Wordlady

Passion fruit or passion killers?

2012-02-10T01:24:00.000-08:00

If you are planning on serving your sweetheart passion fruit this coming Valentine's Day as being particularly appropriate, you might want to think again. When the word “passion” first came into English from a Latin word meaning “suffering”, it was used in particular for the sufferings of Jesus (as it indeed still is). Only later did the sense of “affliction” morph into “extreme love”, which can, alas, be an affliction. But the original meaning survives in the passion fruit. It is the fruit of the passion flower, which was called that because its parts, people thought, recalled Christ's crucifixion: the blossoms look like the crown of thorns, the styles like nails, and the leaves and tendrils like scourges.

Kind of cuts your appetite, doesn't it? Chocolate is safer! (And for more on that, visit this post.)

Pool

2012-02-03T01:15:00.000-08:00

Have you got your fingers crossed that you'll win your office Super Bowl pool this Sunday? You may be thinking that this type of pool is the same as the one you swim in (after all, it's like a big container that stuff is put in), but in fact it's a totally different word. The gambling pool comes from the French word poule (chicken). One of its slang meanings was "plunder" -- images of soldiers carting off chickens after sacking a village spring to mind. This came to mean the collective stakes in a card game that the winner takes like the victor's spoils of war. Then all kinds of groupings came to be known as “pools”: for gambling, as in office pools, and not for gambling, as in car pools, although sometimes those might be a gamble, depending on the drivers involved!

Happy Birthday, Franz!

2012-01-31T03:53:00.000-08:00

January 31 is Franz Schubert's birthday, so what better day for a music-themed post.
The word "music" itself comes ultimately from the Muses, the ancient Greek goddesses of the arts who hung out with the über arts god, Apollo. This came into English via Latin and French, which meant the word wasn't available to the Anglo-Saxons. Their word for "music" was gliw, which has given us the word "glee". Already by the 1200s, "glee" was being used as a synonym for "mirth", but, for all you avid fans of that TV show, Glee does not mean "happiness" in this context. "Glees" were a specific type of part song in the 1600s, and "glee clubs" grew up in the early 1800s. All the same, I find it quite delightful that a word meaning "music" ended up meaning "happiness".

To make you gleeful, and as a homage to Schubert, please enjoy this amazing ballet, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, set to the final movement of his Great C Major Symphony, choreographed by William Forsythe, full of high-energy virtuosity and featuring the world's coolest tutus. Performed here by Claire-Marie Osta, Delphine Baey, Eleonora Abbagnato, Hervé Moreau and Nicolas Noel of the Paris Opera Ballet (if you like ballet, check out my other blog, www.toursenlair.blogspot.com).

The cat's p*jamas

2012-01-23T04:37:00.000-08:00

Papagena (without pyjamas, -- or legs, apparently)

A Canadian twitter follower of mine recently asked which is the correct spelling: pyjamas or pajamas. Traditionally Canadians have followed the British in using "pyjamas" whereas Americans use "pajamas". She felt (and lamented) that Canadians were "sliding" into American usage on this. When we edited the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, "pyjamas" was definitely more common, but this comment suggested it was time to look into it again, so I conducted a facebook poll. So far, 37 Canadians have answered "pyjamas" versus only 6 saying "pajamas", so I don't think much sliding is going on. If you're Canadian and haven't participated in my facebook poll, let me know what spelling you use in the comments (or send me an email).

This is one of the many words that the English borrowed during their time in India. It comes from the Urdu pāy-jāma, pā-jāma, (in turn coming from Persian pāy , pā foot, leg + jāma clothing, garment) and originally designated the loose floaty trousers worn in the Indian subcontinent. The English adopted these as sleepwear in the 19th century, and combined them with a light jacket. As you can see, there is no -s ending in the original language: it was added in English by analogy with "trousers", "pants", etc.

As for the phrase "the cat's pyjamas", we do not know what wit thought it up, but it cropped up, along with its variants "cat's whiskers" and "cat's meow" in the 1920s,

Chopstick

2012-01-20T02:18:00.000-08:00

For Lunar New Year (celebrated this coming Monday), let's look at a word English acquired from Chinese: chopstick. The English started trading with the Chinese in the 1600s, and to facilitate communication a pidgin, or mixture of the two languages, grew up. In Chinese pidgin, “chop” meant “quick” (this is also the origin of “chop-chop” meaning “hurry”.) “Chopsticks” were “quick sticks”, a partial translation of the Chinese name for them, kwaizi, literally “nimble children” or “nimble ones”.

Hats off to the toque!

2012-01-13T03:49:00.000-08:00

Here in southern Ontario, until today, we've been having such an unusually mild winter (above freezing, woohoo!) that we haven't had to dig out the heavy-hitter of the Canadian winter garb armamentarium (cool word, eh?): the toque. Now, if you're not Canadian, the only familiarity you have with this word is for this piece of headgear:

toque (1)

and you may be wondering why on earth we would wear one in the wintertime! If you have a greater knowledge of historical headdresses, you may also be familiar with this:

toque (2)

but by now you have decided that we Canadians are seriously wacko.
But the toque much beloved to us is neither of these, and neither is it pronounced "toke" like those above (so beware, any of you non-Canadians asking for one in a store!). It rhymes with "kook" and looks like this:

charming Canadian family wearing toques (3)

So why is our pronunciation so out of line with the spelling? This piece of headgear is something we borrowed from French Canadians, who call it a "tuque" (and this is indeed an alternate spelling of the word in Canadian English). The French word comes ultimately from a very old pre-Roman word meaning "hill" or "gourd" which stayed alive in some French dialects and was brought over to North America. It is probably because of the similarity in shape between a hill and the knitted cap that the word was adopted for its current use. English Canadians, though, while grateful that their ears were now warm, never having seen the word "tuque" before, thought it must in fact be the similar hat-related word "toque" (which comes from an Italian name for a kind of silk fabric).

So if you're Canadian, you have no difficulty with a sentence like "They were dressed like loggers, in toques and boots". But if you're from somewhere else and that sentence elicits bizarre images of lumberjacks wearing chef's hats or, like the Monty Python song, dressing up in women's clothing, you can now set your mind at ease.

Things are seldom what they seem

2012-01-10T05:02:00.000-08:00

I was quite surprised to see on the Royal Opera House's YouTube channel a reference, written by someone at the ROH, to "Kenneth MacMillan's seldomly performed Rite of Spring". Seldomly? The word "seldom" is already an adverb, and a very old one, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times. It doesn't need an -ly tacked on the end of it. It's a myth that adverbs have to end in -ly, which I'll come back to further down.
But this led me to investigate "seldom" a bit more, and unfortunately it looks as though it may be dying (or at least ailing). Perhaps this is why the ROH writer didn't know how to use it. Google's ngram shows a decidedly consistent downward trend in frequency of usage since the 1820s (click here to see it), when "seldom" seems to have been by far the most common term for the notion "not often". "Rarely", as the chart reveals, has been plodding along steadily throughout that time.
"Seldomly", though very rare compared to any of those synonyms, showed a remarkable uptick from 1960 on (click here to see it). My theory is that, as "seldom" became less and less frequent, fewer English speakers knew that it is in fact an adverb. And something they had been taught in school led them to "fix" it by adding -ly.
In addition to adverbs that have no -ly form and no corresponding adjective, like "often", "soon", and "seldom", there is a category of adverb, called "flat adverbs", where the adjective and adverb have been identical since the Middle Ages. Think of "come close, work hard, run fast, sing loud, do right, hug tight, go slow". But the prescriptive grammarians of the 18th century, to whom we owe many of the ill-founded (wait a minute, there's another one - "ill") grammatical bugbears we were taught in school, could not understand how these words could be adverbs, and, maintaining that they were misused adjectives, inveighed against their use and decreed that they should be replaced by their siblings ending in -ly. Generations of schoolchildren have been subjected to this rule, with the result that many of my students and audience members, reacting to -ly-less adverbs, bewail to me that "adverbs are dying" (which of course is impossible). Inevitably this leads to hypercorrection ("correcting" something that is already correct, based on a misunderstood "rule"), which I believe is the root of the upsurge in "seldomly" in the last 50 years.
I'm curious to know your thoughts about "seldom". Do you use it? Often? Occasionally? Never? Or... seldom? Let me know in the comments (or on my facebook page).

The new NIMBY

2012-01-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

I literally laughed out loud when I read this post on a friend's Facebook page:

This story (about residents signing a petition to prevent the building of a new low-rise seniors' residence in their suburban neighbourhood, citing fears of noise and vandalism and elderly people watching what they're barbecuing) inspired my friend John McGrath to coin a new term: instead of NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard), what we have here are BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing, Anywhere Near Anything). That seems to be the new attitude.

Subsequently the friend said he had not invented the term but learned it one summer working at the Ontario Ministry of Energy.

I LOVE it!

Breakfast at Epiphany's

2012-01-06T03:50:00.000-08:00

A famous movie starring Audrey Hepburn. Stained glass lamps. A zillion little girls born in the eighties.
What do they all have to do with the glum looking gentlemen in the picture?
Today is the feast of the Epiphany, when the three wise men (or Magi) brought gifts to the baby Jesus. The word "epiphany" comes from two Greek words, epi ("to") and phainein ("show"), the idea being that with the visit of the wise men, Christ's divinity was being revealed or manifested to the greater world of the Gentiles (beyond the shepherds abiding in the fields). But in the Middle Ages, there was also another word for the feast day, which combined phainein with the Greek word meaning "God": theos. Theophaneia meant "the showing of a God". In Old French, this got corrupted to "Tiphanie", and baby girls born on or near this feast day in the Middle Ages were often christened with this name.
Some people ended up with it as their surname, like the famous American jewellers and stained glass artists of the Tiffany family to whom we owe beautiful lamps such as this one:

Tiffany lamp
But with the rise of Protestantism, it was no longer popular to name children after the feast days of the Catholic Church. Tiffany fell out of favour for centuries as a first name. Its resurgence in recent years is due to the immense popularity of the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's (and doubtless the doomed hope on the part of parents that their baby would grow up to be as beautiful and glamorous as its star, Audrey Hepburn).
When I used the term "zillion" above, I was speaking scientifically, as you can see from this listing on the US Social Security Administration's cool website about baby names, with "Tiffany" pretty firmly in the top twenty from 1980 to 1989. Significantly, it wasn't even in the top 1000 before 1962. But poor Tiffany. Looks like she's in freefall, beaten out by Isabella, Emma, Olivia, Sophia, and Ava and so many others.

Popularity of a Name

**Popularity of the female name Tiffany**
Year of birth	Rank
2010	311
2009	281
2008	250
2007	211
2006	210
2005	196
2004	175
2003	148
2002	140
2001	127
2000	101
1999	80
1998	67
1997	61
1996	52
1995	46
1994	35
1993	33
1992	32
1991	27
1990	23
1989	16
1988	13
1987	18
1986	17
1985	23
1984	14
1983	14
1982	13
1981	14
1980	14
1979	28
1978	32
1977	34
1976	32
1975	37
1974	41
1973	52
1972	61
1971	62
1970	99
1969	143
1968	178
1967	192
1966	242
1965	389
1964	461
1963	696
1962	784
Note: Rank 1 is the most popular, rank 2 is the next most popular, and so forth. Data are not shown for some of the years you specified because the name Tiffany was not in the top 1000 names for those years. Name data are from Social Security card applications for births that occurred in the United States.

Of hordes and hoarding

2012-01-02T03:46:00.000-08:00

I hope you all now have a nice hoard of presents and shiny electronic devices as a result of your loved ones battling the hordes in the shops before Christmas and in the Boxing Day sales. If only they could have bought you a handy way to distinguish "horde" and "hoard", which are very frequently confused.

Horde, defined by the OED as "A large gathering of people, esp. of wild or fierce people; a gang, troop, crew", has a fascinating etymology. The Persian word urdū meant "camp". Russian borrowed this as orda to designate a tribe or troop of Asiatic nomads, dwelling in camps , and migrating from place to place for pasturage, or for war or plunder. From Russian it spread to Polish, where it acquired an initial h, and from thence to other European languages in the 1500s. By the 1600s it was already being used to mean any large gathering, especially an unruly one. This "horde" is typically used only as a noun.
Now, in case you're making wild etymological leaps and wondering whether urdū has anything to do with "Urdu" (the language of Pakistan), well, ..... yes, it does! How exciting is that? Back in Asia, the phrase zabān-i-urdū was used to mean ‘the language of the camp’. This became shortened to urdū and the language came to be called that. (For a couple of English words with Urdu origins, visit this post and this post.)
The other "hoard" goes all the way back to Old English, and was spelled hord from that time until the 18th century, when the "hoard" spelling took over, probably on the analogy of "board". Hord was the Anglo-Saxon word for "treasure" (a word derived from French), but as was typical for money-related words after the Norman Conquest, it was replaced to a certain extent by its French equivalent. However, we kept "hoard" as a useful word for an accumulation of things, with slightly different connotations than "treasure". "Hoard" can also be used as a verb.
It's hard to find a mnemonic to help you remember which word has the "a" and which one doesn't, but here's my best stab at it. Many synonyms of "hoard" also have an "a":
save stash cache gather garner amass
For "horde", think of its synonym "crowd". No "a"!
I hope that helps!

