Archive-name: alt-usage-english-faq Posting-Frequency: monthly Last-modified: 15 August 1995
by Mark Israel
misrael@scripps.edu
Last updated: 15 August 1995
Yes, I know that this file is too big for some newsreaders. If you are cursed with such a newsreader, you can ftp this file from rtfm.mit.edu, directory pub/usenet/alt.usage.english, file alt.usage.english_FAQ. It's also on the World Wide Web:
Or you can send me e-mail and I'll send it to you in pieces. Sorry for the inconvenience, but there are more of us who appreciate the convenience of a single file.
Please send suggestions/flames/praise to me by e-mail rather than post them to the newsgroup. The purpose of an FAQ file is to reduce traffic, not increase it.
This is in no sense an "official" FAQ file. Feel free to start your own. I certainly can't stop you.
Please don't expect me to add a topic unless
Thanks to all who have contributed!
alt.usage.english is a newsgroup where we discuss the English language (and also occasionally other languages). We discuss how particular words, phrases, and syntactic forms are used; how they originated; and where in the English-speaking world they're prevalent. (All this is called "description".) We also discuss how we think they should be used ("prescription").
alt.usage.english is for everyone, not only for linguists, native speakers, or descriptivists.
Things you may want to consider avoiding when posting here:
You really are welcome to post here! Don't let the impatient tone of this FAQ frighten you off.
There are other newsgroups that also discuss the English language. bit.listserv.words-l (which is a redistribution of a BITNET mailing list -- not all machines on Usenet carry these) is also billed as being for "English language discussion", but its participants engage in a lot more socializing and general chitchat than we do.
sci.lang is where most of the professional linguists hang out. Discussions tend to be about linguistic methodology (rather than about particular words and phrases), and prescription is severely frowned upon there. Newbies post many things there that would better be posted here.
alt.flame.spelling (which fewer sites carry than carry alt.usage.english) is the place to criticize other people's spelling. We try to avoid doing that here (although some of us do get provoked if you spell language terms wrong. It's "consensus", not "concensus"; "diphthong", not "dipthong"; "grammar", not "grammer"; "guttural", not "gutteral"; and "pronunciation", not "pronounciation").
alt.usage.english.neologism is described as being for "meaningless words coined by psychotics". Fewer sites carry it, and it has had little traffic so far; the people who do post to it are more positive about neologisms than the quoted description would indicate.
rec.puzzles is a better place than here to ask questions like "What English words end in '-gry' or '-endous'?", "What words contain 'vv'?", "What words have 'e' pronounced as /I/?", "What Pig Latin words are also words?", or "How do you punctuate 'John where Bill had had had had had had had had had had the approval of the teacher' or 'That that is is that that is not is not that that is not is not that that is is that it it is' to get comprehensible text?" But, before you post such a question there, make sure it's not answered in the rec.puzzles archive, available by anonymous ftp from rtfm.mit.edu; the relevant section is in the directory pub/usenet/news.answers/puzzles/archive/language.
Wordplay for its own sake (anagrams, palindromes, etc.) belongs in alt.anagrams. There are also long lists of things of this sort in the rec.puzzles archive.
misc.education.language.english is a newsgroup devoted to the teaching of English (especially as a second language). comp.edu.languages.natural is devoted to software for assisting language instruction.
misc.writing is a newsgroup devoted to writing, and especially to the concerns of people trying to establish themselves as professional writers.
alt.quotations is the place to ask about origins of quotations, although there is no firm dividing line between those and phrase origins (which belong here). You can access the 1901 edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations at:
Language features peculiar to the U.K. get discussed in soc.culture.british as well as here. Before posting to either newsgroup on this subject, you should look at Jeremy Smith's British-American dictionary, available by anonymous ftp from ftp.csos.orst.edu as pub/networking/bigfun/usuk_dictionary.txt.
If you have a (language-related or other) peeve that you want to mention but don't particularly want to justify, you can try alt.peeves. ("What is your pet peeve?" is not a frequently asked question in alt.usage.english, although we frequently get unsolicited answers to it. If you're new to this group, chances are excellent that your particular pet peeve is something that has already been discussed to death by the regulars.
If you're interested in the peculiarities of language as used by computer users, get the Jargon File by anonymous ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu (18.71.0.38) under pub/gnu or on the WWW:
(also available in paperback form as The New Hacker's Dictionary, ed. Eric S. Raymond, 2nd edition, MIT Press, 1993, ISBN 0-262-68079-3). You can discuss hacker language further in the newsgroup alt.folklore.computers, or in the moderated newsgroup comp.society.folklore.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed. (OED2) (Oxford University Press, 1989, 20 vols.; compact edition, 1991 ISBN 0-19-861258-3; additions series, 2 vols., 1993, ISBN 0-19-861292-3 and 0-19-861299-0), has no rivals as a historical dictionary of the English language. It is too large for the editors to keep all of it up-to-date, and hence should not be relied on for precise definitions of technical terms, or for consistent usage labels.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Merriam-Webster, 1961, ISBN 0-87779-206-1) (W3) is the unabridged dictionary to check for 20th-century U.S. citations of word use, and for precise definitions of technical terms too rare to appear in collegiate dictionaries. People sometimes cite W3 with a later date. These later dates refer to the addenda section at the front, not to the body of the dictionary, which is unchanged since 1961. W3 was widely criticized by schoolteachers and others for its lack of usage labels; e.g., it gives "imply" as one of the meanings of "infer" and "flout" as one of the meanings of "flaunt", without indicating that these are disputed usage. Others have defended the lack of usage labels. An anthology devoted to the controversy is Dictionaries and THAT Dictionary: A Case Book of the Aims of Lexicographers and the Targets of Reviewers, ed. James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt (Scott Foresman, 1962).
Please don't refer to any dictionary simply as "Webster's". Books in Print has 5 columns of book titles beginning with "Webster's"!
Among collegiate dictionaries, the ones most frequently mentioned here are Collins English Dictionary (3rd edition, HarperCollins, 1991, ISBN 0-00-433287-3) and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (Merriam-Webster, 1993, ISBN 0-919028-25-X) (MWCD10). Merriam-Webster publishes sub-editions of its collegiate dictionaries, so look at the copyright date to see exactly what you have. The Chambers Dictionary (Larousse, 1993, ISBN 0-550-10255-8) is a respected British dictionary now also available on CD-ROM.
If you're interested in etymology, get The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1992, ISBN 0-395-44895-6) (AHD3) or Henry Cecil Wyld's Universal English Dictionary (Wordsworth, reprinted from 1932, ISBN 1-85326-940-9). These are two of the few dictionaries that trace words back to their reconstructed Indo-European (Aryan) roots.
Although AHD3 looks larger than a collegiate dictionary, its word count puts it in the collegiate range. If you want an up-to-date dictionary that is larger than a collegiate, get the Random House Unabridged Dictionary (2nd edition, Random House, revised 1993, ISBN 0-679-42917-4) (RHUD2).
You cannot access the OED online, unless you or your institution has paid to do so. The second edition is copyright, and allowing public access to it would be illegal. A public-access version of the first edition is conceivable, but I don't know of one.
The OED is available on CD-ROM for PCs, and server-style for UNIX systems. For info on obtaining the UNIX version in North America, phone the Open Text Corporation in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: e-mail info@opentext.com. If you want to submit citations for the next edition of the OED, you can contact the OED staff directly at oed3@oup.co.uk. Info from Alex Lange: The online OED is encoded with the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which is ISO 8879:1986 and is discussed in obscure detail on the comp.text.sgml newsgroup. The funny-looking escape codes beginning with "&" are known as "text entity references". The ISO has defined a slew of such for use with SGML: publishing symbols, math and scientific symbols, and so on. A good place to start for information about SGML and its uses is an article "SGML Frees Information", Byte, June 1992.
Info from Graham Toal: The Webster Server is best accessed via the "webster" program (use the archie service to find it). An old Webster's dictionary (not the one used by the NeXT or the Webster Server, though it looks as if it might have been that version's grandfather) is available by anonymous ftp from src.doc.ic.ac.uk in the directory media/literary/dictionaries. Roget's Thesaurus (1911 version, out of copyright) is available from mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu as pub/etext/etext91/roget13.txt. black.ox.ac.uk has Collins English Dictionary (1st edition) converted to a Prolog fact base; the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary; and the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (150,837 word forms, expanded from the headwords in the Shorter Oxford, with info about 26 different linguistic properties). Read the conditions of use for the Oxford Text Archive materials before using; most texts are available for scholarly use and research only.
Anu Garg (agarg@ces.cwru.edu) runs a public-access wordserver that provides dictionary (using Merriam-Webster's Collegiate), thesaurus, acronym, and anagram services by e-mail. He also has a mailing list, A.Word.A.Day, that mails out a vocabulary word and its definition to its subscribers every day. For information on these services, send a blank message with subject Help to wsmith@wordsmith.org.
The Oxford Companion to the English Language (ed. Tom McArthur, Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-19-214183-X) is an encyclopaedia with a wealth of information on various dialects, on lexicography, and almost everything else except individual words and expressions. Success With Words (Reader's Digest, 1983, ISBN 0-88850-117-X) is especially suitable for beginners.
David Crystal The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-521-26438-3
David Crystal A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics Blackwell, 1985, ISBN 0-631-14081-6
William Bright, ed. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics 4 vols., Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-19-505196-3
R. E. Asher, ed. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 10 vols., Pergamon, 1994, ISBN 0-08-035943-4
Randolph Quirk et al. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language Longman, 1985, ISBN 0-582-51734-6
Otto Jespersen A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles 7 volumes, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1909-1949The best survey of the history of usage disputes and how they correlate with actual usage is Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, Merriam-Webster, 1989 (WDEU -- recently reprinted as Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, ISBN 0-87779-131-7).
Among conservative prescriptivists, the most highly respected usage book is the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler -- 1st edition, 1926 (MEU); 2nd edition, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers, Oxford University Press, 1965, ISBN 0-19-281389-7 (MEU2). Robert Burchfield (who edited the OED supplement) was supposedly working on a 3rd edition, although nothing seems to have come of this.
The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White (Macmillan, 3rd ed. 1979, ISBN 0-02-418190-0) and Wilson Follett's Modern American Usage (Hill and Wang, 1966, ISBN 0-8090-0139-X) have their partisans here, although they aren't as widely respected as Fowler.
Liberals most often refer to the Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, by Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans (Random House, 1957, ISBN 0-8022-0973-4 -- out of print).
Jack Lynch (jlynch@english.upenn.edu) has a style guide that he originally wrote for business writers and modified for an English Literature course that he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania:
Project Bartleby at Columbia has an incomplete copy of the 1918 edition of Strunk's book The Elements of Style (before White got to it), with some simple hypertext markup:
Evan Morris (words1@interport.net) posts his syndicated newspaper column, "Words, Wit, and Wisdom":
Terry O'Connor (toconnor@peg.apc.org) posts "Word for Word", his column in the Queensland newspaper The Courier-Mail:
Cobuilder offers a column called WordWatch:
The OED posts its newsletters:
The Editorial Eye posts many of its articles:
Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms, Merriam-Webster, 1984, ISBN 0-87779-241-0
Norman E. Steenrod, Paul R. Halmos, Menahem M. Schiffer, Jean A. Dieudonne How to Write Mathematics American Mathematical Society, 1973, ISBN 0-8218-0055-8
Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, & Paul M. Roberts Mathematical Writing Mathematical Association of America, 1989, ISBN 0-88385-063-X
A. P. Cowie and Ronald Mackin Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English: Verbs with Prepositions and Particles, Vol. I OUP, 1975, ISBN 0-19-431145-7
Rosemary Courtney Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs Longman, 1983, ISBN 0-582-55530-2
F. T. Wood English Verbal Idioms London: Macmillan, 1966, ISBN 0-333-09673-8
F. T. Wood English Prepositional Idioms London: Macmillan, 1969, ISBN 0-333-10391-2
There are many hundreds of differences between British and American English. From time to time, we get threads in which each post mentions one of these differences. Because such a thread can go on for ever, it's helpful to delimit the topic more narrowly.
The books to get are The Hutchinson British/American Dictionary by Norman Moss (Arrow, 1990, ISBN 0-09-978230-8); British English, A to Zed by Norman W. Schur (Facts on File, 1987, ISBN 0-8160-1635-6); and Modern American Usage by H. W. Horwill (OUP, 2nd ed., 1935).
Jeremy Smith (jeremy@csos.orst.edu) has compiled his own British-American dictionary, available by anonymous ftp from ftp.csos.orst.edu as pub/networking/bigfun/usuk_dictionary.txt. He plans to publish it as a paperback.
For Australian English, see The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Colloquial Language (Macquarie, 1988, ISBN 0-949757-41-1); The Macquarie Dictionary (Macquarie, 1991, ISBN 0-949757-63-2); The Australian National Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-19-55736-5); or The Dinkum Dictionary (Viking O'Nell, 1988, ISBN 0-670-90419-8).
For New Zealand English, there's the Heinemann New Zealand Dictionary, ed. H. W. Orseman (Heinemann, 1979, ISBN 0-86863-373-9); and A Personal Kiwi-Yankee Slanguage Dictionary, by Louis S. Leland Jr. (McIndoe, 1987, ISBN 0-86868-001-X).
For South African English, see A Dictionary of South African English, ed. Jean Branford (OUP, 3rd ed., 1987, ISBN 0-19-570427-4).
For Canadian English, see A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (Gage, 1967, ISBN 0-7715-1976-1); the Penguin Canadian Dictionary (Copp, 1990, ISBN 0-670-81970-0); or the Gage Canadian Dictionary (Gage, 1982, ISBN 0-7715-9660-X).
For Irish English, see Padiac O'Farrell's How the Irish speak English (Mercier, 1993, ISBN 185635055X); Patrick W. Joyce's English as We Speak it in Ireland (Wolfhound, 2nd ed., 1987, ISBN 0-86327-1227); or Loreto Todd's Words Apart: A Dictionary of Northern Ireland English (C.Smythe, 1990, 0-86140-338-X).
For English in India, see Ivor Lewis's Sahibs, Nabobs and Boxwallahs: A Dictionary of the Words of Anglo-Indian (OUP, 1991, ISBN 0-19-562582-X).
Christine Ammer Have a Nice Day -- No Problem! : A Dictionary of Cliches Plume Penguin, 1992, ISBN 0-452-27004-9
Robert Hendrickson The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins Facts on File, 1987, ISBN 0-86237-122-7 (The paperback reprint, The Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, is no longer available.)
Nigel Rees Bloomsbury Dictionary of Phrase and Allusion Bloomsbury, 1991, ISBN 0-7475-1217-5
Ivor H. Evans, ed. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 14th ed., Harper & Row, 1989, ISBN 0-304-31835-3
Rosalie Maggio The Bias-Free Word Finder: A Dictionary of Nondiscriminatory Language Beacon, 1992, ISBN 0-8070-6003-8
Nigel Rees The Politically Correct Phrasebook: What They Say You Can and Cannot Say in the 1990s Bloomsbury, 1993, ISBN 0-7475-1426-7
Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook Villard, 1993, ISBN 0-679-74944-6
James Lipton An Exaltation of Larks Viking Penguin, 1991, ISBN 0-670-3044-6
Julian Franklyn A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang 3rd ed., Routledge, 1990, ISBN 0-415-04602-5
Paul Wheeler Upper Class Rhyming Slang Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985, ISBN 0283992956
John Meredith Dinkum Aussie Rhyming Slang Kangaroo, 1991, ISBN 0-86417-333-4
Basic English (where "Basic" stands for "British American Scientific International Commercial") is a subset of English with a base vocabulary of 850 words, propounded by C. K. Ogden in 1929. Look under "Ogden" in your library's author index if you're interested. (We're not.)
E-prime is a subset of standard idiomatic English that eschews all forms of the verb "to be" (e.g., you can't say "You are an ass" or "You an ass", but you can say "You act like an ass"). The original reference is D. David Bourland, Jr., "A linguistic note: write in E-prime" General Semantics Bulletin, 1965/1966, 32 and 33, 60-61. Albert Ellis wrote a book in E-prime (Sex and the Liberated Man). You can also look at the April 1992 issue of the Atlantic if you're interested. (We're not.) The following book contains articles both pro and con on E-Prime: To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology, ed. D. David Bourland and Paul D. Johnston, International Society for General Semantics, 1991, ISBN 0-918970-38-5.
Beware of using ad hoc methods to indicate pronunciation. The problem with ad hoc methods is that they often wrongly assume your dialect to have certain features in common with the readers' dialect. You may pronounce "bother" to rhyme with "father"; some of the readers here don't. You may pronounce "cot" and "caught" alike; some of the readers here don't. You may pronounce "caught" and "court" alike; some of the readers here don't.
The standard way to represent pronunciation (used in the latest British Dictionaries and by linguists worldwide) is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For a complete guide to the IPA, see Phonetic Symbol Guide by Geoffrey K. Pullum and William A. Ladusaw (University of Chicago Press, 1986, ISBN 0-226-68532-2). IPA uses many special symbols; on the Net, where we're restricted to ASCII symbols, we must find a way to make do.
