Whetting your appetite

Photo by Manki Kim on Unsplash

I recently saw someone online criticizing an editor for not correcting the past tense "whet" to "whetted".

This got me thinking.

Is "whet" in fact a possible past tense for "whet"? Is it perhaps a holdover from former days? "Whet" is clearly an Anglo-Saxon word; that "wh-" is a dead giveaway (it would have been "hw-" in Anglo-Saxon).

Non Anglo-Saxon words ending in -et, like "vet", all have regular conjugations, i.e. vet, vetted, vetted; jet, jetted, jetted. But if you think of single-syllable Anglo-Saxon verbs ending in -et that are very much more common than "whet":

"set", "let",

they are identical in the present and the past tenses: today I set the table, yesterday I set the table.

And thus it was with "whet", the past and past participle of which were "whet" from its origins, and for centuries thereafter. It was only in the Middle English period (after the Norman Conquest) that the regular conjugation "whetted" cropped up, eventually taking over, but not till the 1700s. The same phenomenon happened with "fret".

But although "whetted" is clearly dominant at the moment, the past form "whet" has continued to burble along, not dying out in the 1700s as the OED would have it.

Similarly, "whet"'s homophone "wet" had (and still has) a past and past participle "wet" from earliest times, having acquired the variant "wetted" only since the 1500s. I would say that "wetted" is still a second runner against "wet" as you can see in this chart:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=wet+his+finger%2Cwetted+his+finger&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cwet%20his%20finger%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwetted%20his%20finger%3B%2Cc0

And although it sounds ok (sort of?) to say "he wetted his finger" rather than "he wet his finger", I don't think it sounds at all idiomatic to say "the child wetted the bed".

So, when you combine

1. the fact that "whet" isn't  a terribly frequent word (occurring between 0.1 and 1.0 times per million words in typical modern English usage. )
   
2. with the very strong influence of common analogous words like "set", "let", and especially the homophone "wet",
   
3. and the fact that past "whet" is an old form that still survives,

it's not at all surprising that someone might (and some people do, according to corpus evidence) use "whet" rather than "whetted" as a past tense of "whet". It could be argued that it is a minority variant form. Failing to change "whet" to "whetted", as editing "errors" go, is hardly the most egregious mistake.

As I have said before, when you come across a usage different than your own, it's so much more rewarding (though time-consuming) to start with the reaction "I wonder..." than to simply crow "WRONG!!" and march onward, feeling superior.

"Whet" is a word we don't use much in its literal sense of "sharpen" anymore. Exceptions are historical fiction and poetry, though it is rare there too. "I'm going to whet this knife and then slice me some tomatoes for a sandwich" sounds vaguely ridiculous and somehow sinister. (I do however have an object in my kitchen drawer that I still call a "whetstone", along with a different object that I call a "knife sharpener"). We don't react to the clanging bell of a van passing through the neighbourhood by saying, "Oh the knife whetter is here!" 

What we do whet nowadays is someone's appetite or, to a lesser degree, their curiosity.

What we shouldn't whet is our whistle. This is the other "wet". The expression "wet someone's whistle" means to have a drink, the "whistle" in question being the voice.

Would you say "it has whet my appetite" or only "it has whetted my appetite"? Would you have to think about it before you chose a form?

* The force of analogy is also noticeable with the much more recent verb "pet", about the etymology and past tense of which you can read in this post. Since someone asked that question five years ago, I have certainly noticed "pet" being used as a past tense.

Flower and flour

Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

For Mother's Day, get your mum some flowers. 

Or if she really likes baking, you could get her a variety of flours (which currently seem harder to come by).

The two words were in fact once the same. 

The Latin word for the prettiest part of a plant, floris, became flour in Old French (subsequently fleur). Very quickly it acquired another meaning: “the choicest part of a plant”. Applied to wheat, this was the part used for baking. 

For centuries, “flour” had both meanings in English, then we changed the spelling to “flower”. In the 18^th century someone had the bright idea to use one spelling for the wheat meal and the other for blooms.

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Floe or flow?

Photo by Marcus Löfvenberg on Unsplash

In my post about spring breakup, I referred to floating slabs of ice as

ice floes

One occasionally sees this misspelled 

ice flows

"Floe" is a surprisingly recent word in English, the first evidence dating only from 1817. It probably comes from Norse flo layer, level piece. I do not know what they were called before the 19th century.

In Newfoundland and the Canadian north, the term "ice pan" is also used. 

"Flow", on the other hand, dates back to Anglo-Saxon times as a verb and to the 15th century as a noun, and has not really changed in meaning over that time.