You're toast

2011-12-30T00:13:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow night many of us will be toasting the new year. Oddly enough, this does have something to do with what we eat for breakfast. “Toast” started out in the 1300s meaning, roughly, “suntan”, derived from a Latin word tostare. The “grilled bread” sense cropped up in the 1400s, but at the time “toast” was a piece of bread coated with sugar and spices, grilled, and then dropped into a glass of wine to flavour it. In about 1700, it became popular to mention a lady's name when inviting people to drink, the idea being that thinking of the lady added a special savour to the wine, just as the sweet spicy crouton did.

Of Sugarplums and Plum Pudding

2011-12-22T12:22:00.000-08:00

One of the weird things about Christmas is that plums seem to be everywhere but are in fact nowhere. Many of us are preparing our plum puddings for Christmas dinner, and of course, on Christmas Eve visions of sugarplums will be dancing in our heads. Meanwhile, the Sugar Plum Fairy is literally dancing, as ballet companies perform endless Nutcrackers. But none of these things has anything to do with actual plums. What gives?

The person who first recounted the deathless tale of Little Jack Horner and his Christmas (i.e. mincemeat) pie would still be trying to think of a body part rhyming with "raisin" were it not for a fortunate (for him) development in both English cuisine and usage in the 1600s. Certain dishes, for instance mincemeat and Christmas pudding, which had originally been made with prunes (dried plums), started to use raisins or currants instead, but the word "plum" continued to be used despite the change in the type of fruit. So what Little Jack's thumb encountered was actually a dried grape, just like the ingredients in your "plum" pudding.

Sugarplums, on the other hand, were never plums, not even candied ones. They were a kind of hard candy, about the size and shape of a plum, in various colours and flavours, often with wire "stems" attached. An aniseed or caraway seed served as a "pit". Sugarplums were in vogue from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, just in time for Tchaikovsky and the choreographers Petipa and Ivanov to ensure their immortality by associating them with the reigning deity of the Land of the Sweets, performed here by the very lovely Miyako Yoshida of Birmingham Royal Ballet:

A very merry Christmas to all Wordlady readers; thank you for following. I hope you have many sugarplums over the holidays... and if you've never been to see Nutcracker... go!

Rein, reign, go away

2011-12-19T06:07:00.000-08:00

Reindeer with reins

With visions of Donner and Blitzen and Co. harnessed up to Santa's sleigh in our heads, one might think that reindeer are so called because they wear reins. But the reins used for horses are from the Latin word retinere (hold back), whereas “reindeer” comes from the language of the Vikings (not surprisingly, since reindeer are found in the northern parts of the world). In Old Norse, rein was the word for what we would call a caribou. “Deer” back then was the general word for animals, only later being restricted to the antler-bearing ones. So, etymologically speaking, “reindeer” means “caribou animal”. "Caribou", by the way, has a very cute etymology, coming from a Mi'kmaq (native people of eastern Canada) word meaning "snow shoveller", from their habit of scraping away snow with their hooves to get at the food underneath.

Neither "rein" nor "reindeer" has anything to do with the other "reign". Or "rain", for that matter, but I doubt anyone makes that mistake. (Coincidentally, though, "rain" did also start out life with a "g"!)

"Reign" comes from the Latin regnum (government by a king) via Old French. Various pronunciations of the word seem to have existed throughout the Middle Ages -- rayn, ray-nye, rayng-nye -- but eventually "rayn" won out. Being English, though, we wouldn't waste the opportunity to bedevil people learning to spell when we could keep a good silent letter to show off that we know the Latin origins of a word. So we're stuck with the g. I guess we should just be grateful that no one felt compelled to reflect the Latin origins of "rein" by spelling it "reitn"!

Sorry, I CAN'T get it for you wholesale

2011-12-16T01:02:00.000-08:00

It is the busiest retail season of the year. “Retail” comes from the Old French verb retaillier (cut again). The literal idea was that the merchant would get a huge hunk of cheese or something else whole (hence “wholesale”), then cut smaller bits off it to sell retail. The root word in retaillier (from the Latin talea, a cut stick) is also found in the word “tailor”, literally a cutter of clothes, and in “tally”, originally a stick with notches cut into it to record the amount of a debt or payment.

Seasonal Spelling Slip-up

2011-12-12T03:52:00.000-08:00

The word "poinsettia" is a spelling trap for the unwary, especially as most of us pronounce it "poinSETTA" (or in fact, in North America, "poinSEDDA"). But don't forget it has that -ia ending so common in plant names: dahlia, petunia, gardenia etc. Not to mention "fuchsia", where we don't pronounce the ending ee-ah either, though one irate correspondent to the dictionary berated me for giving the pronunciation as "FYOOSHA" instead of what she considered the "correct" pronunciation: FOOKseeah (FOOK rhyming with BOOK). I was sorely tempted to write back saying that I would never do anything that would lead some poor innocent to engage in a conversation at a garden centre starting with the statement, "I wanna FOOKSya"!
You might also be tempted to add a superfluous "t" to poinsettia: pointsettia, but the flower is named after J.R. Poinsett, the first US Minister to Mexico and an amateur botanist, who came across the flower while there in the 1830s. Poinsettias are pointless, you might say (I've never been a fan of them).
Wondering what to give your word-loving friends and relations? Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to do with Pigs and Only in Canada, You Say make great gifts, both available from amazon.ca. Click here to order.

Bless you!

2011-12-09T04:02:00.000-08:00

It's winter, and many of us are sneezing (especially if we didn't get our flu vaccine). But until the mid-1400s, people fnesed (this wonderfully evocative word was pronounced “fnayz”). While words starting with fn- became rare, there were many starting with sn-, especially nose-related ones like “snivel”, “sniff”, “snort”, and “snot”. Gradually the venerable “fnese”, which dated back to Anglo-Saxon times, was supplanted by “sneeze”.
For the history of the word "flu", click here, and if you're wondering how to make it plural, click here.
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An instance of homophone confusion

2011-12-05T13:33:00.000-08:00

Do not confuse "incidence", "incidents" and "instance".

Recently I saw the following sentence: " I, and I'm sure plenty of others have seen and heard first-hand incidences of eating disorders".

This person meant "instances".

Incidence is a fancy-schmancy word for "rate": the occurrence, rate, or frequency of a disease, crime, or other undesirable thing. So you could say, "There is a high incidence of anorexia in that group". If you have problems with this, you'd be well advised just to use "rate" instead, and banish "incidence" from your active vocabulary so that you don't confuse it with "instance".

An instance is an example. A single example of something occurring, not the relative rate of its prevalence in a group. "In the course of the year, there were four instances of students with eating disorders."

Another confusion is between "incidence" and "incidents".

An incident is a happening or occurrence, usually an isolated case when something else is going on. The word usually has negative connotations, so if you read, "There was an incident at the ballet last night," you expect it to be that an audience member got up in the middle of the White Swan pas de deux and shouted profanities, not that everyone cheered for 20 minutes of curtain calls.

Summary:
incidence = rate
instance = example
incidents = bad things happening

Don't have a cow...

2011-12-02T00:03:00.000-08:00

Flu vaccine clinics are up and running again. Where does the word “vaccination” come from? In 1796, the British scientist Edward Jenner discovered that immunity to smallpox could be achieved by inoculating people with the milder virus of a disease called cowpox. But, being an 18th-century guy, Jenner gave the virus a Latin name: variolae vaccinae, from the Latin for “cow”, vacca. A cowpox shot was called a “vaccine inoculation”, quickly replaced by the snappier “vaccination”, which was subsequently applied to inoculations against any disease, not just smallpox.
For more on whether "flu" can be used in the plural, and if so, what that plural is, visit this post.

Dr. Whose

2011-11-30T05:06:00.000-08:00

Don't confuse who's and whose.

We are so conditioned to think that apostrophe s indicates a possessive that it is very easy to make this mistake, but who's is not a possessive. Rather, it's a contraction.

If you mean "who is" or "who has", use who's, as in "Who's Katherine's favourite dancer?" or "Who's seen Robert Tewsley dance?" or "Katherine, who's seen Robert Tewsley dance more times than she can count...."

Use whose when using "who is" or "who has" instead would sound wrong, as in statements like "Robert Tewsley, whose acting is as fabulous as his dancing..." or "Whose version of Romeo and Juliet will he be dancing?"

(If you're wondering, "Who's Robert Tewsley?" you can find out more here and see pictures here.)

Anthony and... Katherine?

2011-11-25T01:02:00.000-08:00

I know it doesn't have the same ring as Cleopatra! In honour of my patron saint, whose feast day it is today, this post is not about ancient lovers, but about an etymological quirk found in my name and also in the name "Anthony". North Americans may notice that many British English speakers pronounce the name "Anthony" as if it were "Antony". And why is one of the short forms of "Katherine" Kate?
Both these names started out in the ancient world without any h's, the former from the ancient Roman family name Antonius and the latter from the Alexandrian saint referred to in Greek as Aikaterine. Here she is with her famous wheel:

But both these names were affected by people's tendency to folk-etymologize. People assumed that the saint's name had to be related to the Greek word for "pure", katharos, so they inserted an h into the spelling. But despite the "improved" spelling, English speakers in the Middle Ages (like the French from whom they had borrowed the name) did not pronounce "Katherine" with a "th", but still with a "t". This gave rise to the short forms "Kat" and "Kate" (both of which Shakespeare uses punningly in The Taming of the Shrew). The vowel sound in "Kate" shifted from a short a to a long a under the influence of a phenomenon that affected many English vowels between 1400 and 1600 called the Great Vowel Shift.Vowels followed by two or more consonants were unaffected, though, so the vowel remained short in "Katherine" while it was lengthened in "Kate".
One can see why a saint could be associated with purity, but the folk etymology which affected "Antonius" was a bit weirder. For some reason, the English renaissance scholars who just loved lumbering English spelling with silent letters to reflect the words' classical origins were determined that the name "Antony" really had something to do with flowers (anthos in Greek). So they started spelling the name "Anthony". You will notice that the Antoines, Antons, Antonins, Antonios, and so on of the rest of Europe are not similarly afflicted. Unlike the case of Katherine, though, the "th" pronunciation in Anthony did not follow the "th" spelling, at least not in Britain. In North America we have let the (erroneous) spelling influence our pronunciation of this name.

For the etymology of the word "taffy", traditionally eaten by French-Canadians on St. Katherine's day, visit this post.

Excessive heroine consumption

2011-11-22T03:41:00.000-08:00

I recently came across an article which referred to "heroine ingestion". This gave me pause.

A heroine is the principal female character in a story, or a woman who displays heroic characteristics. Heroin is a drug. There is, however, a connection between the two words. The Bayer company of Germany (the same people who gave us Aspirin, though originally a dye manufacturer rather than a pharmaceutical firm) thought they had found a dandy new painkiller and cough medication (!) when they made it commercially available in 1898 under the trademarked name "heroin", so-called because the now notorious instant euphoria it provides made people feel as if they were larger-than-life heroes. (Not for long, though).

The word "hero" also has an interesting history. It came from the Greek heros, but English speakers, so accustomed to words ending in -s being plurals, lopped the final -s off to create "hero". (For a similar story, see my post about the word "cherry".)

In short, do not write "excessive heroine consumption", unless of course you are speaking of the trend in19th-century operas to bump off the leading lady with tuberculosis.

Heroin. Do not confuse with

Heroine

Kittens and Mittens

2011-11-18T04:17:00.000-08:00

With winter upon us, it's time to get out your mittens. The origin of this word is uncertain, but one possibility, unfortunately for cat lovers like me, is that it comes from the Old French word mite (puss, kitty), which probably originated as an imitation of a cat mewing. Mittens were originally lined with fur, very possibly cat fur.

You may wish to prevent the annual scourge of mitten loss by attaching them to what we Canadians call, with characteristic sensitivity, “idiot strings”, a long string running through the sleeves and across the inside of your coat, with a mitten attached at either end. The thing (though not the word) was a clever invention of the Inuit, for whom losing a mitten would be a serious problem indeed.

That sinking feeling...

2011-11-14T06:36:00.000-08:00

Some people tell me they "shudder" when they hear Americans (as usual, people love to blame Americans!) use "sunk" as the simple past tense of "sink": "Yesterday they sunk three ships". But, although nowadays only North Americans do this (use this form for the past tense, I mean, not sink ships!), we can't "blame" them.

In Old English, there were three simple pasts of "sink": "sank" or "sonk" (!) if the subject was singular, and "sunk" if the subject was plural. Languages like to simplify things, and since "sunk" had always been the past participle of "sink", it's not surprising that by the 1500s it had beaten out "sank" as the past tense too. That great British authority on the English language, Samuel Johnson, stated in his dictionary in 1755 that the simple past was "sunk" and that "sank" was archaic (in fact the term he used was "anciently"!). I'm not quite sure why "sank" was resurrected, but I suspect it might have been on analogy with the forms of "drink".

