Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 10

A cache of arms not a cachet; a certain cachet, not a certain cache; commonly confused words (11-12)

[11-12 of 44 commonly confused words]

What’s the issue?,

People sometimes use cachet when cache is required, and rather more often they use cache when they mean cachet. Despite having five letters in common, and coming ultimately from the same French verb (cacher, ‘to hide’, in the case of cache), in English they are completely unrelated in meaning.

A cache of something is ‘a hidden store of weapons, provisions, treasure. etc.’ and ‘the place where such a store is hidden’. Typical caches are an arms cache or a cache of weapons/arms/explosives/munitions/ammunition. In non-military contexts, you might find a cache of letters/documents and a cache of treasures/ivory. Caches of things may be discovered unexpectedly, or may be used to conceal something illegal or suspect:

a cache of personal letters, diaries and photos from the Himmler family, long secreted in private collections in Israel and recently brought to light.

Last month nine poachers were arrested after rangers tracked them to a cache of ivory hidden in the park.

The word is pronounced exactly like cash.

Cachet is ‘prestige, high status; the quality of being respected or admired’ and rhymes with sachet.

Mechanical chronographs have had a certain cool guy cachet since the late 60s, when most of the iconic models were designed.

The next two examples show each word being used correctly:

Several inmates seized a cache of grenades and other weapons and killed six security officers, including a high-ranking counterterrorism official.

The department stores knew they had to offer something different, something perceived to have more cachet.

In this next one, cachet is wrong, and cache would be correct: Egyptian excavators this week chanced upon a cachet of limestone reliefs.

And in this one, cache is being used incorrectly for cachet:

‘Americans are very patriotic and do like to buy American,’ says Stewart. On the other hand, there’s a certain cache to a British brand – think Rolls Royce.

Mostly cache and cachet do note share collocates, that is, they are clearly differentiated in people’s minds and hence in their usage. However, they overlap in particular with regard to the following verbs: carry, attach and add.

To exemplify, if something carries cachet, is correct, but if it carries cache, it is wrong.

Correct: But for some his name carries no cachet.

Incorrect: Big-name schools carry timeless cache, but many do not yet specialize in a way that is practical. 

 

caché?

Some people also write caché for cachet. There is no such recognised word in English. Presumably, they have head the word, twig that it is French, but have never seen it written and take a guess at how to spell it without bothering to look it up.

Here’s an example:

At The Republic of East Vancouver, we tried to capitalize on this caché of East Vancouver, believing that everyone more or less knows it as a different place with a different state of mind, not just as a geographical designation.

A brief history
Cache

Cache is a word English owes to North American English and to the history of exploration in particular. It is first attested from 1797 in the journals, in English, of a Canadian fur trader and explorer, Charles Jean Baptiste Chaboillez. It is a borrowing of the French feminine noun cache, meaning ‘hiding place.’ As the OED explains, it was first used primarily by American explorers to mean ‘a hole or mound’ made to hide provisions, and the store of provisions hidden therein. In Chaboillez and early citations it is anglicised to cash.

I took advantage of a detached heap of stones,.. to make a cache of a bag of pemmican.

G. Back, Narrative of the Arctic land expedition to the mouth of the Great Fish River,  iv. 129, 1836

By 1860 it had acquired its figurative meaning generally of a hiding place, especially for treasure:

The little cache on the Orkney sea-shore, produced 16 pound weight of silver.

C. Innes, Scotland in the Middle Ages, 1860

The computing meaning of a small, high-speed memory, dates to 1968.

cachet

This is another loanword from French, derived ultimately from the verb cacher, not in the meaning ‘to hide’ but ‘to press on’. The explanation for that derivation is that a cachet in French, and originally in English (before 1639), was a physical seal, as for example on a signet ring, engraved with the emblem of its wearer. In particular, it was used in the phrase lettre de cachet, a letter from the monarch securely closed with his seal impressed in wax and often imposing imprisonment or exile. The trésor de la langue française cites this striking metaphor:

Le monde n’est qu’une cire à laquelle notre esprit comme un cachet impose son empreinte.

The world is but a piece of wax on which our mind like a seal imposes its imprint.

From that highly specific meaning it developed the figurative one of ‘distinguishing mark’, first attested in Thackeray, according to the OED:

All his works [pictures] have a grand cachet: he never did anything mean.

Paris Sketch Book I. 107, 140

The original OED entry was published in 1888 (and therefore written earlier) and did not include the modern meaning of ‘prestige, high status’. As it turns out from the updated entry, that meaning was only first attested in 1882 in a US (Ohio) source so it is hardly surprising the 1888 entry did not include it.

I’ll finish with a quote from the irrepressible Julie Burchill, which coincidentally exemplifies the most frequent collocation of cachet, namely, a certain…

And there is a certain cachet in not telling.

Sex & Sensibility (1992) 55, 1988

This is an updated and expanded version of a 2014 post.

A cache of arms not a cachet: commonly confused words (11-12)

[11-12 of 44 commonly confused words]

What’s the issue?

People sometimes use cachet when cache is required. Despite having five letters in common, and coming ultimately from the same French verb (cacher, ‘to hide’, in the case of cache), in English they are completely unrelated in meaning.

A cache of something is ‘a hidden store of weapons, provisions, treasure. etc.’ and ‘the place where such a store is hidden’. Typical caches are an arms cache or a cache of weapons/arms/explosives/munitions/ammunition. In non-military contexts, you might find a cache of letters/documents and a cache of treasures/ivory. Caches of things may be discovered unexpectedly, or may be used to conceal something illegal or suspect:

a cache of personal letters, diaries and photos from the Himmler family, long secreted in private collections in Israel and recently brought to light.

Last month nine poachers were arrested after rangers tracked them to a cache of ivory hidden in the park.

The word is pronounced exactly like cash.

Cachet is ‘prestige, high status; the quality of being respected or admired’ and rhymes with sachet.

Mechanical chronographs have had a certain cool guy cachet since the late 60s, when most of the iconic models were designed.

The next two examples show the two words being used correctly:

Several inmates seized a cache of grenades and other weapons and killed six security officers, including a high-ranking counterterrorism official;

The department stores knew they had to offer something different, something perceived to have more cachet.

In this next one, cachet is wrong, and cache would be correct: Egyptian excavators this week chanced upon a cachet of limestone reliefs.

Some people also write caché for cachet. Presumably they have head the word, twig that it is French, but have never seen it written and take a guess at how to spell it.

Here’s an example:

At The Republic of East Vancouver, we tried to capitalize on this caché of East Vancouver, believing that everyone more or less knows it as a different place with a different state of mind, not just as a geographical designation.

A brief history
Cache

Cache is a word English owes to North American English and to the history of exploration in particular. It is first attested from 1797 in the journals, in English, of a Canadian fur trader and explorer, Charles Jean Baptiste Chaboillez. It is a borrowing of the French feminine noun cache, meaning ‘hiding place.’ As the OED explains, it was first used primarily by American explorers to mean ‘a hole or mound’ made to hide provisions, and the store of provisions hidden therein. In Chaboillez and early citations it is anglicised to cash.

I took advantage of a detached heap of stones,.. to make a cache of a bag of pemmican.

G. Back, Narrative of the Arctic land expedition to the mouth of the Great Fish River,  iv. 129, 1836

By 1860 it had acquired its figurative meaning generally of a hiding place, especially for treasure:

The little cache on the Orkney sea-shore, produced 16 pound weight of silver.

C. Innes, Scotland in the Middle Ages, 1860

The computing meaning of a small, high-speed memory, dates to 1968.

cachet

This is another loanword from French, derived ultimately from the verb cacher, not in the meaning ‘to hide’ but ‘to press on’. The explanation for that derivation is that a cachet in French, and originally in English (before 1639), was a physical seal, as for example on a signet ring, engraved with the emblem of its wearer. In particular, it was used in the phrase lettre de cachet, a letter from the monarch securely closed with his seal impressed in wax and often imposing imprisonment or exile. The trésor de la langue française cites this striking metaphor:

Le monde n’est qu’une cire à laquelle notre esprit comme un cachet impose son empreinte.

The world is but a piece of wax on which our mind like a seal imposes its imprint.

From that highly specific meaning it developed the figurative one of ‘distinguishing mark’, first attested in Thackeray, according to the OED:

All his works [pictures] have a grand cachet: he never did anything mean.

Paris Sketch Book I. 107, 140

The original OED entry was published in 1888 (and therefore written earlier) and did not include the modern meaning of ‘prestige, high status’. As it turns out from the updated entry, that meaning was only first attested in 1882 in a US (Ohio) source so it is hardly surprising the 1888 entry did not include it.

I’ll finish with a quote from the irrepressible Julie Burchill, which coincidentally exemplifies the most frequent collocation of cachet, namely, a certain…

And there is a certain cachet in not telling.

Sex & Sensibility (1992) 55, 1988

This is an updated and expanded version of a 2014 post.

