Hurricane

It's hurricane season, and, since these storms brew up in the Caribbean, the word comes, not surprisingly, from a Caribbean language. In the now extinct Taino, spoken in the Bahamas and Greater Antilles, hurakán meant “god of the storm”. When Europeans started exploring the Caribbean and having their first taste of violent tropical storms, they adapted this native word, the Spanish as huracán and the Portuguese as furacão. Until the spelling finally settled down as “hurricane” in English in the 1680s, there were about thirty different spellings, the most common being “furacane”. In the 1700s, a “hurricane” was also a kind of fashionable social gathering where your house was overrun with people.

For the etymology of hurricane's Pacific cousin, typhoon, please click here.

Canadians and heritage

Further to my post about whether to use "an" or "a" before words starting with "h", today one of my facebook friends [she is an archaeologist] mentioned "an heritage bridge". When I asked her if she always used "an" before "heritage", she confirmed that she did, and that one of her colleagues also did so "sometimes", though the other never did. I was intrigued by this, and when I did a Google search it became even more intriguing. "A heritage" is vastly, hugely, overwhelmingly more common than "an heritage". But when I eliminated all of the "an heritage" instances that were from the King James Version of the Bible, and those used by non-native speakers of English, the few that remained were predominantly Canadian. Not to say that Canadians prefer "an heritage" to "a heritage", but if you do say "an heritage", you are more likely to be Canadian than not.
This word underwent the same evolution as "history", starting out as "eritage", acquiring an etymological initial "h" in the Renaissance, then acquiring the "h" in the pronunciation in the 19th century.

Please forbear from using "forebearer"

It seems that Wordlady is in a schoolmarmy reproving sort of mood in time for back-to-school, so once again I am writing about a - gasp - language error.


I have recently seen several instances where people used the word "forebearer" when what they meant was "forebear" (an ancestor or predecessor).


Although the famously inclusive Merriam-Webster dictionaries have an entry for "forebearer", and even the famously judgemental American Heritage Dictionary acknowledges that this variant may soon be acceptable (but not yet), most American and British dictionaries and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary consider "forebearer" to be a mistake.


It is not really surprising that people make this mistake, because you would think, looking at the word "forebear", that it comes from "fore" plus "bear", i.e. that these were the people who were born before you. But astonishingly, this is not true. The word was originally "forebeer", nothing to do with ale, but simply a noun "be-er", that is, someone who was before you. It was originally a Scottish term, which explains why the vowel was pronounced more like "bay" than like "be".


Most dictionaries accept "forbear" as a variant spelling of "forebear", but my advice would be to keep "forebear" for the noun and "forbear" for the verb, now very formal, meaning "refrain from doing something", e.g. "She forbore from commenting."


You can see this verb's slide into oblivion on the Google frequency chart below. The apparent post-2000 uptick is due to dictionaries and recent editions of 19th-century books being loaded onto Google Books. It is clear that the verb "forbear" is in its death throes. "Forbearance" has always been healthier than the verb from which it derives, but even it is not what it once was.

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! If you are not already subscribed, you can either: use the subscribe window at the top of this page OR (if you are reading this on a mobile device): send me an email with the subject line SUBSCRIBE at wordlady.barber@gmail.com Privacy policy: we will not sell, rent, or give your name or address to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any point.

Don't misplace your modifiers

Talk about going to extreme lengths for advertising.

“Hung as the signage for Mojo's Cycles, the owner says the bike is a Sears model.” But unless he, and not the bike, really is suspended above his store, this sentence, found in a Toronto newspaper, illustrates the grammatical error called a misplaced modifier.

I know you expect your weekly Wordlady to be a word history rather than a grammar lesson, but this very common mistake really bugs me, so bear with me while I rant.

Make sure that descriptive phrases are properly attached to the thing they describe, to avoid unintended and sometimes hilarious consequences like the following, all found in Toronto newspapers. Those of you who would never misplace a modifier can just laugh or feel smug. But judging by the frequency of these errors, many people can just not see what the problem is, so I have highlighted the misplaced modifier in red and the thing it is grammatically (but not intentionally) modifying in green.

“Small enough to take with you on your next shopping trip, wine experts Phillips and Harradine guide you through the best-value wines at the LCBO.”

“A 53-year-old Winnipeg truck driver, who has been in Canada since he was a baby, has been deported to England, where he was born after being convicted on drug charges.”

“Built for people on the go, Oakville's Mariel Bradley has produced a cookbook.”

“Meant to reflect the newly revamped ROM, the station's leaky, moldy tiles have been replaced by five column designs.”

And the all-time, cringe-inducing winner:

“This latest contraceptive is a flexible ring, about the diameter of an egg, worn as far up your vagina as you can push it for three weeks at a time.”

See what I mean?? DON'T MISPLACE YOUR MODIFIERS!!

For another entertaining misplaced modifier, see my "Casting dispersions" post.

What the h...?

With the Olympics over, thank God we won't have to hear every last thing being described as "historic" any more. But is a new world record "a historic event" or "an historic event"?

