Whatever happened to ptomaine poisoning?

Photo by Wesual Click on Unsplash

Whenever I write a post about pronunciation, it inevitably sets off a flurry of other pronunciation questions from readers, especially if silent letters are involved.

We have (unfortunately) an almost inexhaustible supply of silent letters in English.

Today's example is the old-fashioned word "ptomaine".  People used to refer to food poisoning as "ptomaine poisoning. The word is pronounced toe main (but keep reading for a surprise about that).

Any of a group of amines [organic compounds derived from ammonia] (e.g. cadaverine, putrescine, neurine) of unpleasant taste and odour, formed in putrefying animal and vegetable matter and formerly thought to cause food poisoning

Cadaverine. 

Putrescine. 

Never say that Wordlady fails to introduce you to lovely words. Anyway, it has been determined that these charmingly named substances are not the actual cause of food poisoning; they just coexist with the toxic bacteria that are. The well-known food poisoning bacteria are Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism, and salmonella. 

Botulism, though no fun at all, does at least have an entertaining etymology:

Late 19th century from German Botulismus, originally ‘sausage poisoning’, from Latin botulus ‘sausage’, because first identified in badly preserved sausages.

Death by sausage, as it were. And how appropriate that it was Germans who first named it.

"Ptomaine" came into English in the 19th century from the French ptomaïne, from Italian ptomaina, formed irregularly from Greek ptōma ‘corpse’. Goodness this post is getting morbid.

As to the pronunciation, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1909, gave two possibilities:

toe may ine

or

ptoe may ine

Yes, with a pronounced p. This pronunciation was doomed to failure because English speakers are just not good at initial pt-.

The dictionary even got quite sniffy about the pronunciation that has since become standard:  

‘it is to be regretted that the full correction to ptomatine was not made at its reception into English, which would also have prevented the rise of the illiterate pronunciation toe MAIN, like domain’.

You know, it's unwise to make judgemental remarks about pronunciations you consider "illiterate", because, as we have seen before with words like "balcony" and "camellia",  in a hundred years you'll just look ridiculous.

Well, I'm sorry to inflict a post about food poisoning on you in these times, but at least I am pretty sure you're unlikely to get botulism or salmonella from your chocolate bunny.

Do you use the term "ptomaine poisoning", or have you done so in the past?

Licorice or Liquorice? ISH or ISS?

Photo by Hello I'm Nik 🎞 on Unsplash

I suspect that, like me, you are feeling a need for comfort food in these tumultuous times.

One of my comfort foods is licorice. Or wait, is it liquorice? And how is that last syllable pronounced?

The word came into English not long after the Norman Conquest, from Old French licoresse. The French had got it from late Latin liquiritia, from Greek glukurrhiza, from glukus ‘sweet’ + rhiza ‘root’.

There were many ways to spell it in the Middle English period (licoriz, licorys, lycorys, lycorice, etc.), but NONE of them had a -qu-. 

The origin of the -qu- spelling is one that avid Wordlady readers must by now be finding predictable, not to say boring. Yes, the Latinizing trends of the Renaissance! It's got a -qu- in Latin so it has to have a -qu- in English!  Actually the -qu- in Latin was probably also a mistake, caused by confusion with liquere (to be liquid). Good thing they didn't look at the Greek and go whole hog and change it to "gliquorice with a silent g" while they were at it!

The "licorice" spelling lingered on in Britain so that even in the mid-17th century Samuel Johnson gave it as the only spelling in his dictionary, although the learned authors he quoted spelled it "liquorice". 

Licorice. n.s. [γλυκύῤῥιζα; liquoricia, Italian; glycyrrhzza, Latin.] A root of sweet taste.

Liquorice hath a papilionaceous flower; the pointal which arises from the empalement becomes a short pod, containing several kidney-shaped seeds; the leaves are placed by parts joined to the mid-rib, and are terminated by an odd lobe. Miller.

By this time, pace Johnson, "liquorice" was definitely the much more common spelling in Britain.
  