Averse to adverse to: 44 commonly confused words (9-10)

[9-10 of 44 commonly confused words]
1. Takeaways – in a nutshell

Using ‘to be adverse to something’ to mean ‘to dislike something’ is considered a mistake by many people, dictionaries, and usage guides.
It has been suggested this use may be more common in American English than in British English.
Beware of incorrectly using averse in phrases such as ‘to have an adverse reaction to something’.
Conversely, beware of using adverse in compound adjectives formed with averse: risk-averse, not risk-adverse.

 2. In detail: what do they mean?
2.1 Averse

How many times have you seen sentences such as ‘He was not adverse to compromising himself politically for the sake of his career’ or ‘Are Scottish people adverse to a little sex in their movies?’

They confuse two words that are almost identically spelled but have rather different meanings.

The standard construction to suggest that a person has a strong dislike of or antipathy towards something is averse to, often used with negation:

Examples (from Oxford Dictionary Online)

• Strong and aggressive, he is not averse to a bit of shirt pulling and uses his arms effectively to hold off defenders.

• Now some of you may know that if an opportunity arises of a little fun with a person of the opposite sex I’m not averse, rare as it is.

• I also stand to see the value of my property increase, which I’m not averse to.

• I am a recent alumna of the University of Waterloo and do not consider myself in any way averse to liberal writing.

• I’ve noticed I’m becoming more and more averse to what I call overt luxury.

As in all but one of the examples above — and note how most of them are first-person statements –, averse in negative contexts is often a form of ironic understatement, or litotes: ‘I’m not averse to’ means something like ‘I’m really rather keen on’ (though perhaps reluctant to admit it). All the examples above also show averse being used in the structure to be averse to, i.e. predicatively.

Averse is also often used as the second part of a compound adjective, such as risk-averse, change-averse and so forth. Occasionally NOUN–adverse is wrongly used, as in this article on the use of “guys”.

2.2 Adverse

Adverse, broadly speaking, means: “unfavourable” (an adverse balance of trade, adverse circumstances, adverse weather conditions); “hostile” (adverse criticism, an adverse reaction); or “harmful” (adverse effects)

Examples (from Oxford Dictionary Online/Oxford English Corpus)

• From 1997 to 2000, the combination of adverse weather and declining sales led to retrenchment by any cooperatives.

• A series of meetings at the department after the leak of cabinet papers and the widespread adverse reaction to the government’s plans has led ministers to slow the process.

• Such events promote Belfast’s image and go some considerable way to countering the adverse publicity the city has often received over the years.

• The trials had been cancelled after the drug was found to cause an adverse reaction.

• Roadworks on three of the routes in and out of Skipton are having an adverse effect on local businesses.

In contrast to averse, in these examples adverse modifies the following noun (in other words, it is attributive).

3. Can the word’s origins help?

Without falling into the etymological fallacy, (the notion that a word’s original meaning, or its meaning in the language from which it derives, is its only true meaning) examining these two words’ origins may help clarify the distinction between them.

Both come from Latin, and contain the Latin verb vertere, ‘to turn’, found in so many other verbs and adjectives, (convert, divert, extrovert, invert, pervert, etc).

The late 16th century averse comes from Latin aversus ‘turned away from’, past participle of avertere. The a- part gives it the meaning ‘away from’. The old-fashioned phrase ‘avert your gaze’ means ‘turn your gaze away’, in other words, ‘look away’ Remembering that, and the related noun aversion, may help to crystallise the distinction.

In contrast, adverse from Latin adversus ‘against, opposite’, suggests the notion of one thing being in opposition to another, and therefore hostile or unfavourable to it. Its related noun is adversity, a synonym for misfortune or difficulty.

4. adverse to: a complication

To be adverse to mirrors averse to structurally in certain phrases, particularly in legal contexts, e.g. ‘…”adverse party’” includes every party whose interest on the case is adverse to the interests of the appellant…’–Wisconsin Statutes, 1947;  ‘…the whole parliamentary tradition as built up in this country…is adverse to it’–Winston Churchill, 1942. But in this meaning, it refers to things, to external circumstances, whereas, as we have seen, averse to refers to someone’s personal tastes and inclinations.

5. What do usage guides say?

The Oxford Dictionary Online has a note that calls e.g. ‘He is not adverse to making a profit’ a mistake. The AP Style Guide and the British Guardian Style Guide draw an absolute distinction between the two words, as does Fowler. [image error]Merriam-Webster’s Concise English Usage has a long, scholarly, slightly non-committal discussion pointing to potential overlaps between the two words. The grammar checker in Microsoft’s Word will flag up ‘not adverse to’ as a mistake — which is helpful for many people, but could cause problems for those — often, but not necessarily, lawyers — who are using it correctly.

A quick scan of Google Ngrams for ‘not averse to’ and ‘not adverse to’ suggests that while ‘not adverse to’ was previously often confined to legal contexts of the kind mentioned at 4. above, recent decades show an increase in its use as a substitute for the preferred ‘not averse to’.

In the Oxford English Corpus, a simple search for ‘adverse to’ shows that in British English 60 per cent of examples are in legal contexts, and therefore assumed to be correct, but in American English that figure is less than 1 per cent.

Bounders, cads, nincompoops, trollops, balderdash & other words in that list unknown to the young

[image error] Grateful thanks to the people who made this digital version available at https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/page-view/?i=1364

A couple of weeks ago some British media were agog with the news – ‘Shock! Horror!’ – that twenty words in a list compiled by a research agency were largely unfamiliar to people in the 18–30 age group. The results showing the percentages of people who didn’t know each one are listed at the end of this piece and there is a link here to an article about the survey.

I have no idea who compiled the list or how they did so. Several things, though, struck me. First, some words (e.g. bounder, cad, trollop) were old-fashioned even when I was growing up. They are the sort of words I might have heard my parents use, and even then, if air quotes had been invented, I feel sure Mum and Dad would have used them.

Second, many of them were from the slang/informal (boogie, brill, lush, minted, randy) areas of English vocabulary, which, naturally, changes over time and can sometimes change very fast.

Third, and largely as a corollary of the previous point, many of them were insults or somehow dismissive. Slagging someone or something off is always fun, it seems. Fourth, some are marked by (some) dictionaries as especially British (cad, bounder, yonks), even if that limitation turns out not to be exactly true. Finally, one group contained words which, at a guess, I would say are of some considerable vintage, such as nincompoop, balderdash, betrothed, kerfuffle, and sozzled.  

The list set me thinking about how old some of these words are and about how short-lived – or ephemeral, if you want a posher word – slang can be.

I’ve grouped the words into loose piles and briefly describe the history of each, with examples. Because describing them shows signs of turning into an epic, I’m going to deal with ten in this blog and ten in the next.

Definitions and formality/informality etc. markings are from the Collins Unabridged Dictionary online.

Investigation reveals, inter alia, stories of Scottish ancestry, Oxbridge and public-school snobbery, Dr Johnson’s cod etymology, stomach-churning concoctions and a ‘discernment’ of homographs – I think that’s the appropriate collective noun. (H/T @tonythorne007). 

Old-fashioned even in my parents’ day

bounder – old-fashioned, British slang; ‘a morally reprehensible person; cad.’

It’s interesting that the above definition proffers cad as a synonym; they have the same period flavour. 

Bounder has to me a feel of Victoriana, and sure enough, according to the OED, it first appears in print in a major 1889 dictionary of slang, Barrère & Leland’s Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant (B&L) so must have been in the air before then. The OED entry [1933] notes ‘occasionally applied to a woman’ (one citation, by Angela Brazil, in The New Girl at St Chad’s) but it seems, surely, a generally male epithet. Chambers Slang Dictionary suggests that in origin the word describes someone who bounds about. What the OED citations make clear is that the word started as university slang (i.e. Oxbridge); B&L defined it thus:

a student whose manners are despised by the soi-disant élite, or who is beyond the boundary of good fellowship…(society), a swell, a stylish fellow, but of a very vulgar type

The next citation, from The Times a year later (1890) echoes that:

To speak of a man as a bounder is to allude to him as an outsider or cad. 

Thereafter, it seems the word developed from social disapproval to moral turpitude. The last OED citation is by that bounder Somerset Maugham, suggesting that ‘Women … adore a bounder’, a self-justifying male excuse for bad behaviour if ever there was one.

cad – British informal, old-fashioned; ‘someone who does not treat other people with courtesy and consideration.’