Like "sink", "drink" had more than one simple past in Old English: "drank" if the subject was singular and "drunk" if the subject was plural. But the language took the opposite tack from what it had done with "sink": from about the 13th century on, people used only "drank". But then in the 16th century people started to use "drunk" for the simple past instead, just as they were using "sunk" as the simple past of "sink". So, as you can see, both were possible, but finally "drank" won out. If "sunk" was the standard past tense of "sink" at the time that North America was settled, as Johnson's dictionary suggests, this would explain why it has survived in North America. But the British obviously changed their minds about it and re-adopted "sank". I always like to say it's not the Americans that corrupt English, but the British! In Canada we tend to be caught between the two standards. In the Canadian Oxford Dictionary we gave both "sank" and "sunk" as the simple past of "sink", with "sank" first, as it is more common. But "sunk" is not wrong. So, one less thing for you to shudder about.

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Dust to dust

2011-11-11T02:54:00.000-08:00

Today being Remembrance Day, let us look at the word "khaki", so associated with military uniforms. It comes from an Urdu word meaning "dust". The colour, probably achieved by washing the fabric in muddy water, was adopted for use in uniforms by the British army in India and Afghanistan in the 1840s, the first use of camouflage. If you think of the pictures we see on TV of Afghanistan, you can see why "dust colour" makes for good camouflage. Up till then, the British wore highly conspicuous red uniforms, but with improvements in the accuracy of firearms, the wisdom of camouflage became obvious.
A peculiarly Canadian pronunciation of this word exists (and I use the word "peculiar" not in its pejorative sense): CARkee. About fifty years ago it was probably the most common Canadian pronunciation. I recently conducted a facebook poll to see how it is faring, and the results from Canadian respondents were:
CACKee: 45
CAHkee:: 19
CARkee: 15

Not wanting to be indiscreet, I did not ask how old the "CARkee" respondents are, but judging from their facebook profile pictures, they are not in the first flush of youth. So this Canadian pronunciation is certainly not dead yet, but on its way out. It is interesting, however, to see that CAHkee (the standard British pronunciation) has a stronger showing here than in the US, where my CACKee respondents outnumbered the CAHkee ones 11 to 1.
For another Remembrance Day-themed post, see In Flanders Fields the poppies... and Soldiering on.
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In Flanders fields the poppies...

2011-11-07T01:09:00.000-08:00

I recently took a group of ballet lovers on a trip to Paris and Belgium that included a visit to the Royal Ballet of Flanders in Antwerp. Driving from Antwerp to Bruges, we noticed that, as Canadian John McCrae's First World War poem immortalized, the poppies in Flanders do indeed.... Well, what exactly is it they do? If you filled in that line with "grow" you would be botanically correct, but in fact the famous line is "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row."
(There is some controversy about whether he did in fact use "blow" or "grow" in his original version, but the first published edition has "blow" in the first line. Later in the poem he does have " If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flanders fields.)
"Blow" in this context means "bloom", the word which has for all intents and purposes taken over from it, but wouldn't have provided McCrae with a very good rhyme. It is not the same "blow" as the one we use when referring to strong winds or extinguishing birthday candles, but rather is derived from the Old English word blowan (to bloom, related to the modern German word for "bloom", bluehen). The windy "blow" came from another Old English word, blawan. As luck would have it, the past tense for these verbs was identical, so gradually blawan acquired the same spelling in all its forms as blowan.
In this week of Remembrance Day, whatever those poppies are doing in the fields of Belgium, spare a thought for all those who are buried beneath them.

Fans for fans

2011-11-04T01:19:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks, baseball fans have been worshipping at their chosen shrine with a fervour that verges on the religious. This is not surprising in view of the origins of the word “fan”. It was in reference to baseball, in fact, that the word was first used, in the 1880s, before being extended to other sports and then to the theatre and other activities. It is a shortening of “fanatic”, derived from the Latin word fanaticus meaning “pertaining to a temple” (the Latin word for “temple” being fanum). But fanaticus also had an extended meaning, “inspired by orgiastic rites, frantic with religious enthusiasm”. I don't know if a baseball game can be described as an orgiastic rite, but fans can certainly get frantic.

To cool their ardour, they might want the other kind of fan, but that is a different word entirely, from the Latin vannus, originally a type of basket for winnowing grain by tossing it in the air. This word came to be applied to a hand held device used for agitating the air.

The whys and wherefores

2011-11-02T05:43:00.000-07:00

The subject of my ballet appreciation courses this week has been Romeo and Juliet, and we've been watching some pretty fabulous balcony scene pas de deux:

Of course, in ballet they don't have to use words at all, but in Shakespeare this scene includes the famous line "Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"

Wherefore does not mean "where".

It means "why". Juliet is lamenting the fact that Romeo is who he is, the son of the enemies of her family. WHY oh why does it have to be that way? Why are you Romeo Montague and not some Capulet guy my parents would be happy to marry me off to?

Think of it as a twin of "therefore". "Therefore" makes a statement: "as a result, in consequence". "Wherefore" asks the question: "as a result OF WHAT?" Unlike "therefore", though, "wherefore" is pretty much dead in English except in the (redundant) phrase "whys and wherefores" and... in mistaken allusions to Romeo and Juliet!

Things that go bump in the night

2011-10-28T04:10:00.000-07:00

With Halloween on the horizon, there is much talk of ghosts. Why is there an h in "ghost", when there is none in "go" or "god"? You might be tempted, looking at the word "ghoul", which we also see a lot at this time of year, to leap to the etymological conclusion that the words are connected. But you would be wrong. "Ghoul" comes from the Arabic ghūl , from a verbal root meaning ‘to seize’, and entered English only in the late 1700s.
"Ghost", on the other hand, dates back to the Anglo-Saxons, and was spelled without an h by them and for centuries afterward. For them, the word meant "soul", a usage which now survives only in the phrase "give up the ghost". It was also used for the Spirit of God, a usage that survives, but only barely, in some Christian denominations who still refer to the Holy Ghost. Most, however, have switched to "Holy Spirit", probably because generations of Sunday School students have been perplexed by what Casper is doing as part of the Holy Trinity. The now predominant "spectre" sense dates from the late 1300s.
We owe this particular orthographic annoyance to the printer Caxton, who set up the first printing press in England in 1476. He had discovered printing in Flanders, and was probably influenced by the Flemish spelling of the word, gheest. Despite the influence of the printers in standardizing spellings, though, it is quite surprising that this quirky spelling established itself. Its ultimate success can perhaps be ascribed to the trend in the 1500s to insert silent letters into words to reflect their etymology. Not knowing any better, people perhaps thought that the new "h" in "ghost" was like the new "b" in "debt" or the new "p" in "receipt", which evoked the Latin origins of those words. Caxton also tried to impose this (to quote the Oxford English Dictionary) "capricious substitute for g" in ghoos , ghoot , gherle, which you will probably not recognize as "goose", "goat", and "girl". Obviously (and fortunately!) he did not succeed with these.

For the perennial question whether to spell Halloween with an apostrophe or not, see this post and for the pronunciation, see this post. For the etymology of "pumpkin", see this post.

Not like caucus

2011-10-26T03:42:00.000-07:00

I was just reading my Toronto Star, ever a rich source of spelling mistakes, and noticed a headline "Rowdy and raucus". What they meant was "raucous", but when I did a search on google for the misspelling, I was surprised to find almost half a million instances, so the Star headline editors are not alone. The Latin etymon (that's a fancy - but much shorter - word meaning "word from which another word is derived") of "raucous" is in fact raucus, meaning "harsh or hoarse", and this is indeed the meaning that "raucous" had when it was first borrowed into English in the 1600s (and is still the sense of the French word rauque). The "boisterous, noisy; rowdy, disorderly, uproarious" sense is really quite recent, dating from the mid-1800s.
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Why the apostrophe is doomed

2011-10-25T08:14:00.001-07:00

An interesting article about the history of punctuation, from the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576641182784805212.html

Shubh Diwali!

2011-10-21T04:54:00.000-07:00

Diwali, the Hindu, Sikh, and Jain festival of lights, from the Sanskrit word dipavali (a row of lights), starts next Wednesday. A good opportunity to look at one of many words we have borrowed from Hindi: dinghy. A dingi was a small rowboat used on rivers in India. We originally spelled it “dingy” but then needed to distinguish it from the adjective, and to show that the “g” is hard, we added the “h”.

The piano is my forte

2011-10-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

Today is the 152nd anniversary of Chopin's death, an appropriate day to look at the word "piano". When pianos were first invented, around the beginning of the 1700s, the available keyboard instruments were the clavichord, which was very expressive but had the disadvantage that, well, you couldn't really hear it, and the harpsichord, which you could hear, but it had no mechanism for playing quieter or louder; the harpsichord had two volume levels: on or off.
Around 1700, one Bartolomeo Cristofori, who worked at the Medici court in Florence, invented a new instrument which created sound by a hammer striking a wire (whereas the harpsichord depends on a plucking mechanism). Because the volume could be varied by how hard the hammer hit, this new instrument was called a gravicembalo col piano e forte (‘harpsichord with soft and loud’). Not surprisingly, this got shortened to "piano e forte", then to "pianoforte" and within 70 years of its birth, to "piano". No doubt Cristofori would have spluttered, "But, but, it plays forte TOO! That's the whole point!!"
The Italian musical terms piano (soft) and forte (loud) established themselves in English at about the same time. Piano literally means "plane" or "flat". It comes from the Latin word planus. Because the flat areas in Italy are in the lower coastal parts of the country, the word also came to mean "low", first in reference to height and then in reference to sound. Forte literally means "strong".
And here's my favourite bit of Chopin (both piano and forte) to enrich your day (starting at 0:30):

The lady doth protest too much

2011-10-12T06:11:00.000-07:00

A faithful Wordlady reader has inquired about the usage of the verb "protest": does one protest something or protest against something? She had been taught that adding "against" was redundant. In fact, the verb "protest" has been used with "against" since the verb first started being used in the "utter an objection" sense in the 1500s, and in Britain the usage is still always with "against". In the US, however, people started dropping the "against" in the late 1800s; some claim that the usage came about because newspapers wanted to save space. Whatever the facts of the matter, "protest something" is now firmly established in North American usage and is now as common as "protest against something". One cannot say that either is wrong.

Profiting from profiteroles

2011-10-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

I was recently at a ballet performance in Japan (you can see pictures of it here) and was quite thrilled to discover that the New National Theatre in Tokyo serves chocolate-glazed cream puffs at the intermission. How very civilized. Because I felt that I ought to have the full Japanese theatre experience, I of course indulged. Way better than the cookies we get at the theatre in Toronto! This got me thinking about the word "profiterole": why are small cream puffs called this? In French, "profiterole" is a diminutive of the word "profit" which, in addition to having the monetary sense it has in English, also has a more general sense of "benefit". Apparently the Renaissance author Rabelais (who was as inventive with the French language as Shakespeare was a few decades later with English) invented the word "profiterole" to mean "a little benefit or gratification" and shortly thereafter it was being used for small dumplings. In the next century, such dumplings were made by hollowing out a small bread roll, stuffing it with a filling, and then simmering it in soup. The similarity with little cream puffs meant that by the 19th century they also came to be known as "profiteroles", and we English speakers quite happily borrowed both the dessert and the word from the French.

Crisscross

2011-09-30T06:07:00.000-07:00

In my post on the etymology of the word "index", I mentioned that the alphabet had been called a "Christ cross row" because in schoolbooks it was often preceded by a mark in the shape of a cross, called a "Christ's cross". "Christ's cross" is, somewhat amazingly, also the origin of our word "crisscross". Just as "Christ's mass" became reduced to "Christmas" with its first syllable pronounced CRISS, the same thing happened to "Christ's cross". But, unlike "Christmas", the spelling started to reflect the new pronunciation, as early as the 1600s, first losing the "t", then losing the "h". By the 1800s, "criss-cross" was being used to mean a pattern of intersecting lines. with all sense of the ultimate allusion completely lost.
For another word that surprisingly has its origins in the symbol of the crucifixion, see this post.

When luxury and indolence were Bad Things...

2011-09-26T04:36:00.000-07:00

Do not use "enervate" when what you mean is "energize". You could unwittingly insult someone if you get this wrong, for instance if you told them a talk they just gave or a class they just taught "enervated" you, for "enervate" means "sap of energy or strength", or, as the OED puts it (with a rather Victorian tone of disapproval of self-indulgence):

"To weaken physically (a person or animal); now only of agencies that impair nervous ‘tone’, as luxury, indolence, hot or malarious climates."

The word comes from the Latin ēnervāre (to extract the sinews of, weaken), from ē out + nervus sinew, and was originally used to mean "cut the hamstrings of a horse". Now, my hamstrings take a beating in my ballet classes, but for all that, I find my classes energizing rather than enervating (probably because of the lack of that character-sapping indolence!).

On the index

2011-09-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

As I promised in my post about the plural of "index", here is the story of the word "index".

