Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 12

Round robins and folk etymology

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5-minute read

You know the drill. Come the season-to-be-jolly- (Fa, la, la … repeat ad nauseam) you are sure to receive a missive – or these days most likely an email – telling you what those doting parents you never actually meet or speak to and their brood have been up to – sorry, I mean “achieved”. Because there will be no failures and no disasters mentioned: this is an all-Alpha, achievement-focussed family.

Arabella has set up her own business, which has already won several industry awards and is growing exponentially. Rollo is in his final year at Oxbridge and, when not training as a rugby blue, has directed the college play, learnt a third foreign language and raised several thousand pounds to help local disadvantaged BAME kids. Holidays have, of course, been spent in this country this year because climate change. And in any case the country “hideaway” (in reality a six-bedroomed former rectory left by an aunt) needed some updating.

All this angst-inducing crowing will be included in what is colloquially known as a round-robin. Does it have anything to do with our feathered friends?

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Anything to do with robins?

No. But an interesting story surrounds the phrase all the same. Well, in fact, two stories: the real one about the word’s quirky development over time, and the fake news, folk etymology one. Well, in fact, three. Because there’s also the story of the man who failed to establish New Amsterdam.

Let’s start with the fake history.

Round robin meaning the sort of circular letter we all love to hate is first recorded in an isolated 1871 instance, according to the OED. The phrase didn’t really get going until much later, though, the next quotation being from nearly a century later:

Round-robin letters are often useful … In this case a general letter is written stating all of the news and copies of it are sent to various members of the family, and friends.

Hartford (Connecticut) Courant 3 Sept. (Mag. section) 9/1, 1961

Folk etymology is often picturesque

And if it can give itself the allure of a foreign language, it will, as I will describe in another post on folk etymology.

Wikipedia states that round robin in this sense is an adaptation of the French phrase ruban rond, which means “round ribbon” (literally, “ribbon round”). That article cites two sources for this canard: Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and Robert Hendrickson’s Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (1987, 1998), the latter cited on the Phrase Finder website.

Brewer says categorically: “The device is French, and the term seems to be a corruption of rond (round) and ruban (ribbon) originally used by sailors.”

That it was originally used by sailors is the only fact here. As Brewer was first published in 1870, the French origins myth must go back to before then, but who knows how far.

The French story seems implausible on several grounds: round robin as a phrase to denote a variety of circular things, from communion wafers to ruffs, dates back to the sixteenth century; it is hard to see phonetically how ruban, no matter how Englishly you pronounce it, could be assimilated to ribbon; the order of words is arsy-versy from French to English.

The (Christmas) “circular letter” meaning, now a familiar part of English, is a development of an earlier meaning defined lengthily by the OED as “A document (esp. one embodying a complaint, remonstrance, or request) having the names of the signatories arranged in a circle so as to disguise the order in which they have signed.”

Rum, sodomy and the lash

It first appears with that meaning in a naval context of 1698:

Some of them drew up a paper commonly called a Round Robin, and signed the same whereby they intimated that if the Captaine would not give them leave to goe a shore, they would take leave.

C. Young in High Court of Admiralty Exam. & Answers (P.R.O.: HCA 13/81) f. 679v

Subsequent mentions (the second from the previous version of the OED) make it clear why sailors would choose this form, namely, to avoid fingering their ringleader or to show that they were all equally involved:

The underwritten Petition [was] drawn up and signed by the whole Company in the Manner of what they call a Round Robin, that is, the Names were writ in a Circle, to avoid all Appearance of Pre-eminence.

‘C. Johnson’ Gen. Hist. Pyrates (ed. 2) xii. 332, 1724

A Round Robin is a Name given by Seamen, to an Instrument on which they sign their Names round a Circle, to prevent the Ring~leader being discover’d by it, if found.

Weekly Journal. 3 Jan. 3/4, 1730

The Sailors on board the Fleet, signed, what is called by them, a round Robin, that is, a Paper containing…their Names subscribed in a Circle, that it might not be discerned who signed first.

CampbellLives Admirals(1748) II. 64, 1742

On Wikipedia the ruban rond legend comes complete with an illustration of a 1621 “round robin”, misleadingly phrased to suggest that round robin was the title given it at the time.

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On that illustration, however, hangs a more interesting true story than the myth of French origins. The document has in its centre a request in French to allow the 56 signatories named in the “spokes” of the wheel and their families, totalling 227 souls, to settle in the British colony of Virginia. Those families were Huguenot refugees who had fled to Leiden.

Their range of occupations was such that, like the Pilgrim Fathers, they would have constituted a whole society in miniature – albeit a somewhat lopsided one – in their new home: among others, thirteen labourers to do the hard graft; a gardener, a tiller and two vine-dressers to make their land fruitful; three drapers, four dyers, four weavers, a hatter and a cobbler to keep them clothed; a locksmith and a carpenter to house them; two brewers and a musician for their leisure hours; an apothecary to keep them healthy; and a theology student to herd them zealously along the path of righteousness.

[image error] Sir Dudley Carlton, 1628. Michiel van Mierevelt (1566–1641), Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Their leader was the Walloon Jesse de Forest and it was he who presented the document to the British Ambassador to the Netherlands Sir Dudley Carlton in July of 1621. As Carlton wrote from the Hague:

Here hath been with me of late a certain Walloon, an inhabitant of Leyden, in the name of divers families, men of all trades and occupations, who desire to go into Virginia and there to live in the same condition as others of His Majesty’s [sc. King James VI and I of Scotland and England] subjects…

De Forest’s request was granted with such strict provisions that he decided not to throw in his lot with British colonisation. He then appealed to the States of Holland and West Friesland. He became one of the founders of the Dutch West India Company, Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie. At its behest, in 1623 De Forest led an expedition to what is probably now Guiana, where he died. The following year, thirty-two families of colonists sailed from Holland to settle in the Dutch area around the Hudson river known as “New Netherland”. Whether any settled in Manhattan is unclear.