Before checking, I surmised that this, too, is Victorian or Edwardian. That turns out to be true in the meaning we’re looking at, but there’s a bit of backstory too. Cad is a truncated version of Scottish caddie, nowadays used to refer to a golfer’s little helper. However, earlier (1754) caddie meant, as the OED puts it, ‘A lad or man who waits about on the lookout for chance employment as a messenger, errand-boy…etc.’ Then, in the early nineteenth century the short form cad was part of Eton and Oxford slang to refer to people who were ‘not one of us’, that is, townspeople in Oxford, or at Eton ‘low fellows, who hang about the college to provide the Etonians with anything necessary to assist their sports’ (1831). From being the preserve of the educationally privileged it then passed to mean ‘a fellow of low vulgar manners and behaviour’ to which definition the OED adds the surely superfluous (An offensive and insulting appellation.) However, that entry was written in 1888, so the health warning was probably necessary at the time.

That these two words are far from dead, and, equally, not confined to Britain, becomes clear from Merriam-Webster online, where there are recent press citations referring to actors or characters in books having the said moral character.

With trollop and randy we move from social manners to sex and, sadly, to the masculine denigration of women.

I am not sure if I am imagining I heard one or other of my parents coming out with the jingle Brandy to make you randy, Gin to make you sin – perhaps when being offered a drink. It sounds like forces or wartime slang, which would fit my parents’ wartime experience.  

randy – Collins defines randy thus:

informal, mainly British

a. sexually excited or aroused

b. sexually eager or lustful

Randy has a much longer history than bounder or cad, stretching all the way back to 1665. It derives, probably, from the obsolete verb rand, a form of rant, and was originally Scots. It went through a larva and chrysalis phase before emerging, resplendent or otherwise, in its modern meaning:

larval stage (1665–2003): ‘loud-mouthed, coarsely spoken, esp. of beggars’ (OED [Dec. 2008]):

Nothing but scolding and noise;…I’d rather not marry at all: if she is thus randy beforehand what will she be afterwards?

M. Pix Innocent Mistress II. 11, 1697

chrysalis stage (1723–1935): ‘Boisterous, riotous, disorderly – Chiefly Scottish and English regional’ (OED):

That young bay [horse] you’ll find a little randy, With rather more of ‘devil’ than comes handy.

The now defunct British satirical magazine, Punch, 8 Mar. 1884  

butterfly stage (1771–…). The OED cites a startling Steinbeck quotation:

Fust time I ever laid with a girl…snortin’ like a buck deer, randy as a billygoat.  

Grapes of Wrath vi. 69, 1939

Talk of brandy and gin leads on seamlessly (I had to think hard about the spelling there) to sozzled.

sozzled – Respondents maxed out on ignorance of this word (40%), which surprised me; to me it seemed like a standard, though not core, part of vocabulary. But then that probably just shows my age. Collins marks it as informal and defines it simply as ‘drunk’.

Which loses, IYAM, its somewhat (self-)forgiving nuance. The OED [1986] marks it as beyond informal, that is, as slang. Its first written record is in 1892, in a British newspaper, the Sporting Times. It comes from the verb to sozzle, which in the U.S. has the meaning ‘to splash’. That fits meaning wise but is puzzling, given that the first citation of sozzled is British. In British dialect in the nineteenth century, to sozzle is attested as meaning ‘to mix or mingle in a sloppy manner’ (OED [1913]). As drunksh shtereotypically shlur their wordsh, exchush me, officer, perhaps that fits as an origin. The next citation nicely illustrates an outraged continuum of inebriation:

I wasn’t what you’d call sozzled. I might have been lit up a bit, but sozzled—no.

Blackwood’s Mag. Feb. 157/1, 1921

trollop – Collins defines it as below for British English, and pronounces it derogatory:

1. a promiscuous woman.

2. an untidy woman; slattern.

In its American English incarnation (Webster’s New World College, 4th edn.), Collins reverses those two meanings and pronounces the word rare:

1.   a slovenly, dirty woman; slattern.

2.  a sexually promiscuous woman; specif., a prostitute.

I’d be interested to know if that order reflects the hierarchy of meaning in American minds. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged seems to bear it out, though.

It is first attested in print in 1615, in the ‘wanton woman’ meaning. In other words, that predates the ‘slattern’ meaning. As to where it comes from, well, several sources (Collins, Webster’s, Merriam-Webster) suggest a link with German Trolle, wench or prostitute. The OED rather tentatively suggests a connection with the earlier noun trull (also meaning a woman ‘of low morals’), which it links to German Trulle;  or with the verb to troll, meaning ‘to move to and fro, to saunter’ and other shades of movement. The –op ending might be related to the suffix found in dollop, lollop and the like.

(As an aside, Shakespeare uses the word trull four times, perhaps most notably in Richard Plantagenet, the Duke of Gloucester’s, rant against Queen Margaret (of Anjou) in Henry VI, Part I

She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France,
Whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth!
How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex
To triumph, like an Amazonian trull,
Upon their woes whom fortune captivates!)

I’m pretty sure my parents might have used trollop, for example, to criticise a woman who was overdressed or ‘tartily’ dressed. Otherwise, of course, it could have entered my vocabulary from reading. As it happens, growing up I rarely had to use a dictionary; if I came across a new word, my parents could usually define it for me quite satisfactorily, which makes me reflect how lucky I was in that – and so many other – respects.  

The OED entry (2020) remarks: ‘Now often considered somewhat old-fashioned and typically used self-consciously for stylistic or humorous effect.’ It is hard to see how it could indeed be used other than tongue-in-cheek. Respondents to the survey thought that some words should be allowed to die if considered insulting, and this is surely one such.

It has, nevertheless, other meanings, or rather, as a verb it is still used colloquially to mean ‘to walk in a clumsy or ungainly’ (OED [June 2020]) way, and in Scotland, Australia and New Zealand, of something, especially clothing, that dangles down:

One tail of his gown escaped from a jacket pocket to trollop around his feet.   

B. Kiely, There was Ancient House v. 213, 1955

And in Scottish English, trollopy has a long history (1748, at least; OED [June 2020]) of describing clothing that hangs loose and untidily. If you didn’t know that, the next quotation could easily be misinterpreted;

I am forced to agree with Mr Charles Edmond, of Tighnabruaich*, who laments the modern tendency to wear the kilt in such a ‘trollopy’ fashion.

Express, 18 September 2002

* Generally pronounced as tie-nah-BREW-ich; listen here. It means ‘the house on the hill’ in Scots Gaelic.

Stuff and nonsense!

From lack of morals, we move on to four words suggesting lack of intelligence or lack of meaning: balderdash, tosh, nincompoop and wally.

balderdash – ‘stupid or illogical talk; senseless rubbish.’

Collins Unabridged assigns it no usage label, but Collins Cobuild (for learners of English) marks it old–fashioned.

It’s got a lot going for it as a put-down, if you ask me. Its syllables starting with a(n) (ex)plosive b–d–d respectively bestow on it at a certain weightiness. Then it’s got three syllables, unlike lamer alternatives such as rubbish, boll***s, claptrap, nonsense and so forth. In fact, the only word to rival it in my view is poppycock, similarly syllabled but rather less antique (1852, OED). (If you wish to gorge on the numerous synonyms in the field of nonsense, Merriam-Webster and Collins have excellent lists.) Merriam-Webster goes into the history of 10 words for nonsense here.

For balderdash qua word (I had to get qua in there, sorry) goes back to that Blackadderish Elizabethan Thomas Nashe in 1596. Its modern meaning is first recorded in print in Marvell’s work in 1674 (OED [1885 entry]).

As for where it comes from, it belongs to that forlorn troop in the OED of ‘etymology unknown’. In Nashe it seems to refer to froth or frothy liquid, and a few years later to an unappetising ‘jumbled mixture of liquors, e.g. of milk and beer, beer and wine…’

Beere, by a Mixture of Wine..hath lost both Name and Nature, and is called Balderdash.

J. Taylor Drinke & Welcome sig. B3, 1637

Meh! or Ew!

tosh – slang, mainly British. ‘nonsense; rubbish.’

Here’s a word of no great antiquity and unknown etymology. Being short, it sounds almost like an exclamation. The OED [1913] attests it first in 1892 in the Oxford University Magazine, which might suggest that it too, like bounder, started life as university slang:

To think what I’ve gone through to hear that man! Frightful tosh it’ll be, too.
 

Oxford University Magazine 26 Oct. 26/1 

Merriam-Webster dates it to 1528, which is puzzling.

nincompoop – informal; ‘a foolish person.’

Yet another word whose origins are murky. I seem to remember being told, perhaps at school, that it came from non compos, short for non compos mentis, ‘not of sound mind’. It turns out that is the etymology posited by Dr Johnson, who was not, let’s face it, terribly hot on word origins. (The page with his entry heads this post.) He saith [a corruption of the Latin non compos]. In hindsight, that sounds like a classic linguistic urban myth, like posh being from ‘port out starboard home’. On its first written appearance c. 1668, the word was not spelled as we know it today but nickumpoop and later as nicompoop, which leads the OED [Sept. 2003] to hazard a derivation from a real person’s name, presumably Nicolas, Nicodemus, etc.