There were a lot of words competing for the honour of designating alphabetical lists in the Renaissance. I suspect that this is because indexes as a concept only really came into being at the Renaissance (before then “table” was used for such lists). In fact, apparently you couldn't index before the Renaissance, because before then we had no alphabet! Well, really we did, but it wasn't called that till the early 1500s (1513 being the OED's first quotation). The alphabet had been called a "cross row" or "Christ cross row" (more on this in another post) for a while, because a cross sign began it in schoolbooks. One famous lexicographer, Cotgrave, even sniffily dismissed the word "alphabet" as vulgar in 1611: "Touching the French abece, for alphabet I will not call it, according to the vulgar error, that word being peculiar only to the Greek tongue." (Yet more proof that lexicographers have less power than you might think, and that usage objections have a way of fading away with time.)

But back to indexes. Some down-to -earth person wanted to call them “finders” but he was doomed to failure, because the Renaissance was a time of borrowing from Greek and Latin, especially for highbrow intellectual pursuits.The Greek-derived word in the race was "elench" from elenchos (cross-examination). There were three candidates from Latin:

concordance, from con (together) and corde (heart)

repertory, from reperire (to find)

index, from index (the forefinger, or “pointer” , from indicare to point out).

In the Middle Ages the index finger had beeen called the “teacher”, because "teach" originally meant "point out", but once again the word of Anglo-Saxon origin had to lose out to a Latinate one. It could have been instead the delightful, and equally Latin, “insignitor”, another word that was popular for the index finger in the 1500s. But for fingers and finders, "index" was the ultimate winner.

Update on enrol vs enroll

2011-09-21T05:50:00.000-07:00

Further to my post on the spelling of enrol(l), the results of my highly scientific facebook poll are now in, and "enroll" has taken a commanding lead amongst Canadians of 33-14 over enrol. Many of those who answered "enrol" only did so after checking a dictionary, which suggests to me that if left to their own devices they might have said "enroll". Which reminds me, when I conduct a survey like this, please tell me what you would do spontaneously, not what your dictionary says you should do.

Get, got, ....?

2011-09-19T16:28:00.000-07:00

Just to make people's lives miserable, I suspect, usage pundits like to seize hold of common everyday words and make up "rules" about them which are the exact opposite of what Joe Language User would do if left to his or her own devices. After all, how would one get a power trip if one made rules only about words people rarely if ever use, or if one said, "Go ahead, what you say intuitively is ok"?

The past participle of "get" is such a case: there is a tradition among usage books maintaining that "gotten" is wrong or obsolete. It is indeed obsolete for the British, but it is alive and kicking in North America, so the question is: is it wrong?

Considering that it is one of the most frequent words in English, you might expect "get" to be Anglo-Saxon in origin, but in fact we owe it to the Vikings. For them, the infinitive was geta, the simple past gat, and the past participle getenn. But English verbs with an e vowel commonly changed that vowel to an o in the past participle, as in "steal" becoming "stolen". So when this Old Norse word was borrowed into English in the 1200s, people used the familiar conjugation pattern, and getenn became goten. The vowel in goten even migrated over to the simple past, so that "gat" became "got" by the 16th century (although you will still hear "gat" occasionally in quotations from the King James Bible, dating from 1611). As time went on, the English abandoned gotten in favour of got for both the simple past and the past participle (though they maintained the distinction with "forgot" and "forgotten"). But, like many older forms abandoned by the English, gotten has survived in North American English. So, if anyone tells you it's obsolete, ignore them!

Why not hopwelsh?

2011-09-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

Children are back in the schoolyards. Do they still play hopscotch, or has some Wii version taken over? You might think that there's some cute story about Scotch whisky involved with hopscotch, but in fact, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Scots. Back in the 1400s, the word "skoch" turned up in English meaning "cut a line in" or "make a gash in". Recipes recommended that fish to be grilled should be "skoched" first (today we would say "scored"). If you think of what a piece of steak that has been scored with a knife looks like, you can see the resemblance to a hopscotch drawing on a sidewalk. "Hopscotch" means "hop over the lines", more or less. The earliest references to the game, from 1688 (when they definitely didn't have a Wii version) called it "hop scotches", in fact.

Enrol(l)

2011-09-14T05:56:00.000-07:00

It's the time of year when people are enrolling in all sorts of activities (I recommend taking up ballet classes if you haven't done so yet). A faithful Wordlady reader has written to inquire whether "enrol" or "enroll" is the correct spelling in Canada. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary gives "enrol" as the headword with "enroll" as the variant, so, as with many things, both are correct. Personally, I use "enroll" because I see no good reason to spell it differently from "roll"; English spelling is way too complicated already without adding even more complication! Frankly, I think I was surprised to discover when we edited the dictionary that "enrol" won out over "enroll" (though the margin was probably slim). Both spellings have existed since the word was borrowed into English from French in the 1300s, but "enrol" is now preferred by the British and "enroll" by Americans. Often these differences date back to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary on the one hand and Noah Webster's on the other, but in this case Johnson included only "enroll". It seems that the single-l spelling won out in Britain in the course of the 19th century. I've just started a facebook poll to see how usage is going currently, and I will keep you posted.

Cantaloupe

2011-09-09T16:51:00.000-07:00

Here in Ontario, the peaches are still in season, but now the equally luscious and slurpworthy Ontario cantaloupes are ready to be eaten. Some of you may be surprised to learn that it is warm enough to grow melons in Canada, but I assure you it is! The name "cantaloupe" comes from the Italian Cantalupo, the name of a former country seat of the Pope near Rome, where the fruit is said to have been first cultivated when introduced from Armenia. Apparently what we call a cantaloupe in North America should actually be called a muskmelon, since a true cantaloupe is a different variety of melon, but I doubt that decades of usage will change on this. According to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the spelling "cantaloupe" is more common than "cantaloup" in Canada.
Continuing with the tradition of "Recipes from the Word Lady" that I started with my scone posting , here's a recipe for Cantaloupe Cake that I just tried for the first time this weekend when confronted with a very ripe 2.5kg melon. It was very yummy!
Cantaloupe Cake
Beat together
3 eggs
1/2 c. oil
1 1/2 c. sugar
Add
1 tbsp. vanilla
Mix together:
3 c (400 g) white or whole-wheat flour
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
Add dry ingredients alternately to egg mixture with
2 c. pureed ripe cantaloupe.
Pour into a large greased and floured tube pan or Bundt pan and bake at 325 degrees for about 50 minutes. Let cool till lukewarm. Turn out and dust with icing sugar.
* Since cantaloupes vary in juiciness you may want to start with 2 1/2 cups flour and add more if the batter looks too runny.

Status quo

2011-09-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm not done with plurals of Latin words yet, but I promise I'll talk about a different usage issue next week.

Back in my dictionary-writing days, one of our eager correspondents inquired why no plural form is given for the word "status" in The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, he went on, gives the plural as "statuses" which, he said, "sounds ridiculous and would make it the only Latin derivative with an "es" ending. As far as I am concerned I consider the plural to be "stati" and I would like to know why this is not in the dictionary."

The word "status" is not given a plural because it is a regular noun (forming the plural in -s or -es if ending in a sibilant). This is something that English native speakers can intuitively do.

"Status" has been in the English language since the late 17th century. It has been consistently printed in roman rather than italic type, indicating that it is fully naturalized, since the mid-19th century. Fully naturalized words in English usually form their plurals according to English rules rather than according to the rules of the language from which they were borrowed (otherwise we would talk about the "stamina" of a flower rather than its stamens). The OED entry for the word, which would have been edited in about 1910-15, gave the plural "(rare) status", pronounced "stay tee us", since the plural in Latin is, surprisingly, status (with a long u) rather than the regular masculine plural in -i. I am not sure on what the OED editors based this pronouncement because there is in fact no evidence of the word being used in the plural in the original OED text. The revision to the Supplement to the OED, edited between 1972 and 1986, states "now usu. statuses" for the plural. I think they could have said "now always statuses". Nowhere in the whole text of the OED or the huge databases of quotations that we consulted for the dictionary was there any evidence for the plural "stati" (which, as we have seen, was not the Latin plual anyway) being used in the English language. It must be said also that "status" is simply not used much in the plural.

Despite my correspondent's categorical assertion, there are a number of other Latin borrowings in English ending in -us that form their plural with -es. For example:

sinus

chorus

apparatus

solar plexus

rebus

abacus

bonus

arbutus

lotus

impetus

fetus

hiatus

census

consensus

virus

campus

crocus

circus

hibiscus

discus

exodus

genius

callus

isthmus

ignoramus

anus

and all the dinosaurs

When you get right down to it, even "bus" and "plus" are Latin words ending in -us, and yet no one says "Three bi drove past" (or writes to dictionary editors complaining that we should)!

There are many more such words where English speakers can choose between -es and -i but where -es is more common, such as thesaurus, focus, etc. (If you feel you "ought" to say "thesauri", get over it.)

English is English; Latin is Latin. Surprisingly, they are not the same language!

Back to ... leisure?

2011-09-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

Unlikely as it may seem to those returning to classes next week, the word “school” originally meant “leisure”. The highly cultured ancient Greeks loved spending their leisure time (skhole) hanging out with Socrates and Plato discussing philosophy, so their word meaning “leisure” gradually came to apply to such discussions and then to the place where they happened. By the time the word got to English via Latin, it was written scol. The letter h was reintroduced in the Renaissance only because people wanted to show off that they knew the original Latin and Greek spelling.

The death of dictionaries

2011-09-02T06:25:00.000-07:00

how ironic is it that this article bemoaning the demise of print dictionaries is illustrated by a photo of the author holding an edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary that is at least 30 years out of date?? If he wants publishers to keep producing dictionaries, maybe he should buy them!!

One pizza, two...?

2011-08-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

There's been quite a lot of response to my recent post about the plural of "antenna", some of it of the "shock, horror" variety. The prestige of Latin and Greek plurals has a strong hold on our psyches. Quick, now, what's the plural of "psyche" in ancient Greek? Can you imagine how complicated life would be if we had to know the plural in the original language of every word in English. WAY too complicated, especially when there's that handy English regular -(e)s ending just begging to be used. So we don't phone up the pizza place and order "two large pizze" or stop in our local coffee shop to ask for "two cappuccini". Other languages apply their own pluralization rules when they borrow foreign words, too; the plural of the French word "cameraman" is "cameramans".
Someone asked about "index". Was I in favour of "indexes" rather than "indices"? Well, yes, I am. Not that my being "in favour" of one thing or another has any importance; it's general usage that decides these things.
Here's the Canadian Oxford Dictionary:

index

→ noun ( pl. indexes or esp. in technical use indices 'ndsi:z )

If you consult the OED, you will discover that "indexes" (or even, gasp, in the 1500s,"index's") has been around for centuries, and the OED too gives "indexes" as the first plural of the word, stating quite baldly that it is the usual plural for the alphabetical listing. Now, usage has it that we prefer "indices" for the "sign or indication of something" sense, and when you think of it, that sense hardly exists in the singular anymore. Mathematical and scientific usage favours "indices", but that is just part of the phenomenon of Latin and Greek plurals being more resilient in those fields than in general usage. I wonder how many mathematicians and scientists nowadays have ever studied Greek or Latin; I doubt that this trend will continue.
In the face of the overwhelming weight of regular English plurals, trying to maintain a foreign plural in English is an uphill battle with few if any benefits.
For more on the history of the word "index", stay tuned!

Beer

2011-08-26T08:20:00.000-07:00

Any summer weekend in Canada is likely to be accompanied by copious consumption of beer. Hard though it may be to believe, “beer” was a word used rarely outside of poetry till the 1500s, the common term for the drink being “ale”. “Beer” had been around since the Anglo-Saxons, though, derived in their Germanic language from a monastic Latin word biber (drink)

History of the English language courses

2011-08-23T15:04:00.001-07:00

For the fall schedule, click here.

Thunderstruck

2011-08-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

We had quite a spectacular thunderstorm in Toronto the other day, with lashing rain and lots of those flashes of light that come with a big boom. Yes, LIGHTNING. Notice the spelling. The noun is not "lightening". Lightening is something you do to your hair. They were originally the same word, but the noun for the electrical storm sense has had this special spelling since it first showed up in the language in the 14th century, just in case someone reading "a huge bolt of lightening" might get confused and think it meant a large amount of peroxide. Apparently the earlier, Old English word for the phenomenon had been "leye-rash" (literally, light move fast).
Just to be somewhat confusing, not to mention annoying (otherwise we would be talking about some logical language rather than English) there is a verb "to lighten" meaning "(of lightning) flash", as in "It rained, thundered, and lightened all night". If you put this in the progressive tense it would be "It was raining, thundering, and lightening".
Summary: LIGHTNING is the noun, LIGHTENING is the verb.

