present laws of Louisiana unaltered.” (We’ve expanded the OED citation.)

In the mid-20th century, according to Oxford, “kink” took on a new twist:

“A sexually abnormal person; one who practises sexual perversions; loosely, an eccentric, a person wearing noticeably unusual clothes, behaving in a startling manner, etc.”

The earliest OED citation for this new sense is from the January 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar: “His phone is ex-directory because of all the kinks who used to phone at 2 a.m.”

Returning to your question about “kinky,” we’ll have to back up a bit.

When the adjective “kinky” showed up in English in the 1800s, Oxford says, it meant “having, or full of, kinks; closely curled or twisted: said esp. of the hair of some races.”

The first OED example—from a Jan. 6, 1844, entry in the Congressional Globe, a predecessor of the Congressional Record—is a reference to a black person’s “kinkey” hair.

In the late 1800s, the adjective took on the sense of odd or eccentric. The earliest OED example of this sense is from the Jan. 2, 1889, issue of the Sportsman magazine:

“The kinky ones and the worthy ones who play hole-and-corner with society.”

Here’s a clearer example from The Longest Journey, a 1907 novel by E. M. Forster: “This jaundiced young philosopher, with his kinky view of life, was too much for him.”

In the mid-20th century, the OED says, the adjective “kinky” came to describe someone “given to sexual behaviour regarded as strange or unconventional.”

The dictionary’s first example is from Colin MacInnes’s 1959 novel Absolute Beginners: Suze … meets lots of kinky characters … and acts as agent for me getting orders from them for my pornographic photos.”

The adjective soon took on the sense that’s being used in the title of the Fierstein-Lauper musical: “Of a thing (esp. clothing): sexually provocative in an unconventional way (e.g. kinky boots).”

Here’s an OED example from the 1963 issue of The Annual Register, a British reference that summarizes each year’s events:

“It was the year … that women adopted the fashionable long ‘kinky’ boot.”

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The “cur” in “curmudgeon”

Q: What is the origin of the word “curmudgeon”?

A: Nobody knows, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of word detectives from speculating about it. And some of the speculations are less speculative than others. Here’s the story.

When the word “curmudgeon” first showed up in English in the late 1500s, it referred to a grasping, avaricious man.

But the online Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged describes that sense as archaic, and it says the word now means “a crusty, ill-tempered, or difficult and often elderly person.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of the usage (spelled “curmudgen”) is from the Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

But let’s skip ahead to a more colorful example from Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem, a 1593 pamphlet written by the playwright Thomas Nashe: “Our English Cormogeons, they haue breasts, but giue no suck.”

Although Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged says the origin of “curmudgeon” is unknown, the OED discusses several theories about the word’s etymology.

The appearance of the word “cornmudgin” in Philemon Holland’s 1600 translation of the works of Livy, Oxford says, has led to suggestions that the term originally referred to someone who hides or hoards corn (that is, grain).

The “-mudgin” part of “cornmudgin,” according to this theory, was derived from a Middle English term meaning to steal or an Old French term meaning to conceal or hide away.

The OED reminds us, however, that “curmudgen,” the “corn”-less version of the word in Holinshed’s Chronicles, “was in use a quarter of a century before Holland’s date.”

The dictionary suspects “that cornmudgin is apparently merely a nonce-word of Holland’s, a play upon corn and curmudgeon.” (A nonce word is one used for the nonce—that is, for a specific occasion.)

The OED also debunks Samuel Johnson’s suggestion that “curmudgeon” may be an English corruption of the French phrase cœur méchant , or malicious heart. (In his 1755 dictionary, Johnson attributes the idea to “an unknown correspondent.”)

The Oxford editors are more open to the theory that the first syllable of “curmudgeon” may reflect the word “cur,” which can refer to a despicable or cowardly person as well as a vicious or undesirable dog.  

“The suggestion that the first syllable is cur, the dog, is perhaps worthy of note,” the dictionary says.

In case you’re curious, English borrowed the word “cur” in the 1200s from other Germanic languages where similar terms meant to growl, snarl, or grumble.

“The primary sense appears thus to have been ‘growling or snarling beast,’ ” the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest citation, from the Ancrene Riwle (circa 1225), an anonymous guide for monastic women, uses “cur” in a compound noun: “Þe dogge of helle … þefule cur dogge.” Modern English: “The dog of hell … the foul cur dog.”

And, finally, here’s a figurative example, from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), in which “cur” is used to refer to a man: “Out dog, out curre: thou driu’st me past the bounds / Of maidens patience.”

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“Grate” expectations

Q: When you’re grateful, what exactly are you full of?

A: You’re full of gratitude, of course. But what you’re really asking is, what is “grate”?

The “grate” that a “grateful” person is full of, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, “is a now obsolete adjective, meaning ‘pleasing’ and ‘thankful.’ ”

The old modifier—derived from gratus, a Latin adjective meaning agreeable, pleasing, or thankful—had its heyday in the 1500s and 1600s, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Grateful is a curious sort of adjective,” Ayto writes. “It is unusual for adjectives ending in -ful themselves to be formed from adjectives, and it has been suggested in this case that the related Italian gradevole  ‘pleasing’ may have had some influence.”

The OED notes that the Italian word was also spelled gratevole, and that the English usage may have been influenced by “an accidental resemblance” between the Italian -vole and the English “-ful” endings.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Oxford says, “grateful” was one of several new words that showed up in English with adjectives attached to the suffix “-ful.” Others were “direful,” “tristful,” and “fierceful.”

The Latin adjective gratus has given English several other words, including “gratify,” “gratitude,” and “gratuity.” And the related Latin noun gratia (grace, kindness) has given English “grace” and “gratis.”

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