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How wacky is English spelling?

Photo by Kees Streefkerk on Unsplash

Here's a challenge for you: how many ways can the syllable that sounds like “SEE” be spelled in English? Can you think of an example word to illustrate each of those spellings? Keep thinking! All will be revealed at the end of this article. Don't cheat by looking!

Because English speakers have been such enthusiastic borrowers from other languages throughout our history, our spelling is notoriously non-phonetic. It causes grief to both native speakers and second-language learners. But its sheer quirkiness has contributed to what we can only call a “language as parlour game” phenomenon: English speakers love to test their linguistic mettle (or is that “metal”, or “meddle”, or “medal”?) in games like spelling bees, and our many homophones make the language a fertile source for punsters.

(How are you doing on those “SEE” spellings? Are you up to 10 yet? There are more!)

English is a wacky language. Lunatic, even. Consider how many ways we can write the sound “TOE”.

In a sensible language, it would be written “to”. But no, not for us. The digraph “to” is pronounced “TOE” in some words, but when to is a word unto itself, it is pronounced “TOO”, not of course to be confused with two or too, dear me I am feeling faint.

pto ptomaine

tau taupe

teau plateau

teaux Saulteaux

tho Thomism

to potato

toa toad

toe toe

toh butoh

tot Pitot

tow tow

tto ditto

(12 spellings)

“Twelve spellings,” you think, “But that's ridiculous!” (By the way, how are those “SEE” spellings coming along? There are more than twelve!)

Okay, then. Or should I say, “Oqué!” Because, for the sound in “okay” we have:

ca caber

cai caiman

cay decay

cca occasion

cei ceilidh

cha chaos

k KO

ka kaolin

kay okay

ke kea

kei keiretsu

key Keynesian

kka Akkadian

qa qadi

qué appliqué

que quesadilla

quet bouquet

(17 spellings)

Seventeen??!! Surely there (not “their” or “they're”) can't be more for “SEE”!

Think again!

And while you're mulling on that, let's talk about homophones some more. Our old confusable friends affect/effect, desert/dessert, and principal/principle are problems for all English speakers. But what are homophones for Canadians are not necessarily homophones in other varieties of English.

For instance, khat (an Arabian shrub the leaves of which are chewed as a stimulant), cot, and caught are all pronounced the same in Canadian English but differently in Southern Standard British English (where, what's more, caught is a homophone of court, and khat is a homophone of cart).

A particularly interesting phenomenon occurs when a vowel precedes the letter “r”. For most Canadians the words harry and hairy are perfect homophones. Dictionaries from other countries would fail to warn you about this.

It's not just the vowels that are a problem, though. In North America we tend to pronounce the letter “t” between two vowels or before a syllabic “l” as “d”; hence it is possible to confuse tutor and Tudor or hurtle and hurdle. I once was very confused by a discussion with a lawyer where he seemed to be referring to the company infringing someone else's trademark as a "traitor". "That's a bit harsh," I thought, till I realized the word he was using was "trader"!

You might think, “Well, really, who would ever confuse tootsie and Tutsi?” But bear in mind that in a spelling bee, a contestant is given the word orally out of context, so they have no way of knowing, when they hear the sound “TOOT see” (there, I've just given you two spellings of “SEE”!), whether piggies going to market or African peoples are meant. There are many more homophones than you probably suspect: we identified 1800 of them in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

To keep you entertained while you're still working on your “SEE” list, here are some other syllables in English with wildly variant spellings:

The choux is on the other foot:

choux choux paste

sciu prosciutto

shoe shoe

shoo shoo

shu Shuswap

su sensual

tu punctual

xu sexual

(8 spellings)

Jai thee to a nunnery:

ha'i Baha'i

hai Haida

hay Haydnesque

hei heinie

heigh height

hi hi

hie hie

high high

hy hyacinth

jai jai alai

(10 spellings, 11 if we also count chai in l'chaim)

Heaving a sci:

ci cite

cy cyan

psi psi

psy psych

sai saiga

say sayonara

sci sciatic

scy scythe

si site

sig sign

sigh sigh

ssai assai

ssi Messiah

sy prophesy

xi xi

(15 spellings)

For a small phoe:

fae faeces

fe febrile

fea feat

fee fee

ffee coffee

ffei caffeine

ffi graffiti

ffy taffy

fi fiasco

fie fief

fil fils

fille fille de joie

filles filles du roi

fit confit

fj fjord

foe foetus

fy salsify

ghie toughie

ghy roughy

phae nymphae

phe phenol

phee biographee

phi morphine

phoe phoebe

phy philosophy

(a whopping 25 spellings)

But “SEE” trumps them all. This is your last chance. Exhausted all the possibilities you can think of?

