Premises, premises...

A Wordlady reader has inquired about the use of "premise" to mean "location", instead of the plural "premises". 

It's odd that a word meaning "a starting point for reasoning" also means "a locality". 

This is how it evolved.  

In the Middle Ages, the word meant "the first statement in an argument" (from a Latin word meaning "set before"). Then medieval lawyers started to use it to refer to any foregoing statement in a legal document. In particular,  they used it for the opening statement in a deed or conveyance of property.  In such documents, the things mentioned right off the top were the lands, dwellings, and other buildings, and these were subsequently referred to in the document as "the premises".  Since such things were usually in the plural, or probably referred to in the plural by lawyers just to cover the eventuality that there might be more than one, the plural form took over. 

Gradually, the usage spread beyond the legal profession, and people began to think of "premises" as a synonym for "A house or building together with its grounds, outhouses,etc." [that's "outhouses" in the British sense of outbuildings!]. But there was still a plural notion about it.  Only gradually did the plural noun "premises" come to designate a singular entity like a building or a shop. 

But English just doesn't like plural nouns for things that are (or are perceived as) singular. Stamina and molasses were both originally plural nouns, but have now become singular (it's actually surprising that molasses didn't become molass in the process).  We don't even like singular things having names that sound like they're plural: singular skates, cherise, and pease became skate, cherry, and pea. Under the weight of this pressure, I think it is inevitable that plural "premises" will yield to the singular "premise".

In fact, if you do a Google search on "licensed premise" you find the term in many legal documents, from all over the English-speaking world. 

If this usage bothers you, my advice is: hie you to a licensed premise, drink up, and accept the inevitable.

1. Complain about a licensed premise
   

   www.warwickdc.gov.uk › ... › Your Council › Online Services › Forms

   Use this form to complain about a Licensed Premise.
2. 
   

   TABC License and Permit Description

   www.tabc.state.tx.us/licensing/license_and_permit_description.asp

   Dec 20, 2012 – ... Permit or Wine and Beer Retailer's Permit if food service is the primary business being operated on the licensed premise or to the holder of a ...
3. 
   

   Overview

   www.rld.state.nm.us/.../Special_Dispenser_Permits.aspx

   All laws that apply on a normal licensed premise apply at the location of the SDP or public celebration. For SDP Information Letter 1/7/13, click here. To obtain an ...
4. 
   

   Scottish Certificate for Licensed Premises Staff | SCLPSPersonal ...

   www.personallicencescotland.com/scottish-certificate-for-licensed-pr...

   Licensed Premises Staff includes anyone serving alcohol form behind a bar, sales counter or directly to a table from a licensed premise or temporary event ...
5. 
   

   Rules and Regulations - Maine.gov

   www.maine.gov/dps/liqr/regulations.html - United States

   Whoever is found in charge of a licensed premise or making service or waiting on trade in such licensed premise shall be prima facie construed to be a clerk, ...
6. 
   

   [PDF] 
   

   RSA NSW Section 2 Legislation Part1 Quiz

   www.qhint.com/.../9-... - Australia

   File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
   A customer can remain on a licensed premise when showing severe signs of intoxication if they promise not to drink any more alcohol. 
   
   

To B or not to B

English spelling? Baa!

This coming Sunday is Easter for Greeks, and others of the Orthodox Church. Traditionally, lamb is eaten.

Why is there a silent "b" in "lamb"?

In Old English, this "b" was pronounced, but by the end of the Middle Ages, people had stopped pronouncing it.  Quite sensibly, a few people tried spelling the word "lam" or "lamm", but English spelling has never been sensible, so we stuck with a spelling reflecting a long-dead pronunciation. The same thing happened with "comb" and "dumb", but for the word "crumb", where the explanation is different, tune in to a Wordlady post in June.

We were, however, a little more sensible with the plural form of "lamb". In Old English, this had been lomberu. In the Middle Ages, people reformed it along the lines of other irregular plurals like "children" and "brethren". So for a while we had singular lamb and plural "lambren". This, thank goodness, did not survive, as we decided to make it a regular plural ending in s.

We use the word "lamb" whether the lamb is gambolling in the fields or sitting as a chop on our plates. This is unusual in English, where for most animals we distinguish between the live and cooked versions:
Cow  - beef
Sheep - mutton
Calf - veal
Pig/swine - pork
In all these cases the first word is of English origin and the second of French origin. This is a remnant of the Norman Conquest in 1066, after which French cooking terms flooded the language. The usual explanation is that the Anglo-Saxon (English) speakers would have been tending the animals in the fields while the French speakers were roasting them in the aristocratic kitchens.

Thank you to a Wordlady reader for asking about the silent b in "lamb". If you have questions or suggestions for Wordlady, please feel free to send them to me!

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Why is there a silent p in ptarmigan?

To honour the return of birds in the spring and the birthday of the renowned bird painter John James Audubon (born 26 April, 1785), let's look at the hard-to-spell ptarmigan, a grouse-like bird found in the far north. 