But in American English it never supplanted the earlier "licorice", which is also the only spelling given in Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary, although in Webster's 1783 spelling book he recommended "liquorice". The two spellings battled it out in American English throughout the 19th century, but, starting in 1900, "licorice" started its march to decisive victory. In the current Merriam-Webster dictionary, it is the only spelling given.

As usual, Canada straddles the divide between the US and the UK: the Canadian Oxford Dictionary  gives both spellings, with "licorice" being the more common one. Of course, because of our obsession with changing -or- spellings to -our-, there is some evidence from Canada (and other Commonwealth countries) of people attempting a licourice or liquourice spelling. But these are just plain wrong. 

For more on Canadian -our hypercorrection, see these posts:
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2011/07/discouver-vancouver.html
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2018/07/csi-spelling-whats-wrong-with-rigour.html
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/06/canadian-hypercorrection.html
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2013/11/stupor-or-stupour.html

Now, what about the pronunciation? Licker-iss or licker-ish? We don't really know how it came about, but the "ish" pronunciation seems to have cropped up in the 1600s. Despite being roundly criticized by usage pundits (and we've seen how effective that isn't), it is now the more common pronunciation in North America. In fact, when we did a survey on this word for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary we could find no Canadians who said "lick(uh)riss".

What do you say, and how do you spell this word?

After all this I now have a craving for lic{qu}orice!

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(Not) Written in the stars

"Nothing to do with us!"

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I do not for a moment believe in astrology, but our ancestors did, so it is not surprising that the "aster" in "disaster" is derived from the Greek word astron meaning "star". Disasters were literally events thought to be caused by our stars being misaligned.

You might think that it is the same astron showing up in catastrophe.

But no. Catastrophe has nothing to do with stars, not even etymologically.

Catastrophe comes from Latin catastropha, from Greek katastrophē ‘overturning, sudden turn’, from kata- ‘down’ + strophē ‘turning’ (from strephein ‘to turn’).

It was originally (in the 1500s) a theatrical term, designating the final resolution or dénouement of the plot in a play. In a tragedy, this usually involved the death (or "overturning") of the protagonist. It was possible, though, to have happy or comical catastrophes. But because there were many tragedies, the association with an unhappy ending soon took over, so that catastrophe soon came to mean "a disastrous or unhappy conclusion". By the end of the 1700s it acquired its current meaning "a disastrous, usually widespread, event."

A question:  While we are all confined to quarters, how frequently would you like Wordlady updates? Daily (not sure that I could keep that up, to be honest)? Twice a week? Once a week? Please let me know. I want to keep you entertained but I don't want to overwhelm you.

Stroke someone's ego or stoke someone's ego?

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

A friend of mine recently wrote on Facebook about someone's ego being stroked by the sycophants surrounding them. I'll let you guess who that someone was.

But then her daughter weighed in to say that the correct expression was "stoke someone's ego".

Who was right?

The verb "stroke", which has been with us since Anglo-Saxon times, has been used since the 1500s in a figurative sense to mean "manipulate someone with flattery, persuasion, compliments, etc."

 1561   T. Norton tr. J. Calvin Instit. (1562) ii. i. §2. 70   There is nothing that mannes nature more coueteth, than to be stroked with flattery.

But "ego" didn't enter the language till the 1800s, and it was only after 1900 that it came to be used to mean "self-esteem or self-importance". The phrase "stroke someone's ego" dates from the 1940s. 

In the last ten years, however, we have started to see "stoke someone's ego", much less frequently than the earlier expression, but nonetheless out there. It may have started out as a malapropism for "stroke someone's ego", but the metaphor is different, with the ego seen as something highly combustible which is fanned to higher flames by compliments being shovelled onto it. In contrast, "stroke someone's ego" seems placatory.

Well, I think in our current circumstances we need both expressions!

Psalm: why the silent P?

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My post about the pronunciation of "salmon" (click here) elicited this entertaining story from Wordlady reader Ian Angus:

Your piece reminded me of an experience my family had in the early 1960s.