Other possible connections according to the OED are with a) an obsolete verb to poop, meaning to ‘fool, deceive or cheat’; and b) ninny, for the forms that have that first-syllable ‘n’. The OED also labels the word slang and regional. It does not strike me as the first, and I wonder which regions.

Despite its evident shortcomings, Dr J’s entry reminds me of that exquisite word ninnyhammer (1592), meaning the same as nincompoop.

Among nincompoop’s derivatives is the rather wonderful nincompoopery, that is, the action or behaviour of a nincompoop: ‘No 1970s rock star indulged in prog nincompoopery with such gusto’, opined someone in the Guardian.

wally – derogatory, slang; ‘a foolish person.’

Given that 36 per cent of respondents didn’t know this twentieth-century word, it seems to have enjoyed a rather curtailed shelf life. And given, also, that the majority of my visitors are from the US, it is only polite to tell you that the first vowel in wally is the same as in sorry or golly. This becomes important later, to distinguish it from its homographs.

First cited in print in 1922 (OED [June 2019]), it meant at the time ‘unfashionable person’. It is only in 1980 that it surfaces in print meaning ‘a foolish person’. The OED labels it only ‘mildly derogatory’, which chimes with me: you can say someone is ‘a bit of a wally’, that is, it’s gradable, whereas I think you couldn’t temper, say, nincompoop in that way because it’s an absolute, IMHO. I think I first heard it from a Northern friend in the 1990s and marked it in my mental lexicon as ‘Northern’ – which I now think is not correct. Collins Cobuild marks it as British, and Merriam-Webster online confirms that by not including it.

Its origins are ‘uncertain’ in OED-speak. Possibly, it might derive from the name Walter: after all, people can be proper Charlies, namby-pamby comes from the name Ambrose Philips, and, militarily, a Rupert is a bit of a chinless wonder. Alternatively, it might just come from a different wally noun, meaning a large, pickled cucumber. Go figure. But there is, I suppose, pea-brained in a similarly vegetative metaphor.

But wally also dons a different garb and again, like cad, that garb is a kilt. In fact, there are three homographs — two nouns and three adjectives. Pronounced in several ways, the first vowel aligning in British English with whale (Collins, M-W), or hat (OED ) is the adjective wally1, wallie and other variants meaning ‘excellent, fine, splendid’ or ‘imposing, strong, sturdy’. It’s Scots, mostly archaic but still occasionally seen, and is used most notably in Burns’ Address to a Haggis:

But mark the Rustic, haggis fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He’ll mak it whissle;
An’ legs an’ arms, an’ heads will sned,
Like taps o’ thrissle.

In modern English:

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his ample fist a blade,
He’ll make it whistle;
And legs, and arms, and heads will cleave,
Like the heads of thistles.

And then there’s a second adjective wally or wallie and other variants meaning ‘made of china or porcelain’, which the OED and the Dictionary of the Scots Language group as a sense of the previous adjective but Collins lists as a separate word with a separate origin. From it we have the plural noun wallies for dentures (false teeth) because they were once made of porcelain; a wally close, for the tiled entrance hall to a typical tenement (block of flats/apartment block); and wally dugs, for the china dogs on the mantelpiece typical of rustic Victorian décor.

brill – British slang; ‘excellent or wonderful.’

Like ‘fab’, as in ‘The Fab Four’, here’s an informal word created by shortening, like dozens in everyday use (comfy, delish, glam, admin, info, etc.). I certainly remember using brill – I would say in the late 1980s early 1990s – but the shine soon wore off and it became as stale as last week’s croissants. Even at its height, one felt slightly self-conscious about using it. First attested as recently (in the grand scheme of things) as 1981 (OED [1989]), [I know that’s a dangling or unattached participle, but my meaning is clear] I hadn’t heard or read it for a long time, but it seems to be far from dead. Perhaps it’s just become part of standard language, rather than ‘slang’. if you use the search filter on Twitter (the backslash, \) and enter ‘brill’ you will find quite a few tweets containing the word (apart from the surname). I was quite surprised to find an actor and poet who stars in the long-running radio soap The Archers using it merely days ago (at the time of writing this) and he is certainly not long in the tooth. Moreover, he tells me, it’s part of his idiolect (his personal vocabulary — we all have one) and he doesn’t use it ironically — or even semi-ironically. I must try using it again myself and watch people’s expressions.

I know #TheArchers in COVID mode wasn’t to everyone’s taste but the team did a brill job to keep us on the air.

Ben Norris, ‘Ben’ in The Archers, on Twitter 11 October 2020

Sozzled (40%) – Very drunk
2. Cad (37%) – A man who is dishonest or treats other people badly
3. Bonk (37%) – Have sexual intercourse
4. Wally (36%) – A stupid person
5. Betrothed (29%) – Engaged to be married
6. Nincompoop (28%) – A stupid person
7. Boogie (28%) – Dance to pop music
8. Trollop (27%) – A woman who has many casual sexual encounters or relationships
9. Bounder (27%) – A dishonourable man
10. Balderdash (27%) – Senseless talk or writing; nonsense
11. Henceforth (26%) – From this or that time on
12. Yonks – (25%) – A very long time
13. Lush – (23%) – Very good or impressive
14. Tosh – (23%) – Rubbish; nonsense
15. Swot – (22%) – A person who studies hard
16. Brill – (21%) – Excellent; great
17. Kerfuffle – (20%) – A commotion or fuss
18. Randy – (19%) – Sexually aroused or excited
19. Disco – (17%) – A club or party at which people dance to music
20. Minted – (15%) – Having a lot of money; rich







References

“balderdash, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/14835. Accessed 11 October 2020.

“Balderdash.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/balderdash. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.

“bounder, n.2.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/22059. Accessed 11 October 2020.

“cad, n.4.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/25902. Accessed 11 October 2020.

“Cad.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cad. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.

“nincompoop, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/127179. Accessed 11 October 2020.

“Ninnyhammer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ninnyhammer. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.

“randy, adj. and n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/157992. Accessed 11 October 2020.

“sozzled, adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/185411. Accessed 11 October 2020.

“tosh, n.2.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September “trollop, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/206628. Accessed 11 October 2020.

“Trollop.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trollop. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.

“trollop, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/84491097. Accessed 11 October 2020.

“wally, adj.1, n.1, and adv.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/225351. Accessed 9 October 2020.

“wally, n.3 and adj.3.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/225349. Accessed 9 October 2020.

“Wally.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wally. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.

Voracious or veracious readers? Commonly confused words (7-8)

3-minute read

[7-8 of 44 commonly confused words]

I’ve seen a few profiles on Twitter of people who call themselves “veracious readers“. Presumably they mean “voracious readers“. If so, their self-styled title is deeply ironic: even if they read a lot, they cannot be very attentive to the spelling of their reading matter.

Merriam-Webster drolly quips that a voracious reader ‘couldn’t put it down’ while a voracious reader ‘admits they’re just at book club for the wine’. 

Voracious refers to people who eat a lot, and then, as a metaphor, to people who engage in an activity with great gusto and enthusiasm. At several removes, it’s related to the verb devour, since both derive from Latin vorāre. The classic noun that goes with it is reader, but other voracious things or people are appetite, eater, hunger, consumer and demand. 

Customs revenues have risen, along with Americans’ voracious appetite for foreign goods.

By ten, I was already a voracious reader. 

Americans, the most voracious consumers in the world, are doing something completely different these days .

Veracious, in contrast, is a really rather rare word, meaning “truthful”, e.g. a veracious witness to great and grave events. So, a “veracious reader” would be a truthful one, though I doubt that is the claim people describing themselves as such are making. Like voracious, it too derives ultimately from Latin, from the word for “true”, vērus, which has given us words such as verify, verity, and the vera of Aloe vera.

Here’s a nice quotation about a book of poems:

There’s an uncomfortably veracious centrepiece poem, Closure, about the untidy end of a marriage, which says it all, leaving the narrator spotting his reflection in the kettle, “a tiny bulbous shape puzzling at itself”.

Veracious is also used by mistake in phrases such as *veracious appetite instead of the correct voracious appetite.

Of course, veracious may be just a homophone typo for voracious. What I mean is that it is fatally easy to have two words in your mental lexicon that sound exactly the same, and to key one instead of the other, such as “two” for “too“. You know the difference, but when you type with only half a mind on what you’re doing, the wrong one takes over.

In case you’re not convinced that the two words sound the same, here is the phonetic spelling of voracious /vəˈreɪʃəs/, and here it is for veracious: /vəˈreɪʃəs/. Identical. The villain of the piece is that tricksy little symbol /ə/, which occurs in the first and last syllables. It represents the “uh” sound known as a “schwa“, which is responsible for a huge number of spelling mistakes in English.

 

home in or hone in? Both right? Commonly confused words (3-4)

3-4 of 44 words not to confuse

What’s the issue?

Which of these two sentences do you think is correct? Or do you think both are?

A teaching style which homes in on what is important for each pupil.