Typhoon

2011-08-20T07:58:00.000-07:00

Typhoons (and super-typhoons) have been wreaking havoc recently in Japan, Korea, and The Philippines. A typhoon and a hurricane are technically the same meteorological phenomenon, just occurring in different parts of the world. The word "typhoon" is exceedingly cross-cultural. When English-speakers first encountered these storms in India in the 1500s, they naturally borrowed the Urdu word for the phenomonon, tufan. For about 300 years, the British in India called them "touffans". Meanwhile, however, there was also a Chinese word for the same thing, tai fung (big wind). People who had more contact with China than with India tended to use this word or something like it instead of the Urdu word. As luck would have it, the ancient Greek word for "whirlwind" was tuphon. For several centuries from the Renaissance onward, there was a tendency to believe that all words came from Latin or Greek (even if designating a Pacific Ocean phenomenon!), so people messed around with these Urdu and Chinese words to make them look more like the Greek word, until we finally ended up with "typhoon" in the mid-19th century.

Or we could just say "famous"...

2011-08-15T05:32:00.000-07:00

As you might guess, since I spent a large chunk of my life writing dictionaries, I'm a pretty good speller. But there's one fairly common word that I always have to think twice about and double-check in a dictionary before I write it: renown. Clearly I am not alone in this, as a Google search revealed the following hits:

renown: 2.4 million
reknown: 9 million
renoun: 406,000 (this spelling is my particular downfall)

renowned: 133 million (40 million of them in "world-renowned")
reknowned: 9 million (about 3.5 million of them in "world-reknowned")
renouned: 11 million (about 4.5 million of them in "world-renouned")

Probably lots of the "reknown" hits were in sources saying "this is a misspelling", but still the number is staggering. If the numbers for "renowned" weren't so decisive, lexicographers would have to start thinking about whether they should change the spelling of "renown" to "reknown".

What a quick Google search cannot reveal is how frequent another problem is: using "world-renown" as an adjective, as in "world-renown scientist", when it should be "world-renowned".

Just this morning I saw an article in The Australian referring, with wild disregard of spelling, to a "world-reknown philosopher" (yes, there are such things, apparently).

Bob Hanna, world-renowned philosopher
Clearly I haven't come up with a good mnemonic for this one, as it's still a stumbling block for me. Somehow, "celebrity philosopher" doesn't seem like an option. I remind myself there is no "k" (which seems to be the biggest problem) by remembering that the word in French is renommée, but that will only help you if you speak French. But I still want to spell it with a "u" rather than a "w". Thank goodness for dictionaries! Don't rely on your spellchecker, as, interestingly, the reproving red spellchecker squiggly did not show up in either my word-processing program or my email program for the misspelled words above.

I guess we can at least be thankful that we are not lumbered with the spelling proposed by16th century pedants who loved sticking extra silent letters into English words to reflect their Latin origins (God knows where they got the "p", though): "renoumpn"!

Niagarum malum

2011-08-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

In August, we in southern Ontario are spoiled by the plethora of peaches coming into season. There is nothing quite like biting into a peach from the Niagara peninsula, so juicy that one is advised to eat them over a sink!
Peaches were originally cultivated in China about 2000 BC. They migrated westward until they reached Greece in about 300 BC from Persia. Because of its perceived Persian origin, the Romans called the peach a “Persian apple” (persicum malum). In time this was shortened to persica, which the French subsequently squished down into persca, then pesca, and finally pêche, which is the word the English borrowed about Chaucer's time, before which there don't seem to have been peaches in England.

Of etymology and entomology

2011-08-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

At last, a post which really is about both etymology and entomology!
I recently saw an article in the Toronto Star stating that 8% of Canadians receive their TV signal by "antennae". Now, the Star is not one for pretentious Latin plurals (or any Latin plurals for that matter) so it rather surprised me that they hadn't used "antennas", which, as the Canadian Oxford Dictionary entry shows, is the standard plural for the broadcasting sense of "antenna", whereas "antennae" is used for insects, lobsters, etc.:

antenna

→ noun
1. ( pl. antennas ) a metal rod, wire, or other structure by which signals are transmitted or received as part of a radio or television transmitting or receiving system.
2. ( pl. antennae) (Zool.) one of a pair of mobile appendages on the heads of insects, crustaceans, etc., sensitive to touch and taste; a feeler.
3. (antennae) the faculty of instinctively detecting and interpreting subtle signs (the dulling effect of the suburbs on a person's hipness antennae).
- DERIVATIVES antennal adjective (in sense 2).
- ORIGIN Latin, = sail yard

What is a sail yard, you are no doubt wondering, and what can it possibly have to do with an insect's feelers? It's not the same word as the one you use for your garden. A yard is a horizontal (or diagonal) bar attached to the mast of a sailing ship, from which the sail is suspended.

You can see from the picture above the resemblance of the bit of the yard jutting out beyond the end of the sail to the feelers on the head of an insect. A fifteenth-century translator into Latin of a work about insects decided to use the word antennae instead of the word cornuae (horns). This caught on amongst the entomology set, and since it was snobbier to use Latin words for scientific subjects than boring English words like "horn" or "feeler" which had served perfectly well until then, finally took over as the standard word in English. In 1894 Marconi, experimenting with radio transmission, patented an elevated antenna, and the word took on a new life.

Englishman on a bun

2011-08-06T04:57:00.000-07:00

The first example of the word "barbecue" in English is someone saying “We lay all night on our barbecues”! That will give you something to think about as you fire up your propane beast. But the hapless English were not being slow-roasted with hickory sauce. The Arawak, a native people of the Caribbean, slept on raised wooden platforms of sticks, their name for which the invading Spanish adopted as barbacoa in the 1600s. A similar framework was also used for smoking and drying meat, which is clearly the origin of the current meaning of the word. There is no truth to the explanation that the word comes from the French “barbe à queue”, suggesting that an animal was roasted whole “from beard to tail”.

Saint Thingummy

2011-08-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

I have just come back from attending three days of a dance festival in a small resort town in the Laurentians north of Montreal. Like almost all small towns in Quebec, this one has a name starting with "Saint": Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts. Nearby are St-Hippolyte, Ste-Adele, Ste-Agathe, and St. Jovite. Typically, if the founder of a town wanted to honour his wife Agathe, he would name the town after her patron saint. There are so many of these in Quebec that gazetteers of provincial maps have to subdivide the "S" section into "St A", "St B" and so on. But did you know that there is a word specifically meaning "Place name derived from a saint's name"? Here it is, to impress your friends with the next time you visit Quebec: hagiotoponym, from the Greek hagios (holy), topos (place), and onoma (name).
If you want to see pictures of Saint-Sauveur, which looks like everyone's idea of a picturesque Québécois village, or read more about the dance festival, visit my ballet blog at toursenlair.blogspot.com

If you go down to the woods today...

2011-07-29T04:37:00.000-07:00

Despite what you may have heard about “picnic” being a racist term having something to do with lynching, it is in fact a perfectly innocuous word derived from the French verb piquer (to peck at) and nique(something of little value). It came into English in the mid 1700s, referring to a European custom that is essentially what we would call a potluck dinner. The outdoor element came to be the defining factor only about a century later (and seems to have been an English invention).

Hot weather's a bitch

2011-07-22T04:47:00.000-07:00

As you mop your brow and consume cooling libations, you may curse what are known as the dog days. The dog days of summer have their origins in astronomy. The brightest star in the night sky has the Greek name Sirius (“sparkling” or “scorching”). It is also known as the Dog Star, being the chief star in the constellation which the Greeks fancifully thought of as one of the hunter Orion's dogs. Sirius passes through a period when it is not visible because it rises and sets during daylight. But at a certain point during the summer, usually sometime in July, it is seen again just before dawn. This coincides with the hottest part of the year, so the Romans blamed the star for the weather, calling the forty days following its appearance the “dog days”.
The Dog Star suffered from a bad rap: the Egyptians believed that its rising caused the Nile to flood, and the Romans blamed it for all sorts of pernicious things as well as the unbearable heat. It was generally believed also that it drove dogs mad, and as late as the 16th century people were even advised not to have sex during the dog days! In English, this benighted time of year was first known, about 1400, as the "canicular days", from the Latin canicula (little dog). Even today in French the word for "heat wave" is la canicule. The simpler "dog days" doesn't show up until 1538.

Damn Yankees

2011-07-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

It infuriates me. My pulse rises. I can't stand it. It makes me cringe no end. Thoroughly disgusted. It makes me shudder. My teeth are on edge. I don't know how anything could be as annoying and lazy. It really irritates me. Makes me shiver with annoyance. My worst horror. I can feel the rage rising. Hideous.

These are comments that recently appeared on the BBC's website. What is it that has so many British knickers in a twist, arousing such outrage and indignation? The phone hacking scandal? Some really significant injustice? No, it's the fact that people use the verb "turn", as in "He's turning 90", in reference to the celebration of a birthday. Or, even worse, shock horror, that people use the word ... I can hardly bring myself to type it.... "alphabetize". "Alphabetize"!! I mean really! What are they thinking??? "Put in alphabetical order" is so much more elegant and efficient. And as for... gasp... "train station"? Who could possibly prefer that to the superior and oh-so-snappier "railway station"? It's not as if we have "bus stations" and "car parks"... oh, wait a minute...

I am not kidding. These were three of the BBC's top 50 list of Americanisms (out of thousands) submitted by their audience, along with the seething comments of disparagement I listed. Whether they were in fact Americanisms or not didn't seem to matter. There is one law in linguistic fascism across this fair Commonwealth, and that is: if you dislike a word or phrase, it MUST be American. The corollary of this, equally strong, is: if it's American, you MUST dislike it, and indeed your prejudice is something to wear proudly. Unless of course it's a word like, oh I don't know, "computer", which maybe we'll put up with in spite of its undeniable nefarious US origin, for lack of something British (and better, it goes without saying).

What, you say that the first recorded evidence of someone using "turn" in reference to a birthday is Samuel Johnson's pal Hester Thrale in 1789? Never mind, I'm too busy grinding my teeth to hear your mild-mannered objection to my intemperate dislike.

Do not confuse me with facts, or even worse, history. I don't want to know that "oftentimes" dates, like "often", from the 14th century (not too many English-speaking Americans around then!), and that both supplanted "oft", which, oddly, no one is trying to assert is the "proper" word. That "transportation", first used in a law passed under Henry VIII (that famous Yank), is older than "transport", and "expiration" -- used by Shakespeare --predates "expiry" by a good two centuries. "Period" and "full stop" both originated in the 16th century. These are just more examples of the well-documented phenomenon of words surviving in American English while British English has lost them.

"What kind of word is "gotten"?" asks Shuddering in Warrington. Well, actually, it's an older past participle of "get" (sort of like "forgotten", notice?) and you have no more right to be indignant about it than someone in Poughkeepsie has to upbraid the British about being so lazy as to shorten the past participle to "got".

"The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine" is one condescending statement. Well, perhaps fortnightly would suffice.... if North Americans actually used the word "fortnight" and knew what it meant!!

It's really amazing, in view of this airy assumption of superiority and stream of vituperation, that the British have a reputation for, how can I put this delicately, arrogance. All the nice British people I know and love are clearly not writing to the BBC. Those who are should just accept the fact that the 61 million residents of their sceptred isle do not have a monopoly on English, and that 300 million Americans have just as much right to use the language as they do. And, news flash, there will be differences. How would the British react if an American broadcaster published comments like "I grind my teeth in fury when I hear someone say they were taken to hospital instead of to the hospital"? Some American usages will inevitably make their way across the pond. Saying "train station" instead of "railway station" is not the end of the world or of British civilization as we know it. Vive la différence!

A cure for Anal Ysis

2011-07-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

Well, I know all you Word Lady fans have just been dying for another punctuation blog post ever since I wrote about commas, so here it is: my big punctuation pet peeve: badly used hyphens when breaking words at the end of a line. Many of you are thinking, "But my computer does that for me!" Ha! If you trust your computer, you will end up with some very user-unfriendly word breaks. I have a little collection of them; please feel free to let me know about others you have come across.
Sometimes even a technically correct word break, which follows the syllabication of the word, ends up leading the poor reader astray.

This sounds like a nasty affliction: anal-
ysis

There's the to-and-fro-ing anti-pro-
ject

the mythical leg-
end

But there are others where the computer obviously has no clue where the syllables are in English:

trai-
psing

(sounds like some kind of Chinese dish served in a cafeteria)

indo-
ctrination

(possibly something like Sino-ctrination?)

loose-
ned

(God forbid that Loose Ned should contract Anal Ysis!)

In fact, some newspapers break off the past tense -ed even on one-syllable words, like hop-
ped

(It gives a very High Anglican feel to reading the newspaper!)

There is the very frequent re-
ally

and its cousin, which I just saw this week: rear-
rest

Save Loose Ned from Anal Ysis and from being rear rested! Don't let your computer do your word breaks for you.

For more on hyphenation, visit this post and this one.

Allons, enfants de la patrie

2011-07-14T04:45:00.000-07:00

July 14th is Bastille Day, marking the start of the French Revolution, and time to look at some words that we owe to the Revolutionaries. First up, perhaps surprisingly, is “aristocrat”. Although English had had the word “aristocracy”, derived from the Greek aristos (best) and kratos (strength), since the 1500s to designate government by the privileged, it wasn't until the French started lopping their heads off that we started calling nobles “aristocrats”. On the other end of the social scale, we have the noun “commune” (ultimately from the Latin communis meaning “in common”) designating the smallest administrative jurisdiction established under the Revolutionary government. This word took on a life of its own in English, to designate groups of people living communally, a sense which it does not have in French.