What is clear, however, is that in the legal documents of New Amsterdam a decade and more later, several of the family names that figured in that original round robin reappear among the founders of the new settlement. In a sense, then, de Forest can be credited with a hand in the very beginnings of today’s New York.

Space prevents me expatiating on round robin’s 17 other meanings besides “circular letter”, except to cite it as an example of how even the most humdrum- and innocuous-seeming words can accrete a boggling variety of meanings.

Sources: OED; Froendt, Antonia H. (1924) The Huguenot-Walloon Tercentary. New York: The Huguenot-Walloon New Netherland commission.

[image error] Brazilian landscape with anteater, 1649. Frans Post (1612-1680), Alte Pinakothek, Munich. A memory by a Dutch painter of the short-lived Dutch colony in Brazil.

 

It’s never too late to bill and coo

[image error] A poster for the 1948 film featuring birds.

The modern artists of today

May paint their picture faster

But when it comes to skill, I say

You can’t beat an old master.

It’s never too late to bill and coo,

At any age one and one make two

And it’s never too late to fall in…

Never too late to fall in…

Never too late to fall in…

Love

(c) Sandy Wilson

“It’s never too late to bill and coo,” sings Lord Brockhurst in The Boy Friend, that affectionate 1950s tribute to an earlier tradition of musicals.

Of late, I’ve been looking at bird images and metaphors, of which there are well over a hundred in current English, between idioms (a chicken and egg problem), proverbs (what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as the Durham chief constable said only the other day) and metaphorical applications of bird-related vocabulary (to crow, to tweet).

In particular, I’ve been looking at what I classify as the conceptual metaphors HUMAN COUPLES ARE BIRD COUPLES and HUMAN FAMILIES ARE BIRD FAMILIES. There are so many metaphorical linguistic expressions that express those twin concepts, such as brood, to fly the nest, empty nest syndrome, hen-pecked, and so on. During the courting phase, while nesting is going on, if all’s going well, there is likely to be much billing and cooing.

That phrase features too in the jazz classic Lullaby of Birdland, reprised by the late Amy Winehouse, and sung by earlier chanteuses like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.

Lullaby of birdland, that’s what I

Always hear when you sigh.

Never in my wordland

Could there be ways to reveal

In a phrase how I feel.

Have you ever heard two turtle doves

Bill and coo when they love?

That’s the kind of magic

Music we make with our lips when we kiss.

(c) ‘B.Y. Forster’ – George David Weiss

(Stereo)typically it’s turtle doves who make this signature sound, to bill and coo, but other birds such as wood pigeons do it too.  In fact, you’ll be lucky to see turtle doves in the British Isles: they are now on the RSPB’s red list (meaning population has declined by more than 50 per cent in the last 25years).

But what exactly is to bill and coo? A look in the data suggests it might not be quite what you think.

To coo, self-evidently, is a bird sound, specifically ‘To make the soft murmuring sound or note characteristic of doves and pigeons’ (OED). For an onomatopoeic word, its first written citation seems surprisingly late, coming as it does (see below) in the third quarter of the seventeenth century (‘late’ given that that e.g. to crow is first attested before 1000 and to clock, the forerunner of to cluck, c. 1050.)

So, two kind turtles, when a storm is nigh,

Look up, and see it gathering in the sky:

Each calls his mate, to shelter in the groves,

Leaving, in murmur, their unfinished loves:

Perched on some drooping branch, they sit alone,

And coo, and hearken to each other’s moan.

Dryden, The Conquest of Granada: II, ii, 82, 1672

And in case you’re wondering what reptiles are doing sitting on branches, turtle often stood for turtle dove in early modern English.

In contrast, the verb to bill dates to the early thirteenth century in the meaning ‘to peck’. Later it came to refer to birds stroking each other’s beaks, as turtle doves and some other birds do when mating. That gesture was then applied to humans, meaning ‘to caress, to make show of affection’ (OED) and is recorded earliest in 1609 (in Shakespeare) but only appears in conjunction with cooing in Thackeray (1854), at least according to the OED.

Cooing is something people do when they talk softly or sweetly, and typically they coo over something, particularly babies:

The midwife Sister Assunta delivered me and cooed over me for my name, Aidan, was that of the saint who had converted the heathens of the Western Isles of Scotland.

Now, Merriam-Webster labels to bill and coo ‘old-fashioned’, defines it as ‘to kiss and talk quietly’ and gives the example A young couple sat together in the corner, billing and cooing. That’s pretty much the OED meaning too, and the one that’s in my mental vocabulary, but in fact it’s a phrase which seems to have hopped a distance from its original perch, or at least had a little chick.

Oxford Online defines it more broadly as to ‘behave or talk in a very loving or sentimental way’ and includes among its small (for it) selection of four examples this one with its jaundiced view:  The media arts are still young, but not so young, in my opinion, that we need to see more pieces which are catalogs of effects with nothing to say behind them, and then bill and coo over how wonderful they are.