Or

A teaching style which hones in on what is important for each pupil.

Where you live in the English-speaking world will affect your opinion.

Which also means that whichever version you use, someone somewhere is likely to consider it wrong. (And if they are of the ‘grammar’ pedantry persuasion, to take great delight in doing so.)

(But if you are not a British English speaker, the chances are that you’ll plump for the second one.)

A handful of examples

Home

Once again the media homed in on Tyrannosaurus.

American Scientist

DRUG dealers were today warned that the police were homing in on them after a man caught with drugs worth £26,000 was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in jail.

Bolton Evening News (UK)

Hone

The writer Malcolm Hulke really seems to be honing in on the anxieties of the time, by focusing on the pollution of the planet and leaving the earth uninhabitable.

The Independent blog (UK).

Yes, they had those rhetorically brilliant 1858 debates, but the election of 1860, waged in a fiercely divided country, also honed in on the candidates’ appearances [sic].

Boston Globe.

 

Tapas menu

Hone in seems to be as widely used as home in, if not more widely.
If you use hone in, you are (globally) in the majority, but several reputable sources view it as a mistake.
For many people, however, it is the only correct version, and makes sense semantically.
Both phrasal verbs can be seen as “skunked”, i.e. they will offend someone’s linguistic sense of smell, so they might be best avoided.
There is an argument that hone in is a separate development, not a mistake.
Users of each version can easily find justifications for it – specious or otherwise, selon votre goût.

À la carte menu

Read on …

Take Our Poll
Worldwide, more people use hone in than home in. 

A US copywriter spotted “home in” in a blog of mine, and kindly pointed out what she thought was a typo. She was surprised when I told her it was intentional. In a straw poll in her office – this was in the US, remember – everyone agreed hone was the only correct version.

That surprised me. I was familiar with the “home in” version, whose meaning has always seemed self-evident to me: I think of a  homing pigeon returning to a specific place, or a missile homing in on its target, and therefore to home in on something is to target it or pinpoint it (or, as the ODO definition goes, “Move or be aimed towards (a target or destination) with great accuracy“).

Consequently, as a British English speaker, I have occasionally winced when, for example, British HR-obots talked about “honing in on” a particular point or issue. Shurely shome mishtake, I thought, a misinterpretation, a malapropism, an eggcorn.

I first posted on this topic about 18 months ago, and since then, having looked at more data, I am obliged to change my mind. For it seems that the home in version is a) less frequent across all varieties of English and b) shows signs of being ousted even in British English by the hone in version.

Some figures

The figures I mention do not show exactly the same picture. Nevertheless …

1 I looked in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), which consists of about 2.6 billion words of data from US, British and several other varieties of English. (Or, to indicate its vast size another way, over 112 million sentences of English.)

I looked for in + on after the lemmas home and hone (i.e. all forms, home, homes, homed, homing, hone, etc.). Overall, hone in on is slightly more frequent, with 700 instances against 655.

Looking at regional variation within those figures gives us this table:

Regional variety
home in on
hone in on


British English
 283
 67


American English
254
 419


unknown
57
 69


Australian English
16
 37


Irish English
13
 47


South African English
8
 6


New Zealand English
6
 12


East Asian English
6
 8


Canadian English
5
 30


Indian English
4
 3


Caribbean English
3
 2


TOTALS
655
700

Only in British (and three other varieties, with very low figures, also italicised) is home commoner. The ratio in BrE of home: hone is 80.9:19.1%.

Outside US and Canadian English, the highest ratio of hone: home is in Irish English (78.3:21.7%).

For the US, the ratio is 62.3:37.7%, and for Canada it is 85.7:14.3%.

2 Looking at the Global Corpus of Web-Based English (GloWbE, pronounced “globe”, 1.9 billion words from 1.8 million web pages) produces rather different results.

Across all 20 varieties of English covered, hone greatly outnumbers home: 786 vs 283 instances.

The figures below show figures for US, Canadian and British English.

All

US
CAN
GB


 HOMING IN ON
122

29
3
45


 HOMED IN ON
115

20
7
37


 HOMES IN ON
29

3
1
13


 HOME IN ON
17

2
1
8


 TOTAL
283

54
12
103







ALL

US
CA
GB


 HONE IN ON
411

124
42
73


 HONING IN ON
154

42
20
31


 HONED IN ON
145

43
14
27


 HONES IN ON
76

20
5
12


 TOTAL
786

229
81
143

The ratio of hone:home for the US (81:19%) is higher still than in the OEC, while for Canada it is very similar. For Britain, however, the OEC figures are completely reversed in favour of hone: 58.1:41.9%.

In all other varieties, hone wins.

3 Google books Ngrams shows the lemma home +  in on as more frequent than hone +  in on, e.g., for the string home in on 10 occurrences per million words in 2000 vs 3 per million in 1999 for hone in on. It also shows a steep rise from the 1970s onwards.

But hone in on just doesn’t make sense! It’s obviously a crass mistake!!

Mmmmm. It clearly does make sense to very many people, including George Bush.**

For it to be a mistake, it would have to be clear that home in on was well established before the arrival of hone in on . That is not indisputably so, as Mark Liberman suggested in some detail a while ago.
The sense development of home in on is fairly clear (see OED citations at the end), but what of hone in on ? After all, the core meaning of hone is “to sharpen a blade” (1788), so what has that got to do with “focussing on something”?

Showing the word’s metaphorical extension, the second OED definition of hone is “To refine or practise (a skill, technique, etc.); to make more effective or intense.” The first example in this category is from 1914, but then the next one is from 1955, and the OED notes “Before the mid 20th cent. usu. as part of an extended metaphor”. 1955 is only ten years before the first appearance of hone in.

Well, as regards going from “sharpening” to “focussing”, Grammarist suggests this: “Hone means to sharpen or to perfect, and we can think of homing in as a sharpening of focus or a perfecting of one’s trajectory toward a target. So while it might not make strict logical sense, extending hone this way is not a huge leap.”

Judging by some online comments, some people even see a meaning distinction between the two forms: “’home in’ and ‘hone in’ do not mean the same thing. They have similar but distinct meanings. ‘Home in’ means to get closer to like a missile homing in on its target, while ‘hone in’ means to pay close attention to or listen to something.”

Mark Liberman suggests in detail a development I shall summarize like this:

hone (down) X = “improve X by sharpening focus on the essentials and eliminating or ignoring extraneous materials” –> hone in on Y = “reach Y by a process of successively sharpening focus while eliminating extraneous material.”

What do dictionaries and usage guides say?

A couple of dictionaries list hone in on with no comment, but several others consider it a mistake.

Several style guides take that same view; some set great store by the physical meaning of hone, in a way that comes close to being the etymological fallacy.

Oxford Dictionaries Online in both World English and US versions notes at home in on that hone is quite common in mainstream US writing, but that many people still consider it a mistake, as do Collins and freedictionary.com. Macmillan lists it with no comment.

The OED makes no bones about calling hone in the result of “folk etymology”.
My revised (4th) edition of  Fowler’s Modern English Usage  covers similar territory to this blog more briefly, but suggests avoiding either word altogether.
Merriam-Webster notes the existence of hone in and suggests that it “seems to have become established in American usage”. The American Heritage College Dictionary (2004) gives “to direct one’s attention; focus” as a meaning of hone in.
Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, however, considers it unequivocally wrong.
The Guardian style guide notes, somewhat acidly, “home in on, not hone in on, which suggests you need to hone your writing skills.” Neither The Economist nor The Telegraph guides mentions it.
The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edn., notes: home in. This phrase is frequently misrendered hone in. (Hone means “to sharpen.”) Home in refers to what homing pigeons do; the meaning is “to come closer and closer to a target.”
The Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage charts the development of hone in on, but notes that “If you use it, you should be aware that some people will think that you have made a mistake.”

Various online grammar sites also castigate hone in on as a mistake for home in on. One site (Grammarist), which is more permissive, attracted 57 tetchy and not so tetchy comments, mostly against hone in on.

So…? What should I do?

The hone in variant has been around for half a century. It is used in many parts of the Anglosphere. As discussed, some dictionaries list it without comment, while others warn against it, as do many usage and style manuals.

If you use it, you are unlikely to be misunderstood. However, if you do use it, bear in mind that some people will consider it a mistake, and therefore conclude that you can’t use English “correctly”. And others will come to the same conclusion if you use home in.

To steer clear of the problem, why not use focus on, concentrate on, zero in on, or any other synonym that suits your context?

** From Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. “An issue looming on the usage horizon is the propriety of the phrase hone in on. George Bush’s use of this phrase in the 1980 presidential campaign (he talked of ‘honing in on the issues’) caught the critical eye of political columnist Mary McCrory, and her comments on it were noted, approved, and expanded by William Safire. Safire observed that hone in on is a confused variant of home in on, and there seems to be little doubt that he was right. . . . Our first example of home in on is from 1951, in a context having to do with aviation. Our earliest record of its figurative use is from 1956. We did not encounter hone in on until George Bush used it in 1980. . . .”