In the pink

2011-07-08T05:32:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks, I've been revelling in the profusion of pinks in my garden. You may be thinking that these mini- carnations are called this because they are pink in colour (well, except for the white ones...) but in fact the colour is named for the flower rather than vice versa, and the story is quite complicated
The Anglo-Saxons didn't have a word for pink, and probably didn't even conceive of it as a separate colour, just as a lighter shade of red. They could use rosen (of the colour of a rose) on occasion, but this did not seem to designate a specific pale red colour.
Under the influence of French, by the 14th century "rose" was being used for what we would now call pink, as is the case in most European languages (although roses can be red or yellow or white, as well as pink!) But roses got quite a lot of bad publicity in late 15th-century England, beset from 1455 to 1487 by a power struggle between the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The first Tudor king, Henry VII, who seized power at the end of the period, used the Lancastrians' emblem of a red rose and the Yorks' white rose in his propaganda emphasizing how strife-ridden and unstable the 30 years preceding his beneficent orderly reign had been. Whether or not this bad rap for roses set the stage for a new word for the colour is hard to say, but about 100 years later, English speakers looked to another flower to name this colour, and "pink" started its ascendancy over "rose", in spite of the fact that another word "pink" was used at the time for a greenish-yellow pigment (just to be really confusing!)
Pinks had been around for a few centuries under the name "gillyflower", a corruption of the French word girofle (clove, because of their clove-like scent). In the 1500s, people started to call them "pinks" because of their fringed petals, which look as if someone has taken the pinking shears to them.

This verb "pink" (make decorative cuts in fabric) had been around for a few centuries, possibly dating back to Old English in the form "ping", which is derived from the Latin pungere (prick, puncture).
So, a long and circuitous route from a Latin word meaning "pierce" to our everyday word for a pale red.
And a warning: if you read about the "pink" jackets traditionally worn by the British while fox hunting, remember they're not pink at all but scarlet. They may have been originally made by a tailor called Thomas Pink, though this has not been proved. Perhaps it's a case like slang, where the in-group knows the meaning of the word and outsiders are revealed by their ignorance.

.

Discouver Vancouver

2011-07-07T06:10:00.000-07:00

With Canada Day and the Fourth of July just past, it's a good time to look at some of the differences between Canadian and American English. Canadians are a little uncertain about our national identity, but one thing we can all agree on: we're NOT AMERICANS (no offence intended to any Americans reading this; you probably feel as strongly that you're NOT CANADIANS).

A handy and inexpensive way of proving our un-Americanness is to spell words like "labour" and "colour" with the British -our spellings instead of the American -or. I am sure 300 million Americans are not even aware of the affront caused by us rejecting their spelling practices!

The differences between British and American spelling stem from two 18th-century publications by two great lexicographers: Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary was published in England in 1755, and Noah Webster, whose American Spelling Book was published in the US in 1783, later followed by a dictionary.

Take the famous “colour”. In Latin, the word was color. In medieval French, the pronunciation of the second syllable – sort of halfway between “lower” and “lure” – was reflected by spelling the word colur or colour (the latter spelling covering all eventualities). We could have just stuck with the Anglo-Saxon word, “hue”, but, true to the English mania for synonyms, and little knowing that several centuries later Canadians would be arguing bitterly about its spelling as a reflection of our national identity, English-speakers borrowed “colour” from the French. Then the Renaissance came along, and that meant we had to reflect the Latin spelling, so "color" came back. Both spellings coexisted until Johnson and Webster put their lexicographical feet down, each opting for a different spelling.

Webster may have been inspired by political motives to do the contrary of what the British were doing, but he was also interested in consistency: why spell “colour” but “director”, “honour” but “honorary” (yes, even the British spell “honorary” that way)?

The roots of Canadian English (other than Newfoundland English, which derives from the dialects of southwest England and Ireland) are in the speech of the United Empire Loyalists who fled the United States during and after the Revolution, about the time of Webster's spelling book. At its origins, then, Canadian English was American English. This common origin, as well as our ongoing frequent exposure to American English, explains why the American spelling persists in Canada. In the 19th century, vast numbers of people from the British Isles were encouraged to settle in British North America to ward off any lurking nefarious American influence. As British English was the prestige version of the language, British spellings started to be imposed. But they have never completely supplanted the American ones.

Some Canadians feel very strongly about words ending in -our as a token of our identity, adding extraneous u's where there is no need to. They don't go as far you might be led to believe by the Simpsons episode in which Marge and Homer, competing in mixed curling in the Vancouver Olympics, are passed by a tour bus with "Discouver Vancouver" emblazoned on it, but they have been known to use -our instead of -or in words like "elabourate" (recently noticed in the Toronto Star) and "humourous", and there is a very strong tendency to spell the aforementioned "honorary" as "honourary". A recent facebook poll I conducted about the spelling of this word had 39 well-educated Canadians opting for "honourary" versus 22 for "honorary", similar to the results we found when we conducted a survey for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, as a result of which it is possibly the only dictionary of current English to include "honourary" as a spelling variant. Traditionally, dictionaries have held to the belief that since "honorary" came directly into English from Latin honorarius, it should be spelled without a u. "Honour" on the other hand, came through French. Not surprisingly, though, the spelling "honourary" was used in the 17th and 18th centuries alongside the u-less variant, and I see no reason why Canadians should not be allowed to use it.

That Simpsons episode also poked fun at Canadian English by having Bart call his nerdy friend "Milhoose", but that's a subject for another post.

maple

2011-07-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Happy Canada Day! Wave those Maple Leaf flags about! Where does the name of our national tree come from? In Old English, the tree was called a mapuldur. It and the apple tree (apuldur) were the only trees whose name ended in -dur. The Anglo-Saxons figured that if an apuldur was a tree producing apples, then -dur must mean “tree”, and, undeterred by the fact that a maple tree does not produce mapples, proceeded to consider the -dur ending redundant and lopped it off. Some sort of tribal memory of this reasoning may still survive in England. I once saw in an Oxford deli a notice advertising “Canadian-style carrot cake”. Intrigued, I asked what made it Canadian, to which the server replied, “The Canadian woman who makes the cake puts some special Canadian ingredient in it...maple nuts, I think”!

cravat

2011-06-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

June 25 is Croatia's national holiday, known as “Statehood Day”. A good day to look at a word for a type of necktie. In the 17th century, Croatian mercenaries in the armies of other European countries wore neckcloths of lace or linen, tied in a bow with long flowing ends. This became all the rage in French fashion, for both men and women. It was named after its originators, called in their native language “Hrvati”. Since French-speakers could not pronounce “hrv”, the word became cravate, and subsequently “cravat” in English.

Should you hate the word "responsibilize"?

2011-06-25T06:02:00.000-07:00

For some reason, the suffix -ize, which has been hugely productive in English for the last 500 years (the OED lists almosts 3000 words with this ending), tends to raise some people's hackles. "Jeopardize" was roundly attacked in the 19th century, but no one objects to it now, nor to "economize", "terrorize", "formalize", or any number of other -ize words which, at one point, were new coinages. Yet, when people encounter a new (to them) word with this suffix, some of them have hissy fits.
A friend of mine recently came across "responsibilize" in something she was editing and felt she should, in her words, "share this atrocity" with me. Why is "responsibilize" an "atrocity" whereas no one bats an eyelid at the similarly formed "mobilize" or "stabilize" (both borrowed from French in the 1800s)? French seems to have fewer qualms about words like this, living happily with "culpabiliser" (make someone feel guilty) and "sensibiliser" (make someone aware of or sensitive to) -- and expressing those ideas a lot more efficiently than English does, I must say! "Responsabiliser" has been used in French since the 1970s, as indeed "responsibilize" and its derivatives have been in English.
"-ize" is an extraordinarily useful suffix and doesn't deserve the opprobrium it gets.
People, you can't hate a word just because you've never seen it before, any more than you can hate a person just because you've never met them before.

The eyes have it

2011-06-22T04:49:00.000-07:00

A very frequently misspelled word is ophthalmology, the branch of medicine dealing with the eyes (and its derivative ophthalmologist). Most commonly, people forget the first h, likely under the influence of "optic", but the first l also often falls by the wayside. If you have problems with this word (and who can blame you?), you have two options:
1) This word is about eyes, and we have two of those, so think about that to help you remember that there are two h's and two l's.
2) Use the word "eye doctor"! (if only life were so easy...)

Word of the week: confetti

2011-06-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

Wedding season is in full swing, so let us look at the word “confetti”, derived from the Latin confectus (prepared, pickled), which also gave us the old-fashioned English word “comfit” (a candy). In fact, in Italian, confetti means “candies”, specifically those sugar-coated almonds that are given away at christenings and weddings. Italians threw these – or plaster imitations of them – during carnival, at parades. The custom spread to southern France, where people started using paper as a cheaper (not to mention less painful) projectile. The English adopted the custom and the word, which became a singular noun for us only in the 20th century.

When REALLY not to use "u" after "q"

2011-06-13T06:43:00.000-07:00

The capital of one of Canada's northern Territories, Nunavut, goes by the euphonious name Iqaluit (it used to be called Frobisher Bay, much less musical). In Inuktitut, Iqaluit means "many fish". Unfortunately English spelling has a habit of putting a "u" after the letter "q", so English speakers commonly misspell Iqaluit as Iqualuit (in fact I just saw that spelling in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen). Indeed, in September 2009 the Prime Minister's Office used this misspelling repeatedly in a press release, causing a great brouhaha when the Nunavut Language Commissioner pointed out that "iqualuit" means "people with large unwiped bums" (that's bums in the "buttocks" sense, for any American readers who are confused). DEFINITELY a mistake you don't want to make.
Another Inuktitut borrowing into English with a "q" not followed by "u" is qiviut, or the fine underbelly hair of a muskox. There's a bit of trivia to impress your friends with.

Why isn't life a bowlful of cherrieses?

2011-06-10T12:01:00.000-07:00

What a treat it is to see Ontario cherries come into season. “Cherry” comes from a Latin word, ceresea, which became the French word cerise (in Northern French dialect cherise). Why is there an s on the end in French but not in English? In fact, there used to be an s in English as well. You would have one cherise and many cherises (because who can stop at just one?). But this was too much for English-speakers, for whom an s ending suggested a plural, so they dropped the s in the singular and made it “cherry”.

links

2011-06-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

With the return of the nice weather, many of you will be hitting the links. Golf links have no connection with the word “link” meaning “connect”. “Links” comes from an Old English word, hlinc (rising ground or a ridge). The word died out in southern England but survived in Scotland to designate gently rolling sandy ground covered with grass near the seashore. These were probably the original golf courses.

CON or CONE?

2011-06-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

I've been on a bit of a scone-athon lately, baking and eating alike.

For me, "scone-athon" rhymes, but perhaps for you it would need to be a "scone-athone".

Both pronunciations, one rhyming with "con" and the other with "cone" coexist on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the US "cone" is more common.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary lists "con" first, which suggests that our pronunciation survey revealed that that pronunciation was more common in Canada. It could have been a 55%-45% split, I don't actually remember, and my general feeling is that "cone" may in fact be more common in Canada, so please let me know which one you use.

The Oxford Dictionary of English has this intriguing comment about British English usage:
In British English the two pronunciations traditionally have different regional and class associations, with the first pronunciation (CON) associated with the north of England and the northern working class, while the second (CONE) is associated with the south and the middle class. In modern British English, however, it has become fashionable among certain middle-class people to adopt the first pronunciation.
I find this interesting because I first encountered scones as a child in southern England in a middle class -- and resolutely unfashionable -- family (a Canadian one, though). I have always rhymed scone with con.

The word was originally Scottish, and definitely pronounced "scon", judging from the spellings from the 15th to 18th century. If the "con" pronunciation is indeed more common in Canada, we probably owe it to the heavy Scottish influence on Canadian English. The word is perhaps a shortened adoption of Middle Dutch schoonbrot, Middle Low German schonbrot ‘fine bread’.

In Australia and New Zealand, they apparently love their scones (rhyming only with cons) so much (and indeed I had a mighty fine tea at the Queen Victoria Tea Rooms in Sydney) that they use "scone" as a slang synonym for "head" and have developed some delightful idiomatic expressions:

do one's scone (Aust. & NZ colloq.) become angry.

scone-hot (NZ colloq.) excellent

go a person scone-hot (Aust. colloq. dated) attack a person with vigour, especially verbally; become angry with him or her (she went him scone-hot for not paying the light bill in time).

off one's scone (Aust. colloq.) crazy; insane.

"scone n." The Australian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd edition. Ed. Bruce Moore. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

If all this is making you salivate, here's the Word Lady's famous scone recipe, much lauded by her friends (because in addition to being a word lover and ballet lover, Word Lady is quite the baker). You can literally "do your scone" (but not in the Antipodean sense). Yum! Enjoy your tea!

Mix together:
2 c. white flour
1 c. whole wheat flour
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
3/4 c. sugar
grated rind of one orange

Using a pastry blender or two knives, cut in
3/4 c. butter
until the butter is in small pieces.