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What is going on in that last example? Nothing there suggests cosy coupledom, still less any reciprocal exchange of caresses and sweet nothings. Instead, the meaning can be summarised as ‘to gush effusively or fulsomely’.  It looks as if in this use the meaning of bill has been bleached out and the word has instead been assimilated to the meaning of coo, merely serving to increase that verb’s intensity. (The corpus data shows that coo is often twinned with another verb, such as cuddle and coo, gurgle and coo, kiss and coo, and so forth.) In other words, the whole phrase works similarly to more obviously reduplicative phrases like to huff and puff and to ooh and aah but without the rhyme element. You cannot reverse the order of the elements in such phrases – of which English has hundreds – hence one of the terms to describe them: irreversible binomials. (When did you last eat chips and fish? Or engage in the thrust and cut of business? Or ride and park? You see how common they are).

The phrase is not particularly common — for examples, 58 examples for all forms in one corpus compared to well over 1,100 for to kiss and cuddle in all forms. That relative scarcity might explain the newly acquired meaning.

People coo over things (especially babies) and they doubleplus coo when they bill and coo. They can even get sentimental over money:

If he was a cartoon character, he’d be… It varies from game to game – from Mr Burns [sc. from The Simpsons], billing and cooing over his piles of cash…

Observer, 27 December 2015

The original meaning referring to birds and to lovers is still going strong, but this more generalised meaning also seems pretty well established. The next three examples show the original and the modified meanings:

In the distance, the sun dapples the river and wood pigeons gently bill and coo in the thicket of trees.

Big Issue, 18 May 2018

Peter and Olivia spent a lot of time billing and cooing.

Entertainment Weekly, 11 March 2011

It is a matter of personal pride when international celebrities bill and coo about overflowing theatres and rich film heritage of Kerala.

The Hindu, 24 March 2016.

And the data inevitably shows what looks like confirmation of ‘Butterfield’s Law’, which states that ‘If an idiomatic expression can be meaningfully eggcorned, it will be.’ Thus we have ‘bellowing and cooing’ where the context (a post about baby-sitting) suggests it really is billing that was misinterpreted and eggcorned: ‘At 3/2 years, the subject has trained his or her slaves to understand the intracacies [sic] of his or her bellowing and cooing, mewling and puking.’

 

Elusive or illusive or allusive? Commonly confused words (17-18)

(17 & 18 of 30 commonly confused words)

Takeaways—for busy people

Beware of writing illusive when you mean that something or someone is hard to find, pin down, or define. The correct word and spelling is elusive .

Correct: Yet happiness is an elusive concept, rather like love.

Incorrect: Sharks up to forty feet are quite common, although when Helen was there they proved to be X illusive.

If you use Word, the spelling and grammar check will query illusive. 
If you want to suggest that something is an illusion, illusory is much more frequent than illusive, and a safer choice (readers will be in no doubt about what you mean):

Correct: …a Buddhist monk advised him, “You must first realize the illusory nature of your own body”.

In written texts, X illusive is more often used by mistake than in its true meaning, though many examples are ambiguous.

The word allusive is also occasionally used by mistake for elusive.
This post gives plenty of examples of appropriate and mistaken use.
If you feel confident that you already know all this, why not try the self-test at the bottom of the blog?

For the full story, read on…

(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, above the Twitter feed) 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!)

Why does the mistake happen?

The reason seems pretty obvious: the words sound the same: i-l(y)oo-siv (/ɪˈl(j)uːsɪv/.) If you don’t edit your writing carefully the mistake could slip through, because your spellchecker might accept illusive as a legitimate word. Which it is, but, very often, probably not the one you meant!

What is the difference?

Elusive…

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relates to the verb “to elude”. So, something elusive eludes or escapes you, is difficult to grasp physically or mentally.

A classic example is from that golden oldie by Bob Lind, Elusive Butterfly:

Across my dreams, with nets of wonder,

I chase the bright, elusive butterfly of love.

[image error] Justin Timberlake trying to be elusive.

Things that are often elusive are creatures, foes, beasts…and Justin Timberlake. If people describe him as elusive, that means he is hard to track down and photograph or interview; if they were chasing the illusive Justin Timberlake, they would be implying something about his very existence, or about his skill at creating illusions.

If people describe a concept as elusive, they mean it is hard to pin down, explain, or define; if they describe it as X illusive, they may possibly mean that it is indeed an illusion, but as often as not it is the wrong word choice. In the next example the appropriate word has been used:

If the situation in western Pakistan continues to deteriorate, success will be elusive and very difficult to achieve.

What about illusive?
[image error] A superb Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott with his dogs.

It means, as the Collins Dictionary puts it, “producing, produced by, or based on illusion; deceptive or unreal”. It has a rather literary ring to it, as in Sir Walter Scott’s:

’Tis now a vain illusive show,

That melts whene’er the sunbeams glow.

Modern examples include:

…a film essay about the real and illusive nature of motion pictures.

(after all, films produce an illusion in the mind of the viewer);

Gaskell [i.e. Mrs Gaskell, the novelist] did not sentimentalize or yield to the illusive attractions of the English pastoral idyll.

(the attractions were indeed an illusion, since country life was harsh and poverty-stricken).

Illusive by mistake

However, the data in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) demonstrate how often illusive appears by mistake for elusive. A roughly 10-per cent sample (50 examples) of all examples of illusive contained 23 in which illusive was clearly a mistake:

…but even after a decade, his [i.e. Ricardo Chailly’s] musical character remains strangely X illusive and lacking any special definition.

(the intended meaning must be “hard to define” and therefore should be elusive);

During the long period we spent waiting for this X illusive good weather, there was also tragedy on the mountain—Everest Expedition dispatches

(my reading is that the good weather came only sporadically, but the sentence is conceivably ambiguous).