The following scheme is due to Evan Kirshenbaum. I show here only examples for the sounds most often referred to in this newsgroup. The examples transcribe British Received Pronunciation (RP) except as noted. For Evan's complete scheme, illustrated with examples from U.S. English, see Evan's own regular posts here and to sci.lang, or send e-mail to Evan (kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com). There's a WWW page that shows what the IPA symbols look like:
The consonant symbols [b], [d], [f], [h], [k], [l], [m], [n], [p], [r], [s], [t], [v], [w], [z] have their usual English values.
Here is the scheme compared with the transcriptions in 4 U.S. dictionaries. (Most British dictionaries now use IPA for their transcriptions.)
Merriam-Webster American Heritage Random House Webster's New World
[A] ä ä ä ä
[A.] (merged with [A]) o breve o (merged with [A])
[a] a overdot (merged with [A]) A a overdot
/AI/ i macron i macron i macron i macron
/AU/ a u overdot ou ou ou
[C] (merged with [x]) (merged with [x]) (merged with [x]) H
[D] th underlined th th slashed th
/dZ/ j j j j
[E] e e breve e e
/E@/ a schwa â â (merged with [e])
/eI/ a macron a macron a macron a macron
[g] g g g g
[I] i i breve i i
[I.] ue ligature (merged with [y]) (merged with [y]) (merged with [y])
[i] e macron e macron e macron e macron
[j] y y y y
[N] <eng> ng ng <eng>
[O] o overdot ô ô ô
/OI/ o overdot i oi oi oi ligature
/oU/ o macron o macron o macron o macron
[S] sh sh sh sh ligature
[T] th th th th ligature
/tS/ ch ch ch ch ligature
[U] u overdot oo breve oo breve oo
[u] ü oo macron oo macron oo macron
[V] (merged with [@]) u breve u u
[V"] (merged with [@]) û û û
[W] oe ligature oe ligature OE ligature ö
[x] k underlined KH KH kh ligature
[Y] oe ligature macron (merged with [W]) (merged with [W]) (merged with [W])
[y] ue ligature macron ü Y ü
[Z] zh zh zh zh ligature
[&] a a breve a a
[@] schwa schwa schwa schwa
- superscript schwa syllabicity mark unmarked '
Auditory files demonstrating speech sounds can be obtained by anonymous ftp from ftp.cs.cmu.edu, in /user/ai/areas/nlp/corpora/pron and /user/ai/areas/speech/database/britpron. Or look on the WWW at
A rhotic speaker is one who pronounces as a consonant postvocalic "r", i.e. the "r" after a vowel in words like "world" /wV"rld/. A nonrhotic speaker either does not pronounce the "r" at all /wV"ld/ or pronounces it as a schwa /wV"@ld/. British Received Pronunciation (RP) and many other dialects of English are nonrhotic.
Many nonrhotic speakers (including RP speakers, but excluding most nonrhotic speakers in the southern U.S.) use a "linking r": they don't pronounce "r" in "for" by itself /fO/, but they do pronounce the first "r" in "for ever" /fO 'rEv@/. Linking "r" differs from French liaison in that the former happens in any phonetically appropriate context, whereas the latter also needs the right syntactic context.
A further development of "linking r" is "intrusive r". Intrusive-r speakers, because the vowels in "law" (which they pronounce the same as "lore") and "idea" (which they pronounce to rhyme with "fear") are identical for them to vowels spelled with "r", intrude an r in such phrases as "law [r]and order" and "The idea [r]of it!" They do not intrude an [r] after vowels that are never spelled with an "r". Some people blanch at intrusive r, but most RP speakers now use it.
Those who round their lips when they say it would probably transcribe it /dOg/; those who don't round their lips, /dAg/.
Very few people in North America distinguish all three vowels /A/, /A./, and /O/. Speakers in Eastern and Southern U.S. merge /A./ and /A/, so that "bother" and "father" rhyme. Speakers in Western U.S. and in Canada merge /A./ and /O/, so that "cot" and "caught", "Don" and "Dawn" are pronounced alike. Some speakers merge all three vowels. The Oxford Companion to the English Language says: "The merger of vowels in tot and taught begins in a narrow band in central Pennsylvania and spreads north and south to influence the West, where the merger is universal. [. . .] In New England, where the merger is beginning to occur, speakers select the first vowel; in the Midland and West, the second vowel is used for both." Although /A./ is seldom used to transcribe American pronunciation, the vowel transcribed /O/ may sound like /A./ to non-American speakers, or it may sound like /O/.
There is a further complication with "dog": U.S. dictionaries give the pronunciations /dOg/, /dAg/ in that order (and similarly with some other words ending in "-og", although which ones varies from dictionary to dictionary). "Dawg", the name of the family dog in the comic strip "Hi and Lois", may be intended to convey the pronunciation /dOg/ to (or from) people who usually pronounce the word /dAg/; or it may be intended as how a child in a community where /A./ and /O/ are merged might misspell "dog".
There is a general tendency in English whereby when a word with a stressed final syllable is followed by another word without a pause, the stress moves forward: "kangaroo", but "kangaroo court"; "afternoon", but "afternoon nap"; "above board", but "an aboveboard deal". This happens chiefly in noun phrases, but not exclusively so ("acquiesce" versus "acquiesce readily"). Consider also "Chinese" and all numbers ending in "-teen".
When "have to" means "must", the [v] in "have" becomes an [f]. Similarly, in "has to", [z] becomes [s]. When "used to" and "supposed to" are used in their senses of "formerly" and "ought", the "-sed" is pronounced /st/; when they're used in other senses, it's /zd/.
In many dialects, "the" is pronounced /D@/ before a consonant, and /DI/ before a vowel. Many foreigners learning English are taught this rule explicitly. Native English speakers are also taught this rule when we sing in choirs. (We do it instinctively in rapid speech; but in the slower pace of singing, it has to be brought to our conscious attention.)
Words that have different pronunciations for specialized meanings include "contrary" (often stressed on the second syllable when the meaning is "perverse") and "to process" (stressed on the second syllable when the meaning is "to go in procession"). "Offence" and "defence", usually stressed on the second syllable, are often in North America stressed on the first syllable when the context is team sports. (In the U.S., of course, they are spelled with -se.)
"Cocaine" used to be pronounced /'co ca in/ (3 syllables). "Waistcoat" used to be pronounced /'wEskIt/¹. "Humble" and "human" were borrowed from French with no [h] in their pronunciation. "Forte" in the sense "strong point" comes from French, where the "e" is not pronounced.
"Zoo" is an abbreviation of "zoological garden". The (popular but stigmatized) pronunciation of "zoological" as /zu@'lA.dZik@l/ (as opposed to /zo@'lA.dZik@l/) is due to the influence of "zoo".
"Elephant" was "olifaunt" in Middle English, but its spelling was restored to reflect the Latin "elephantus". Similarly, "crocodile" was "cokedrill".
"Golf" is Scots. The traditional Scots pronunciation is /gof/. "Ralph" was traditionally pronounced /ref/ in Britain -- Gilbert and Sullivan rhymed it with "waif" in H.M.S. Pinafore; that's how the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams pronounced his name; and even today actor Ralph Fiennes (of Schindler's List fame) is said to pronounce his name /ref faInz/.
"Medicine" and "regiment" were two-syllable words in the 19th century: /'mEdsIn/ and /'rEdZm@nt/. /'mEdsIn/ can still be heard in RP.
King Arthur would have pronounced his name /'artur/.
The new pronunciations in such cases are called "spelling pronunciations". The "speak-as-you-spell movement" is described in the MEU2 article on "pronunciation".
¹In fact, it is still so pronounced in many areas.
acronym. Strictly, an acronym is a string of initial letters pronounceable as a word, such as "NATO". Abbreviations like "NBC" have been variously designated "alphabetisms" and "initialisms", although some people do call them acronyms. WDEU says, "Dictionaries, however, do not make this distinction [between acronyms and initialisms] because writers in general do not"; but two of the best known books on acronyms are titled Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary (19th ed., Gale 1993) and Concise Dictionary of Acronyms and Initialisms (Facts on File, 1988).
The Network Dictionary of Acronyms is available through World Wide Web at
or by e-mail (send the word help to freetext@iruccvax.ucc.ie).
"alot". This spelling of "a lot" is frequently mentioned as a pet peeve. It rarely appears in print, but is often found in the U.S. in informal writing and on Usenet. There does not seem to be a corresponding "alittle".
"alright". The spelling "alright" is recorded from 1887. It was defended by Fowler (in one of the Society for Pure English tracts, not in MEU), on the analogy of "almighty" and "altogether", and on the grounds that "The answers are alright" (= "The answers are O.K.") is less ambiguous than "The answers are all right" (which could mean "All the answers are right".) But it is still widely condemned.
"between you and I". The prescriptive rule is to use "you and I" in the same contexts as "I" (i.e., as a subject), and "you and me" in the same contexts as "me" (i.e., as an object). In "between you and me", since "you and me" is the object of the preposition "between", "me" is the only correct form. But English speakers have a tendency to regard compounds joined with "and" as units, so that some speakers use "you and me" exclusively, and others use "you and I" exclusively, although such practices "have no place in modern edited prose" (WDEU). "Between you and I" was used by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Since this antedates the teaching of English grammar, it is probably not "hypercorrection". (This is mentioned merely to caution against the hypercorrection theory, not to defend the phrase.) Shakespeare also used "between you and me".
"could care less". The idiom "couldn't care less", meaning "doesn't care at all" (the meaning in full is "cares so little that he couldn't possibly care less"), originated in Britain around 1940. "Could care less", which is used with the same meaning, developed in the U.S. around 1960. We get disputes about whether the latter was originally a mis-hearing of the former; whether it was originally ironic; or whether it arose from uses where the negative element was separated from "could" ("None of these writers could care less . . .") Henry Churchyard believes that this sentence by Jane Austen may be pertinent: "You know nothing and you care less, as people say." (Mansfield Park (1815), Chapter 29) Meaning-saving elaborations have also been suggested; e.g., "As if I could care less!"; "I could care less, but I'd have to try"; "If I cared even one iota -- which I don't --, then I could care less."
An earlier transition in which "not" was dropped was the one that gave us "but" in the sense of "only". "I will not say but one word", where "but" meant "(anything) except", became "I will say but one word."
Other idioms that say the opposite of what they mean include: "head over heels" (which could mean turning cartwheels, i.e. "head over heels over head over heels", but is also used to mean "upside- down", i.e. "heels over head"); "Don't sneeze more than you can help" (meaning "more than you cannot help"; "help" here means "prevent"); "It's hard to open, much less acknowledge, the letters" (where "less" means "harder", i.e. "more"); "I shouldn't wonder if it didn't rain"; "I miss not seeing you"; and "I turned my life around 360 degrees" -- not to mention undisputedly ironic phrases such as "fat chance", "Thanks a lot", and "I should worry".
"could of". We get frequent complaints about the occurrence of "of" in unedited prose where the meaning is "have". "Have" contracts to "'ve", so "could've", "might've", "must've", "should've", "would've", etc. (and their negatives, "couldn't've", etc.), should be so spelt. People have testified that it's got beyond a spelling mistake: they've heard "would of" spoken with a clear pause between the words.
WDEU says: "The OED Supplement dates the naive (or ignorant) use of of back to 1837. [. . . Y]ou had better avoid it in your own writing. [. . .] Bernstein 1977 allows that a schoolchild cannot be blamed for could of -- once."
"different to", "different than". "Different from" is the construction that no one will object to. "Different to" is fairly common informally in the U.K., but rare in the U.S. "Different than" is sometimes used to avoid the cumbersome "different from that which", etc. (e.g., "a very different Pamela than I used to leave all company and pleasure for" -- Samuel Richardson). Some U.S. speakers use "different than" exclusively. Some people have insisted on "different from" on the grounds that "from" is required after "to differ". But Fowler points out that there are many other adjectives that do not conform to the construction of their parent verbs (e.g., "accords with", but "according to"; "derogates from", but "derogatory to").
"done" = "finished". The OED's first citation for "done" in the sense of "finished" is from 1300, and it has been in continuous use since then. It was used in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer ("When the Clerkes have dooen syngyng"); by Francis Bacon ("Dinner being done, the Tirsan retireth", 1611); by John Donne ("And having done that, Thou haste done, I have no more", 1623); by Dryden ("Now the Chime of Poetry is done", 1697); and by Dickens ("when the reading of this document is done", 1859). According to The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (OUP, 3rd ed., 1970, ISBN 0-19-869118-1), the proverb "Man's work lasts till set of sun; woman's work is never done" is first recorded with the words "is never done" in 1721.
In the early 20th century, for some reason objections to the use of "done" in the sense of "finished" arose in the U.S. It became regarded as colloquial, and in 1969 only 53% of AHD's usage panel approved of it in writing. Although these objections have now subsided, one should still beware that the two senses of "done" may cause ambiguity: does "The work will be done next month" mean "The work will get done next month" or "The work will be done by next month"?
The use of "be done" with a personal subject, meaning "have finished", is described by the OED as "chiefly Irish, Sc., U.S., and dial." The first citation is dated 1766, and is from Thomas Amory, a British writer of Irish descent: "I was done with love for ever." American users have included Thomas Jefferson ("One farther favor and I am done", 1771); Mark Twain ("I am done with official life for the present", 1872); and Robert Frost ("But I am done with apple- picking now", 1914). Users in the British Isles have included Robert Louis Stevenson ("We were no sooner done eating than Clumsy brought out an old, thumbed greasy pack of cards", 1886) and George Bernard Shaw ("You can't be done: you've eaten nothing", 1898).
"Be finished" is also used in the sense of "have finished". Jespersen's first citation is from Oliver Goldsmith ("When we were finished for the day", 1766). English-speakers should be careful not to render this construction literally into other languages: Partridge recounts the story of an Englishman who in a French restaurant said Je suis fini to the waiter, who looked at the "finished" customer with some concern.
Any of "be done", "be finished", "have done", and "have finished" may be followed either with a gerund, or with "with" plus any noun phrase. If "with" is not used and the noun phrase is not a gerund, then only "have finished" may be used ("have done" would not have the sense "have finished" here). Use of "with" changes the meaning: "I have finished construction of the building" means that the building is fully constructed, whereas "I have finished with construction of the building" means merely that my part is over.
These uses of "be done" and "be finished" are examples of what Fowler called the "intransitive past participle", where, instead of the more usual transformation:
we see the transformation:
Fowler gives the examples: fallen angels, the risen sun, a vanished hand, past times, the newly arrived guest, a grown girl, absconded debtors, escaped prisoners, the deceased lady, the dear departed, coalesced stems, a collapsed lorry, we are agreed, a couched lion, an eloped pair, an expired lease.
"is is". Double "is", as in "The reason is, is that . . ." is a recent U.S. development, much decried. Of course, "What this is is . . ." is undisputedly correct.
"due to". "Due to" meaning "caused by" is undisputedly correct in contexts where "due" can be construed as an adjective (e.g., "failure due to carelessness"). Its use in contexts where "due" is an adverb ("He failed due to carelessness") has been disputed. Fowler says that "due to is often used by the illiterate as though it had passed, like owing to, into a mere compound preposition". But Fowler was writing in 1926; what hadn't happened then may well have happened by now.
"functionality". "Functionality" is often attacked as a needless long variant of "function". But they are differentiated in meaning. "The function of a screwdriver is to turn screws. Its functionality includes prying open paint cans, stirring paint, scraping paint, and acting as a chisel. The function is what it is designed to do. The functionality is what you can do with it." -- Evan Kirshenbaum. This specialized meaning of "functionality" is not yet in most dictionaries.
gender-neutral pronouns. Singular "they" (as in "Everyone was blowing their nose"), which has been used in English since the time of Chaucer, has gained popularity recently as a result of the move towards gender-neutral language. Prescriptive grammarians have traditionally (since 1746, although the actual practice goes right back to 1200) prescribed "Everyone was blowing his nose."
Proposals for other gender-neutral pronouns get made from time to time, and some can be found in actual use ("sie" and "hir" are the ones most frequently found on Usenet -- "hir" is said to have been used in a gender-neutral fashion by Chaucer). Cecil Adams, in Return of the Straight Dope (Ballantine, 1994, ISBN 0-345-38111-4), says that some eighty such terms have been proposed, the first of them in the 1850s.
Discussions about gender-neutral pronouns tend to go round and round and never reach a conclusion. Please refrain. John Chao (chao@hoss.ee.udel.edu) is constructing a long FAQ on this topic:
(We also get disputes about the use of the word "gender" in the sense of "sex", i.e., of whether a human being is male or female. This also dates from the 14th century. By 1900 it was restricted to jocular use, but it has now been revived because of the "sexual relations" sense of "sex".)
"hopefully", "thankfully". The traditional, undisputed senses of these words are active: "in a hopeful manner", "in a thankful manner".
The OED's first citation for "hopefully" in the passive sense (= "It is to be hoped that") is from 1932, but no unmistakable citation has been found between then and 1954. (WDEU has three ambiguous citations dated 1941, 1951, and 1954.) WDEU's first citation for the passive sense of "thankfully" (= "We can be thankful that") is from 1963. These uses became popular in the early '60s, and have been widely criticized on the grounds that they should have been "hopably" and "thankably" (on the analogy of "arguably", "predictably", "regrettably", "inexplicably", etc.). You'll find "hopefully" defended in "Mathematical Writing", a set of lecture notes from one of Knuth's courses.
