Best Actress in a supporting gown

 

Photo by Adriano Gonçalves on Unsplash

Whenever the Academy Awards roll around, people have burning questions. 

Who will be best actor/actress? Which film will be the best picture? 

Who cares? 

We know what people are really interested in: the gowns.

In Late Latin, the word gunna meant "fur". By the 8th century this word was being used to mean a fur garment that elderly or sick monks were allowed to wear over their habits (it being pretty darn nippy getting up in the middle of the night in those chilly monasteries to sing one of the offices of the day). 

This was borrowed into Old French as goune, a word that has completely died out in French but survived in English after being borrowed in the 1300s. Originally it meant any flowing garment worn by either sex. This has survived in the scholar's gown worn as part of academic dress. 

Until the 18th century, "gown" was the ordinary name for a woman's garment, but it was then superseded by "dress", leaving "gown" to be used only for fancy dresses (or, as the OED inimitably puts it, "a dress with some pretension to elegance.")

It is somewhat ironic that "gown" is also used for that most un-fancy of attire, with no pretension to elegance whatsoever: the hospital gown. But, with news that fashion houses like Giorgio Armani have retooled their factories to make hospital attire (bravo them!), perhaps we will finally end up with elegant hospital gowns.

Copyright Katherine Barber 2012

Donning and doffing

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I remember about ten years ago having a good laugh when seeing a statement on a package of vinyl gloves to the effect that they were designed for easy doffing.

Haha, (said I), that's obviously one of those bad translations from Chinese! No one really says "I'm done washing the dishes and now I'm going to doff these gloves"! How very archaic/poetic. The only thing that people doff is their hat, and usually now that's only in a figurative sense of expressing acknowledgement of another's superiority, often with a connotation of subservience. I could only think of someone whipping off those vinyl gloves with a flourish.

Well, the laugh is on me because I was WRONG (again).

My instincts were not completely amiss, because this is what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say about "doff":

In ordinary colloquial use in north of England (not in Scotland). Elsewhere, since 16th century, a literary word with an archaic flavour. John Ray [17th century dialect lexicographer] noted it as a northern provincialism; Samuel Johnson [1755], as ‘in all its senses obsolete, and scarcely used except by rustics’. In 19th cent., from the time of Scott, very frequent in literary use.

Good old Sir Walter Scott, to whom we owe the revival of many archaisms.

But, as we have all come to know much more about the protective gear that hospital workers and others wear (how many of us had even heard the initialism PPE a mere month ago?), we have learned that in the medical field the word "doff", and its opposite "don" are very common indeed. 

What is the origin of these words? As soon as I tell you, you will think, "Well that's so obvious!" but it may not have occurred to you before.

They can both be traced back to Anglo-Saxon, where "do on" and "do off" were phrasal verbs meaning "put on" and "take off" (clothing). Over the years these phrasal verbs got smooshed together until we ended up with "don" and "doff". 

As to all those medical staff and  other essential workers who are busily donning and doffing all day long, I can only doff my hat to them.

How to avoid bad language advice

Today we have a guest post from John McIntyre, who has worked as an editor at The Baltimore Sun for more than thirty years and has taught editing at Loyola University Maryland since 1995. John blogs about the language at http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/

John has a new book out, in which he "sets out to expose arrant nonsense, oversimplification, and crackpot edicts". Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing is available from amazon.com and amazon.ca. You can also  order from Barnes and Noble

In Britain the monarch is never wrong. Whenever the sovereign drops a brick in public, a functionary turns up at Buckingham Palace to explain that Her/His Majesty "was badly advised."

In the same way, many of the things that you are getting wrong in writing are not your fault: you have been badly advised. You have been taught superstitions about English that have no foundation in the language. You have been hobbled with oversimplifications. You have been subjected to bizarre diktats from supposed authorities.

Much of it was well-intentioned. Grammarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lacking an established English grammar had to invent one. They turned to Latin, which had prestige and an established grammar they had been taught in schools, and they tried to adapt English to it. But Latin is a very different kind of language, and it was a bad fit.

Others have sought to tidy up the language by inventing and enforcing distinctions and prohibitions, seldom helpfully. (Look at the over/more than entry.)

We have wound up with what the linguist Arnold Zwicky has termed "zombie rules" absurd rules that have no foundation in the language and which have been repeatedly exploded by linguists and better-informed grammarians, but which roam classrooms and editorial offices like the undead.

As Henry Hitchings summed the situation up in The Language Wars, "The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance."

Likewise, advice on writing in general is marred by oversimplifications, half-heard advice, and idiosyncratic preferences--sometimes bizarre--passed off as professionalism.

Your teachers, editors, mentors, and supervisors have a lot to answer for.

And you have much to unlearn. Look inside and see.
I have kept the advice succinct. If you need further explanation on any point, look me up. If you want to argue with me, you can try.

Reviews

"This is charming and smart (one of my favorite combinations) and, to be sure, extraordinarily useful." --Benjamin Dreyer, author of Dreyer's English

"A wise and helpful book." --Mignon Fogarty (Grammar Girl)

"The world of writing advice is riddled with bogus rules, misunderstanding, and pseudo-expertise. John McIntyre's concise and witty book sets the record straight using evidence, experience, and sound judgment." --Stan Carey, writer and blogger at Sentence first and Macmillan Dictionary Blog

"Grammar pedants confirm the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Happily for us, John McIntyre has a lot of knowledge about the English language and its uses. In Bad Advice, McIntyre excoriates the simplistic, outdated and just plain wrong "rules" that have long haunted English writing. Listen to him, rather than the ghosts of English teachers past, and your writing will be all the better for it." -- Lynne Murphy, author of The Prodigal Tongue

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!