*** OED definitions / earliest citations. (Italics in examples mine.)

HOME

a. intr. Of a homing pigeon: to fly back to its ‘home’ or loft after being released at a distant point; to arrive at the loft at the end of such a flight. Hence of any animal: to return to some specific territory or spot after having left it or having been removed from it. Freq. with to.

1854   Poultry Chron. 1 573/2   It is generally considered that a cock [pigeon] homes quickest when driving to nest, and a hen when she is feeding squabs.

…

intr a. Of a vessel, aircraft, missile, etc.: to move or be guided to a target or destination by use of a landmark or by means of a radio signal, detection of a heat signature, etc. Usu. with in on, or less commonly on, on to, or towards. Cf. hone v.4

1920   Wireless World Mar. 728/2   The pilot can detect instantly from the signals, especially if ‘homing’ towards a beacon.

1947   J. G. Crowther & R. Whiddington Sci. at War 119   Torpedoes and bombs that follow or ‘home’ on to their targets.

1968   Galaxy Mag. Nov. 107/1   The only way another ship could get here would be to home in on the drone that our Line ship homed in on.

…

NB: the previous version of the entry had a 1956 US citation for home in on, in the physical sense.

b. fig.To make something the sole object of one’s attention; to focus intently on something. Cf.hone v.4

1955   C. M. Kornbluth Mindworm 53   That was near. He crossed the street and it was nearer. He homed on the thought.

1971   New Scientist 16 Sept. 629/1   Mexico’s Professor S. F. Beltran homed in on education as a critical need.

…

HONE4

It should be noted that this is a new 3rd edn. entry from 2004, which treats hone here as a homograph of hone3 with its meaning of “to sharpen.” I think previously both were grouped under the same headword.

Etymology:  Apparently a variant or alteration of another lexical item. Etymons: home v.

Apparently an alteration of home v. (see home v. 5a), probably arising by folk-etymological association with hone v.3

orig. U.S.

 intr. to hone in: to head directly for something; to turn one’s attention intently towards something. Usu. with on. Cf. home v. 5a.

1965   G. Plimpton Paper Lion vii. 62   Then he’d fly on past or off at an angle, his hands splayed out wide, looking back for the ball honing into intercept his line of flight.

1967   N.Y. Times 5 Nov. iii. 10/1   A few who know the wearer well recognize that something is different without honing in on the hairpiece.

…

Flaunting or flouting the law? Commonly confused words (5-6)

[5-6 of 44 commonly confused words]

(Four-minute read.)

I’ve been prompted by a comment on this site (h/t Rick), and by seeing flaunt for flout recently, to revise and republish this post from the early days of this blog.

What’s the issue?

Put simply, it is this: Are people who write sentences such as ‘motorists who blatantly flaunt the regulations for their safety and well-being’ (instead of flout) woefully ignorant dunderheads who need remedial English and should not be allowed into print, or are they just following a long-standing and perfectly legitimate linguistic trend?

How you answer that question defines your place on the descriptive-prescriptive spectrum (if you answered yes to the first alternative, you are probably an out-and-out prescriptivist). Your answer could also depend on where you live, and which dictionary or usage guide you take as your bible.

What do these words mean?

Though sounding similar, they have—at least in origin—rather different meanings. If you flaunt something, you show it off in a way which is brash and overdone. The very use of the word suggests that you don’t approve of whoever is doing the flaunting. Typical things that people flaunt are their wealth, their sexuality, and themselves, or bits of their anatomy (ahem!).

He flaunts his riches like everyone in the business.

Women should have it both ways—they should be able to flaunt their sexuality and be taken seriously.

Katie seemed to be flaunting herself a little too much for Elizabeth’s liking.

If you flout a law, rules, regulations, convention, and semantically related nouns, you do not obey them, and you treat them with blatant disregard.

Around 10 smokers were openly flouting the ban when the Health Board’s environmental health inspectors arrived.

Spain s Duchess of Alba, known as the ‘rebel noble,’ has died at age 88. The wealthiest woman in Spain, she was also a bohemian, famous for her eccentric style and for flouting convention in numerous ways.

In another case, it rejected the appeal of a New Mexico photographer accused of flouting anti-discrimination laws by refusing to photograph a same-sex wedding.

A quote from Chinua Achebe (1987) illustrates the confusion between the two. ‘Your Excellency, let us not flaunt the wishes of the people.’ ‘Flout, you mean,’ I said. ‘The people?’ asked His Excellency, ignoring my piece of pedantry.

Unlike some other pairs of confusable words, such as lord/laud, the confusion here seems to work only in one direction. IOW, people do not use flout instead of flaunt.

What do dictionaries and usage guides say?

Merriam-Webster gives that transitive use of flaunt two definitions.

1 to display ostentatiously or impudently:

2 to treat contemptuously

while adding a note, which states that the use of flaunt in this way ‘undoubtedly arose from confusion with flout’, but that the contexts in which it appears cannot be considered ‘substandard’.

On the other side of the pond, Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO) states categorically that the two words ‘may sound similar but they have different meanings’. [image error]The 1993 draft addition to the OED entry for flaunt notes that the usage ‘clearly arose by confusion, and is widely considered erroneous’.

Various British usage guides maintain the distinction rigidly, and the Economist style guide’s witty note runs ‘Flaunt means display; flout means disdain. If you flout this distinction, you will flaunt your ignorance’. The Australian Macquarie Dictionary notes ‘Flaunt is commonly confused with flout’.

Nevertheless, ODO admits that in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) ‘the second and third commonest objects of flaunt, after wealth, are law and rules’.

What does the evidence say?

Other corpora (Corpus of Contemporary American, the NOW corpus, and the Global Corpus of web-based English (GloWbE) present a similar picture of the most frequent collocates of flaunt. For instance, in GloWbE, the most common noun object of flaunt is wealth, followed in equal second place by body and law. The other corpora show a similar pattern.

However, if you look at relative frequency, that is, at how often each verb has as its object a noun in the semantic field of ‘law, regulation, etc.’, things start to look rather different. For instance, in GloWbE again, you have the following (flout/flaunt) ratio:

law 287:37

laws 100:18

rules 212:25

convention 31:3

That shows a percentage of between 10 and 15 per cent for flaunt with those collocates. Figures from the NOW corpus show a rather lower percentage, which may be due to its being journalistic, and therefore more ‘edited’:

law 1614:77

rules 2116:96

convention 82:4

So, while Merriam-Webster is less prescriptive than Oxford, Macquarie, and British style guides, in that it accepts the contested use, these figures suggest that many, many more writers across the twenty varieties of English represented in the corpora mentioned actually maintain the distinction than those that ignore it.

Conclusion

 

Given the current state of things, any reply to my original question has to be nuanced. So, if you read something that contains collocations such as flaunt…rules, regulations, convention, you could try to suppress a sigh for the total collapse and degradation of the English language and just give the writer the benefit of the doubt: it is presumably part of her or his idiolect.

Flaunt has been used to mean ‘flout’ since the 1920s, according to that draft addition to the OED entry, and appears regularly, particularly in journalistic writing. At least one dictionary recognizes it as having that meaning; in the long run, others may accept it too.

On the other hand, if you are writing or editing something, there is an argument that it would be wise to maintain the distinction, and, possibly, tactfully, raise the issue with the author. In that way, you or they might avoid the involuntary sighs of some of your (probably older) readers as they are distracted from the content of your message by what they see as a flaw in its form.

Forty-four commonly confused English words

 

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Dozens of words are all too easy to confuse. Their’s [sic] the notorious case of its’s/its, not to mention there/they’re/their, your/you’re, and other obvious spelling mistakes caused by two words sounding the same, that is, being homophones as they’re known in the trade.

But then there are a host of others which are less frequently used or are used mostly in formal or literary writing and in journalism. Since some readers of those genres undoubtedly love to pounce on any mistakes, it could be embarrassing to write one instead of the other.

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‘All the evidence suggests…’

This is not a list of my subjective bugbears and personal tics. Far from it. It is based on what I’ve noticed in reading or editing over the years, and on what I’ve heard/hear. I have corroborated that observation/listening in the first place by seeing how often these pairs are discussed in online editorial forums and how often questions about them are entered as Google searches.

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Second, for many of these posts I have looked at corpus data – chiefly from the Oxford English Corpus, but also from other corpora – to get an idea of how widespread the phenomenon of – let’s call it “meaning swapping” – is, and what its geographical spread might be. There are also pairs such as meanwhile/mean while where the issue is whether to write them as a single word or two words.

Looking at data not only counterbalances the ‘frequency effect’ (i.e. once we’ve noticed and mentally noted a linguistic occurrence, we see it everywhere), it can also produce surprising results: what BrE speaker would have thunk that, as far as I can see, hone in is now the ‘norm’, not only in US English but in nearly all varieties?