The disputed, passive use of "hopefully" is often referred to as "sentence-modifying"; but it can also modify a single word, as is hopefully clear from this example (!).
Discussions about these words go round and round for ever without reaching a conclusion. We advise you to refrain.
"impact" = "to affect". The verb "to impact" predates the noun "impact" in English. "Impact" -- which comes from Latin impactus, past participle of impingere = "to push against" -- is first recorded in English in 1601 in the form of the past participle, "impacted". The verb "to impact", meaning "to press closely into or in something", dates from 1791. The noun "impact" dates from 1781. The (undisputed) expression "impacted wisdom tooth" dates from 1876. There is another English verb derived from Latin impingere: "to impinge", first recorded in 1605. "To impinge on" shares with "to impact" the sense "to come sharply in contact with", and some people consider it stylistically preferable. Unlike "to impact", "to impinge on" has acquired the figurative sense "to encroach on", possibly through confusion with "to infringe". This sense is attested from 1758 on.
The usage dispute centres on the use of the verb "to impact (on)" in the sense "to affect, to have an effect on, to influence". The OED's earliest citations where this is clearly the sense are: for "impact on", 1951; and for transitive "impact", 1963.
Opposition to these uses is widespread. 84% of AHD3's Usage Panel disapproved of "social pathologies [. . .] that impact heavily on such a community"; and 95% disapproved of "a potential for impacting our health". Among the objections to such use of "impact" are that it sounds pretentious and bureaucratic, and that it may connote to the reader violence that the author did not intend. The latter objection can apply also to "impact" the noun. Kenneth Hudson, in The Dictionary of Diseased English (Macmillan, 1977), noted: " `Yves St. Laurent's Triangles give even more design impact to your bed' (Washington Star, 17.10.76) is not the happiest of sentences. `Make a nice bed look even better' would have been more reassuring."
"It's me" vs "It is I". (freely adapted from an article by Roger Lustig) Fowler says: "me is technically wrong in It wasn't me etc.; but the phrase being of its very nature colloquial, such a lapse is of no importance".
The rule for what he and others consider technically right is not (as is commonly misstated) that the nominative should always be used after "to be". Rather, it is that "to be" should link two noun phrases of the same case, whether this be nominative or accusative:
According to the traditional grammar being used here, "to be" is not a transitive verb, but a copulative verb. When you say that A is B, you don't imply that A, by being B, is doing something to B. (After all, B is also doing it to A.) Other verbs considered copulative are "to become", "to remain", "to seem", and "to look".
Sometimes in English, though, "to be" does seem to have the force of a transitive verb; e.g., in Gelett Burgess's:
The occurrence of "It's me", etc., is no doubt partly due to this perceived transitive force. In the French C'est moi, often cited as analogous, moi is not in the accusative, but a special form known as the "disjunctive", used for emphasis. If etre were a transitive verb in French, C'est moi would be Ce m'est.
In languages such as German and Latin that inflect between the nominative and the accusative, B in "A is B" is nominative just like A. In English, no nouns and only a few personal pronouns ("I", "we", "thou", "he", "she", "they" and "who") inflect between the nominative and the accusative. In other words, we've gotten out of the habit, for the most part.
Also, in English we derive meaning from word position, far more than one would in Latin, somewhat more than in German, even. In those languages, one can rearrange sentences drastically for rhetorical or other purposes without confusion (heh) because inflections (endings, etc.) tell you how the words relate to one another. In English, "The dog ate the cat" and "The cat ate the dog" are utterly different in meaning, and if we wish to have the former meaning with "cat" prior to "dog" in the sentence, we have to say "The cat was eaten by the dog" (change of voice) or "It is the cat that the dog ate." In German, one can reverse the meaning by inflecting the word (or its article): Der Hund frass die Katze and Den Hund frass die Katze reverse the meaning of who ate whom. In Latin, things are even more flexible: almost any word order will do:
all mean the same, the choice of word order being made perhaps for rhetorical or poetic purpose.
English is pretty much the opposite of that: hardly any inflection, great emphasis on order. As a result, things have gotten a little irregular with the personal pronouns. And there's uncertainty as to how to use them; the usual rules aren't there, because the usual word needs no rules, being the same for nominative and accusative.
The final factor is the traditional use of Latin grammatical concepts to teach English grammar. This historical quirk dates to the 17th century, and has never quite left us. From this we get the Latin-derived rule, which Fowler still acknowledges. And we do follow that rule to some extent: "Who are they?" (not "Who are them?" or "Whom are they?") "We are they!" (in response to the preceding) "It is I who am at fault." "That's the man who he is."
But not always. "It is me" is attested since the 16th Century. (Speakers who would substitute "me" for "I" in the "It is I who am at fault" example would also sacrifice the agreement of person, and substitute "is" for "am".)
"less" vs "fewer". The rule usually encountered is: use "fewer" for things you count (individually), and "less" for things you measure: "fewer apples", "less water". Since "less" is also used as an adverb ("less successful"), "fewer" helps to distinguish "fewer successful professionals" (fewer professionals who are successful) from "less successful professionals" (professionals who are less successful). (No such distinction is possible with "more", which serves as the antonym of both "less" and "fewer".) "Less" has been used in the sense of "fewer" since the time of King Alfred the Great (ninth century), and is still common in that sense, especially informally in the U.S., but in Fowler's day it was so rare in British English that he didn't even mention it.
Partisans of "fewer" use "one car fewer" rather than "one fewer car", and "far fewer" rather than "much fewer".
"like" vs "as". For making comparisons (i.e., asserting that one thing is similar to another), the prescribed choices are:
In 1 and 2, "like" governs a noun (or a pronoun or a noun phrase). In 3, "as" governs a clause with a noun and a verb. In 4, "as" governs a prepositional phrase. Look at what the word governs, and you will know which to use.
In informal English, "like" is often used in place of "as" in sentences of type 3 and 4. "Like" has been been used in the sense of "as if" since the 14th century, and in the sense of "as" since the 15th century, but such use was fairly rare until the 19th century, and "a writer who uses the construction in formal style risks being accused of illiteracy or worse" (AHD3). "Like" in 1 and 2 is a preposition; "as"/"like" in 3 or 4 and "as if" are conjunctions. Fowler put "Like as conjunction" first in his list of "Illiteracies" (he defined "illiteracy" as "offence against the literary idiom").
In some sentences of type of 3, "as" may sound too formal: "Pronounce it as you spell it." To avoid both this formality and the stigma of "like" here, you may use "the way": "Pronounce it the way you spell it." But this solution is available only if you are specifying a single way; it doesn't work, for example, in "Play it as it's never been played before." ("Play it in a way . . ." might work here, but lacks the connotations of enthusiasm and excellence that "play it as" has.)
The most famous use of "like" as a conjunction was in the 1950s slogan for Winston Cigarettes: "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." The New Yorker wrote that "it would pain [Sir Winston Churchill] dreadfully", but in fact conjunctive "like" was used by Churchill himself in informal speech: "We are overrun by them, like the Australians are by rabbits." "Like" in the sense of "as if" was, until recently, more often heard in the Southern U.S. than elsewhere, and was perceived by Britons as an Americanism. When used in this sense, it is never now followed by the inflected past subjunctive: people say "like it is" or "like it was", not "like it were".
Sometimes, "as" governs a simple noun. When it does, it does not introduce a comparison, but rather may:
"like" vs "such as". The Little, Brown Handbook (6th ed., HarperCollins, 1995) says: "Strictly, such as precedes an example that represents a larger subject, whereas like indicates that two subjects are comparable."
Nobody would use "such as" in the second sentence; the disputed usage is "like" in the first sentence.
Opposing it are: earlier editions of The Little, Brown Handbook (which did not use the hedge "strictly"); the Random House English Language Desk Reference (1995); The Wordwatcher's Guide to Good Writing and Grammar by Morton S. Freeman (Writer's Digest, 1990); and Word Perfect: A Dictionary of Current English Usage by John O. E. Clark (Harrap, 1987).
The OED, first edition, in its entry on "like" (which is in a section prepared in 1903) said that "in modern use", "like" "often = `such as', introducing a particular example of a class respecting which something is predicated"; but it has no citation earlier than 1886.
Fowler did not treat the topic. His own practice seems to have been to write "such . . . as" when using examples to define the set ("such bower-birds' treasures as au pied de la lettre, à merveille, [. . .] and sauter aux yeux"), and "as" or "such as" when the words preceding the examples sufficed to define the set ("familiar words in -o, as halo and dado"; "simple narrative poems in short stanzas, such as Chevy Chase"). This is the same restrictive vs nonrestrictive mentioned under "`that' vs `which'": "Ballads, such as Chevy Chase, can be danced to" would imply that all ballads can be danced to, whereas "Such ballads as Chevy Chase can be danced to" would not.
Modern American Usage by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang, 1966) says: "Such as is close in meaning to like and may often be interchanged with it. The shade of difference between them is that such as leads the mind to imagine an indefinite group of objects [. . .]. The other comparing word like suggests a closer resemblance among the things compared [. . .]. [. . . P]urists object to phrases of the type a writer like Shakespeare, a leader like Lincoln. No writer, say these critics, is like Shakespeare; and in this they are wrong; writers are alike in many things and the context usually makes clear what the comparison proposes to our attention. Such as Shakespeare may sound less impertinent, but if Shakespeare were totally incomparable such as would be open to the same objection as like." Bernstein, in Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins (Farrar, 1971), agrees, calling those who object to "German composers like Beethoven" "nit-pickers".
"more/most/very unique". Fowler and other conservatives urge restricting the meaning of "unique" to "having no like or equal". (OED says "in this sense, readopted from French at the end of the 18th Century and regarded as a foreign word down to the middle of the 19th.") Used in this sense, it is an incomparable: either something is "unique" or it isn't, and there can be no degrees of uniqueness. Those who use phrases like "more unique", "most unique", and "very unique" are using "unique" in the weaker sense of "unusual, distinctive".
"none is" vs "none are". With mass nouns, you have to use the singular. ("None of the wheat is . . .") With count nouns, you can use either the singular or the plural. ("None of the books is . . ." or "None of the books are . . .") Usually, the plural sounds more natural, unless you're trying to emphasize the idea of "not one", or if the words that follow work better in the singular.
The fullest (prescriptive) treatment is in Eric Partridge's book Usage and Abusage (Penguin, 1970, 0-14-051024-9). In the original edition Partridge had prescribed the singular in certain cases, but a rather long-winded letter from a correspondent persuaded him to retract.
Plurals of Latin/Greek words. Not all Latin words ending in "-us" had plurals in "-i". "Apparatus", "coitus", "hiatus", "impetus", "nexus", "plexus", "prospectus", and "status" were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in "-us" with a long "u". "Corpus", "genus", and "opus" were 3rd declension, with plurals "corpora", "genera", and "opera". "Omnibus" and "rebus" were not nominative nouns in Latin. "Ignoramus" was not a noun in Latin. "Caucus" and "syllabus" were not Latin words.
Not all classical words ending in "-a" had plurals in "-ae". "Anathema", "aroma", "bema", "carcinoma", "charisma", "diploma", "dogma", "drama", "edema", "enema", "enigma", "lemma", "lymphoma", "magma", "melisma", "miasma", "sarcoma", "schema", "soma", "stigma", "stoma", and "trauma" are from Greek, where they had plurals in "-ata". "Quota" was not a noun in Latin. (It comes from the Latin expression quota pars, where quota is the feminine form of an interrogative pronoun meaning "what number". In that use, it did have plural quotae, but in English the only plural is "quotas".)
Not all classical-sounding words ending in "-um" have plurals in "-a". "Factotum", "nostrum", and "quorum" were not nouns in Latin. (Totus = "everything" and noster = "our" were conjugated like nouns in Latin; but "factotum" comes from fac totum = "do everything", and "nostrum" comes from nostrum remedium = "our remedy".) "Conundrum", "panjandrum", "tantrum", and "vellum" are not Latin words.
If in doubt, consult a dictionary (or use the English plural in "-s" or "-es"). One plural that you will find in U.S. dictionaries, "octopi", raises the ire of purists (the Greek plural is "octopodes").
The classical-style plurals of "penis" and "clitoris" are "penes" /'piniz/ and "clitorides" /klI'tOrIdiz/.
Foreign plurals => English singulars. Some uses of classical plurals as singulars in English are undisputed: "opera", "stamina". ("Opera", still used as the plural of "opus", became singular in Vulgar Latin, and then in Italian acquired the sense "musical drama", giving rise to the English word.) "Agenda" once excited controversy but is now accepted. Others are the subject of current controversy: "data" (used by Winston Churchill!), "erotica", "insignia", "media", "regalia", "trivia". Yet others are still widely stigmatized: "bacteria", "candelabra", "criteria", "curricula", "phenomena", "strata".
"Bona fides", "kudos", and "minutia" are singulars in Latin or Greek.
"Graffiti" (plural in Italian) is disputed in English. But "zucchini" (also plural in Italian) is the invariable singular form in English (the English plural is "zucchini" or "zucchinis"). The names of types of pasta (cannelloni, cappelletti, ditali, fusilli, gnocchi, macaroni, manicotti, ravioli, rigatoni, spaghetti, spaghettini, tagliarini, tortellini, vermicelli, ziti, which are masculine plural in Italian; and conchiglie, farfalle, fettucine, linguine, rotelle, which are feminine plural; some of the -e words are often spelled with -i in English) are treated as mass nouns in English: they take singular verbs, but plurals are not made from them. (Many of the words listed as disputed above are also treated as mass nouns when they are used as singulars.)
Preposition at end. Yes, yes, we've all heard the following anecdotes:
Fowler and nearly every other respected prescriptivist see nothing wrong with ending a clause with a preposition; Fowler calls it a "superstition". ("Never end a sentence with a preposition" is how the superstition is usually stated, although it would "naturally" extend to any placement of a preposition later than the noun or pronoun it governs.) Indeed, Fowler considers "a good land to live in" grammatically superior to "a good land in which to live", since one cannot say "a good land which to inhabit".
"quality". The attributive use of "quality", as in "quality workmanship", is sometimes questioned. The alternative that nobody will object to is "high-quality" (for which OED's first citation is from 1910).
OED's first citation of "quality" in the sense of "high quality, excellence" is from Shakespeare (1606): "The Grecian youths are full of qualitie, Their loving well composed, with guift of nature." (Troilus and Cressida, IV iv). It seems to have been in steady use since then. The proverb "Quality is better than quantity" is first recorded in 1604 in the form "The gravest wits [. . .] The qualitie, not quantitie, respect."
The attributive use of "quality" is another matter. OED has one citation of "quality air" from 1701, and then there is nothing until the listing in Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1950), which labels it "colloquial, chiefly U.S.". Chamber's Twentieth Century Dictionary, 1959 edition, calls it "vulgar". Modern dictionaries do not give it a usage label. It is attacked by Morton S. Freeman (A Handbook of Problem Words and Phrases, ISI, 1987). It is defended by Theodore Bernstein (Dos, Don'ts, and Maybes of English Usage, Barnes & Noble, 1977). Bloomsbury Good Word Guide (Bloomsbury, 1988) and Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (Harper & Row, 1975 & 1985) note that some people object to it.
The term "quality time", meaning "time spent in social interaction with another person, especially one's young child", dates from 1988. It is widely derided as faddish. "High-quality time" is not used.
Other words that have acquired similarly specialized meanings are: "fortune" meaning "good fortune" (dates from 1390, and had precedent in Latin); "luck" meaning "good luck" (1480); "behave" meaning "to behave properly" (1691); "criticize" meaning "to criticize unfavourably" (1704); "temper" meaning "ill-temper, short temper" (1828); "class" meaning "high class, elegance" (1874; informal; originally a sports term; the term "class act" dates from 1976); "temperature" meaning "feverish temperature" (1898; informal; an ironic development, since "temperature" once meant to be in temper, to be free from distemper that fever indicates); and "attitude" meaning "hostile attitude" (1962; U.S. informal; probably from such phrases as "You'd better change your attitude" and "I don't like your attitude"). Context usually indicates the specialized meaning, e.g., in "He has a temper"; one would have no occasion to want to say, "He has a temper, but I'm not going to tell you whether it's long or short or anything else about it."
Repeated words after abbreviations. Disputes occur about the legitimacy of placing after an acronym/ initialism the last word that is abbreviated in it, e.g., "AC current", "the HIV virus". "AC" and "HIV" by themselves will certainly suffice in most contexts. But such collocations tend to become regarded as irreducible and uninterpretable words. "The SNOBOL language" and "BASIC code" are as good as "the BASIC language" and "SNOBOL code"; and why should "an LED display" (Light Emitting Diode display) be reasonable, but not "an LCD display" (Liquid Crystal Display display)? The extra word may guard against ambiguity; e.g., "I've forgotten my PIN" might be mistaken in speech as being about sewing, whereas "I've forgotten my PIN number" identifies the context as ATMs.
"Scotch". Scots' preferred adjective for Scotland and for themselves is "Scots". "Scottish" is also acceptable. But "Scotch" (although used by Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, and still used by some Americans of Scots descent) is now considered offensive by many Scots. Certain Scots hold that only three things can be "Scotch": "Scotch whisky", "Scotch egg", and "Scotch mist". They are not interested in considering additions to this list, although many other terms containing "Scotch" can be found in dictionaries.