We had just moved from Vancouver to a rural area about 35 miles south of Ottawa, where much of the population was of Irish Protestant descent.

My sister was in Grade 8 in the local two-room school. Bible readings were still mandatory. One day she came home, with instructions to learn some verses from Sam 23. She diligently searched through the two Books of Samuel, and couldn't find it -- of course it was Psalm 23.

That was when we realized that the local pronunciation of the "al" in many words was a flat "a".  So palm was pam, calm was cam, and so on.

I still live in the area, and that pronunciation has long since disappeared.

I did a survey, and it transpires that this pronunciation is alive and well in Ireland, with even young people using it. There is also some evidence from Scotland. Elsewhere, however, it is dying out. In Canada, we find it, but only rarely, and among older (i.e. 70+) speakers, in areas historically dominated by Irish or Scottish  settlers: in addition to the Ottawa Valley, it is attested in southwestern Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, the Prairies. It may also be in Newfoundland but I have no information from there, so if any of you do, please let me know.

This is probably a holdover from the earliest pronunciation of "psalm", which was likely to have been S AL M. Over the centuries, the L got swallowed up into the preceding vowel, which gradually shifted to an AH sound in England. The Scots and Irish also dropped the L but their vowel sound didn't shift.

Do you know anyone who says "SAM" or "CAM" for these words? If so, where?

And lo! another silent letter! Where did that initial P come from and why don't we pronounce it?

"Psalm" is derived from post-classical Latin psalmus from ancient Greek psalmos (song sung to the harp), from psallein (to pluck, twitch, twang, play). The word was one of those ecclesiastical words borrowed fairly early into Anglo-Saxon, directly from Latin rather than by way of French as happened after the Norman Conquest. But the initial /ps/ in the pronunciation had already been simplified to /s/ in spoken post-classical Latin, so when the Romance, Germanic, and Celtic languages borrowed it, it was pronounced and written with only an initial s- . 

Because this was a religious word, and Latin was the language of the church, in some languages, spellings (but not pronunciations) with initial ps- were occasionally reintroduced by analogy with written Latin. This trend accelerated with the tendency to Latinized spellings from the Renaissance onwards. Although most European languages resisted the temptation to put a P at the beginning of the word, French, German, Dutch,and (of course) English succumbed. In French, German, and Dutch, the Latinized spelling has resulted in the initial P being now pronounced.  

But in English, as usual, we complicated our lives even more: adding the P but then keeping it silent! When will we ever learn?

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.

The L in salmon

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

"You might as well go ahead and pronounce the L in SALMON. Nothing matters anymore"

I had a bit of a chuckle, though as you know I am not judgemental about variant pronunciations.

The real question is, why DON'T we pronounce the L in "salmon"?

The word comes ultimately from the Latin salmon, but we got it by way of French, as we did with so many other food words. The French, as was their wont, had swallowed up the Latin L in their pronunciation, so by the time we English borrowed the word, it was saumon, no L in the spelling and so no L in the pronunciation. It is saumon in French to this day.

But as faithful Wordlady readers know, in English this was doomed to change, thanks to the Renaissance obsession with reflecting Latin origins in English spelling, a phenomenon responsible for many of our silent letters.  By the 17th century, the spelling without an L had died out altogether. Most of us still do pronounce the word SAMMON, but there is some evidence of people saying SALmon (or else the above meme wouldn't exist).

It is exactly the same phenomenon as happened with falcon, palm, almond, and calm.

The influence of literacy, and seeing that L before our eyes, is very strong. In this case, it is reinforced by the pronunciation of "salmonella", which is indeed pronounced -- or supposed to be pronounced -- SAL mon ella. It has nothing to do with fish (unless you eat one that's gone off). The word "salmonella" was coined in French in 1900 to honour the American veterinarian
Daniel Salmon.

How do YOU pronounce "salmon"? With an L or without? 

For more explanations of silent letters in English, go to this post: https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2014/11/silent-letters-in-english-series.html
or click on the "silent letters" tag at the bottom of this post.