Whiling or wiling?

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

A Wordlady reader has asked what we are doing during our enforced isolation.

Are we

whiling away the hours

or

wiling away the hours.

Since ever fewer people pronounce initial wh- as "hw", these two verbs are perfect homophones for most English speakers.

Knowing that the noun wile means

A crafty, cunning, or deceitful trick; a sly, insidious, or underhand artifice; a stratagem, ruse [think Wile E. Coyote],

you might think that you are warding off boredom with cunning ruses and that hence, "wile away the hours" is the right choice.  

Indeed, many people have thought this over the last two centuries, including Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, who wrote in Oliver Twist: "I was reading a book to-night to wile the time away."

But let's be serious. I don't know about you, but I'm not that cunning in finding ways to pass the time. Cuddle cat. Check. Watch TV. Check. Cuddle cat again. Check. Write Wordlady post. Check. Back to the cat.

Thankfully, in the early 1600s English speakers turned the very old noun "while" (dating from Old English and meaning "a portion of time") into a verb meaning "to pass the time". So we can (and do) while away the time/hours etc.

Maybe as this isolation wears on, we will have to find more cunning ways to pass the time and we really will be wiling away the hours, but for now I think we are just whiling them away.

By the way, you noticed, right, that both verbs while and wile are derived from the related nouns? Of course you know I would never miss an opportunity to point out a noun-verb conversion! 

Looking for a good way to while away the hours? Why not read some of the over 600 blog posts on Wordlady? And, hey, share (oh hey, there's another verb that started out as a noun) a few on social media for your friends who are also looking for ways to while away the time. All you have to do is click on the "Wordlady" at the top of this page and you will be able to access every post.

A fun noun-verb/verb-noun conversion quiz

MacMillan Dictionaries has created this fun quiz on my favourite subject, functional shifts, better known as "Is it OK to use a noun as a verb or a verb as a noun?" The answer is YES, by the way. You can read my thoughts about it here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2010/09/verbs-its-ok-to-do-this-really.html
For many other examples that I've written about, you can click on the "nouns as verbs" tag.

Here's the quiz:
http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/nounings-and-verbings-quiz

I don't think the point of the quiz is to see how many you get "right", actually. I think it is to show how very embedded these conversions have become in English, so we no longer have any notion that "Well, that's really a NOUN; it shouldn't be used as a verb". Or vice versa.

Oh, and by the way, if you're tempted to quote Calvin and Hobbes "Verbing weirds language" as someone always does when this topic comes up, please don't. Verbing enriches the language, and it's perfectly normal. Not weird at all. 

How do you pronounce "grimace"?

 

A friend of mine recently posted on facebook that she was surprised to hear a narrator pronounce the word "grimace" as "grim ACE". 

Several others chimed in that this was clearly wrong.  Everyone knows it's pronounced "GRIM us".

I thought so too, but it's always best to check before making pronunciation pronouncements. Lo! It appears that "GRIM us" is an upstart. A hundred years ago, "grim ACE" was the only pronunciation for this word. 

Before that, when we first borrowed the noun in the 1600s from the French grimace, we pronounced it a la francaise "gree MASS". By the time we turned the noun into a verb in the 1700s, it was being pronounced "gree MACE".

It is not uncommon for the stress in English to migrate from the second syllable to the first, leaving the vowel in the second, unstressed syllable to be reduced to a schwa. This is clearly what happened, though it is hard to say when exactly in the 20th century this came about. 

One thing is for sure, when we surveyed Canadians about their pronunciation of "grimace" for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, no one said "grim ACE", so we included only the "GRIM us" pronunciation. Other dictionaries, however, give "GRIM us" first and "grim ACE" second.
 
There are two theories as to the ultimate origin of "grimace":

1. Middle French, alteration of grimache, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English grīma mask
2. Spanish grimazo caricature, from grima fright.

How do you pronounce "grimace"? 


I'm offering my Rollicking Story of the English Language course again in the New Year! More info here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2017/12/rollicking-story-of-english-course.html

Photo credit: Tom Roberts on Unsplash

Hurtling over hurdles

I just read a posting for a job which required candidates who could "find creative solutions to hurtles that arise". What they meant was "hurdles". These two words are pronounced the same in North American English.

"Hurtle" is a verb meaning "move wildly at a dangerous speed". A car can hurtle down a street. Something can hurtle through the air.

"Hurdle" is first of all a noun, one of those fence-like objects that runners leap over. The word is also used figuratively, as in the sentence in question.

Originally hurdles were portable rectangular frames of woven wicker, used on farms as temporary gates or walls of sheep pens. As is typical with English nouns, a verb developed out of this meaning "jump over a hurdle".

Perhaps a way to remember that hurtle is spelled with a t is that if your car is hurtling down the street you are likely to get hurt.

Photo by Andrew McElroy on Unsplash

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