The term "Scotch tape" (a trademark for clear sticky tape made by the 3M company, based in Minnesota) was originally a reference to the stereotype of Scots miserliness. 3M at one time made a tape with no adhesive along the middle. The tape was intended as a masking tape for painting cars (masking off areas that you didn't want to paint), so 3M thought it didn't need a full sticky coating; but customers were not impressed.
"shall" vs "will", "should" vs "would". The traditional rules for using these (based on the usage of educated Southern Englishmen in the 18th and 19th centuries) are quite intricate, and require some choices ("Should you like to see London?"; "The doctor thought I should die") that are no longer idiomatically reasonable. But if you're dead set on learning them, they're set out in The King's English, by Fowler and Fowler (OUP, 1931, ISBN 0-19-881330-9). Usage outside England has always been different: the old joke, where the Irishman cries for help: "I will drown and no one shall save me" and the Englishman mistakes this for a suicide resolution, is contrived, in that an Irishman would far more likely say "no one will save me."
split infinitive. Sir Ernest Gowers wrote in The Complete Plain Words (HMSO, 1954): "The well-known [. . .] rule against splitting an infinitive means that nothing must come between `to' and the infinitive. It is a bad name, as was pointed out by Jespersen [. . .]
It is a bad rule too; it increases the difficulty of writing clearly [. . .]." The split infinitive construction goes back to the 14th century, but was relatively rare until the 19th. Shakespeare, Spenser, Pope, and Dryden are among the authors who never split infinitives.
Fowler wrote (in the article Position of Adverbs, in MEU) that "to" + infinitive is "a definitely enough recognized verb-form to make the clinging together of its parts the natural and normal thing"; "there is, however, no sacrosanctity about that arrangement". There are many considerations that should govern placement of adverbs: there are other sentence elements, he said, such as the verb and its object, that have a stronger affinity for each other; but only avoidance of the split infinitive "has become a fetish".
Thus, although in "I quickly hid it", the most natural place for "quickly" is before "hid", "I am going to hide it quickly" is slightly more natural than "I am going to quickly hide it". But "I am going to quickly hide it" is itself preferable to "I am going quickly to hide it" (splitting "going to" changes the meaning from indicating futurity to meaning physically moving somewhere), or to "I am going to hide quickly it" (separation of the verb from its object). And even separating the verb from its object may become the preferred place for the adverb if "it" is replaced by a long noun phrase ("I am going to hide quickly any trace of our ever having been here").
Phrases consisting of "to be" or "to have" followed by an adverb and a participle are not split infinitives, and constitute the natural word order. "To generally be accepted" and "to always have thought" are split infinitives; "to be generally accepted" and "to have always thought" are not.
Certain kinds of adverbs are characteristically placed before "to". These include negative and restrictive adverbs: "not" ("To be, or not to be"), "never", "hardly", "scarcely", "merely", "just"; and conjunctive adverbs: "rather", "preferably", "moreover", "alternatively". But placing adverbs of manner in this position is considered good style only in legal English ("It is his duty faithfully to execute the provisions . . .").
Clumsy avoidance of split infinitives often leads to ambiguity: does "You fail completely to recognise" mean "You completely fail to recognise", or "You fail to completely recognise"? Ambiguous split infinitives are much rarer, but do exist: does "to further cement trade relations" mean "to cement trade relations further", or "to promote relations with the cement trade"?
The most frequently cited split infinitive is from the opening voice-over of Star Trek: "to boldly go where no man has gone before". (Star Trek: The Next Generation had "one" in place of "man".) Here, "boldly" modifies the entire verb phrase: the meaning is "to have the boldness that the unprecedentedness of the destinations requires". If "boldly" were placed after "go", it would modify only "go", changing the meaning to "to go where no man has gone before, and by the way, to go there boldly".
Hardly any serious commentator believes that infinitives should never be split. The dispute is between those who believe that split infinitives should be avoided when this can be done with no sacrifice of clarity or naturalness, and those who believe that no effort whatever should be made to avoid them.
"that" vs "which". In "The family that prays together stays together", the clause "that prays together" is called a restrictive clause because it restricts the main statement to a limited class of family. In "The family, which is the basic unit of human society, is weakening", "which . . . society" is called a nonrestrictive clause because it makes an additional assertion about the family without restricting the main statement.
It is generally agreed that nonrestrictive clauses should be set off by commas; restrictive clauses, not. Nonrestrictive clauses are now nearly always introduced by "which" or "who" (although "that" was common in earlier centuries). Fowler encourages us to begin restrictive clauses with "that"; but this is not a binding rule¹ (although some copy-editors do go on "which hunts"), and indeed is not possible if a preposition is to precede the relative pronoun.
Object relative pronouns can be omitted altogether ("the book that I read" or "the book I read"); in standard English, subject relative pronouns cannot be omitted, although in some varieties of informal spoken English, they are ("There's a man came into the office the other day".
¹There is an additional use of the word "which". If the phrase being restricted contains two nouns (as in "the allure of the game"), then the phrase is restricted by "which", not by "that" (as governed by this convention). Thus,
means that whatever the antecedent for "it" is, is the allure of the game. Which game? The game that fascinates her. On the other hand,
means that there is something in particular about the game which fascinates her, and that something is the allure of the game. (Note use of this convention in previous sentence!) This use is sometimes called the displaced "which".
the the "hoi polloi" debate. Yes, "hoi" means "the" in Greek, but the first 5 citations in the OED, and the most famous use of this phrase in English (in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Iolanthe), put "the" in front of "hoi". This is not a unique case: words like "alchemy", "alcohol", "algebra", "alligator", and "lacrosse" incorporate articles from other languages, but can still be prefixed in English with "the". "The El Alamein battle" (which occurred in Egypt during World War II), sometimes proffered as a phrase with three articles, actually contains only two: alamein is Arabic for "two flags" (which is appropriate for a town on the border between Egypt and Libya), and does not contain the Arabic article al.
"true fact". Many phrases often criticized as "redundant" are redundant in most contexts, but not in all. "Small in size" is redundant in most contexts, but not in "Although small in size, the ship was large in glory." "Consensus of opinion" is redundant in most contexts, but not in "Some of the committee members were coerced into voting in favour of the motion, so although the motion represents a consensus of votes, it does not represent a consensus of opinion."
Context can negate part of the definition of a word. "Artificial light" is light that is artificial (= "man-made"), but "artificial flowers" are not flowers (i.e., genuine spermatophyte reproductive orders) that are artificial. In the latter phrase, "artificial" negates part of the definition of "flower". The bats known as "false vampires" do not feed on blood: "false" negates part of the definition of "vampire".
The ordinary definition of "fact" includes the idea of "true" (e.g., fact vs fiction); the meaning of "fact" does have other aspects (e.g., fact vs opinion). Context can negate the idea of "true". Fowler himself used the phrase "Fowler's facts are wrong; therefore his advice is probably wrong, too" (a conclusion that he was eager to avert, moving him to defend his facts) in one of the S.P.E. tracts.
It follows that "true fact" need not be a redundancy.
"whom". In informal English, one can probably get away with using "who" all the time, except perhaps after a preposition.
The prescription for formal English is: use "who" as the subjective form (like "he"/"she"/"they"), and "whom" as a direct or indirect object (like "him"/"her"/"them"):
Note the difference between:
and:
Note also, that unless you say "It is he", you cannot rely on these transformations for complements of the verb "to be". You may say "It's him", but the question is "Who is it?", definitely not "Whom is it?"
The case of "whoever" is determined by its function in the clause that it governs, not by its function in the main sentence: "I like whoever likes me." "Whomever I like likes me."
Very few English-speakers make these distinctions instinctively; most of those who observe them learned them explicitly. Instincts would lead them to select case based on word order rather than on syntactic function. Hence Shakespeare wrote "Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drowned". But Fowler called this a solecism in modern English; it might be better to abstain from "whom" altogether if one is not willing to master the prescriptive rules.
"you saying" vs "your saying". In "You saying you're sorry alters the case", the subject of "alters" is not "you", since the verb is singular. Fowler called this construction the "fused participle", and recommended "Your saying . . ." instead. The fused participle can lead to ambiguity: does "Citizens participating helped the project" mean "Those citizens who participated helped the project", or "The fact that citizens participated helped the project"? (Placing commas around "participating" would yield a third meaning.) Appending an apostrophe to "citizens" would make the second meaning clear.
Other commentators have been less critical of the fused participle than Fowler. Jespersen traced the construction as the last in a series of developments where gerunds, which originally functioned strictly as nouns, have taken on more and more verb-like properties ("the showing of mercy" => "showing of mercy" => "showing mercy"). Partridge defends the construction by citing lexical noun-plus-gerund compounds. In most of these (e.g., "time-sharing"), the noun functions as the object of the gerund, but in some recent compounds (e.g., "machine learning"), it functions as the subject.
"." after abbreviations. Fowler recommends putting a "." only after abbreviations that do not include the last letter of the word they're abbreviating, e.g., "Capt." for captain but "Cpl" for corporal. In some English- speaking countries, many people follow this rule, but not in the U.S., where "Mr." and "Dr." prevail.
", vs ," According to William F. Phillips (wfp@world.std.com), in the days when printing used raised bits of metal, "." and "," were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above) if they had a '"' on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the convention arose of always using '."' and ',"' rather than '".' and '",', regardless of logic.
Fowler was a strong advocate of logical placement of punctuation marks, i.e. only placing them inside the quotation marks if they were part of the quoted matter. This scheme has gained ground, and is especially popular among computer users, and others who wish to make clear exactly what is and what is not being quoted. Logical placement is accepted by many more publishers outside than inside the U.S.
Some people insist that '."' and ',"' LOOK better, but Fowler calls them "really mere conservatives, masquerading only as aesthetes".
"A, B and C" vs "A, B, and C". This is known as the "serial comma" dispute. Both styles are common. The style with the extra comma was recommended by Fowler, and is more common in the U.S. than elsewhere. Although either style may cause ambiguity (in "We considered Miss Roberts for the roles of Marjorie, David's mother, and Louise", are there two roles or three?), the style that omits the comma is more likely to do so: "Tom, Peter, and I went swimming." (Without the comma, one might think that the sentence was addressed to Tom.)
James Pierce reports that an author whose custom it was to omit the comma dedicated a novel: "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God."
Non-native speakers are often unnecessarily cautious in their use of English. Someone once posted to alt.usage.english from Japan, asking, "What is the correct thing to say if one is being assaulted: `Help!' or `Help me!'?" Not only are they both correct; there was a whole slew of responses asking, "Why the heck would you worry about correctness at a time like that?"
It may happen that your post's greatest departure from English idiom is something unrelated to what you are asking about. If you like, say "Please correct any errors in this post"; otherwise, those who answer you may out of politeness refrain from offering a correction.
Although not so stratified as some languages, English does have different stylistic levels. In a popular song, you may hear: "It don't make much difference." When speaking to a friend, you will probably want to say: "It doesn't make much difference." If you are writing a formal report, you may want to render it as: "It makes little difference." So it's helpful if when posting, you specify the stylistic level that you're enquiring about.
If you prefer to make a query by e-mail, rather than posting to the whole Net, you can send it to the Purdue University Online Writing Lab. Send e-mail to owl@sage.cc.purdue.edu. They also have an ftp/gopher site, owl.trc.purdue.edu, and a WWW page:
Another WWW page that may be of interest to learners of English is The Comenius Group's Virtual English Language Center:
If you wish to improve your English by exchanging e-mail with an English-speaker, you can post a request to the newsgroup soc.penpals. This is free (to you), so you should not pay the fee for Comenius' "E-mail Pen Pal Connection".
An elementary grammar of English, designed primarily for French- speakers but useful to all, can be found at
"a"/"an" before abbreviations. "A" is used before words beginning with consonants; "an", before words beginning with vowels. This is determined by sound, not spelling ("a history", "an hour", "a unit", "a European", "a one"). Formerly, "an" was usual before unaccented syllables beginning with "h" ("an historian", "an hotel"); these are "now obsolescent" in British English (Collins English Dictionary), although "an historian" is retained in more dialects than "an hotel".
Before abbreviations, the choice of "a"/"an" depends on how the abbreviation is pronounced: "a NATO spokesman" (because "NATO" is pronounced /'neItoU/); "an NBC spokesman" (because "NBC" is pronounced /Enbi'si/) "a NY spokesman" (because "NY" is read as "New York (state)").
A problem: how can a foreigner tell whether a particular abbreviation is pronounced as a word or not? Two non-foolproof guidelines:
Is it "a FAQ" or "an FAQ"? Either is acceptable. "FAQ" is more likely to be mentally expanded to "frequently asked question" if you're talking about a particular (frequently asked) question than if you're talking about "an FAQ file".
"A number of . . .". "A number of . . ." usually requires a plural verb. In "A number of employees were present", it's the employees who were present, not the number. "A number of" is just a fuzzy quantifier. ("A number of . . ." may need a singular in the much rarer contexts where it does not function as a quantifier: "A number of this magnitude requires 5 bytes to store.")
On the other hand, "the number of . . ." always takes the singular: "The number of employees who were present was small." Here, it's the number that was small, not the employees.
When to use "the". This is often quite tricky for those learning English. The basic rules can be found in the Purdue University Online Writing Lab's WWW page titled "The Use and Non-Use of Articles":
and in "An Overview of English Article Usage for Speakers of English as a Second Language" by John R. Kohl of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute:
(You can obtain textual WWW pages by e-mail. Send e-mail to agora@mail.w3.org with, in this case,
as the message body). The book Three Little Words; A, An and The: a Foreign Student's Guide to English by Elizabeth Claire (Delta, 1988, ISBN 0-937354-46-5) has been recommended.
The article "the" before a noun generally indicates one specific instance of the object named. For example, "I went to the school" refers to one school. (The context should establish which school is meant.) Such examples have the same meaning across most (all?) dialects of English.
The construct <preposition><noun>, with no intervening article, often refers to a state of being rather than to an instance of the object named by the noun. The set of commonly used preposition-noun combinations varies from one dialect to another. Some examples are:
She is at university (U.K.) = She is in college (U.S.) = She is a student, enrolled in a particular type of tertiary institution. This sentence does not imply that she is now physically present on the campus.
He was taken to hospital (U.K.) = He was hospitalized. (A U.S. speaker might say "to the hospital" even if there were several hospitals in the area.)
Present Subjunctive. The present subjunctive is the same in form as the infinitive without "to". This is also the same form as the present indicative, except in the third person singular and in forms of the verb "to be".
The present subjunctive is used:
Past Subjunctive. The past subjunctive is the same in form as the past indicative, except in the past subjunctive singular of "to be", which is "were" instead of "was".
The past subjunctive is used:
Present Past
Possible condition: "If I am" "If I was"
Counterfactual condition: "If I were/was" "If I had been"
"As if" and "as though" were originally always used to introduce counterfactuals, but are now often used in "looks as if", "sounds as though", etc., to introduce things that the speaker actually believes ("It looks as if" = "It appears that"). In such cases the present indicative is often used. Fowler says that there is no "sequence of moods" requirement in English: it's "if I were to say that I was wrong", not "if I were to say that I were wrong".
"A.D." "A.D." stands for Anno Domini = "in the year of the Lord", not for "after the death".
Most stylebooks prescribe placing "A.D." before the year: "Arminius died A.D. 21." WDEU calls this "the traditional and still most frequently used styling" (the OED has citations from 1579 on); but Collins English Dictionary says "this is no longer general practice." Placing "A.D." after the year is, if anything, better supported by precedents from Classical Latin (whose word order was flexible enough that either version would be grammatical): the ancient Romans did not use A.D. dating, but Cicero (Pro Flacco I) has quingentesimo anno rei publicae = "in the five-hundredth year of the state".
"alumin(i)um". (notes by Keith Ivey) This word is usually "aluminum" /@'lum@n@m/ in the U.S. and in Canada, and "aluminium" /,&lU'mInI@m/ in other English-speaking countries.
People sometimes complain that the American form is inconsistent with other element names, which end in "-ium". But even in British spelling, there are elements that end in "-um" not preceded by "i": lanthanum, molybdenum, platinum, and tantalum (not to mention argentum, aurum, cuprum, ferrum, hydrargyrum, plumbum, and stannum; but then those aren't English names, just the names from which the symbols are derived).
A widespread false belief among those who spell the word "aluminium" is that theirs is the original spelling, from which the American version is a later development, perhaps resulting from a typographical error. The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (63rd ed., p. B-5) gives this bit of history:
I used to work for ACS, but I have no idea why they would have chosen "aluminum" over "aluminium", especially if "aluminium" was already established.
A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles (University of Chicago Press, 1938, ISBN 0-226-11737-5) gives U.S. citations of "aluminum" from 1836, 1855, 1889 (two), and 1916, and says: "This form is in common use in mining, manufacturing, and the trade in the U.S.; the form aluminium is used with practical uniformity in Great Britain and generally by chemists in the U.S."
"Aluminium" is given as the only form by Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary; and as the preferred form by The Century Dictionary (1889) and by the 9th and 11th editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Britannica yearbook switched its index entry from "aluminium or aluminum" to "aluminum" in 1942.