Of the other 28 examples, only 12 unequivocally used—at least by my reading—the true meaning of illusive:

…this illusive common interest, this notion of shared stakes encompassed the whole world and large majorities in almost every society .—Free India Media

(the left-leaning nature of the text suggests that common interest between the ruling classes and the ruled is indeed an illusion).

But 15 were ambiguous to me, and in some cases it was impossible to work out quite what the writer intended:

After a troubled season at Arsenal, Bergkamp was his illusive best on Friday night, dropping off Kluivert and playing a part in almost all of Holland’s better moments.—Sunday Herald, 2000

Was Bergkamp hard to pin down and tackle, or a master of illusion through feints?

The Corpus of Web-Based Global English (GloWbE) presents a similar picture.  For example, a search for illusive and any words following within three spaces yields this top ten:

man, quality, power, concept, nature, dream, leopard, creatures, happiness, desire.

Nearly all the quotations for man are for the “Illusive Man” in a video game. I have no idea whether the word is a deliberate pun in this context.

Of the remainder, quality, concept, leopard, and creatures self-evidently match elusive. 

Dream and desire similarly correspond to illusive; 

Power, nature, and happiness could go with either, but in the GloWbE contexts are appropriately described as illusive. 

illusive/illusory

Illusory has the same definition as illusive. According to the OED, it was first recorded in a letter of 1599 by no less a personage than Elizabeth I (though it looks like a noun), [image error]and then by John Donne.

To trust him uppon pledges is a meare illusorye.—1599
A false, an illusory, and a sinfull comfort.—Sermons, X. 51, before 1631

Illusive appeared nearly a century later (1679) according to the OED, in the blood-curdlingly titled The narrative of Robert Jenison, containing 1. A further discovery and confirmation of the late popish plot. 2. The names of the four ruffians, designed to have murthered the king…

Which is it better to use?

If you really mean to convey the idea that something is an illusion, I’d be tempted to go for illusory, as the more common word, and in order to dispel any suspicion that you meant elusive. In the OEC it is roughly eight times more frequent than illusive:

“…they give the Palestinians the illusory feeling that via a unilateral strategy and parliamentary resolutions they can obtain their political aspirations,” foreign ministry spokesman Emanuel Nachshon told The Irish Times.

So that’s that all sorted out, then

If only… Another word (a near homophone) sometimes gets snarled up in this tangle of meaning. It is allusive, the adjective corresponding to “allusion” and used mainly by literary critics, film critics, and the like. Some poetry, such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, is highly allusive, since it constantly alludes (i.e. refers indirectly) to other texts, poetic or otherwise.

Although there is no question that Ulysses provided a supreme example of the allusive method in action, deployed on a breathtaking scale, Eliot’s almost insatiable appetite for allusion sprang from other sources as well.—T.S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. Ronald Bush, 1991

But people occasionally use it by mistake. I heard the pronunciation “allusive” referring to whales in a recent BBC trailer for a nature programme. And if you search for “The Allusive Butterfly of Love” online you will find quite a few examples.

More mistaken examples:

Picking up a taxi from Epping tube station, it was another half an hour finding the X allusive final destination.—Ideas Factory
Give John Kerry this. He’s maddeningly X allusive.

Given the prevailing muddle over the meaning of these words, it is perhaps not surprising that one has to turn to literary titans to see them used with absolute precision: at a conference in August 2004, Vikram Seth memorably and alliteratively defined writing as “allusive, elusive and illusive”.

Test yourself. Go on, you know you want to.

Choose between allusive, elusive, and illusory:

Although his restless experimentation and complex, _________ style often prove difficult on first reading, his novels possess a complexity and depth that reward the demands he makes upon his readers.
Dylan is notoriously _________; as he wrote on the album notes to Highway 61 Revisited , “there is no I—there is only a series of mouths .”
The hint that the possibility exists for real and not _________ happiness and love appears fleetingly in a few of Sirk’s earlier Universal-International films.
...the Convention is interpreted and applied in a manner which renders its rights practical and effective, not theoretical and _________.
But in one area, success is _________: The city’s rats remain as bold and showy as ever, darting through well-lighted subway stations as…

1. allusive 2. elusive 3. illusory 4. illusory 5. elusive/illusory

Discernible or discernable? Is discernable even a word? (2)

[image error]In the previous blog on this topic, I presented some information about the history of these two forms of the ‘same word’, which have exactly the same meanings.

Once a presumed synonym comes into existence, though, it seems that some people will search heaven and earth to find a justification for its existence. Such is the case with discernable. If you google it, you might be directed to Wikidiff, which assures you that there is a meaning distinction between the two forms. You could have fooled me, but here, for what it’s worth, is what that august fount of knowledge claims:

‘The difference between discernible and discernable is that discernible is possible to discern while discernable is detectable or derivable by use of the senses or the intellect.’

Whoever thought that up had not quite worked out that nonsense on stilts is still nonsense, even if stamped with the faux seal of the internet/Wiki/wotevah. If something is ‘possible to discern’ it can ‘be discerned’, which means that it is ‘detectable by use of the senses or the intellect.’ I’m not sure where the ‘derivable’ comes in, but this cyberjobsworth was clearly not averse to circularity.