Add
3/4 c. raisins
Add
1 c. buttermilk or plain yogourt
Combine with a wooden spoon until all wet ingredients are just incorporated into dry. Turn out onto a lightly floured board. Knead lightly a few times then pat to 3/4" thick. Cut out 2-inch rounds (I use a wine glass), place on ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees for 15-17 minutes or until lightly browned.

If I'm your mentor, are you my mentee?

2011-05-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

An alert friend of mine just pointed out that she had come across the word "mentee" in a University of Toronto publication. That would be a person who is being mentored. I find this word fascinating, on several fronts. First of all, it's older than you would think: the OED's first quotation is from 1965:
1965 Amer. Econ. Rev. 55 862 What is the typical economics class but a contact between the conservative teacher and his mentees?
Although that one may have been jocular (are economists ever jocular, one wonders), by 1978 it seems less so:
1978 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. 72 423 The effects of the mentor on the mentee can be profound.
But what is really interesting is the process of word formation. Interpreting the -or ending of "mentor" as what is called an agent suffix (as in "actor", "mortgagor", etc.), someone has created by back formation a notional verb "ment" and then added an "-ee" suffix. There is nothing wrong with back-formation; in fact it's the source of such common words as "kidnap" and "manipulate". However, this is an odd case, because the origin of "mentor" is a personal name.
The original Mentor was a character in Homer's Odyssey (actually Athena the goddess of wisdom in disguise), who acted as a guide and advisor to Telemachus. In 1699 the French author Fénelon published a book called Les Aventures de Télémaque including the character (or should one say "authee"?) Mentor in a starring role as a counsellor. The book was such a hot seller both in French and in translation that by 1750 "mentor" had come to mean "advisor" in many European languages.
As is so often the case with nouns in English, someone started using "mentor" (but not "ment") as a verb, apparently in sporting circles, about the time of the First World War (that one is probably older than you thought, too). The practice of mentoring employees became popular in the 80s, probably creating a need for a word to designate the beneficiary of the mentoring, and "mentee" was just waiting to fill that need. Although not hugely frequent yet, it looks as though the word has staying power.

Lawn

2011-05-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

How's your flowery mead? If you were a medieval gardener, that's what you would be out mowing every weekend, because although the English had what we call lawns back then, the word “lawn”, derived from the Old French word for a heath, launde (related to “land”), meant a woodland glade. By the late 1600s,”lawns” were stretches of land left untilled and therefore likely to be covered with grass. In the early 1700s, garden design for the stately mansions in England changed to a more natural, less formal style, which incorporated large expanses of grass kept short (usually by sheep!). The word “lawn” was waiting for a job opportunity, and there it was, thanks to the the 18th-century garden designers who developed the classic English garden. So, alas, no flowery mead mowers for us. And no “lawn sheep” either.

Word of the week: Cottage

2011-05-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

Here in Canada, it's the beginning of a long weekend, with Monday being "Victoria Day", in honour of Queen Victoria's birthday on May 24th. Yes, we know she's not the queen anymore, but why would we give up an opportunity to celebrate spring and drink (an activity which accounts for the holiday's nickname in Ontario, May Two-Four, "two-four" being Canadian slang for a case of 24 beer)?
For many it's time to barrel (or more likely crawl) down the highway to “cottage country” (also a Canadian term) and open up their lakeside residence for the summer. The Old English cot or cote (as in “dovecote”) was a humble dwelling. Just as we have “bag” and “baggage”, a “cottage” was a cot along with its various appurtenances, such as a yard for the chickens. For centuries, cottages were definitely down-market. Then, in the 1700s, a back-to-nature movement, exemplified by Marie-Antoinette playing shepherdess at her bucolic “hamlet” at Versailles, took Europe by storm. It became trendy for the well-to-do English to retreat from their London mansions to smaller and simpler country houses, which, with a kind of inverse snobbery, they called “cottages”. The name came to be applied to summer lakeside residences in late-19th-century North America.

Do or die

2011-05-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

I've recently seen a couple of instances where people have confused the simple word "do" for something fancier: "without further adieu" and the related "much adieu about nothing". The confusion is somewhat understandable with "ado", as this word no longer has an independent life in English outside the phrases "without further ado" and "much ado about nothing". In Old Norse, the languages which the Vikings living in the North of England spoke, the preposition marking the infinitive form of the verb was "at" rather than "to" (as it was in Anglo-Saxon and is in Modern English). In northern dialect, "at do" got somewhat squished into "ado", and this has survived only in the phrases mentioned above (and would probably not still survive in "much ado" were it not for Shakespeare's play).
Another surprising confusion is "make due" instead of "make do". "Make do" is admittedly a rather odd construction, since "make" is more likely to be followed directly by an adjective like "due" than by another verb. It is also, surprisingly, fairly recent, the OED's first quotation being from 1927. But by the forties it was part of the famous "Make do and Mend" of the British war effort on the home front. This "Reduce, Re-use, recycle" slogan before its time was first publicized in a pamphlet produced by the Ministry of Information in 1943.

Count me in

2011-05-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

This week many of us in Canada and around the world have been filling in our census forms. “Census” is a Latin word, derived from censere (assess, estimate). The ancient Roman census was a registering of Roman citizens and their property for purposes of taxation. A particularly famous one caused the visit of a certain carpenter from Nazareth and his heavily pregnant wife to the town of Bethlehem. Just think if they had been able to do it online, as we now can. The word was revived for modern enumerations of the population when the newly formed United States conducted its first census in 1790.
Interestingly, the words “censor” and “censure” have the same origin. The Roman officials in charge of the census were “censors”, and their powers extended beyond counting and taxing to supervising public morals as well. A “censure” was one of their judgements. It came to mean any kind of judgement, and subsequently a particularly negative one.

Do your utmost to avoid this error

2011-05-08T13:13:00.000-07:00

I've recently seen a few examples of people being unsure about the word "utmost", writing instead "upmost" or "outmost". In a way, this is not surprising, because we have no word "ut" in English anymore. Back in Anglo-Saxon times, "ut" was the spelling for the word that eventually became "out" in Modern English. So the "utmost" thing was something that was the furthest out from the centre, the "out-most" thing. But as the language evolved, "out" took over, and "ut" remained only in the words "utmost", which by the 16th century was being used only figuratively, and both the adjective and the verb "utter" (the latter originally meaning "put something out there").

I'll see if I have a vase big enough...

2011-05-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

How about giving your mother a grove of trees for Mother's Day? That is what “bouquet” originally meant in French. It came from a Germanic word, bosk, also the ultimate origin of the word “bush”. Although a bouquet was by definition a clump of trees, the French started to say, redundantly, “un bouquet d'arbres” (literally a clump of trees of trees). The English “grove of trees” is similarly redundant, because you can't have a grove of anything else. As a result, the French began to think that bouquet meant a “clump” or “bunch” of any plants, and started to talk about a “bouquet de fleurs” – a bunch of flowers. It came into English in the 1700s, when it was terribly trendy to borrow French words.

Paying the Piper (and not calling the tune)

2011-04-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

Here in Canada, it's time to pay the taxman, as the deadline for filing our tax returns is April 30. And when you send off your cheque to the nice people at Revenue Canada, you are literally appeasing them, for the word “pay” derives ultimately (and surprisingly) from the Latin word pax, meaning “peace”. This is how it happened. A Latin verb derived from pax, pacare, meant “pacify”. Specifically it was applied, not to sticking a soother in a baby's mouth, or to pacifying warlike tribes, but to placating people to whom you owed money, the only way to do that being to give them the money! So pacare came to mean “give money to” – “pay”, in fact. As the Latin word evolved in Old French, the middle “c” was dropped, and, like most of our words having to do with money (including “money” itself), this one came into English after the Norman French conquered England.

The Royal Nupt*als

2011-04-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

Even Wordlady is hopping aboard the Royal Wedding bandwagon. My homage to Prince William and Kate (with whom I share a pet name) is to warn you against misspelling and mispronouncing "nuptial". Yes you read that right, it's nuptial, not nuptual. It comes from the Latin word nuptiae (wedding). As happened with nuclear, people have been perhaps influenced by words with similar, but not exactly the same, endings (as in "conceptual" and "voluptuous"). Although there are many fairly common words in English ending in -tial (circumstantial, preferential, confidential, credential, partial, etc.), with which no one has any problems, "nuptial" is the only one ending in -ptial, other than the word "preceptial", which I bet you don't use a lot. So what we would like to wish the happy couple is all the best on the occasion of their "NUPsh'lls".

Easter

2011-04-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter! Eostre was an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn, whose feast was celebrated at the spring equinox. The early Christians had a habit of blending Christian with non-Christian practices; for instance, the date of Christmas coincides roughly with the Roman feast of Saturnalia (seven days of merrymaking starting December 17th) and the festival of the birth of the sun god Mithra (December 25th). In this case, the Christian missionaries to Britain co-opted an Anglo-Saxon religious festival and even the goddess's name. Other languages, in contrast, derive their word for Easter from the Hebrew Pesach (Passover): French, for instance, has Pâques, Italian has Pasqua, and Russian has Paska.

Born or hatched?

2011-04-20T06:08:00.000-07:00

At some point in my distant past I must have been taught to make a distinction between "born" (of mammals) and "hatched" (of birds, reptiles, etc. that emerge from eggs). I say this because, upon watching an item on TV about a pair of peregrine falcons that have set up housekeeping in Toronto, I had a kneejerk schoolmarm reaction when I heard the announcer talking about the birds being born. You will know that Wordlady doesn't often have these!

I find some exercises for schoolchildren on the Web where they have to categorize animals as "born or hatched", so perhaps this is where my objection comes from. It doesn't seem to be a hot issue amongst usage commentators, and far be it from me to quibble with John Keats, who in his "Ode to a Nightingale" has the following line: "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" (mind you, perhaps one should not take Romantic poets as experts on ornithology, since Shelley famously produced the line in "To a Skylark": "HAIL to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert").

I see from birdwatching websites that birders talk of birds being born. Please do let me know if you have this "born/hatched" usage issue or not. Perhaps it's time for me to let it go.

By the way, don't forget you can share Wordlady posts with your friends on facebook or twitter by clicking on the "Share this" buttons on the left hand column, and you can also now sign up for alerts by email by simply typing your email address in the "Follow by email" window.

Are you pseudisodomous?

2011-04-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons English spelling is so difficult is that vowels in unstressed syllables often get reduced in speech to an indeterminate sound (called a schwa). There is nothing wrong with this; it is just the way English is pronounced. But it means that, for instance, the last two syllables in "autonomous" sound exactly the same as the last two in "synonymous", despite their different spelling. Be wary! Don't make the mistake of spelling "synonomous" or "anonomous", etc.

"Synonymous", like "anonymous", "pseudonymous", "eponymous", and a few other words you probably don't use daily (like "pseudeponymous" - falsely named or attributed), includes the Greek word onuma (name), which acquired a y instead of the u in Latin. "Autonomous", on the other hand, comes from the Greek nomos (law).

And then there's the euonymus, a type of bush whose name literally means "well-named" or "lucky" in Greek.

Note that just to make our lives miserable on the spelling front, there is no o in the final syllable for this one, as it is not an adjective but a Latin noun. According to Pliny, the flowering of the euonymus presaged pestilence, and thus its name was either euphemistic or ironic.

As a special treat for you word lovers looking for something with which to impress your friends or win spelling bees, here's that fancy word I used in the title of this post: pseudisodomous. Are you thinking it's something titillating? I bet you are, but don't get too excited: it describes a method of building or type of masonry in ancient Greek architecture in which the courses of blocks were of unequal height, length, or thickness, but the blocks in each course were alike. Riveting, I know. Sorry!

Supervised consumption facilities

2011-04-18T05:13:00.000-07:00

Well, what do you think a "supervised consumption facility" might be? A fat farm? Apparently not. This is the latest jargon/euphemism for what is also known as a "safe injection site", where drug addicts can come and shoot up with clean needles and under medical attention. I wonder what name the addicts have for it; I bet they don't say, "I'm going down to the supervised consumption facility now for my fix"!

Although I haven't studied the issue in any depth, I think these are probably more socially desirable than having the drug addicts shooting up in the street with dirty needles, but I am amused by the polysyllabic, sanitizing name for something which, viewed with other eyes, might be called a "drug den"! Surprisingly, "drug den" is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, though they certainly existed back when the letter D was being edited in 1893-97 (OED does have entries for "opium den" and "opium-cellar"). Usage of this word really took off, though, only in the 1980s. GoogleBooks reveals an early 1892 quote from The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal published by the American Presbyterian Mission Press. I don't think the Presbyterian missionaries were the ones consuming the dope, and I am sure they would never have dreamed of a day when such a thing would be provided by the government!

Don't fret

2011-04-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

My choir recently sang a quite lovely motet, "Lord, let me know mine end" by C.H.H. Parry, set to the words of the 39th Psalm. I found this simile, in the translation dating from the 1500s, particularly striking: "When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment", which got me thinking about the word "fret" (I should probably have been thinking about whether I was singing the right note!) You can hear the whole piece here:

with the "fretting" at 6:06, where Parry very cleverly conveys musically the image of a moth's wings fluttering while it gnaws on the garment.