"bug" = "defect". The 1947 incident often related by Grace Hopper, in which a technician solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II computer by pulling a moth out from between the contacts of one of its relays, did happen. However, the log entry ("first actual case of bug being found") indicates that this is not the origin of this sense of "bug". It was used in 1899 in a reference to Thomas Edison. It may come from "bug" in the sense "frightful object", which seems to be related to "bugbear" and "bogey", and goes back to 1588. See the Jargon File.
"Caesarean section". The OED erroneously states that Julius Caesar was born by Caesarean section. But Caesarean section was always fatal in antiquity, and Julius' mother is known to have survived. "Caesarean section" may have been coined by someone who thought that Caesar was born this way; it may come from an order (Lex Caesarea) of the Caesars of Imperial Rome that any pregnant woman dying at or near term was to be delivered by C-section; or it may simply come from Latin caedo "I cut".
Also not named directly after Julius Caesar are "Caesar salad" (allegedly named after a restaurant named Caesar's in Tijuana, Mexico); and "Julian day" (number of days elapsed since 1 January 4713 B.C., used in astronomy; named by Joseph Scaliger after his father, Julius Caesar Scaliger). The computer term "Julian date" (date represented as number of days elapsed from the beginning of a chosen year) was apparently inspired by "Julian day".
"canola". "Canola" is defined as "any of several varieties of the rape plant having seeds that contain no more than 5% erucic acid and no more than 3 mg per gram of glucosinolate". If you ever come across rapeseed oil that is not canola, I would avoid it, because erucic acid causes heart lesions, and glucosinolates cause thyroid enlargement and poor feed conversion!
Rape plants have been an important source of edible oil for almost 4000 years. Canola was developed after World War II by two Canadian scientists, Baldur Stefansson and Richard Downey.
"Canola" is variously explained as standing for "Canada oil, low acid", and as a blend of "Canada" and "colza". I imagine that "Mazola" (a brand name for corn [= "maize"] oil) had an influence.
"Canola" was originally a trademark in Canada, but is now a generic term. It's the only term now in use there; some sources do say that canola was "formerly called rape". (Although "rape" denoting the plant is etymologically unconnected with "rape" meaning forced sexual intercourse, the homonymy doubtless contributed to the former term's falling into disfavour.)
"Designer eggs", low-cholesterol eggs developed at the University of Alberta, are produced by adding canola and flax to the hens' diet.
"cop". This does not stand for "constable on patrol" or "constabulary of police". The noun "cop" (first attested meaning "policeman" in 1859) is short for "copper" (first attested meaning "policeman" in 1846). "Copper" in this sense is unlikely to derive from copper buttons or shields worn by early policemen. Rather, dictionaries derive it from "to cop" (first attested meaning "to grab" in 1704 and meaning "to arrest" in 1844). "To cop" may come from Dutch kapen = "to steal"; or it may come from Old French dialect caper = "to take", from Latin capere.
"copacetic". This word, meaning "extremely satisfactory", was first recorded in 1919, and was originally heard chiefly among U.S. black jazz musicians. The tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (1878-1949) popularized the word, and claimed to have coined it when he was a shoeshine boy in Richmond; but a number of Southerners testified that they had heard the word used by parents or grandparents in the late 19th century. Suggested origins include: a supposed Italian word copacetti; a Creole French word coupersetique meaning "that can be coped with"; and the Hebrew phrase kol besedeq "all with justice". RHUD2 says that all these theories "lack supporting evidence".
"crap". "Crap" does not derive from Thomas Crapper. Thomas Crapper (1837-1910) did exist and did make toilets. (At least 3 authors have gone into print asserting he was a hoax, but you can see some of his toilets at the Gladstone Pottery Museum, Uttoxeter Road, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire ST3 1TQ, U.K.; phone +44 1782 311378.) The word "crap" was imported into English from Dutch in the 15th century, with the meaning "chaff". It is recorded in the sense "to defecate" from 1846; Thomas Crapper did not set up his business until 1861. Also, Thomas Crapper did not "invent" the flush toilet (the ancient Minoans had them); he merely improved the design.
"flammable". People often ask why "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing. The English words come from separate Latin words: inflammare and the rarer flammare, which both meant "to set on fire". Latin had two prefixes in-, one of which meant "not"; the other, meaning "in", "into", or "upon", was the one used in inflammare. "Inflammable" dates in English from 1605.
"Flammable" was first attested in an 1813 translation from Latin. It was rare until, because of concern that the "in-" in "inflammable" might be misconstrued as a negative prefix, "flammable" was adopted by the U.S. National Fire Protection Association in the 1920s; underwriters and others interested in fire safety followed suit. Merriam-Webster Editorial Department writes: "Though we have been unable to confirm that Benjamin Whorf" (1897-1941; the linguist who shares credit for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) "was responsible for the word's adoption, the theory seems plausible enough: he was, in fact, employed by the Hartford Fire Insurance Company from 1918 to 1940, and was widely recognized for his work in fire prevention."
"Flammable" is still commoner in the U.S. than in the U.K.; in figurative uses, "inflammable" prevails (e.g., "inflammable temper").
Other words where an apparently negative prefix has little effect on the meaning are: "to (dis)annul", "to (de)bone", "to (un)bare", "to (un)loose", and "to (un)ravel". "Irregardless" (which probably arose as a blend of "irrespective" and "regardless"; it was first recorded in western Indiana in 1912), means the same as "regardless", but is not considered acceptable.
"fuck". "Fuck" does not stand for "for unlawful carnal knowledge" or "fornication under consent of the king". It is not an acronym for anything at all.
It is a very old word, recorded in English since the 15th century (few acronyms predate the 20th century), with cognates in other Germanic languages. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Random House, 1994, ISBN 0-394-54427-7) cites Middle Dutch fokken = "to thrust, copulate with"; Norwegian dialect fukka = "to copulate"; and Swedish dialect focka = "to strike, push, copulate" and fock = "penis". Although German ficken may enter the picture somehow, it is problematic in having e-grade, or umlaut, where all the others have o-grade or zero-grade of the vowel.
AHD1, following Pokorny, derived "feud", "fey", "fickle", "foe", and "fuck" from an Indo-European root *peig2 = "hostile"; but AHD2 and AHD3 have dropped this connection for "fuck" and give no pre-Germanic etymon for it. Eric Partridge, in the 7th edition of Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Macmillan, 1970), said that "fuck" "almost certainly" comes from the Indo-European root *peuk- = "to prick" (which is the source of the English words "compunction", "expunge", "impugn", "poignant", "point", "pounce", "pugilist", "punctuate", "puncture", "pungent", and "pygmy"). Robert Claiborne, in The Roots of English: A Reader's Handbook of Word Origin (Times, 1989) agrees that this is "probably" the etymon. Problems with such theories include a distribution that suggests a North-Sea Germanic areal form rather than an inherited one; the murkiness of the phonetic relations; and the fact that no alleged cognate outside Germanic has sexual connotations.
"hooker". Contrary to what you may have read in Xaviera Hollander's book The Happy Hooker, the "prostitute" sense of "hooker" does not derive from Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker (1814-1879), a major general on the Union side of the U.S. civil war, whose men were alleged to frequent brothels. "Hooker" in this sense goes back to 1845 (see AHD3); the U.S. Civil War did not begin until 1861. It may come from the earlier sense of "thief" (which goes back to 1567, "to hook" meaning to steal), or it may refer to prostitutes' linking arms with their clients. A geographical Hook (Corlear's Hook in New York City, or the Hook of Holland) is also possible.
"kangaroo". "Kangaroo" does not derive from the aboriginal for "I don't understand". Captain James Cook's expedition learned the word from an aboriginal tribe that subsequently couldn't be identified. Since there were a large number of Australian aboriginal languages, and it has taken some time to record and catalogue the surviving ones, for many years the story that it meant "I don't understand" was plausible. The search was further complicated by the fact that many aboriginal languages imported the word from English. But if you consult an up-to-date English dictionary, such as RHUD2, you will see that "kangaroo" is derived from the Guugu-Yimidhirr (a language spoken near Cooktown, North Queensland) word ga<eng>-urru "a large black or grey species of kangaroo".
Similar stories are told about "llama" (a Quechua word, not from the Spanish ¿Como se llama? = "What's it called?"); "indri" (this one does derive from the Malagasy word for "Look!"); and several place names, among them Canada (kanata was the Huron-Iroquois word for "village, settlement"; Jacques Cartier is supposed to have mistaken this for the name of the country); Istanbul (said to come from a Turkish mishearing of Greek eis ten poli "to the city"); Luzon (supposedly Tagalog for "What did you say?"); Nome (supposedly a printer's misreading of a cartographer's query, "Name?"); Senegal (supposedly from Wolof senyu gal "our boats"); and Yucatan (supposedly = "I don't understand you").
"limerence"/"limerent". The meaning of "limerence" falls somewhere between "infatuation" and "romantic love". It was coined circa 1977 by Dorothy Tennov, then professor of psychology at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was an arbitrary coinage; there is no specific etymology. I have a long message with the symptomatology of limerence. E-mail me (misrael@scripps.edu) if you want it.
"loo". This British colloquial word for "toilet" was established usage by the 1920s. Suggested origins include:
"O.K." This one has generated lots of folklore. The following list of suggested origins and info comes from MEU2, from Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Historical Slang (1972 edition, Penguin, 0-14-081046-X), and from Cecil Adams' More of the Straight Dope (Ballantine, 1988, ISBN 0-345-34145-2). Thanks to Jeremy Smith for his help. The abbreviations on cracker boxes, shipping crates, cargoes of rum, et al., became synonymous with quality.
"Oll korrect, popularized by Old Kinderhook" is what's given in most up-to-date dictionaries.
"pie-shaped". This word, for which our earliest citation so far is from 1913 (found by Fred Shapiro with Lexis) nearly always means "shaped like a slice of pie", not "shaped like a pie". (A use found by Matthew Rabuzzi in W3's entry "Jack Horner pie" may mean the latter.) The word is quite common in North America (a search by Myles Callum on Lexis turned up more than a thousand instances), but little known elsewhere (a search on a British corpus turned up nothing, and British correspondents tell us that they "would not automatically assume that that was what was meant"). The word, for which there is no entry in any dictionary, was discovered by Mark Israel on 11 July 1995, when Matthew Rabuzzi used it in a suggested emendation to the "Origin of the dollar sign" entry in this FAQ, and it was found to be missing from the dictionaries. That's right, folks; in future years, when you open your dictionary and see an entry for "pie-shaped" there, remember: you have me to thank for it!
"portmanteau word". This term for "blend word" comes from "portmanteau", "a leather travelling case that opens into two hinged compartments" (from the French for "carry cloak") by way of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass: "You see it's like a portmanteau -- there are two meanings packed up into one word." Although most modern blends are simply the first part of one word plus the last part of another (e.g., "brunch" = "breakfast" + "lunch"; "smog" = "smoke" + "fog"; "Chunnel" = "Channel" + "tunnel"), Carroll himself formed his portmanteau words in a more subtle manner: "slithy" = "lithe" + "slimy"; "mimsy" = "miserable" + "flimsy"; "frumious" = "fuming" + "furious". Carroll's coinages "chortle" (which is now in most dictionaries) and "gallumph" (which is in the OED) are generally understood as "chuckle" + "snort" and "gallop" + "triumph" respectively, although Carroll himself never explained them.
Blend words predate Carroll: MWCD10 derives "squiggle" from "squirm" + "wriggle", and dates it circa 1816.
There is a dictionary of them: Portmanteau Dictionary: Blend Words in the English Language Including Trademarks and Brand Names by Dick Thurner (McFarland, 1993, ISBN 0-89950-687-9).
"posh". "Posh" (probably) does not stand for "port out, starboard home". MWCD10, p. 27a, says, "our editors frequently have to explain to correspondents that the dictionary fails to state that the origin of posh is in the initial letters of the phrase 'port out, starboard home' -- supposedly a shipping term for the cooler accommodations on steamships plying between Britain and India from the mid-nineteenth century on -- not because the story is unknown to us but because no evidence to support it has yet been produced. Some evidence exists that casts strong doubt on it; the word is not known earlier than 1918 (in a source unrelated to shipping), and the acronymic explanation does not appear until 1935."
A tenable theory is that "posh" meant "halfpenny" (from Romany posh "half") and then "money" before acquiring its present meaning. Or it may come from the slang "pot" (= "big", "a person of importance"). Or it may be a contraction of "polished".
I got e-mail from someone whose grandmother claimed to have seen steamship tickets with "P.O.S.H." overprinted. And William Safire's I Stand Corrected (Times, 1984, ISBN 0-8129-01097-4) quotes a letter from an Ellen Thackara of Switzerland: "When I lived in the Orient the P.&O. (Pacific [sic] and Orient) Line out of London did put beside the names of important people `POSH', so they would have the cooler side of the ship." (The P&O is actually the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company; it's not clear whether the mistake is Thackara's or Safire's.) But to convince us, you'll have to find one of these tickets and send a copy to Merriam-Webster.
"quiz". This is first recorded in 1775 in the sense "an odd person". It is doubtful that "quiz" came from an alleged incident in which James Daly, a late-18th-century Dublin theatre manager, made a wager that he could introduce a new word into the English language overnight, and hired urchins to chalk the word "quiz" on every wall and billboard in Dublin. "Quiz" may come from the Latin "Qui es?" (= "Who are you?", the first question asked in Latin oral exams in grammar schools), or it may be a shortening of "inquisitive".
"Santa Ana". This California term for "a strong, hot, dust-bearing wind blowing towards the southern Pacific coast from the desert" comes from (according to MWCD10) the Santa Ana mountain range or (according to AHD3) the Santa Ana Canyon, not from the California city of Santa Ana.
"scot-free". Like "hopscotch", this word for "without incurring any penalty" has no connection with frugal Scotsmen. In 12th-century England, a "scot" or "sceot" was a municipal tax paid to the local bailiff or sheriff (the word came from an Old Norse cognate of "shoot"/"shot", and meant "money thrown down"). The word "scot-free", which is recorded from the 13th century, referred to someone who succeeded in dodging these taxes. Later, the term was given wider currency when "scot" was used to mean the amount owed by a customer in a tavern: anyone who had a drink on the house went "scot-free". This "scot" was reinforced by the fact that the drinks ordered were "scotched", or marked on a slate, so that the landlord could keep track of how much the customer owed.
"sirloin"/"baron of beef". "Sirloin" comes from Old French surlonge, from sur "above" and loigne "loin". Its current spelling may have been influenced by a story that a King of England (variously said to be Henry VIII, James I, and Charles II) "knighted" this cut of beef because of its superiority.
A "baron of beef" is a joint consisting of two sirloins left uncut at the backbone. This "baron" may have originated as a joke on "sirloin", or it may be an independent word.
"SOS". SOS does not stand for "Save Our Ship/Souls", for "Stop Other Signals", for "Send Our Saviour/Succour", for "Sure of Sinking", or for the Russian Spasiti Ot Smerti (= "save from death"). The signal ". . . - - - . . .", recommended for international distress calls at the international Radio Telegraph Conference of 1906 and officially adopted in 1908, was not chosen for any alphabetic significance.
Such a signal is now known as a "prosign" (from "procedural signal"). Those prosigns (such as this one) that are transmitted without interletter gaps are notated with an overbar. Since ". . ." is S and "- - -" is O in Morse code, the distress signal is conventionally represented as:
but since there are no interletter gaps, it could also be analysed as various other combinations of Morse code letters.
Mark Brader writes: "The sign used before SOS was CQD, which was composed of the usual `calling' sign CQ, plus D for Distress. Even in 1912 when the Titanic was sinking, its operator put out a CQD first and only added SOS after being reminded."
Thomas Hamilton White (whitetho@med.unc.edu) writes: "I have read that the international distress call evolved from SOE (sent as three letters), which had been used as a distress signal by German companies. However, because the final E in this sequence consisted of a single dot, the signal was modified to . . . - - - . . . to be more distinctive and symmetrical. [. . .] I can think of one very practical reason for continuing to informally treat the distress signal as SOS -- ever try to stamp . . . - - - . . . in a snowbank?"
"spoonerism". This term for interchanging parts of two different words in a phrase is named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), Dean and Warden of New College, Oxford. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd edition (1953), attributed two famous spoonerisms to Dr Spooner: "Kinquering congs their titles take", and "You have deliberately tasted two worms and you can leave Oxford by the town drain." (The "down train" was the train going away from London, in this case through Oxford. Other popular attributions to Dr Spooner are: "a well boiled icicle"; "a blushing crow"; "a half-warmed fish"; "our shoving leopard"; "our queer old Dean"; "You hissed my mystery lectures"; "My boy, it's kisstomary to cuss the bride"; "When the boys come home from France, we'll have hags flung out"; and "Pardon me, madam, you are occupewing my pie. May I sew you to another sheet?")
But after the publication of Spooner: A Biography by Sir William Hayter (W. H. Allen, 1976), the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd edition (1979), gives only one spoonerism ("weight of rages"), and says: "Many other Spoonerisms, such as those given in the previous editions of O.D.Q., are now known to be apocryphal."
"till"/"until". The conjunction "till" is not a shortening of "until". MWCD10 dates "till" from the 12th century and "until" from the 13th century. "Until" was a compound, whose first element also survives in "unto", and whose second element was the ancestor of "till".
The spelling "'til" occurs, but is not standard anywhere.