[image error]

According to the OED, whose judgement I prefer to that of Wikidiff, and according to common sense, whose virtues may be even greater than those of that august cultural monument, there is simply NO DIFFERENCE (at least in meaning) between the two words. Each has five senses, which are exactly paralleled in the other, including the fifth and obsolete ‘capable of discerning’ (an ability the writer of Wikidiff clearly lacked):

1603   S. Daniel Panegyrike sig. B3   God..Hath giuen thee all those powers of worthinesse, Fit for so great a worke, and fram’d thy hart Discernible of all apparences.

1650   Man in Moon No. 37. 295   I hope this will be a sufficient caution for all discernable, or rationall men.

The difference is a simple orthographical one, ‘derivable’ or ‘possible to discern’ by looking at data.  Which is more frequent? Discernible or discernable. You know the answer yourself, vermute ich, but here is the science:

Figures and ratios for discernible/able in several corpora:

Oxford English Corpus:

Feb 2014 – General – 4430/1472; total = 5,902; Ratio 75:25%

Monitor corpus Aug. 2017 – 9750/1861; total = 11,611; Ratio 83.97:16.03%

Academic journals, June 2015 –  6,303/1,858; total = 8,161; Ratio 77.23:22.77%

BYU corpora:

Corpus of Historical American (CoHA)– 1132/54; total = 1,186; Ratio 95.4:4.6%

NOW Corpus (News) – 5602/932; total = 6,534; Ratio 85.7:14.3%

Corpus of Contemporary American (CoCA)– 1096/190; total = 1,286; Ratio 85.2:14.8%

And here are the figures from the Global Corpus of Web-based English.

TOTAL
US
CAN
GB
Ire
OZ
NZ
IN
Rest


discernible
2,608
609
164
596
170
244
121
80
624


discernable
721
183
46
175
40
65
42
21
149


RATIO [%]
78.8/21.2
76.9/23.1
78.1/21.9
77.3/22.7
81.0/19.0
79/21
74.2/25.8
79.2/20.8
80.1/19.9

As you will have noticed, for most corpora, the proportion of discernible seems to hover betwen the 75% and 80% mark.

The exceptions are those datasets that exceed the 80% mark, of which there are four: OEC Monitor, CoHA, NOW and CoCA. To what extent the difference is signficant, not being a statistician, I am afraid I cannot say. The very high 95.4% of the CoHA data, though, is presumably due to writers historically being more careful about putting down what they thought of as the correct form.

[image error]

Good ole’ Ngrams shows a slight drop in discernable at the beginning of the 19th century, and then an upward trend towards 2000, while discernible shows an earlier peak, and then decline.

Finally, omniscient Google asks ‘Did you mean discernible?’ if you key in the –able form.

So, yes, according to what the sources tell us, discernable is used and legitimate, but still a minority taste (a bit like the British LibDems, really). The only usage note I can find on it is in Pam Peters’ Cambridge guide, where she suggests that writers use the -able form either ‘in deference to the older tradition, or by using the regular English wordforming principle for English verbs’.

In that regard, the OED lists about 3,700 –able adjectives compared with a mere 600 for –ible.

Discernible or discernable? Is discernable even a word? (1)

[image error]

‘Discernable’, I hear you say. ‘There’s no such word!’

While editing the other day I came across this spelling, and it had me scratching my head. ‘A mistake, surely?’ said I to myself, a tad too smugly, as it turned out.

I thought I’d better check all the same.

I’m glad I did, for thereby hangs a tale of imported words, historical swapping, and current variation or uncertainty.

Is it correct, you might ask? Well, yes and no. (It depends what you consult.)

Is it frequent? (For those in a hurry [FTIAH], far less so than discernible.)

And what does ‘the dictionary’ say? ([FTIAH], It depends which one.)

Which came first? And where from? (Read on.)

If I write discernable, am I wrong? (Read on.)

READ ON

‘The dictionary’ says:

The Online Oxford Dictionary gives it as an alternative form under the headword discernible .
Collins proclaims it ‘rare’ and ‘another word for discernible’.
Google asks ‘did you mean discernible?’
Merriam-Webster online makes it a subentry under discern , ‘discernible or less commonly discernable’.
M-W Unabridged gives it as an alternative under discernible with no comment on relative frequency.
In its etymology rubric for discernible , the OED says ‘compare earlier discernable ’, which has its own (Dec. 2013) entry.

So, if you go by ‘the dictionary’, it exists and is valid.

However, the OED entry for discernable has a cautionary note: ‘discernible is now the more common word; some later examples of discernable may show typographical errors for it.’ (My underlining.)

And the ‘After Deadline’ column’s spelling check in the NYT – admittedly back in 2010 – had this to say:

‘Here’s a new nominee for the title of most-frequently-misspelled word (by percentage of uses): “discernible.”

Like “legible” and “divisible,” it ends in “-ible” rather than “-able” (the spelling generally depends on how the original Latin verb was conjugated). In the past year we used “discernible” in articles 92 times and “discernable” 15 times, for an error rate of about 14 percent.

Granted, a few dictionaries charitably list “discernable” as an alternate spelling, but the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a 16th-to-18th-century variant. We should stick to “discernible.”’

By Philip B. Corbett January 19, 2010 11:05 Am

 

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Where do discernible/discernable come from?

There’s a bit of a story to unravel here. The M-W unabridged puts it in a nutshell:

Origin of DISCERNIBLE

discernible alteration (influenced by Late Latin discernibilis, from Latin discernere + –ibilis -ible) of discernable; discernable from Middle French, from discerner + -able

In other words, it suggests that what most people would today take to be the standard form is an alteration of the form in –able.

Does the OED agree?

Not exactly, but it does provide some interesting historical information.