But what about the word "fret"? Old English had two words for "eat": etan for people and fretan for animals (Modern German still makes this distinction between essen and fressen). We English speakers stopped making the distinction, so that by the 1600s people, animals, birds, worms, and moths were all eating rather than "fretting".

But back in the 1200s we had started using "fret" figuratively, of the "gnawing" or "consuming" effect of what one author called "vexatious passions" (love, anger, etc.) on the mind. "Rage frets her bones," wrote one Renaissance author. One could also "fret oneself" with such feelings, or with worry. From there it was a short step to the current intransitive use, where we fret about something.

The guitarists among you will be wondering about the noun "fret", but this is unrelated, coming from an Old French word meaning "ring".

If you want to hear my choir, you can check out the podcasts here:
http://stthomas.on.ca/services-podcasts
where eventually the recent service will turn up. That'll be me singing the wrong note on "fretting"! (Actually I did sing the right note, so do pay attention to the exquisite altos.)

And they say FRENCH is the language of ballet...

2011-04-14T16:19:00.001-07:00

For more franglais, check out this post:
http://toursenlair.blogspot.com/2011/04/more-franglais.html

Don't have a meltdown

2011-04-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

The indignation aroused by the threat of nuclear meltdown in Japan is as nothing compared to the outrage caused by people using the pronunciation “nucular”.

This pronunciation for “nuclear” may drive of you nuts, which reaction is at least etymologically consistent, for “nucleus” comes from the nuc- form of the Latin word nux (nut) plus the diminutive ending -leus. Latin had another word for “little nut”, nucula, which was borrowed into English as a botanical term not long after “nucleus”. The adjective derived from it was indeed “nucular”. However, it is unlikely that confusion of these two related words is at the root of this issue.

Those of you for whom the "nucular" pronunciation is a shibboleth that distinguishes the illiterate from the blessed will no doubt have a meltdown of your own when you learn that the Oxford English Dictionary now has an entry for "nucular" in the "nuclear" sense. I was pretty surprised myself that they gave it an entry, but the OED doesn't do things lightly (and certainly not in haste), and has the following note: "The colloquial pronunciation .... rendered in written form as nucular... has been criticized in usage guides since at least the mid 20th cent., although it is now commonly given as a variant in modern dictionaries."

That last part is true at least of the ardently descriptivist Merriam-Webster dictionaries, which give the disputed pronunciation with the following comment: "Though disapproved of by many, pronunciations ending in \-kyə-lər\ have been found in widespread use among educated speakers including scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, United States cabinet members, and at least two United States presidents and one vice president.” Indeed, many blame President Eisenhower for this pronunciation, but according to the OED he was not the first to use it.

There is a phonological reason for this development: there are no common two-syllable words in English ending in \klee-ər\ (unless you happen to use the word "cochlear" a lot!). But there are many ending in \-kyə-lər\: particular, spectacular, ocular, etc. Often alternate pronunciations arise by analogy with more common strings of sounds.

Likewise, rearranging the order of pronunciation of the vowels and consonants in a word is not uncommon in the history of English. Indeed, that is why we have "third" and "thirteen" instead of the original and more logical "thrid" and "thriteen" ("three" originally having been written "thri"). No doubt many in Tudor times were getting their doublets and hose in a twist over ignorant people mispronouncing "thrid".

Nonetheless, I do not recommend adopting “nucular” as your pronunciation, as it is so very stigmatized. I cannot tell how common it really is; when we did a survey on the question for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, none of our correspondents admitted using it. But try not to go nuclear if you hear it; there are more important things to get upset about. Those pesky people who insist on saying “thirteen” instead of “threeteen”, for instance.

Getting the rough end of the ananas

2011-04-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

My ever-alert nephew, journalist Mike Barber, drew my attention to a tumblr page which listed the names in 27 languages for my favourite tropical fruit.
26 of these languages, from Arabic to Turkish, had some variant of "ananas". And then there's English, with ... "pineapple". Why?

The word "ananas" did indeed exist in English from about 1600 to 1850. According to the OED, the word comes "apparently from Nanas, its name in a South American Indian language of Peru [Guarani], it having been first seen by Europeans in Peru, and described under the name Nanas by André Thevenet, a monk, in 1555." But in English it had an unfortunate and career-limiting pronunciation, sounding exactly like "an anus" (honestly, I don't make these things up, although how the OED knows this I don't know).

Probably desperate not to shock any more dinner guests, and seeing a similarity between the fruit and what falls off pine trees, English speakers started calling it a "pineapple". This had been the name for a pine cone since the 1300s (Latin, French, Dutch, and German also called pine cones pine "apples".) Then, of course, we needed a new word for the thing on pine trees, and since we had borrowed the word "cone" in the 1500s, "pine cone" was ready to take over from the early 1700s.

There are two quite delightful slang uses of "pineapple": the evocative Australian "get the rough end of the pineapple" (get a raw deal) and a now dated British "on the pineapple" (unemployed or on welfare). On the pineapple, on the dole... dole ... pineapple... geddit?

New words: Of Pickles and Patent Trolls

2011-04-05T05:02:00.000-07:00

Google..has been pressing Washington for legal reform to dissuade so-called "patent trolls", companies that exist only to sue others over intellectual property claims.
Toronto Star 5 Apr. 2011, B1/4

The earliest use of this seems to be about 2004.

Pickleball is a scaled-down combination of tennis, badminton, and ping pong. With its smaller court, low net, paddle and holey plastic ball, it's particularly appealing to older, slower bodies. Picklers pay the township $1 each to play and provide their own equipment...Pickleball..got its name from Pickles, a co-inventor's dog who chased whiffleballs during family games.
Toronto Star 5 Apr. 2011, GT1/4

Google Books has the following quotation from 1975:
Susan Frohnmayer, women's program coordinator ..leads an exercise class beside the pickleball court.
Fortune Mag. vol. 92

How we use to use use

2011-04-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

The verb "use" used to be, well, used (maybe I should start this post over...).

Nowadays I can't say "I use to go to ballet classes 4 times a week", meaning "I do this habitually", although I could have said that from about 1400-1700 (not that I was dancing back then, though some mornings it feels like it). (The title of this post is not a mistake, but me being intentionally -- all right, you can say pretentiously -- archaic.)
This sense of "use" now occurs only in the past tense: "I used to go to ballet classes". In speech, this sounds exactly like the noun "use" plus "to" (YOOSS too). From this arise two problems:
1) Do not write "I use to", even though it sounds like that. Remember, "used" is in the past tense.
2) When you put this in the negative, you DON'T write "used". "I didn't use to go to ballet classes" is correct. It looks weird, but that's the correct version. Just as you wouldn't say "I didn't wanted to go", you can't say "I didn't used to go". "Didn't used to" is an extraordinarily common mistake, but it is a mistake nonetheless.

Fools rush in...

2011-04-01T06:29:00.000-07:00

It's April Fool's Day. “Fool” has a delightful history. It came into English from the French fol (a stupid or silly person) in the Middle Ages. Back then it was not as contemptuous a word as it is now, more a designation of someone who was simple-minded or lacking in judgement. Indeed, it was even used as a term of endearment (I do not recommend trying this now). Its ultimate origin is the Latin follis (bellows used to pump air into a fire), used in Latin slang to mean a windbag or what we would now call an airhead.

More franglais

2011-03-30T05:26:00.000-07:00

Just found this on the city of Antwerp's tourism site:

Voulez-vous savoir les dernières nouveautés et recevoir inside information? Devenez fan de nos facebook-pages.
Si vous aimez être bien informé de tout ce qui est en train de passer dans the Antwerp fashion scene, vous devez régulièrement regarder notre facebook-page

For another example, visit my other franglais post.

Led astray

2011-03-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

The past tense and past participle of the verb "lead" is "led". Today I am leading you down the garden path; yesterday I led you down the garden path. It is almost more common to see it misspelled "lead" than to see it spelled correctly. The "lead" that sounds like LED is the heavy metal. Since it is so very easy to make this spelling mistake, you will have to stop yourself every time you use the past tense of the verb "lead" and check your spelling. YOUR SPELLCHECKER IS OF NO USE! Here's a little sentence to memorize that may help you: Ed fed Ted and led him to bed.

Hey, lady!

2011-03-25T05:27:00.000-07:00

In some Christian denominations, March 25th commemorates the angel Gabriel's visit to Mary (referred to as “Our Lady”) to tell her she will be the mother of Jesus. In olden days, this was known as “Lady Day” and was until 1752 considered to be the beginning of the new year. Happy New Year! “Lady” has an interesting origin: the Anglo-Saxon word hlafdige, literally “loaf kneader”. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxons put great store by bread as a social classifier: the word “lord” comes from hlafweard (“loaf warden” or “loaf keeper”) and the word for servant (now dead) was “loaf eater”.

Spring has sprung!

2011-03-21T15:13:00.001-07:00

Sunday marked the vernal equinox, the first day of spring. The season's name comes from the same “spring” which is the source of a river. From this original meaning, “spring” took on the sense of a beginning: dawn was “dayspring”, and the season marking the start of new life was “the spring of the leaf” or “the spring of the year”, quickly shortened to simply “spring”. “Equinox” comes from the Latin equi- (equal) and nox (night), as day and night are of equal length all over the globe. German is even more charmingly analytical, calling this phenomenon “Day-and-night-the-same”!

No ants!

2011-03-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

It's a common mistake to use the word "tenant" when what is meant is "tenet". A tenant is someone who pays to occupy or use property but does not own it. A tenet is a basic belief. Both words ultimately come from the Latin word tenere (to hold). "Tenet" is in fact the form of the verb meaning "he/she/it holds". Perhaps a way to remember the correct spelling of "tenet" is this: while ants may occasionally turn up in your rented home or business, there's no way they can infiltrate your (or anyone's) religious, political, or philosophical beliefs.

Another common mistake is to double the n in "tenant". Goodness, n's are intrusive! "Tennant" is a surname (originally for someone who was a tenant farmer, just to be confusing), but not an acceptable variant spelling of the word "tenant".

Tripping the light fantastic

2011-03-13T05:35:00.000-07:00

It's the March Break school holiday here in Ontario, and many Ontarians will be going on trips. The word “trip” originated in a Germanic word for a light, dainty dancing step. Although other languages have a similar word in the same sense, only in English did “trip” also come to mean “stumble over one's feet”, no doubt a reflection on how well the English danced! Sailors started to use “trip” as slang for a quick, short sea voyage, (rather as we might say “a hop, skip, and a jump”), and eventually the word took over from “voyage” and “journey” as our standard word for excursions of any length.
As for the phrase I used as the title of this post, we owe it to John Milton, of all people, who coined the usage in a line, "Trip it as ye go On the light fantastick toe." in his poem L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (now also a fabulous ballet by Mark Morris which delighted one of my ballet-tripping groups last year). Milton was using the word "fantastic" in its then current sense of " Having the appearance of being devised by extravagant fancy; eccentric, quaint, or grotesque in design, conception, construction, or adornment." (OED), so this is just a fancy way of saying "dancing". I'm off now, to trip a bit of the light fantastic myself at my ballet class.

Off with their heads!

2011-03-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

Talking to a lawyer about a trademark dispute recently, I was taken aback when he started referring to the traitors who infringe trademarks. Goodness, I know he makes a living defending these suits (I mean that in the lawsuit sense, but I guess it also works in the "guy in a business suit" sense), but isn't that a rather strong word? Then I realized the word he had used was "traders". Yet another example of words that may not be homophones for other English speakers but are for us North Americans with our voiced intervocalic "t" (that's the fancy linguistic way of saying we make our t's into d's when they come between two vowels). I wouldn't have thought these words would be confused in writing, but sure enough, one can find anything on Google. I found 2000 examples of the phrase "accused of being a trader".

A Couple more Words about Couple

2011-03-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

Further to yesterday's post, my German teacher points out that in German, the word for "pair", Paar, is also used to mean both exactly two and an unspecified small number. But because German capitalizes its nouns, it has a nifty solution for distinguishing between the two: ein Paar is two, and ein paar is a few. Not, of course, that this helps in speech, so a German hankering for jellybeans would be no further ahead with me than an English speaker. And, although the English Language did use to capitalize all Nouns, I don't think we English Speakers and Jellybean Eaters are likely to revive this Practice. Some American usages originating in the 19th century were in fact influenced by German, so it is entirely possible that the use of "couple" to mean "a few" can be attributed to this too.

A tram named Desire

2011-03-04T04:13:00.001-08:00

Streetcars – or trams as they are known in Europe – are a hot topic in Toronto. “Tram”, derived from a Germanic word meaning “beam of wood”, started its English life in Scotland as one of the shafts on a wheelbarrow (who knew there was a specific word for that?). In the coalmines of northern England, the word started to be used for the wheeled carts themselves, which eventually were run on iron rails called “tramways”. When this light rail system was adapted for passengers in the coal-mining area of Wales, the coal-mining word migrated with it.