"tip". "Tip", in the sense of "gratuity", does not stand for "to insure [i.e., ensure] politeness/promptness" or "to improve performance". It may derive from "tip" in the sense "to tap, to strike lightly" or in the sense "extremity", both of which have cognates in other Germanic languages. Or it may be a shortening of "stipend".
"titsling"/"brassiere". "Brassiere" is first recorded in a Canadian advertisement of 1911. Dictionaries derive it from obsolete (17th century) French brassiere = "bodice", from Old French braciere = "arm protector", from bras = "arm". (The French word for bra is soutien-gorge, literally "support-throat".)
In the southern U.S., a bra is sometimes called a "tit-sling". This has an obvious derivation.
Wallace Reyburn, to whom Thomas Crapper owes his current fame, wrote a later book describing a lawsuit over rights to the bra, fought from 1934 to 1938 in New York, between a German-born designer, Otto Titzling (1884-1942), and a French-born designer, Philippe de Brassiere. Martin Gardner, in Time Travel and Other Mathematical Bewilderments (Freeman, 1988, ISBN 0-7107-1925-8), p. 137, says: "The book by Wallace Reyburn Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper does exist. For many years I assumed that Reyburn's book was the funniest plumbing hoax since H. L. Mencken wrote his fake history of the bathtub. [. . .] Reyburn wrote a later book titled Bust-up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra. It turns out, though, that both Thomas Crapper and Otto Titzling were real people, and neither of Reyburn's books is entirely a hoax."
"typo". "Typo" is related to, but does not come from, the verb "to type". It is short for "typographical error", which, of course, could refer to any error made by a typographer. (The humorous but useful hackish coinage "thinko", used for when the person typing was thinking of the wrong thing, pretends that "typo" does come from "to type".) Arguments of the form "It couldn't have been a typo, because those two keys are nowhere near each other on the keyboard" are a bit tiresome, especially when one keeps the true etymology of "typo" in mind.
"Wicca". Wicca is "a pagan nature religion having is roots in pre- Christian Europe and undergoing a 20th-century revival" (AHD3). Only the most recently published dictionaries contain an entry for it; RHUD2 dates it 1975. "Wicca" is a revival of an Old English word which you can find in older dictionaries by looking in the etymology of either "witch" or "wicked". In Old English, wicca was the masculine form of a word meaning "wizard" or "sorcerer". (The feminine form was wicce. "Witch" comes from wicce.) Wicca and wicce came from from a proto-Germanic (not Celtic) wikkjak, "one who wakes the dead", the first element of which comes from the same Indo-European root as "wake".
Yes, we've heard the joke about the Beatles song "Wiccan, Work It Out".
"widget". (notes by William C. Waterhouse) "Widget" is a deliberately invented word meant (probably) to suggest "gadget". Most dictionaries fail to trace it to its origin. It comes from the 1924 play "Beggar on Horseback", by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly. In the play, a young composer gets engaged to the daughter of a rich businessman, and the next part of the play acts out his nightmare of what his life will be like, doing pointless work in a bureaucratic big business. At one point he encounters his father-in-law at work, and we get the following dialogue:
Part of the point, of course, is that no one ever tells him what "widgets" are.
"wog". "Wog", a chiefly British, derogatory word for someone from the Middle or Far East, does not stand for "wealthy/Western/wily/ wonderful/worthy Oriental gentleman", or for "worker on Government service". It may be a shortening of "golliwog".
"wop". This derogatory word for "an Italian" does not stand for "without papers/passport", for "working on pavement", or for "western Oriental person". It comes from Italian dialectal guappo = "thug", ultimately from Latin vappa = "flat wine".
"ye" = "the". The "y" here is a representation of the obsolete letter thorn (þ), which was pronounced [T] or [D] (the same as modern "th"). The pronunciation of "ye" in "Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe" as /ji/, which you sometimes hear, is a spelling pronunciation.
"the bee's knees". A bee's "corbiculae", or pollen-baskets, are located on its tibiae (midsegments of its legs). The phrase "the bee's knees", meaning "the height of excellence", became popular in the U.S. in the 1920s, along with "the cat's whiskers" (possibly from the use of these in radio crystal sets), "the cat's pajamas" (pyjamas were still new enough to be daring), and similar phrases which made less sense and didn't endure: "the eel's ankle", "the elephant's instep", "the snake's hip".
"beg the question". Fowler defines "begging the question" as the "fallacy of founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as the conclusion itself."
"Question" here does not mean "a sentence in interrogative form". Rather, it means "the point at issue, the thing that the person is trying to prove". The phrase is elucidated by William Fulke in "Heskins parleamant repealed" (1579): "O shameless beggar, that craveth no less than the whole controversy to be given him!" The OED's first citation for "to beg the question" is from 1581.
Common varieties of begging the question are paraphrase of the statement to be proved ("Telepathy cannot exist because direct transfer of thought between individuals is impossible"), and arguing in a circle ("The Bible must be true, because God wouldn't lie to us; we know God is trustworthy, because it says so in the Bible"). Fowler gives two example of non-circular question-begging: "that fox-hunting is not cruel, since the fox enjoys the fun, and that one must keep servants, since all respectable people do so". Gowers notes that single words, such as "reactionary" and "victimization", can be used in a question-begging way.
The Latin term for the fallacy is petitio principii. The phrase can be traced back to Aristotle (4th century B.C.):
The word that Aristotle uses, aiteisthai, does literally mean "to beg".
"blue moon". (notes by Philip Hiscock) The phrase "blue moon" has been around a long time, well over 400 years, but during that time its meaning has shifted around a lot. I have counted six different meanings which have been carried by the term, and at least four of them are still current today.
"Bob's your uncle". This British phrase means "all will be well" or "simple as that": "You go and ask for the job -- and he remembers your name -- and Bob's your uncle." It dates from circa 1890.
P. Brendon, in Eminent Edwardians, 1979, suggests an origin: "When, in 1887, Balfour was unexpectedly promoted to the vital front line post of Chief Secretary for Ireland by his uncle Robert, Lord Salisbury (a stroke of nepotism that inspired the catch-phrase `Bob's your uncle'), . . ."
Or it may have been prompted by the cant phrase "All is bob" = "all is safe."
(Info from Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Catch Phrases, 2nd edition, revised by Paul Beale, Routledge, 1985, ISBN 0-415-05916-X.)
"to call a spade a spade". is not an ethnic slur.
The ancient Greeks said "to call a kneading-trough a kneading-trough". This is first recorded in Aristophanes' play The Clouds (423 B.C.), and also shows up in Plutarch's Apophthegms.
In the Renaissance, Erasmus confused Plutarch's "kneading-trough" (skape:) with the Greek word for "digging tool" (skapeion), and rendered it in Latin as ligo. Thence it was translated into English in 1542 by Nicholas Udall in his translation of Erasmus's version as "to call a spade [. . .] a spade".
"To call a spade a bloody shovel" is not recorded until 1919. "Spade" in the sense of "Negro" is not recorded until 1928.
This, of course, does not necessarily render the modern use of "to call a spade a spade" "politically correct". Rosalie Maggio, in The Bias-Free Word-Finder, writes: "The expression is associated with a racial slur and is to be avoided", and recommends using "to speak plainly" or other alternatives instead. In another entry, she writes: "Although by definition and derivation `niggardly' and `nigger' are completely unrelated, `niggardly' is too close for comfort to a word with profoundly negative associations. Use instead one of the many available alternatives: stingy, miserly, parsimonious . . ." Beard and Cerf, in The Official Politically Correct Handbook, p. 123, report that an administrator at the University of California at Santa Cruz campaigned for the banning of such phrases as "a chink in his armor" and "a nip in the air", because "chink" and "nip" are also derogatory terms for "Chinese person" and "Japanese person" respectively. In the late 1970s in the U.S., a boycott of the (now defunct) Sambo's restaurant chain was organized, even though the name "Sambo's" was a combination of the names of its two founders and did not come from the offensive word for dark-skinned person.
"The die is cast." does not mean "The metal template has been molded." It's what Julius Caesar said on crossing the river Rubicon to invade Italy in 49 B.C. The "die" is a gambling die, and "cast" means thrown. The phrase means "An irrevocable decision has been made." (The Latin words, "Jacta alea est", come from Suetonius' Divus Julius, XXXII. Alea denotes the game of dice, rather than the physical die: the dice game is in its thrown state. "The die is cast" and "the dice are cast" would be equally good translations. Compare "Les jeux sont faits", heard at Monte Carlo.)
Plutarch wrote two accounts in Greek of Caesar's crossing the Rubicon. Both times, he gives the words as Anerriphtho: kubos = "Let the die be cast." In one of the accounts (Life of Pompey), he says that Caesar actually uttered the words in Greek; in the other (Life of Caesar), he suggests that the words were already a proverb before Caesar uttered them.
"dressed to the nines". This expression, meaning "very fashionably and elaborately dressed", is recorded from the 18th century. "The nine" or "the nines" were used to signify "superlative" in numerous other contexts. Theories include: 9, being the highest single-digit number, symbolized the best; a metanalysis of Old English to then eyne "to the eyes"; a reference to the 9 muses; and from the expression "nine nines fine", denoting gold of 99.9999999 percent purity.
"Elementary, my dear Watson!" does not occur as such in any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, although Holmes does exclaim "Elementary" in "The Crooked Man", and writes "My dear Watson" in "The Final Problem". The first recorded juxtaposition is in the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes (the first Holmes film with sound).
The original stories never mention an Inverness cape, a deerstalker hat, or a meerschaum pipe, either. Those props are due to illustrators and to actors.
"Enquiring minds want to know." This originated as a slogan used in TV ads in the 1980s by the National Enquirer. The Enquirer (based in Lantana, Florida; not to be confused with the fine paper based in Philadelphia) is the largest-selling "news" weekly in the U.S.; it belongs to the sensationalistic genre known as "supermarket tabloids" or "checkout line rags" because the most familiar points of distribution are racks near supermarket checkout lines.
The ads featured a series of "ear-catching" headlines from recent issues followed by actors (I hope) miming surprise at the revelation. The stories ranged from amazing weight-loss diets based on the intake of broccoli and ice cream to the tragic story of Michael Jackson's unrequited love for Liz Taylor. A following voice-over would say, "Enquiring minds want to know."
"The exception proves the rule." The common misconception about "The exception proves the rule" (which you will find in several books, including the Dictionary of Misinformation) is that "proves" means "tests". That is not the case, although "proof" does mean "test" in such phrases as "proving ground", "proofreader", "proof spirit", and "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."
As MEU says, "the original legal sense" of the "the exception proves the rule" is as follows: "`Special leave is given for men to be out of barracks tonight till 11.0 p.m.'; `The exception proves the rule' means that this special leave implies a rule requiring men, except when an exception is made, to be in earlier. The value of this in interpreting statutes is plain."
MEU2 adds: "`A rule is not proved by exceptions unless the exceptions themselves lead one to infer a rule' (Lord Atkin). The formula in full is exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis." [That's Latin for "The exception proves the rule in cases not excepted."]
The phrase seems to date from the 17th century. (Anthony Cree, in Cree's Dictionary of Latin Quotations (Newbury, 1978) says that the phrase comes from classical Latin, which it defines as Latin spoken before A.D. 400; but no classical citations have come to our attention.) Below are the five seventeenth-century citations that we could find. 1, 3, and 4 are in the OED; 2 is in Latin for Lawyers by E. Hilton Jackson and Herbert Broom; 5 is in A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Morris Palmer Tilley.
"face the music". This expression meaning "accept the unpleasant consequences" is first recorded in the U.S. around 1850. It may derive from musical theatre: a nervous actor would have to summon all his courage to face the audience across the orchestra pit. Or it may be one of three military references: an infantryman taking his place in the line of assembly; a cavalier keeping his restive horse still while the band starts to play; or a soldier being drummed out of his regiment.
"Go figure". This expands to "Go and figure it out", and means: "The reasons for the fact just stated are unknown and possibly unknowable. You can waste your time thinking about what they might be, if you choose, but you're not likely to accomplish anything." (Kivi Shapiro)
"Go figure" comes from Yiddish Gey vays "Go know". Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yinglish (Penguin, 1989, ISBN 0-452-26534-6), says: "In English, one says, `Go and see [look, ask, tell] . . .' Using an imperative without any link to a conjunction is pure Yiddish, no doubt derived from the biblical phrase, translated literally: `Go tell . . .' `Go praise the Lord . . .' (In English this becomes `Come, let us praise the Lord.')"
Other English expressions said to derive from Yiddish include: "Big deal!" (A Groyser kunst!); "Bite your tongue" (Bays dir di tsung); "bottom line" (untershte shure); "Eat your heart out" (Es dir oys s'harts); "Enough already!" (Genug shoyn); "for real" (far emmes); "If the shoe fits, wear it" (Oyb der shukh past, kenstu im trogn); "Look who's talking!" (Kuk nor ver s'ret!); "make like a" (makh vi); "shm-" as in "Fair, shmair"; "Sez you" (Azoy zugst du); "Thanks a lot" (ironic) (A shenem dank aykh); and "That's for sure" (Dos iz oyf zikher).
"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste". (Desiderata) "Desiderata" was written in 1927 by Max Ehrmann (1872-1945). In 1956, the rector of St. Paul's Church in Baltimore, Maryland, used the poem in a collection of mimeographed inspirational material for his congregation. Someone who subsequently printed it asserted that it was found in Old St. Paul's Church, dated 1692. The year 1692 was the founding date of the church and has nothing to do with the poem. See Fred D. Cavinder, "Desiderata", TWA Ambassador, Aug. 1973, pp. 14-15.
"go to hell in a handbasket". This phrase, meaning "to deteriorate rapidly", originated in the U.S. in the early 20th century. A handbasket is just a basket with a handle. Something carried in a handbasket goes wherever it's going without much resistance.
"hell for leather". Robert L. Chapman's New Dictionary of American Slang (Harper & Row, 1987, ISBN 0-06-181157-2) says:
"by hook or by crook". This phrase formerly meant "by fair means or foul", although now it often (especially in the U.K.) means simply "by whatever necessary means". The first recorded use is by John Wycliffe in Controversial Tracts (circa 1380). Theories include: a law or custom in mediaeval England that allowed peasants to take as firewood from the King's forests any deadwood that they could reach with a shepherd's crook and cut off with a reaper's billhook; rhyming words for "direct" (reachable with a long hook) and "indirect" (roundabout); beginners' writing exercises, where letters have hooks and brackets are "crooks"; and from "Hook" and "Crook", the names of headlands on either side of a bay north of Waterford, Ireland, referring to a captain's determination to make the haven of the bay in bad weather using one headland or the other as a guide.
"Illegitimis non carborundum". Yes, this means "Don't let the bastards grind you down", but it is not real Latin; it is a pseudo-Latin joke.
"Carborundum" is a trademark for a very hard substance composed of silicon carbide, used in grinding. (The name "Carborundum" is a blend of "carbon" and "corundum". "Corundum" denotes aluminium oxide, and comes to English from Tamil kuruntam; it is related to Sanskrit kuruvinda = "ruby".) "The "-ndum" ending suggests the Latin gerundive, which is used to express desirability of the activity denoted by the verb, as in Nil desperandum = "nothing to be despaired of"; addendum = "(thing) fit to be added"; corrigendum = "(thing) fit to be corrected"; and the name Amanda, from amanda = "fit to be loved").
Illegitimis is the dative plural of illegitimus = "illegitimate"; the gerundive in Latin correctly takes the dative to denote the agent. Illegitimus could conceivably mean "bastard" in Latin, but was not the usual word for it: Follett World-Wide Latin Dictionary (Follett, 1967) gives nothus homo for bastard of known father, and spurius for bastard of unknown father.
The phrase seems to have originated with British army intelligence early in World War II. It was popularized when U.S. general Joseph W. "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell (1883-1946) adopted it as his motto. Various variant forms are in circulation.
"Let them eat cake!" The French is Qu'ils mangent de la brioche (not "gateau" as one might expect). And Queen Marie-Antoinette did not say this. Jean-Jacques Rousseau attributed it to "a great princess" in book 6 of his Confessions. Confessions was published posthumously, but book 6 was written 2 or 3 years before Marie-Antoinette arrived in France in 1770.
"mind your p's and q's". This expression, meaning "be very careful to behave correctly", has been in use from the 17th century on. Theories include: an admonishment to children learning to write; an admonishment to typesetters (who had to look at the letters reversed); an admonishment to seamen not to soil their navy pea-jackets with their tarred "queues" (pigtails); "mind your pints and quarts"; "mind your prices and quality"; "mind your pieds and queues" (either feet and pigtails, or two dancing figures that had to be accurately performed); the substitution of /p/ for "qu" /kw/ in the speech of uneducated ancient Romans; or the confusion by students learning both Latin and Ancient Greek of such congates as pente and quintus. And yes, we've heard the joke about the instruction to new sextons: "Mind your keys and pews."
The most plausible explanation is the one given in the latest edition of Collins English Dictionary: an alteration of "Mind your `please's and `thank you's".
"more honoured in the breach than in the observance". From Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4. Shakespeare meant "Better broken than observed", not "more often broken than observed".