Apart from looking at corpus evidence, I have also often noted what dictionaries and usage guides say about the question so that you, gentle reader, can make up your own mind.

Why bother?

Lots of people have that laissez-faire attitude, but quite a few people are bovvered – sometimes very, very bovvered. And people, such as editors and proofreaders, whose business it is to ‘correct’ others’ writing, earn their living by being bothered.

Those people who Google questions about these pairs may not be particularly bothered, but they are, at the least, curious to find an unequivocal answer. In fact, after – sigh, ‘What is the first word in the dictionary’ – the most common search terms that bring people to this site are ‘whereas or where as’, ‘defuse or diffuse’ and ‘ascribe to or subscribe to’.

[image error] Here’s a feline-themed homophone.

As you can see, they’re a very mixed bag as regards meaning. What links nearly all of them, though – with the exception of coruscating/excoriating – is the very close similarity between the members of the pair. In some cases, just like they’re/their/there, but depending to an extent on accent, they are true homophones, e.g. veracious/voracious, illusive/elusive.

Here’s the complete list in alpha order:

adverse to / averse to (9-10)
all of a sudden / all of the sudden (31-32)
ascribe to / subscribe to (15-16)
cache / cachet (11-12)
champ / chomp at the bit (33-34)
coruscating / excoriating (1-2)
decry / descry (13-14)
defuse / diffuse (19-20)
elicit / illicit (21-22)
elusive / illusive (illusory / allusive) (17-18)
flaunt / flout (5-6)
home in on / hone in on (3-4)
lauding it over / lauding it over (29–30)
meanwhile / mean while (35-36)
militate / mitigate (37-38)
peek / peak / pique (23-24)
seamlessly / seemlesly (39-40)
tenterhooks / tenderhooks (41-42)
another think / thing coming (43-44)
veracious / voracious (7-8)
wave / waive / waiver (25-26)
whereas / where as (27-28)

There are plenty of others; I may add them to the list as time goes on.

phase / faze (verbs)

[image error]Yet another homophone glitch. If something is phased, it is done in stages (i.e. phases) over a period of time:

e.g. the work is being phased over a number of  years;

a phased withdrawal of troops.

If something fazes you, it disconcerts you in such a way that you do not know how to react:

e.g. She’s been on the stage since the age of three so nothing fazes her at all.

In the next example, the wrong one has been used:

Cox is unlikely to be X phased by the prospect of going for gold in Athens , having been a record breaker at the tender age of 11–BBCi Sport, 2004 Olympics. 

exasperate / exacerbate

Not homophones this time, but similar enough in sound to cause confusion. If someone or something exasperates you, they annoy you greatly and make you feel frustrated

e.g. Speed bumps definitely do make you slow down, and taxi drivers take sadistic pleasure in exasperating their passengers by coming almost to a halt in front of them;

But speculation that he may quit Britain for America exasperates him.

If something exacerbates a situation or a problem, it makes it worse. It’s a rather formal word.

e.g. rising inflation was exacerbated by the collapse of oil prices;

At least the government is trying to find an actual solution, rather than exacerbating the problem.

Recently, I’ve noticed quite a few examples of exasperate being used instead of the collocationally more standard exacerbate. 

More than half of households living in council or housing association homes…live in one that is not at all, or not very suitable. The Bedroom Tax has exasperated this problem—Big Issue, No. 1018, December 2014.

Given the history of exasperate, and its multiple meanings other than the most common one of ‘to annoy’, it might, arguably, be difficult to maintain that it is wrong in that context.

This is an updated version of the page with which I first introduced this series of 30 easily confused words.

A coruscating attack? Or an excoriating attack? Who’s right? Commonly confused words (1-2)

(1 & 2 of 44 commonly confused words) A revised & shortened version

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If person A makes a coruscating attack on person or thing B, what does it mean?

For instance:

The report is a coruscating attack on the Government’s welfare reforms and those of its coalition predecessor.

Sunday Express.

Three options might suggest themselves: a) search me, guv; b) oh, A is tearing into B like nobody’s business; c) A is an ignoramus, and what they actually meant was ‘an excoriating attack’.

A while back, The Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column plumped firmly for option c):

‘In the following article, Terry Eagleton’s “corruscating [sic] review” of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion may have been withering or possibly even acidulous.’

The Guardian style guide is categorical about the matter:

‘coruscating means sparkling, or emitting flashes of light; people seem to think, wrongly, that it means the same as excoriating’.

The Economist style guide concurs.

You won’t hear either word down the pub. (Unless it’s a pub frequented by lexicographers, journalists, usage pundits, writers or arty-farty types. Ah, most pubs in Stockbridge, then). Both are rare, and typical of arty or journalistic writing.

‘Takeaways’

A Twitter poll suggests that a minority would stet ‘coruscating attack.’

Most people would change it, either to excoriating (41%) or to a synonym of that (45%).
(See the end of the blog for possible synonyms.)
The Online Oxford Dictionary alone among dictionaries recognizes the meaning ‘savage, acidulous’.
For many, it will be a ‘skunked’ term.
Coruscating is occasionally used in a small number of phrases in what looks like confusion with excoriating.
The lemma to excoriate and its derivatives are about five times more frequent than coruscate.
Coruscating as an adjective is more frequent in British English than elsewhere, as are its collocations with attack and semantically similar words.
A Google search for ‘coruscating attack’ and ‘excoriating attack’ shows the second – the ‘correct’ one – in a ratio of 4.7:1 to the first.

So what do these words mean?
coruscating
[image error] Album cover for jazz giant John Surman. Copyright ECM or original graphic artist
Meaning and examples

Coruscating can be a bit of a journalistic trap. British hacks in particular sometimes light on it in order to embellish their prose, occasionally with scant regard for its meaning.

It derives from the Latin coruscāre in its meaning of ‘to flash, glitter, gleam’.

‘Glittering’ or ‘sparkling’, literally or metaphorically, is what it usually means in English. Merriam-Webster has a pithy definition for the metaphorical use: ‘to be brilliant or showy in technique or style’ and some nice examples.

Coruscating is the participial form, and the verb itself is rather rare. ( According to the OED, the word was recorded first in this –ing form, in 1705.)

The Oxford Online Dictionary labels the verb as literary, and includes the following example:

Finally, as the blazing star appeared high over the island, the glow coruscated into incredible brilliance and began the nightly display.

Nouns typically described as coruscating are wit, brilliance, a review, a performance, a display, and an attack.

The Oxford English Corpus data suggests that it occurs with less than expected frequency in U.S. English, and with higher than expected frequency in BrE.

She preserves the steely delicacy and coruscating wit of Wilde’s writing.

Sunday Times.

… a complete understanding of the resources of the instrument and an acute ear for contrast allowed Liszt to produce a quasi-orchestral palette of tone-colours, lending a coruscating brilliance and variety to both his original music and his transcriptions.

Oxford Companion to Music.

Oops, did I chose the wrong word?

Examples like the previous reflect the core meaning of the word, but what are we to make of these examples?

… the anthropologist and writer John Ryle wrote a coruscating review essay in the Times Literary Supplement , documenting numerous inaccuracies….

Guardian, Comment is Free. 

Departing SNP leader John Swinney yesterday delivered a coruscating attack on the tormentors within his own party who…

Scotland on Sunday.

Here it is obviously intended to mean ‘scathing’, ‘ferocious’ and the like. It seems to be a mistake for the less rare but equally Latinate adjective excoriating.

(If you enjoy this blog, and find it useful, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up (in the right-hand column) and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and writing tips.)

excoriate/excoriating

Origins, meanings, examples

While the verb has been used in English to mean ‘to strip the skin off someone’, i.e. flay them, it has a specific modern medical meaning, ‘to damage or remove part of the surface of the skin’ (images of which I’m too squeamish to show).

It comes from the Latin excoriāre ‘to strip off the hide’, < ex- out + corium hide>, and the OED dates its first occurrence to 1497, in a work published by Wynkyn de Worde.

[image error] The flaying of St. Bartholomew. Rome. 3rd quarter 16th century, cutting from a collectar. In the style of a Croatian artist – which may explain why the Romans look curiously oriental, with their splendid mustachios.

Clearly, if you can excoriate someone physically, that is, flay them, you can also do so metaphorically (lambast similarly developed from physical to figurative, and think of ‘to roast someone or something’ in a figurative sense, e.g. This is a movie whose brain belongs in its pants, and which deserves to be roasted for the turkey it truly is.)

The OED defines this non-physical meaning of to excoriate as ‘upbraid scathingly, decry, revile’ and dates its first occurrence to 1882. A current example follows:

Talk shows were excoriated in the media and featured in countless political cartoons of the period.

Art Journal, (U.S.).

Excoriating … is the participial adjective from the verb. It typically qualifies attack(s), a critique, a report, criticism, or an editorial.