Stepping back a bit from either derivative, let’s take the verb discern. The OED gives it a dual parentage from French AND Latin. (Words from ‘French and/or Latin’ constitute the fourth-largest group of loanwords in English, after those from [you’ll have guessed already] Latin only, French only, and Greek, and ahead of German]. It is first recorded from before 1325 (i.e. the exact date is not known).

DISCERNABLE

Given its existence in English, discern, like so very many other verbs, was then capable of having the suffix –able added – or, as the OED puts it: ‘formed within English by derivation’ – when the need to express the idea of ‘able to be discerned’ arose. Which it did, but not before 1548, it seems, and then in a rather sad cause.

1548   W. Patten The Expedicion into Scotlande of…Prince Edward, Duke of Somerset sig. k.vi

That woorthy gentleman and valiaunt Captain all piteefully disfigured and mangled amoong them lay: and but by his bearde nothing discernable.

That extract is from the account of the disastrous (for the Scots) battle between the English and Scots armies at Pinkie Cleugh (near Musselburgh, which is not far from Edinburgh), on 10 September, 1547. Possibly as many as 6,000 Scots were killed out of an army of 22,000 to 23,000.

In that extract, the meaning is not the main modern one of ‘perceptible’ but rather that of ‘recognizable’, in this case only by the subject’s beard. (How you recognize a man by his beard alone could be a skill we moderns have lost. Hipsters take note.)

[image error] Lord Protector Somerset by Holbein (Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, under whose auspices the attack on Scotland took place.) You’d have to be Herculeanly butch to get away with that look nowadays.

That meaning of ‘perceptible (to the mind)’ first surfaced thirteen years later, in a translation of Calvin (the theologian)’s work:

1561   T. Norton tr. J. Calvin Inst. Christian Relig. i. xvii. f. 62   The schoole of certayn and plainly discernable trueth [L. certae conspicuaeque veritatis schola].

It is worth noting, firstly, that the OED gives twenty-first century citations for four out of the five meanings it assigns to discernable (the fifth being, in any case, obsolete).

Second, the OED also notes ‘Compare Middle French, French discernable visible, (in later use also) that can be perceived by the mind or intellect (16th cent.)…’ which leaves it tantalizingly unclear what influence the OUP lexicographers think French had on the word. (Remember what M-W Unabridged says, quoted earlier.)

DISCERNIBLE…

is a direct borrowing from the Late Latin discernibilis, from the Latin verb discernere mentioned earlier, ‘to separate, to distinguish, to settle, decide’ (from which comes discrete, meaning ‘separate’ and not ‘tactful’, which is spelled discreet). I wonder if its replacing the –able form is an example of the philological Latinizing trend that e.g. added the b to debt.

It currently has all the same meanings as discernable, and one extra, historically (= capable of discerning), with which it first appeared in 1603 in a work by the Elizabethan/Jacobean poet Samuel Daniel:

1603   S. Daniel Panegyrike sig. B3   God..Hath giuen thee all those powers of worthinesse, Fit for so great a worke, and fram’d thy hart Discernible of all apparences.

 

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The first OED citation for one of its current meanings (‘That can be discerned or perceived by the mind or intellect.’) is:

1616   S. S. Honest Lawyer i. sig. B

I am composd most of the nimbler elements: But little water in me, farre lesse earth, some aire..but their mixture Is scarce discernible, th’are so dispers’d. For my predominant qualitie is all fire.

A contemporary OED example with the same meaning is: 2003   N.Y. Mag. 3 Nov. 90/3   Songs that stop and start for no discernible reason.

Finally, in the meaning of ‘visible’ we have the first appearance in 1678:

W. Thomas Serm. preached before Lords 36

Elijah’s little Cloud scarce discernible at first aspect, but being dilated, blackens the Heavens.

And more recent quotations from George Eliot and Ian McEwan:

1866   ‘G. Eliot’ Felix Holt I. ii. 67   There was the slightest possible quiver discernible across Jermyn’s face.

2001   I. McEwan Atonement 160   There was nothing, nothing but the tumbling dark mass of the woods just discernible against the greyish-blue of the western sky.

Tbc in another blog, with information on relative frequencies.

Furlough: what it means & where it comes from

I’ve blogged about this for Collins dictionaries, so I thought I’d post the link here.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/word-lovers-blog/new/furlough-a-military-word-on-civvy-street,616,HCB.html

Fulsome is as fulsome does. What does fulsome ‘mean’?

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7-minute read

What you need to know if you ain’t got time/inclination to read any further:

fulsome praise, apologies, tributes and dedications might be a) insincere and over the top or b) sincere and heartfelt. A (probable) minority of people – purists – think that only a) is correct.


Because of these two (overlapping) meanings, the word is potentially ambiguous and best avoided. It is what is known as a ‘skunked’ term. For the negative you could try unctuous, gushing, overdone, extravagant, insincere, over the top and fawning. For the positive you could do worse than effusive, generous, liberal, glowing, lavish, sincere, heartfelt and enthusiastic according to the noun in question.


Fulsome also means ‘abundant, plentiful’ and ‘full and plump, fleshy’, the latter referring to people. These are two meanings that were revived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively and are still going strong.

Some people also object to the use of fulsome in such contexts when full would seemingly do just as well.




Examples of this are: ‘In recent months officials working on Bradford’s bid have been privately worried that Leeds might fail to offer its fulsome backing’, and ‘I agree with Dawkins that a fulsome explanation of phenomena, however difficult to comprehend, confers satisfaction, without necessarily detracting from natural beauty.’