"peter out". This expression meaning "to dwindle to nothing" is recorded from 1846, which precludes derivation "peter" in the sense "penis", an Americanism not attested until 1902. "To peter out" was apparently first used by American miners referring to exhausted veins of ore. The origin is uncertain. It may come from "saltpetre" (used in the miners' explosives, so called because it forms a salt-like crust on rocks, ultimately from Greek petra = "rock", whence we also get "petrify" and "petroleum"); or it may come from French peter, which literally means "to fart" but is used figuratively to mean "to fizzle" and in the phrase peter dans la main = "to come to nothing" (this comes from the Indo-European root *perd-/*pezd-, whence we get "fart", "feisty", "fizzle", "partridge", "pedicular", and "petard").
"politically correct". MWCD10 (1993) dates this expression 1983. But Merriam-Webster has since discovered a much earlier use, in H. V. Morton's In the Steps of St. Paul (1936). The passage reads: "To use such words would have been equivalent to calling his audience `slaves and robbers'. But `Galatians', a term that was politically correct, embraced everyone under Roman rule, from the aristocrat in Antioch to the little slave girl in Iconium."
"put in one's two cents' worth". This expression meaning "to contribute one's opinion" dates from the late nineteenth century. Bo Bradham suggested that it came from "the days of $.02 postage. To `put one's two cents' worth in' referred to the cost of a letter to the editor, the president, or whomever was deserving". This OED citation confirms that two-cent stamps were once common:
On the other hand, "two-cent" was an American expression for "of little value" (similar to British "twopenny-halfpenny"), so the phrase may simply have indicated the writer's modesty about the value of his contribution.
"rule of thumb". This term for "a simple principle having wide application but not intended to be strictly accurate" dates from 1692. A frequently repeated story is that "rule of thumb" comes from an old law regulating wife-beating: "if a stick were used, it should not be thicker than a man's thumb." Christina Hoff Sommers (Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Simon & Schuster, 1994, ISBN 0-671-79424-8, pp. 203-207) investigated this and found no evidence of such a law; the earliest reference to it was in two U.S. court rulings (Bradley v. State, Walker 156 Mississippi 1824; State v. Oliver, 70 North Carolina 61, 1874) which called it an "ancient law". Thumbs were used to measure lots of things (the distance from the upper fold of the knuckle to the top of the nail is roughly one inch). The phrase may also come from ancient brewmasters' dipping their thumb in the brew to test the temperature of a batch; or from a guideline for tailors: "Twice around the thumb is once around the wrist . . ."
"shouting fire in a crowded theater". This is from the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Schenck v. U.S. (1919), setting limits on the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, wrote: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."
"son of a gun". dates from 1708; therefore, not son of a "shotgun marriage", which is only recorded from 1922. Possibly, it means "cradled in the gun-carriage of a ship"; allegedly, the place traditionally given to women on board who went into labour -- the only space affording her any privacy and without blocking a gangway -- was between two guns. Or it may mean more simply "son of a soldier".
"spit and image"/"spitting image". These phrases mean "exact likeness". "Spitting image" is first recorded in 1901; "spit and image" is a bit older (from the late 19th century), which seems to refute the explanation "splitting image" (two split halves of the same tree). An older British expression is "He's the very spit of his father", which Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Routledge, 1950) traces back to 1400: "He's . . . as like these as th'hads't spit him." Other languages have similar expressions; e.g., the French say C'est son pere tout crache = "He is his father completely spat." Alternative explanations are "so alike that even the spit out of their mouths is the same"; "speaking likeness"; and a corruption of "spirit".
"to all intents and purposes". This cliche (meaning "practically") is a shortening of the legal phrase "to all intents, constructions, and purposes". The corruption "for all intensive purposes" is frequently reported.
"Wherefore art thou Romeo?" "Wherefore" means "why", not "where".
"whole cloth". (notes by Ellen Rosen) The phrase "made out of whole cloth" (and variants) means "utterly without foundation in fact, completely fictitious". MWCD10 gives only this sense for "whole cloth", and dates it 1840. This is a surprise to some people who sew and quilt, who still use "whole cloth" in its literal sense of "uncut fabric".
The OED has citations of "whole cloth" from 1433 on. Its first definition is "a piece of cloth of the full size as manufactured, as distinguished from a piece that may be cut off or out of it for a garment, etc."
The OED also gives the phrase "cut (or made) out of whole cloth". The earliest citation is from 1579. From the citations, it seems that for the first 300 years or so, the phrase was used with the connotation of entirety, but not of falsehood. For example, this citation is from 1634: "The valiant Souldier . . . measureth out of the whole cloath his Honour with his sword."
OED labels the falsehood sense "U.S. colloquial or slang". The citation from 1843 is the first with this sense: "Isn't this entire story .. made out of whole cloth?" A citation from 1905 (and obviously British) indicates that the term "whole cloth" was not yet being used only in that sense: "That Eton captain is cut out of whole cloth; no shoddy there."
Before the Industrial Revolution, few people had ready access to whole cloth. Cotton had to be picked (or sheep sheared); the cotton or wool had to be washed and picked over; the material had to be spun into thread, and the thread woven into cloth. Cloth was therefore precious and frequently reused. A worn-out man's shirt would be cut down to make a child's shirt; the unworn parts of a woman's skirt would be reused to make quilts; etc. Also, homespun fabric was not very comfortable to wear. Even after the Industrial Revolution, ready-made whole cloth was sufficiently expensive that many people could not afford to use new cloth for everything.
Therefore, to have a piece of clothing made out of whole cloth must have been very special, indeed: something new, not something hand-me-down; something that hadn't been patched together from disparate, often unmatched pieces; maybe even something comfortable. So describing something as being made from whole cloth would mean that it had never existed as a garment before, and that it was something special, something wondrous -- one's Sunday best, or better.
The modern figurative meaning of "whole cloth" seems to depend on a lie's having sprung whole ex nihilo; having no connection with existing facts. All-newness distinguishes garments and lies made out of whole cloth. This is a positive characteristic for clothes, but not for the average tissue of lies and deception.
"the whole nine yards". This phrase, meaning "all of it, everything", dates from at least the 1950s. The origin is a matter for speculation. 9 yards is not a particularly significant distance either in football or in the garment business (a man's three-piece suit requires about 7 square yards of cloth, and cloth is sold in bolts of 20 to 25 yards). The phrase may refer to the capacity of ready-mix concrete trucks, which averages about 9 cubic yards. See Cecil Adams, More of the Straight Dope, pp. 252-257. "Snopes" (hbeng010@huey.csun.edu) is compiling a "canonical collection" of explanations.
It may be one of: "ablaut", "accidence", "acrolect", "adianoeta", "adnominal", "adnominatio", "adynaton", "agnosia", "agrammatism", "alexia", "alliteration", "alphabetism", "amblysia", "amphibol(og)y", "anacolouthon", "anacrusis", "anadiplosis", "anaphora", "anaptyxis", "anastrophe", "antiphrasis", "antisthecon", "anthimeria", "antonomasia", "aphaeresis", "aphasia", "aphesis", "apocope", "apocrisis", "aporia", "apophasis", "aposiopesis", "apostrophe", "aptronym", "asyndeton", "Aufhebung", "banausic", "bisociation", "brachylogy", "cacoetheses scribendi", "cacophemism", "calque", "catachresis", "cataphora", "catenative", "cheville", "chiasmus", "chronogram", "cledonism", "commoratio", "consonance", "constative", "coprolalia", "copulative", "crasis", "cruciverbalist", "cryptophasia", "deictic", "dilogy", "disjunctive", "dissimilation", "dittograph", "dontopedalogy", "dysgraphia", "dyslalia", "dyslexia", "dysphemism", "dysprosody", "dysrhythmia", "echolalia", "embo(lo)lalia", "enallage", "enclitic", "endophoric", "epanalepsis", "epanorthosis", "epexegetic", "epenthesis", "epitrope", "epizeuxis", "eponym", "equivoque", "etymon", "eusystolism", "exergasia", "exonym", "exophoric", "extraposition", "eye-word", "factitive", "festination", "fis phenomenon", "Fog Index", "frequentative", "glossogenetics", "glossolalia", "glottochronology", "glyph", "graphospasm", "hapax legomenon", "haplograph", "haplology", "hendiadys", "heteric", "heterogenium", "heterography", "heteronym", "heterophemy", "heterotopy", "hobson-jobson", "holophrasis", "honorific", "hypallage", "hyperbaton", "hyperbole", "hypocoristic", "hypophora", "hyponymy", "hypostatize", "hypotaxis", "idioglossa", "idiolect", "illeism", "ingressive", "isocolon", "isogloss", "klang association", "koine", "langue", "Lautgesetz", "ligature", "lipogram", "litotes", "logogram", "logogriph", "logomisia", "lucus a non lucendo", "macaronic", "macrology", "meiosis", "(a)melioration", "mendaciloquence", "merism", "metalepsis", "metallage", "metanalysis", "metaplasm", "metathesis", "metonymy", "Mischsprache", "mogigraphia", "mondegreen", "monepic", "monologophobia", "Mummerset", "mumpsimus", "mussitation", "mytheme", "noa word", "nomic", "nosism", "nothosonomia", "objective correlative", "obviative", "omphalopsychites", "onomasiology", "onomastic", "onomatopoeia", "oratio obliqua", "oxytone", "palindrome", "palinode", "pangram", "paradiastole", "paragoge", "paragram", "paralinguistic", "paraph", "paraphasia", "paraplasm", "parasynesis", "parataxis", "parechesis", "parelcon", "parimion", "parole", "paronomasia", "paronym", "paroxytone", "parrhesia", "pasigraphy", "patavinity", "patronymic", "pejoration", "periphrasis", "perpilocutionist", "phatic", "philophronesis", "phonaesthesia", "phonocentrism", "pleonasm", "ploce", "polyptoton", "polysemy", "polysyndeton", "privative", "proclitic", "prolepsis", "proparalepsis", "prosonomasia", "prosopopoeia", "prosthesis", "provection", "psittacism", "purr-word", "quadriliteralism", "quaesitio", "quote fact", "rebus", "reification", "rheme", "rhopalic", "sandhi", "scesis onomaton", "Schlimmbesserung", "semiotics", "sigmatism", "simile", "Sprachgef"uhl", "Stammbaumtheorie", "stichomythia", "subreption", "sumpsimus", "superordinate", "suprasegmental", "syllepsis", "symploce", "synaeresis", "synaesthesia", "synaloepha", "synchisis", "syncope", "synecdoche", "synesis", "systole", "tachygraphy", "tautology", "theophoric", "tmesis", "traduttori traditori", "trope", "univocalic", "Ursprache", "Wanderwort", "Wellentheorie", "Witzelsucht", "wordfact", "xenoepist", or "zeugma". Look 'em up (!). (A good book to look them up in is The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers, by David Grambs (Random House, 1990, ISBN 0-679-72860-0.)
Mentioning something by saying you aren't going to mention it (e.g., "I won't mention his laziness") is called "apophasis". Joseph Shipley's Dictionary of World Literary Terms (The Writer, 3rd ed., 1970) says: "apophasis Seeming to deny what is really affirmed. Feigning to pass by it while really stressing it" (e.g., "not to mention his laziness"): "paralepsis. Touching on it casually: metastasis. Pretending to shield or conceal while really displaying (as Antony with Caesar's will in Shakespeare's play): parasiopesis. [. . .] autoclesis (P. the self-inviter). Introduction of an idea by refusing before being requested, intending thus to awaken (and respond to) a demand, as Antony with the will in Julius Caesar." "Paralepsis" is more often spelled "paraleipsis" (which is the Greek form) or "paralipsis". A few sources (The Century Dictionary, Wyld's dictionary) do not support a distinction between apophasis and paraleipsis.
(The lists of names given in this entry are deliberately incomplete. For a comprehensive list of formal and informal terms for these and many other keyboard symbols, see the entry ASCII in the Jargon File.)
"&" is called "ampersand".
The longest name for "@" is "commercial at sign"; the first and last words may each be omitted. The official ANSI/CCITT name is "commercial at".
"#" has three principal names relating to uses for it:
Of these, "pound" is the most widely used in the U.S., but confuses people who expect that term to mean the symbol for sterling currency (which was located on British typewriter keyboards in the same place as "#" is found on U.S. keyboards). "Number sign", adopted by ANSI/CCITT, is unambiguous, but little known in both the U.K. and the U.S.; and "sharp" is not widely used. Computer-users in the U.K. usually call the symbol a "hash", from its appearance. Finally, the term "octothorp" (which MWCD10 dates 1971) was invented for "#" (based on its eight endpoints), apparently in a failed attempt to avoid the naming problem by creating a new name.
Sentences containing every letter of the alphabet are called "pangrams", or "holalphabetic sentences". They are covered in part 2 of the language section of the rec.puzzles archive.
A sentence where a description of the manner of saying refers punningly to quoted matter is called a "Tom Swifty". (Some people restrict "Tom Swifty" to sentences where the pun is in an adverb, and use "croaker" for sentences where the pun is in the verb: "`I'm dying', he croaked.") The name "Tom Swifty" derives from the Tom Swift adventure series for boys (whose enthusiastic use of adverbs modifying "said" they parody); but the form goes back to the 19th century, and was used by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922).
I maintain the Canonical Collection of Tom Swifties, with over 900 entries. E-mail me (misrael@scripps.edu) if you want a copy.
A sentence where words following a quotation humorously reinterpret what is quoted ("`Eureka!' said Archimedes to the skunk") is called a "wellerism", after the character Sam Weller in Dickens' novel The Pickwick Papers. The form predates Dickens.
"To fall short of". "To trail" can also come in handy when both things are moving.
"Spear side", but I prefer Truly Donovan's suggestion, "datstaff side" (!).
David Justice (david@frnk303.franklin.com) writes:
On the other hand, books such as Who's Who do have fictitious entries.
My name is my mother's nickname. Her name was Etrulia, which she acquired from an aunt-by-marriage, Etrulia (a.k.a. Truly) Shattuck. Beyond that, the origins of the name are lost. Truly Shattuck, however, was a woman of some notoriety, having first come to public attention, according to family legend, when her mother, Jane, was tried and acquitted for having murdered her young daughter's seducer. This would have been in Northern California, perhaps the Bay Area, around the turn of the century, I would guess. At some point thereafter Truly went on the stage, and was supposedly a Floradora girl. Somehow (family legend is very murky about this), she got herself married to a staid Scottish lawyer from Michigan (during which time my mother was born and named for her), but that was not a very enduring union. During my mother's childhood, she was known to be running a chicken farm in California. Her last brush with notoriety, which we learned about from her obituary published in the Chicago Tribune, was when she was arrested for shoplifting a very expensive dress at Marshall Field. Her defense was that she needed to look for a job and hadn't anything to wear.
Anyway, it sure beats being named for a fatuous character in a bad Ian Fleming children's book.
Trademark information can be obtained from the International Trademark Association (INTA; formerly the U.S. Trademark Association), 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036-6712.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the commonest word in written English is "the," followed by: of, and, to, a, in, that, is, I, it, for, as. The commonest word in spoken English is "I." The commonest word in the King James Version of the Bible is "and".
Frequency Analysis of English Vocabulary and Grammar: Based on the LOB Corpus by Stig Johansson and Knut Hofland (OUP, 1989, ISBN 0-19-8242212-2) gives the top eighteen words and their (relative) frequencies as:
The American Heritage Word Frequency Book by John B. Carroll, Peter Davies, and Barry Richman (Houghton Mifflin, 1971, ISBN 0-395-13570-2) gives the top 300 words in order of frequency and in groups of 100 as:
the of and a to in is you that it he for was on are as with his they at be this from I have or by one had not but what all were when we there can an your which their said if do will each about how up out them then she many some so these would other into has more her two like him see time could no make than first been its who now people my made over did down only way find use may water long little very after words called just where most know
get through back much before go good new write out used me man too any day same right look think also around another came come work three word must because does part even place well such here take why things help put years different away again off went old number great tell men say small every found still between name should Mr home big give air line set own under read last never us left end along while might next sound below saw something thought both few those always looked show large often together asked house don't world going want
school important until 1 form food keep children feet land side without boy once animals life enough took sometimes four head above kind began almost live page got earth need far hand high year mother light parts country father let night following 2 picture being study second eyes soon times story boys since white days ever paper hard near sentence better best across during today others however sure means knew it's try told young miles sun ways thing whole hear example heard several change answer room sea against top turned 3 learn point city play toward five using himself usually
Richard Lederer, in Crazy English (Pocket Books, 1989, ISBN 0-671-68907-X), calls these "contronyms". They can be divided into homographs (same spelling) and homophones (same pronunciation).
The homographs include:
A couple of homophones:
Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English (OUP, 5th edition, 1992, ISBN 0-631-16657-2) starts its "Practice Sentences" section with a few of these. A sampling:
There is an English-to-Old-English Dictionary: Wordcraft, by Stephen Pollington (Anglo-Saxon Books, 1993, ISBN 1-898281-02-5).
Brian Kelk (bck1@cl.cam.ac.uk) has a collection of phonetic alphabets (A alpha, B bravo, C charlie, etc.) that he posts occasionally. For comic alphabets (A for 'orses, B for mutton, C for yourself, etc.), see Eric Partridge, Comic Alphabets, Routledge & Paul, 1961.