Throughout the second world war, Aneurin Bevan subjected the line of the Churchill coalition government to excoriating criticism and withering examination …

A British English issue?

Of those collocations listed above for excoriating, over three-quarters are British English (78%). In other words, they are possibly better known in BrE than elsewhere. That might explain why the confused coruscating ?attack and ?review seem also to be peculiarly British: 80% of examples.

Is this a recent phenomenon?

It seems not. Good ol’ Ngrams throws up an example of coruscating attack from a 1961 Report to the Fellows, Pierpoint Morgan Library, p. 59. However, it also shows a vertiginous rise in frequency of that collocation between 1981 and 2000.

Why are the two confused?

I don’t know, but here are some thoughts. If one were to be uncharitable, ‘Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance’, as Dr Johnson is reported to have said. Viewed in that light, ‘coruscating‘ becomes a malapropism of the ‘allegory on the banks of the Nile’ kind.

But that won’t entirely do: the alternation simply cannot be arbitrary or random.

First, though clearly miles away from being homophones, they share both an -ating element and a Latinate sound – but, admittedly, not the same number of syllables.

Second, if someone has seen the phrase ‘coruscating review’, but not read the review in question, how would they know what was meant? Reviews are often negative, so assigning a negative meaning to coruscating would not seem unreasonable. In any case, for many reviewers, the bitchier the review the more brilliant it is, at which point coruscating and excoriating easily begin to merge.

What word could I use instead?

The thesaurus is your oyster here: the Grauniad‘s acidulous and withering, and then blistering, devastating, scathing, savage, caustic, vitriolic, and whatever else your thesaurus and malevolence suggest.

A ‘skunked term’ is Bryan Garner’s phrase for a word or phrase whose alleged misuse will annoy purists. I suspect that for a certain number of people, ‘coruscating’ for ‘excoriating’ will indeed exude the rank, decaying smell of error.

Ascribe to or subscribe to? Commonly confused words (15-16)

 

Quick takeaway points

Using the construction ascribe to a view, idea, etc. in the way shown in the examples under the next heading is generally considered a mistake.
It appears from comments on the Merriam-Webster website that some people were taught at school that this construction is in fact correct.
The use of the correct subscribe to  (= support, endorse), derives clearly and logically from that word’s earliest use of putting your signature to something, as explained at 4 below.
Lincoln used ascribe to in its proper meaning in his inaugural presidential address. See 6.1.

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(6-minute read)
1. What is the issue?

Take a sentence such as this from the Washington Examiner of 29 July 2020:

Some conservatives and prominent black people have criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, saying the founders ascribe to Marxist political ideology and wish to see the current system of government in America dismantled.

Or this:

“He doesn’t necessarily ascribe to the philosophy of ‘bigger is better’ or featuring loud colors or ‘sale’ logos to attract attention.”

Art Business News

The verb generally considered correct in both cases is subscribe.

“Yes, we know,” you may say: “you’re teaching your grandmother to suck eggs“. Nevertheless, [image error]enough people commit the mistake to make it worth highlighting.

In fact, from a few comments on the Merriam-Webster online site, it seems that some people were actively taught by their schoolteachers that ascribe to is correct in this context, and that subscribe to is wrong.

2. 1 What is the correct use of ascribe to?

As Cobuild defines it, the word nowadays has three core meanings. Note that they all require the preposition to, and have a direct object and an obligatory prepositional object. In other words, you cannot say he *ascribed his success, and the structure is generally ascribe [something] to [somebody/something]. (Most examples given here are from the Online Oxford Dictionary).

If you ascribe an event or condition to a particular cause, you say or consider that it was caused by that thing:

He ascribed Jane’s short temper to her upset stomach;

He ascribed the poor results to poverty and the lack of resources at most schools.

(To attribute [sthg] to [sb/sthg] works as a synonym for this (and the next meanings) or give the credit to, if it is a good thing, such as success.)

If you ascribe something such as a quotation or a work of art to someone (my amendment: or to some period) you say that they said it or created it (my amendment: or that it was said or created in that period):

a quotation ascribed to Thomas Cooper;

He mistakenly ascribes the expression ‘survival of the fittest’ to Charles Darwin.

if you ascribe a quality to someone, you consider that they possess it:

Tough-mindedness is a quality commonly ascribed to top bosses;

I don’t want to ascribe human reactions to my dog, because that spoils the joy of seeing things from a dog perspective.

See 6.2 for other, historical examples, among which there is an example from Dr Johnson of ascribe being used directly transitively. In modern writing this seems to happen in the passive, e.g. Importantly, the white woman’s position on the veranda also signals the cultural position that she is ascribed in the film…

Merriam-Webster Online notes some nice differences between the synonyms of ascribe to such as attribute to, assign to. However, the second of its two “Recent examples on the Web” is precisely the wrong usage discussed in this post and is the sentence used at the start of the this blog.

If you enjoy this blog, and find it useful, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up (in the right-hand column) and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I shall be blogging regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and writing tips. Enjoy!)

2.2 With which meaning of subscribe is ascribe confused?

Subscribe has many meanings, but the one in question is meaning 2 in the Online Oxford Dictionary:

(subscribe to) Express or feel agreement with (an idea or proposal):

Or maybe he subscribes to the postmodern idea that truth is a social construct;

We prefer to subscribe to an alternative explanation.

Closish synonyms for this meaning are agree with, support, back, accept, believe in and endorse.

3. What do usage guides say?

There is no mention of it in the excellent Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage, nor in the equally excellent Cambridge Guide to English Usage. The current (3rd) edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage does not include it either, but I have added it to my revision for the 4th edition.

4. Can etymology help?

Rather obviously, both words contain the element -scribe, meaning “write”, imported ultimately from Latin, and all around us in words such as describe, inscribe, and so forth. The sub- element is the Latin for “under”, as in submarine, sub-editor, etc. So, literally, if you subscribe something, you put your name under it. The word was directly borrowed from Latin, and its first recorded use is as just described: [image error]

This is my last Will, subscribed with my own Hand, R.H.—1415

That meaning is defined by the OED as follows: “To put one’s signature or other identifying mark upon (a document), esp. at the end or foot, typically to signify consent or agreement, or to declare that one is a witness; to signify assent to or compliance with (something), by signing one’s name; to attest (a particular viewpoint or position) by one’s signature”.

If you want a mnemonic for which of the two words under discussion is appropriate in which context, it may help to remember support, which—ultimately, in Latin—contains the same prefix—sub, i.e. “under”—as subscribe. If you subscribe to a view, theory, etc., you do indeed support it.

5. How often does the mistake happen?

[Skip this if you don’t want the “science” bit]

It is true that it is not the commonest of mistakes, but then neither verb is particularly frequent in its own right. Subscribe (the specific form, not the lemma) just scrapes into the seven thousand most frequent words in English (in the Oxford English Corpus), which make up 90% of all texts: it occurs just under 7 times per million words of texts; ascribed (again, the token, not the lemma) comes in as the 12,200th most common form in English, occurring less than 3 times per million words.

Since the mistake most often occurs in collocation with words such as view and theory, and others in their lexical field, the only measure I can easily produce for its frequency is to compare the collocations subscribe to…theory and ascribe to…theory (within a five-word frame to the right). The first occurs 471 times in the OEC, the second 18 – i.e. in under 4 per cent of cases.

6.1 Biblical and Lincolnian uses

Many people on the Merriam-Webster website looked up the word because it is used in Psalm 29 in some versions of the Bible:

1 Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

2 Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name; worship the Lord in holy splendor

New Oxford Annotated Bible

(It is worth noting that the Authorized Version (King James) does not use ascribe in this context, but the more Anglo-Saxon Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, etc.

Abraham Lincoln also used it — correctly, of course — in his first inaugural address (March 4, 1861) in the sense of “attributing” something to God:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?

6.2 Other historical examples

The OED subdivides ascribe into 11 senses, of which six were already labelled obsolete as long ago as 1885, when the entry was compiled.

It was first used in English in the Wycliffite Bible, and is among [image error]the earliest ten per cent of words the OED records.

On its first appearance it was used broadly in the first meaning discussed above:

Lest…to my name the victorie be ascrived—2 Sam. xii. 28, before 1382

(The spelling with v mirrors the Old French form from which it was borrowed. In the 16th century it was Latinized to a letter b.)

Other examples in this use, as shown below, range from Sir Thomas More to Samuel Johnson:

Al which miracles al those blessed saintes do ascribe vnto the worke of god.—Thomas More, Heresyes IV, in Wks. 286/2, 1528
The same Græcians did often ascribe madnesse to the operation of the Eumenides.—Hobbes, Leviathan I. viii, 37, 1651
This Speech is…the finest that is ascribed to Satan in the whole Poem.—J. Addison, Spectator No. 321. ¶6, 1711
We usually ascribe good, but impute evil.—Johnson, The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language 25, 1746

This is an updated version of a post originally published in 2014.