A recent facebook poll I conducted showed "an historic" favoured over "a historic" by 60% of respondents, and this seemed to cut across generational lines. This is such an intriguing phenomenon. Typically in English, we use "a" before a pronounced h (as in "history") and "an" before silent h (as in "hour", "honour", etc.). So why do so many people (you've probably guessed I'm not one of them) do the counterintuitive thing and say "an historic" even though the h is pronounced?

If you look on the ever-helpful internet, you will find all sorts of wacko "rules" about this, depending on whether it's a noun or a verb, whether the first or second syllable is stressed, how many syllables the word has, what happens in French (in French!) and many other variables. Why do people make their lives this complicated?

Especially when THERE IS NO REASON TO DO THIS!! It's just a result of a quirk in the history (or should I say istory?) of English spelling and pronunciation.

"Historic" and "historical" didn't come into English till the Renaissance, but "history" has been around much longer. In Latin it was historia, but the Romans stopped pronouncing the h long before Latin morphed into Old French. The French didn't pronounce it (still don't) and being sensible people back then, didn't put an unpronounced letter in the spelling. Voilà: istorie. We borrowed the word, h-less in both spelling and pronunciation.

But then the Renaissance came along, and we developed a mania for putting silent letters in our spellings to reflect the original Latin word. So "istory" and its derivatives acquired an h in the spelling, but still not in the pronunciation. It therefore was perfectly natural to say "an history" or "an historic event", just as we still say "an hour" or "an honour".

 It was not until the end of the 19th century, and the advent of both mass literacy and social opprobrium for people who "drop their aitches", that we started pronouncing the h in "history" and "historic" (and many other words besides). But for some reason, although we all sensibly adjusted our indefinite article from "an" to "a" before "history", some of us didn't do the same before "historic".

Mastering counterintuitive linguistic "rules" like this is a good way to make you feel superior to those who do the opposite --but naturally idiomatic-- thing, and I believe this has something to do with the survival of "an historic". I am not saying that all my friends who say this are consciously asserting their linguistic superiority, but  I think they must be channelling something they were taught in school.

I even see the tendency spilling over onto other words starting with h. In the last few months I have seen all of the following:

an helicopter
an hospital
an horrific
an hilarious
an Hispanic
an hibiscus

and there is ample evidence on Google for all of these. Admit it, you "an historic" types, you're thinking, "But those are ridiculous!". Aren't you?

(For another example, "an heritage", see this post.)

Something has to give, though.  It's just too much work -- and not natural English -- to say "an" and then pronounce your h afterwards, so either the n or the h has to go. Indeed, I heard a CBC-TV reporter talking about one of those multitudinous historic events at the Olympics, and it certainly sounded to me like "an istoric day". Some linguists believe that the pronounced h"is doomed to die in Standard English as it has done in so many languages, and perhaps this is a sign of it ailing, though there are vast numbers of words in English with a very healthy initial h.

My advice is:

Use "an" before the FOUR (count 'em!) words and their approximately twelve common derivatives, that start with a silent h in standard English (i.e. not those varieties of English, like Cockney, in which all initial h's are silent):

heir, honest, honour, hour

For Americans and about 50% of Canadians, the word "herb" is also in this category.

Use  "a" before h's that are pronounced (everything else). EVEN "HISTORIC"!! (For some speakers, "humour" and "human" also have a silent "h", but since those words start with a "you" sound, they also take "a".)

How easy is that?

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The Beatles' use of language

Does "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" really refer to LSD? The answer to this and other questions in this interesting article: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/08/strawberry-fields-forever/

Please stand!

Over the past few weeks we have heard many national anthems played at the Olympics, and meanwhile in my church choir I've been singing another kind of anthem, a choral setting of a biblical text.

Where does this word "anthem" come from? It has come a very long way, having its ultimate origins in the Greek elements anti (against) and phone (sound). This became the church Latin word antiphona (a composition sung with one choir responding to another), which has given us the word "antiphon".

But antiphona was fated to have another evolution as well. When the Anglo-Saxons were confronted with this church Latin word, they decided to drop a few syllables and thus turned antiphona into antefne. Even for the Anglo-Saxons, though, antefne was a hard mouthful of consonants, so gradually the f became an m and the final ne dropped off altogether, leaving us with "anthem" by about 1500.

Throughout this time, it maintained the original meaning of an antiphonal composition, but starting with Chaucer, it also meant a piece of scripture set to music. Any singer who has ever made it through Holy Week can sympathize with the speaker in Henry IV part 2 who said "For my voice, I have lost it with hallowing, and singing of Anthems." The word "anthem" for such pieces tends to be used of English compositions and the Church of England. On the continent and in Catholic churches such religious choral pieces are more likely to be called "motets", a diminutive of the French word mot (meaning "word"): a "little word".

Shakespeare also used "anthem" more figuratively to mean any song of praise, and this led ultimately to its being used to describe the royalist song that gained popularity in the mid-1700s. But even in late Victorian times, pedants were complaining that "anthem" was not the "right" word for "God Save the Queen", and that it should be called a "national hymn" instead (as indeed national anthems are in French and German and other languages). This just shows that pedants never win out in matters lexical. Just think how they would react to the latest evolution of the word, as in "Technohead's irresistibly zany pro-marijuana anthem". Definitely not suitable for the Olympics. Or church!