3. The word is less frequent (per million words) in US English than in British, Australian or NZ varieties.

We are not unpeeved!

‘I wish people would stop saying “fulsome” to be fancy’ came the tweet de coeur from the excellent begetter of the Twitter account @grammartable on 2 February 2020.

Her complaint raises the obvious question, which is the ‘fancy’ use? Looking into history is no help because trying to pin down fulsome’s true meaning is like trying to nail jelly to the wall –  apart from being an instance of the etymological fallacy.

In a nutshell, the question is, if someone bestows fulsome praise on you or anyone, are they being puppy-like in their enthusiasm and sincere in what they say, or are they being two-faced and speaking with forked tongue and you should trust them as much as you would trust a promise by Putin to give the Crimea back (I think I’ve used up my cliché allowance for today.)

Having started out in life full of innocent promise, fulsome for a long time thereafter laboured under the burden of negative meanings being heaped upon it, such as ‘morally reprehensible, obnoxious’, or ‘sexually unrestrained, unchaste, lascivious’ or ‘difficult to digest, cloying’ or ‘sickly-sweet’ or ‘physically disgusting; filthy, dirty, foul, loathsome.’

Not the kind of word you’d like to introduce to your mother, then.

In particular, if in modern times you described the praise heaped on someone as fulsome, in your view it was phony, fake, sarcastic, ironic. That’s supposedly clear from these OED examples (and the OED definition at the end of the blog).

How can you spot sincerity on the page?

‘It’s been a great pleasure to meet you. I’ve been a fan of yours for many years.’ He hoped it didn’t sound meaninglessly fulsome.

S. Brett,  Comedian Dies iii. 33, 1979

A bit fulsome, perhaps, but one easily forgives any over-appreciation of a kindness.

F. Kingsland,  Etiquette for All Occasions iii. 55, 1901

They [sc. retired EU commissioners] are free to lavish fulsome praise on the EU and all its works whenever they wish without ever having to mention that it is paying them up to £75,000 a year.

Telegraph, 2007

The Collins Cobuild dictionary for learners of English hits the nail on the head for that meaning:

If you describe expressions of praise, apology, or gratitude as fulsome, you disapprove of them because they are exaggerated and elaborate, so that they sound insincere.

But hang on a cotton-picking moment.

Nobody looking at those contexts who had no previous contextual knowledge of the word could suss the insincerity out, could they? They could gaily replace fulsome with enthusiastic or lavish and the apparent meaning would not change one iota.

There’s a whole tone of voice/tongue-in-cheek aspect here that does not emerge when the word is on paper or on the screen.

For once, folk etymology is right

Just take a look at the shape of the word and you can see what’s going to happen. Any folk analysis of it would break it down into full and the suffix –some as in handsome, wholesome, lissom, winsome and so forth.

And, well, folks, that analysis is correct, as it happens. Back in the thirteenth century (1200–) it came about by a merger of full + some and meant ‘abundant’ in a good way (see the OED definitions at the end).

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Thereafter, over the course of many centuries it acquired – and sometimes lost – generally unsavoury meanings, one of which is the one under discussion. The ‘oh, don’t try to butter me up’ meaning first appears in Ben Jonson’s work in 1602. His and the following quotation make it much clearer through context than the examples already quoted that fulsome is a bad thing.

In sinceritie, if you be thus fulsome to me in euery thing, I’le be diuorc’t; Gods my body!

B. Jonson, Poetaster ii. i. sig. C, 1602

I never heard anything so fulsome from the mouth of man; and found my self…impatient of such filthy stuff.

S. Patrick, Parable of Pilgrim 199, 1665

What do the usage pundits pundit?

This connotation was recognised and widely used, it seems, until the last century. Fowler in 1926 and Gowers in Fowler 2 in 1965 mentioned the pronunciation, nothing else.

By 1996, however, Burchfield in Fowler 3 was worried enough to opine: ‘An age-old semantic process, in which a word loses its depreciatory element, is gaining a new recruit. The process seems to be proceeding more swiftly in AmE than in BrE and to be more common among public speakers and journalists than in other quarters, to judge from the evidence I have seen.’

Gadzooks! Those American journalists destroying our language yet again! And note the militaristic ‘recruit’ obeying the conceptual metaphor ENGLISH IS A FORTRESS TO BE DEFENDED AGAINST AN ATTACKING ARMY.

Burchfield was referring to a process known technically as ‘melioration’, whereby a word is allowed to rise from the naughty stool it has been sitting on and rejoin the rest of the class, its head held high.

But, as I’ve said, if you didn’t know the word was insincere you wouldn’t know it was insincere, if you see what I mean.

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The earliest OED citation for the positive meaning – and the date is probably reliable as this is OED3 – is from 1922:

Why did you write that and fill it with so much fulsome expression of regard and love?

People of State of New York against Thomas J. Ryan: Case on Appeal (Court of Appeals, State of N.Y.) 168

Oh, those Americans! Destroying the language but then peeving about it.

And it turns out that fussing about the true meaning is a very American thang. According to the unimpeachable Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage, laments started to be heard in the 1950s ‘in the wake’ of the word’s increasing use. Moreover, part of the insistence that the word is negative stems from definitions in M-W dictionaries. Those M-W lexicographers! Mischief- makers, every one.

M-W (2002) do, however, say that ‘The watchword obviously must be care’ and ‘If you do use the nonpejorative senses, make sure your context is unambiguous.’

Oddly, given that, it is less frequent in my 2014 corpus and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English in US usage than in British, Australian or NZ English.