Its name comes from a Gaelic word, tàrmachan, meaning “grumbler” or “croaker”, presumably in reference to the sound the bird makes. In Gaelic, as you see, there was no “p” at the beginning of the word. But in the late 17^th century, some meddlesome person, thinking the word was derived from the Greek ptero (meaning “feather” or “wing”), stuck a “p” at the beginning to reflect its “Greek” origin (that it doesn't have). It's been there ever since. 

Thank goodness they didn't get a hold of the Canada … pgoose!

Ptarmigan as painted by Audubon

REMINDER: March 16 "Tea and Wordlady": Bachelor for Rent: Things You Never Suspected About Canadian English. More info here: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/02/tea-and-wordlady-wednesday-16-march.html

Tiptoe through the tulips

It's been a late spring in southern Ontario, but even here a few brave tulips are beginning to poke through the ground. In more temperate climes they must be blooming, not to mention providing tasty snacks for squirrels (for rhe etymology of "squirrel", please click here.

Tulips came to Europe from their native Turkey in the 16th century, so not surprisingly their name comes from a Turkish word:  tulbant or tulibant.  This word did not originally designate the flower, however; it is simply the Turkish word for "turban". The open flower of a tulip was thought to resemble the headgear. 

But whereas the name for the flower came directly into the western European languages from Turkey, retaining the original "l", the name for the hat took a more circuitous route and acquired an "r" along the way. It is possible that the people of southwestern India, or the Portuguese who colonized parts of India, changed tulbant into turbant. This eventually became our turban. Fortuitously, really, because it would be very odd to read about people wearing tulips on their heads. 

The garden at Chateau Wordlady

pre-squirrel:

 and post-squirrel:

 

Arts jargon

The Guardian is encouraging people to send in examples of the most execrable arts jargon they have found, launching the campaign with this:
"Combining radical notions of performativity and the body as liminal space, my practice interrogates the theoretical limitations of altermodernism. My work, which traverses disparate realms of object-making such as painting and performance, investigates the space between metabolism and metaphysic".

My best recent example:
"The arch antagonist of received ballet wisdom, William Forsythe’s choreographic provocations have earned him as much notoriety as acclaim. Yet beneath the anarchic comedy, the fiercely deconstructive and random-seeming surface of a work such as the second detail there lurks an ungainly but defiant elegance, a vision of dance that forces us to look anew at ballet’s meanings and potentialities."

Click here to join in with the Guardian::
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/apr/17/artspeak-best-worst-examples

Or paste your example in the comments!

The Guardian has now collated the results. "Choreographic provocations" is in there with the worst of them!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/may/03/artspeak-examples-what-not-to-write?CMP= 

If the past tense of "teach" is "taught", why isn't the past tense of "reach" "raught"?

I don't know about you, but in the last few months I've noticed a sudden upsurge in the use of the phrasal verb "reach out". It used to be that reaching out had some kind of emotional connotations; either you reached out for help or you reached out to help someone. But more recently it seems to be just a synonym of "contact". In one recent TV program I heard it used at least four times to mean "make a phone call" (or I suppose it could also have potentially covered  "send a text or email to").  I do not know where this is coming from. Have you noticed it too?

Meanwhile, the noun "outreach" in the sense "The activity of an organization in making contact and fostering relations with people unconnected with it, esp. for the purpose of support or education and for increasing awareness of the organization's aims or message" is older than you probably think, with the first evidence dating from 1899. However, this noun certainly increased in frequency quite dramatically starting in the 1960s.

Here's an interesting piece of trivia about the verb "reach". Originally its past tense and past participle were "raught" (analogous to "teach" and "taught"). But in the Middle Ages the verb became regular. For a while "teached" also tried to supplant "taught" but "taught" proved more resilient than "raught". 

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Magazine

By special request from a Wordlady reader, today's word is "magazine". Where does it come from and why do we use it for such disparate things as the place for the ammunition in a gun and a glossy periodical?

Going way back, the word comes from Arabic maḵzan, maḵzin (storehouse), derived from the verb ḵazana (to store up). This was borrowed into various Romance languages in the Middle Ages, including French, where magasin means "store" to this day.

English didn't borrow the word from French until the late 1500s, and used it specifically for a storehouse for ammunition and other military supplies.  But the general sense of "storehouse for assorted merchandise" chugged along beside it, and was also used figuratively, for stores and collections of all sorts of things, including knowledge. By the 1630s, books providing information on a specific subject were being called "magazines", and in 1731 a new periodical publication saw the light of day, calling itself The Gentleman's Magazine, with this explanation for its title:

"This Consideration has induced several Gentlemen to promote a Monthly Collection to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces on the Subjects abovemention'd."

Obviously, the name took off, and with the advent of broadcasting in the 1920s, the word "magazine" was extended again to cover radio and television shows covering a variety of subjects.

Meanwhile, however, the "storehouse for ammunition" sense was alive and well. In the 1850s, much smaller supplies of ammunition, the cartridges for guns, also came to be known as magazines.  

Canadian readers may be entertained to learn that the first mention of the word "magazine rack" found by the Oxford English Dictionary is in the Eaton's catalogue:

1917–18   T. Eaton & Co. Catal. Fall–Winter 416/1   Morris Chair... Paper and magazine rack under arm.