There are THIRTY-ONE different spellings of SEE” in English!

From cey to coe:

c C-section

cae Caesar

ce cede

cea cease

cee Sadducee

cei receive

cey Ceylonese

ci calcium

cie policies

coe coelom

cy icy

sce scene

sci hyoscine

se sebum

sea sea

see see

sei seize

sey curtsey

si Tutsi

sie siege

sse Tennessean

ssee lessee

ssey odyssey

ssi lassi

ssie lassie

ssy sissy

sy hypocrisy

xe tuxedo

xi taxi

xie pixie

xy boxy

I can only conclude that all of us who have to write English, especially those of us who make our livings in the language industries, deserve a meddle, dammit, I mean medal for putting up with this chaos.

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Going through a phase

Wait, is this a phaser or a fazer?

  Which of these sentences is spelled correctly?

1. But nothing fazes Richard, so he'll be up for it.
2. But nothing phases Richard, so he'll be up for it. 

Did you say "phases"? If so, you were WRONG (ok, I admit it, it gives me a little thrill to be able to say that occasionally). Nothing fazes Richard.

The word meaning "disconcert, trouble" has nothing to do with "phase".  FAZE is a very old word, derived from Old English fésian (to drive away), which by the 15th century was also being used to mean "frighten, alarm". Like so many words that have died out of Standard British English, this one survived in North America, and by the 1830s had taken on the meaning "disconcert, disturb". It was subsequently revived in British English.

The homophone PHASE comes ultimately from the Greek word designating each of the aspects of the moon or a planet, according to the amount of its illumination. It is a mere stripling compared to "faze", having entered English in the 17th century. Very quickly its use was extended from the strictly astronomical sense to mean "a distinct period or stage in a process of change or development".

And then, GUESS WHAT??? It BECAME A VERB. 

First, in the early 1900s, in electrical engineering:

To adjust the phase of (an oscillation, alternating current, etc.), esp. in order to bring it into phase or synchrony with something else.

and then, in the late 1940s, more generally: 

To organize, carry out, or introduce in phases. Freq. with in (or out): to introduce into (or withdraw from) use, operation, etc., gradually or in stages.

Remarkably, people were unfazed by this function shift. As they should be.


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Gorillas and guerrillas

Gorilla. Do not confuse with guerrilla.

There's been much in the news about gorillas lately, so of course you want to know why they are called that.  This is what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say:

An alleged African name for a wild or hairy man (strictly for the female only), preserved (in accusative plural γορίλλας) in the Greek account of the voyage undertaken by the Carthaginian Hanno in the 5th or 6th cent. BC; hence adopted in 1847 as the specific name of the ape Troglodytes gorilla (now Gorilla gorilla), first described by Dr. T. S. Savage, an American missionary in Western Africa.

Do not confuse gorillas with guerrillas. 

guerrilla /ɡəˈrɪlə/ 

▶

noun

(also guerilla)

• 1. a person taking part in an irregular war waged by small bands operating independently, often against a stronger, more organized force, with surprise attacks etc.: [also attributive] : guerrilla warfare.

 You will notice that the alternate spelling "guerilla" is given by dictionaries, but this spelling (which is also the spelling used in French) is MUCH less common than "guerrilla". 

The word comes from Spanish guerrilla, a diminutive of guerra (war), and was first used to describe Spanish fighters in the Peninsular War against Napoleonic occupation in the early 1800s.

Since then, this word has taken on a life of its own, and has since the 1970s become an adjective

"Designating activities conducted in an irregular, unorthodox, and spontaneous way, without regard to established conventions, rules, and formalities, as guerrilla advertising, guerrilla cooking, guerrilla filmmaking, etc."

Surprisingly, though, the first example of this adjectival usage is earlier than you would think:

1888   Polyclinic Nov. 134/2   The so-called pure pepsins..which, by a system of ‘guerrilla’ advertising..have been foisted upon the deceived medical profession.

 My favourite examples of this are:

guerrilla gardening  n. gardening on sites that the gardeners are not authorized to use (typically land which has been abandoned or otherwise neglected), esp. as a political or environmental statement.

guerrilla knitting  n. street art consisting of colourful knitted or crocheted items and motifs attached to public objects and monuments; the action of decorating objects or monuments in this way; cf. yarn bombing

"Who yarn-bombed that tree? Not moi!" *whistles nonchalantly*

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