The following table was compiled by Bob Cunningham from information in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1995 yearbook:
Number of Speakers Country
English English English English
Mother (Lingua Bilingual Creole
Tongue Franca)
224,900,000 253,410,000 United States
56,830,000 United Kingdom
17,700,000 696,000 Canada
15,188,000 17,300,000 Australia
3,620,000 South Africa
3,340,000 Ireland
3,205,000 150,000 New Zealand
1,190,000 36,000 Trinidad and Tobago
310,000 30,000,000 India
240,000 Zimbabwe
132,000 1,890,000 Hong Kong
106,000 160,000 Belize
100,000 6,000,000 220,000 Malaysia
100,000 Spain
87,000 Jersey
85,000 Virgin Islands
80,000 France
70,000 Isle of Man
70,000 Japan
64,000 Guernsey
64,000 Israel
62,000 Bermuda
54,000 144,000 Guam
32,000 Sweden
28,000 114,000 St. Lucia
27,000 237,000 Barbados
26,000 Gibraltar
23,000 Norway
19,000 Puerto Rico
18,000 Denmark
15,000 Netherlands
Antilles
10,000 1,820,000 Sri Lanka
10,000 99,000 Brunei
8,000 Malta
6,000 Aruba
4,000 Luxembourg
3,000 19,000 Dominica
2,200 41,900 Northern Mariana Islands
2,000 54,000 American Samoa
2,000 Macau
2,000 Mauritius
2,000 Monaco
2,000 Seychelles
1,000 Andorra
1,000 85,000 Western Samoa
800 10,100 Nauru
500 Micronesia
63,000 Antigua and Barbuda
200,000 Bahamas
3,100,000 Bangladesh
580,000 Botswana
40,000 Colombia
66,000 Costa Rica
160,000 Fiji
2,000 French Guiana
92,000 Grenada
572,000 Guyana
11,000 Honduras
2,350,000 Jamaica
2,100,000 Kenya
480,000 2,100,000 Liberia
490,000 Malawi
130,000 Namibia
42,000 Nicaragua
14,000,000 33,000,000 Nigeria
15,000,000 Pakistan
362,000 Panama
60,000 Papua New Guinea
36,000,000 Philippines
700,000 4,400,000 Sierra Leone
1,097,000 Singapore
42,000 St. Kitts and Nevis
109,000 St. Vincent and the Grenadines
800,000 Tanzania
280,000 Tunisia
180,000 Uganda
800,000 Zambia
For countries having a "post-creole continuum" ranging from Creole proper to standard English, the entire continuum is assigned to the Creole column. The yearbook lists the 1,190,000 speakers in Trinidad and Tobago as speaking "Trinidad English", not standard English.
According to this information, the number of mother-tongue English speakers in the world (not counting those in Trinidad and Tobago) is 326,652,000. 69% of these live in the United States.
The yearbook says: "No systematic attempt has been made to account for populations that may legitimately be described as bilingual, unless the country itself collects data on that basis". This explains, why, for example, no "English bilingual" speakers are listed for the United Kingdom, even though many native speakers of Welsh and Gaelic speak English fluently. The yearbook's full entry for the U.K. is:
English 56,830,000
Scots-Gaelic 80,000
Welsh 560,000
Other 950,000
Explaining "English (Lingua Franca)", the yearbook says: "Where a nonindigenous official or excolonial language constitutes a lingua franca of the country [. . .], speakers of the language as a second tongue are shown [. . .], even though very few may speak it as a mother tongue."
The U.S. and traditional British names for large numbers are as follows:
U.S. Traditional British
10^6 million million
10^9 billion thousand million or milliard
10^12 trillion billion
10^15 quadrillion thousand billion
10^18 quintillion trillion
10^21 sextillion thousand trillion
10^24 septillion quadrillion
10^27 octillion thousand quadrillion
10^30 nonillion quintillion
10^33 decillion thousand quintillion
10^36 undecillion sextillion
10^39 duodecillion thousand sextillion
10^42 tredecillion septillion
10^45 quattuordecillion thousand septillion
10^48 quindecillion octillion
10^51 sexdecillion thousand octillion
10^54 septendecillion nonillion
10^57 octodecillion thousand nonillion
10^60 novemdecillion decillion
10^63 vigintillion thousand decillion
. .
. .
. .
10^303 centillion
. .
. .
. .
10^600 centillion
The word "billion" has existed in France since the 15th century. Opinions differ as to its initial meaning: one possibility is that it meant 10^12 to mathematicians and 10^9 to others. The first use in England recorded in the OED is by Locke in 1690: the quotation clearly shows that for Locke it meant 10^12. This remained the standard British meaning until the middle of the 20th century. Early in the 18th century, French arithmeticians revised its meaning to 10^9, and the U.S., acquiring the word directly from the French, took this meaning also.
French has the word "milliard", also meaning 10^9, which had largely displaced "billion" by the beginning of the 20th century. ("Milliard" is given in English dictionaries, though most of the few people who know it would think of it as a French word.) By 1948, the use of large numbers in the sciences and the declining value of the franc led the French Weights and Measures conference to recommend the return of "billion" to its original meaning of 10^12. This became official policy in 1961.
By this time, the British had been introduced to the U.S. meaning. MEU warns us that the usages differ; MEU2 (1965) suggests: "Since billion in our sense is useless except to astronomers, it is a pity that we do not conform [to the U.S. meaning]". The British Government took this advice in 1974, when Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced to the House of Commons that the meaning of "billion" in papers concerning Government statistics would thenceforth be 10^9, in conformity with U.S. usage.
Despite this, the U.S. meaning is still rare outside journalism and finance, its introduction having served merely to create confusion. Throughout the U.K., a common response to the question "What do you understand by `a billion'?" would be: "Well, I mean a million million, but I often don't know what other people mean." Few schoolchildren are confident of the meaning, though, again, 10^12 seems to be preferred. Many well-educated adults, aware of both meanings, either avoid the term altogether or use it only in the unambiguous phrases "English billion" and "American billion". English-speaking South Africans, Australians and New Zealanders are similarly reluctant to use a term that has become ambiguous.
Scientists have long preferred to express numbers in figures rather than in words, so it is easy to avoid "billion" in contexts where precision is required. The plural is still used freely with the colloquial meaning of "a very large number".
Publications consulted:
OED, Editions 1 and 2.
Robert, Dictionnaire historique de la langue francaise.
P Pamart, "A propos d'une reforme des mesures legales", in
"Vie et Langage", (125)1962, pp 435-437.
Some people say things like: "It is not correct that it is the biblical meaning. The biblical meaning of a man's knowing a woman is such total love as to know all about her, which includes intercourse. It is not an evasive term for one-night stands."
Not so. The Biblical sense of "to know" is simply "to fuck", as you can see from Genesis 19:4-8 : "[. . .] the men of Sodom compassed the house round [. . .] and they called unto Lot, and said unto him, `Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them.' And Lot [. . .] said [. . .] `Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you [. . .]'"
The Hebrew word here is yada (yod daleth ayin). The Greek word gino:sko: is used similarly in the New Testament.
Is assertion followed by "not" a recent American neologism? NOT! "I love thee not" was the regular word order in Shakespeare's day. Examples including the pause are harder to find; the earliest that we've found is in Irish dialect, in Ellis Parker Butler's Pigs is Pigs (1905):
e. e. cummings wrote a poem beginning:
Credit to David Murray for bringing the cummings example to our attention. And Wanda Keown found the following in Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife (1943): "Norman thought: Country parsonage? Healthy mental atmosphere, not!"
The construction owes its present popularity to the "Wayne's World" skits in the U.S. TV show Saturday Night Live. The first use in SNL was in the 1970s in a skit with Jane Curtin and Steve Martin. (It is said that the writers of these skits encountered the practice when it was a fad in their high school in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.) Another phrase that comes from SNL is "Isn't that special?" (the Church Lady, played by Dana Carvey).
It is sometimes said that the dollar sign's origin is a narrow "U" superimposed over a wide "S", "U.S." being short for "United States." This is wrong, and the correct explanation also tells why the $ sign is used both for dollars and for pesos in various countries. The explanation is not widely known, maybe because not many people would think to look for it in A History of Mathematical Notations, Volume II: Notations Mainly in Higher Mathematics by Florian Cajori (published in 1929 and reprinted in 1952, by Open Court Press). Cajori acknowledges the "U.S." theory and a number of others, but, after examining many 18th-century manuscripts, finds that there is simply no evidence to support those theories.
Spanish pesos were also called piastres, Spanish dollars, and pieces of eight. (The piece of eight was so called because its value was eight reales. Some countries made one-real coins by slicing pieces of eight into eight sectors; the still-current U.S. slang "two bits" for a quarter of a dollar may refer to this, although "bit" denoting any small coin -- as in "threepenny bit" -- was already in use.) The coins were circulated in many parts of the world, much as U.S. dollars are today. The coins were so well known that, when the U.S. got around to issuing its own silver coinage (U.S. dollar coins first appeared in 1794), it simply replicated the Spanish unit's weight and hence value, and even one of its names; so it was natural to use the same symbol.
Since three of the four names given above for the Spanish dollar start with p (and pluralize with s), it was natural for abbreviations like p and ps to be used. Sometimes ps was written as
s
P
that is, P with a superscript s. The superscript was a common way of rendering abbreviated endings of words -- we see vestiges of it today in the way some people write "10th". Now, what happens if you write P with a superscript s fast, because it's part of a long document that you have to hand-write because you can't wait for the typewriter to be invented, let alone the word-processor? Naturally, you join the letters. Well, now look at the top part of the resulting symbol. There's the $ sign! Reduce the P to a single stroke and you have the form of the $ with a double vertical; omit it altogether and you get the single vertical.
And yes, both these forms are original. Cajori reproduces 14 $ signs from a diary written in 1776; 11 of them have the single stroke, which was the more common form to the end of the century, and 3 have the double stroke.
Although the $ sign originally referred to a Spanish coin, it was the revolting British -> American colonists who made the transition from ps to the new sign. (This is apparently also why we write $1 instead of 1$; it mimics the British use of the pound sign.) So, while it did not originally refer to the U.S. dollar, the symbol does legitimately claim its origins in that country.
This is a suggested format for citing the most common types of online material, derived from advice given in various sources (listed at the end). The sources also serve as examples of the formats suggested. Details such as the order of citation elements and the format of dates are matters for the house style of the publisher.
FTP/Gopher/Telnet. Cite these using the URL format described under "World Wide Web" below.
Usenet news articles. The standard form of citation is:
World Wide Web. The standard format for a Web citation is:
However, including the "URL:" prefix seems ugly and unnecessary, as the angle brackets and access code suffice to identify the code as a URL.
Diacritics. You can use diaereses in words like "naïve" and "coöperate" if you want. The use of diacritics has been declining because of Linotypes and computers that didn't allow them.
"-er" vs "-re". The following words are spelled with "-re" in the U.K. but with "-er" in the U.S.: accoutre(ment), calibre, centre, fibre, goitre, litre, louvre, lustre (brilliance, but "luster" one who lusts) , manoeuvre ("maneuver" in the U.S.), metre (for the distance and for poetic and musical metre, but "meter" for the measuring device), meagre, mitre, nitre, ochre, philtre, reconnoitre, sabre, sceptre, sepulchre, sombre, spectre, (amphi)theatre, titre. (The British "metre"/"meter" distinction is retained when the various prefixes are prepended: "kilometre", "speedometer", etc. "Micrometer", a device for measuring minute things, is distinguished from "micrometre", a micron. "Theatre" has some currency in the U.S., especially in names of specific theatres.)
The following words are spelled "-re" in both the U.K. and the U.S.: acre, cadre, euchre, lucre, massacre, mediocre, ogre, wiseacre. (The "-cre" and "-gre" words may have been kept that way in order to keep the "c" and "g" hard, although there are counterexamples such as "eager" and "meager".)
In none of these words is "-er" the agent suffix (as in "revolver") or the comparative suffix (as in "longer"). Most of these words come from Latin through French, and they took the "-re" form in French because the "e" was not part of the word root. (The adjectives tend to be in "-ral", "-ric", and "-rical", rather than "-eral", "-eric", or "-erical".) But many similar words (cloister, diameter, neuter, number, sinister) were changed from "-re" to "-er" in English. The process has merely happened faster in the U.S. than in Britain.
"-ize" vs "-ise". The following verbs are always spelled with "-ise": advertise, advise, arise, chastise, circumcise, comprise, compromise, demise, despise, devise, disguise, enterprise, excise, exercise, (dis/en)franchise, improvise, incise, merchandise, premise, reprise, revise, rise, supervise, surmise, surprise, televise. (At least, they're almost always spelled that way: "advertize", "merchandize", and "surprize" are listed in some U.S. collegiate dictionaries, but are not the usual forms anywhere.) A useful mnemonic is that, except "improvise", none of these make nouns in "-isation" or "-ization". (Exceptions in the other direction are "aggrandize", "criticize", and "recognize".)
"Apprise" means "to inform"; "apprize" means "to appreciate". U.K. "prise open" = U.S. "pry open".
"Exorcize" is most commonly spelled "exorcise" in the U.S., though "exorcize" (which Fowler would have recommended) also occurs.
For other verbs, "-ize" is usual in the U.S. and recommended by Fowler, although "-ise" is also used in the U.K. Fowler recommends "-yse" in "analyse", "catalyse", and "paralyse", although "-yze" is usual in the U.S.
Pronouns. The ONLY personal possessive pronoun with an apostrophe is "one's".
The forms "it's", "they're", and "who's" are contractions for "it is" (or "it has"), "they're", and "who is" (or "who has") respectively. They have nothing to do with possessive pronouns.
The apostrophe does occur in the possessive case of indefinite pronouns ("anybody's", "someone's", and so on).
Nouns. Here are some basic rules:
Singular Plural
Nominative dog dogs
Possessive dog's dogs'
Singular Plural
Nominative class classes
Possessive class's classes'
(The possessive plural is what is wanted in "the Joneses'". This is short for "the Joneses' house", which is not "the Jones's house".)
There are, however, examples where the singular possessive suffix is a bare apostrophe:
Singular Plural
Nominative patience patiences
Possessive patience' patiences'
(In most such examples, the plural is rarely used.) For nouns in this category, many people would consider the 's suffix and the bare apostrophe to be acceptable alternatives. The rules listed below may be taken as "most common practice", but they are not absolute.
The question of which suffix is correct arises less often than one might imagine. Instead of saying "the crisis' start" or "the crisis's start", most native speakers of English would say "the start of the crisis", thus avoiding the problem.
History. For those who want to know where the apostrophe came from, here is how it probably happened. Some of this is well documented, some is guesswork on my part.
Back in the days when English had many more inflections than it now has, the most common suffix for the genitive singular was -es. (There were several noun declensions, so that not all nouns fitted this pattern; but this could be considered to be the "most regular" case.) For example: mann (=man), mannes (=of the man). Over time there developed a tendency to stop pronouncing the unstressed "e", so that "mannes" became "mann's". The apostrophe stands for the omitted letter.
(Modern German still has -es as the genitive suffix for many nouns. The Germans did not stop pronouncing their unstressed "e"s, so the case suffix is still written as -es.)
Pronouns were also inflected, but not in the same way. (They were all fairly irregular, as they still are today.) The genitive form of "hit" (=it) was "his" (=its). As "his" evolved into "its", there was no "e" to drop, therefore no logical reason to insert an apostrophe.
The "its" and "it's" forms did coexist in the 17th and early 18th century, but today the "its" form is considered to be the only correct spelling.
Plural nouns are harder to explain. The most common genitive plural inflection was -a, which is quite unrelated to our modern -s'. My best guess is that most of the old plural suffixes were replaced by -s under the influence of French; and that subsequently the rules for forming singular possessives were extended to the plurals. If this is what happened, then a hypothetical -s's plural possessive suffix would immediately collapse to -s', in the same way as for many singular nouns ending in "s". There was in any case a long period where spelling was a lot less standardized than it is today, so one should not think in terms of any sort of "standard rule" existing during the transitional period.
Note for Non-English Speakers. The apostrophe in these cases normally has no effect on pronunciation. Thus dogs, dog's, and dogs' all sound the same. The exception is where the apostrophe separates two "s"s, and then it is pronounced as an unstressed schwa¹. Thus class's, classes, and classes' are all pronounced as /klas@z/.
For nouns where there is some difference of opinion over whether the possessive suffix should be -'s or a bare apostrophe (that is, those nouns where a final unstressed syllable ends with an [s] or [z] sound) some native speakers use a lengthened final consonant intermediate between /z/ and /z@z/. This is, however, a fine and almost inaudible distinction.
¹I'd like to point out that this is also true when the 's is preceded by ch, sh, dge, and other similar sounds.
Other Comments. One occasionally hears that "John's dog" is an abbreviation for "John his dog". It is more likely that the derivation went in the opposite direction, i.e.:
with the "John his dog" form coming into use only briefly before disappearing from modern English.
Using an apostrophe in a plural which is not a possessive form is almost never recommended by prescriptivists. The only situation where it is recommended is where visual confusion would otherwise result, as for example in the sentence "Mind your p's and q's". In forms like "the 1980s" or "two CPUs", apostrophes are not recommended.
It is correct to use an apostrophe to indicate missing letters, in contractions like "aren't", "isn't", "it's" (= it is or it has). Be careful in these cases to put the apostrophe in the correct place. The apostrophe replaces the missing letter(s); it does not replace the space between words.
Mark Israel (misrael@scripps.edu)