Here are a few contexts from the corpus I use (2014). They suggest, I submit, how impossible it often is to decide whether fulsome is negative or positive even when surrounding context is included.

She added: ‘I have no desire whatsoever for a leadership contest but if there were to be one and Charles to be a contender, he would have my wholehearted and very vocal support.’ Elsewhere in the Lib-Dem group in Brussels, however, there was less fulsome praise for the leader.

Nowadays, there’s a tendency to honour notable people during their own lifetime which is great. There isn’t much point in doing it when they’re dead and not around to hear the fulsome praise being heaped on them.

He has not quite offered a fulsome apology, but I will. In All the First Minister’s Men I predicted a cost in excess of £300m, a wild underestimate.

[Fulsome here, though, probably comes close to being simply ‘a full apology’.]

He prefaced it with a long and fulsome forty-seven page dedication to Princess Caroline, given over mainly to a denunciation of the evils of female education.

[image error] ‘Sauce’ means ‘the booze’ means ‘the sherbet’ means ‘the sherry’ means ‘alcoholic beverage’.

Dixit et pronuntiavit OED

I’ll leave the last word to the OED. Note what it says about meanings 5 a. and b.

It defines the ‘full, copious’ meaning as

1. a. Characterized by being full of some commodity or material; abundant, plentiful; providing a copious supply, rich; (in later use also) complete, comprehensive.

Revived in the 19th century.

The meticulous documentation in learned and fulsome footnotes.

Speculum 30 498, 1955

Fullsome breakfasts, luxuriant Laura Ashley bedrooms and Joan’s welcoming smiles are all-inclusive.

Beautiful Brit. Columbia Fall (Insert) 24, 1993

The spelling in the last example for the category (above) shows the (folk) etymology of the word in action

Then

1. b. Chiefly of a person or (a part of) the body: full and plump; fleshy, corpulent; oversized, overfed; (in later use) full-figured; voluptuous. Also in extended use.

Revived in the 20th century.

The queen is by a fire with a rather fulsome lady-in-waiting, yarning wool.

R. Curtis & R. Atkinson in R. Curtis et al., Black-Adder (1998) 21/1 (stage direct.), 1983

It was still full of those heavy, fulsome, towering trees.

R. Mabey, Flora Britannica 58/2, 1996

His thousands of smiling, fulsome ladies are just that—nude rather than naked.

Vanity Fair Nov. 164, 2004

5. Of language or behaviour, or of a person with regard to this.

a. Offensive or objectionable owing to excess or lack of moderation; esp. excessively effusive or complimentary; too lavish, overdone.

In recent use, sometimes distinguished from sense A. 5b  only by mildly pejorative overtones: in many 20th century examples, it is difficult to be certain whether the older critical sense or a neutral or even positive sense is intended. (Underlining mine.)

b. Unrestrained, exuberant; effusive; lavish; wholehearted.

This use probably developed from sense A. 5a partly as a result of the ambiguity of expressions such as fulsome praise, in which the speaker’s or writer’s attitude may be taken as neutral or even positive rather than critical; see also etymological note. It has been censured by writers on usage, but is now well established. Cf. also sense A. 1a.

 

 

Penguin awareness, penguin suits, Penguin books & Welsh

[image error] Huddle in, chaps! It’s brass monkeys out there.

5-minute read (and every second a joy)
Penguins

It’s #penguinawarenessday today. Which is a jolly good thing since, I suspect, most people other than Pingu fans and naturalists will be blissfully unaware of them for the rest of the year.

I bet you’ll never guess from which language English borrowed penguin. Could it be from those adventurous mariners the Dutch, as their word is pinguïn? Or perhaps from a Polynesian language? Nope, neither of those. It’s most probably from…

…

…

…

…

Welsh.

Which is interesting, because very few Welsh words have entered the mainstream of English, corgi being a highly visible exception.

The Welsh origin is from pen meaning ‘head, headland’ and gwyn meaning ‘white.’ And according to the OED etymologists it was probably first applied to the now extinct Great Auk. The pen part features in Penzance, Penmaenmawr and Penrith, and gwyn in the Christian names Gwyn, Gwynn, Gwynne.

Infinite were the Numbers of the foule, wch the Welsh men name Pengwin & Maglanus tearmed them Geese.

That’s an extract, dated 24 August 1577, from the log kept on the Golden Hindeby the priest Francis Fletcher on Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world. (‘Maglanus’ we know as Magellan.)

Having waddled into English, the word has dived into other languages such as French pingouin or Russian пингвин (peengveen) or Finnish pingviini.

[image error] You can visit the Golden Hinde replica in London. Not too far from The Globe or Southwark Cathedral.
He’s an animal when he’s angry!

We often use words and phrases that characterise human behaviour in animal terms. Some obvious examples are a nasty man is a swine; a wily one is an old fox; a greedy person is a pig or a gannet; and a treacherous friend is a snake. (Add your own examples here ****************)

Those words above used metaphorically make vivid use of a central conceptual metaphor: PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS.

What’s more, when we liken someone’s behaviour to that of an animal, the behaviour concerned is almost always bad, as the previous examples suggest (the early bird catches the worm is a rare exception).

What we’re doing with that kind of language is making use of the overarching conceptual metaphor BAD HUMAN BEHAVIOUR IS BAD ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR.

Sweeeeeeeet!

If you watch footage of penguins moving on land, they look clumsy, comical, almost touchingly vulnerable, endearing in their ridiculousness, sweeeeet. But the metaphor we draw from their behaviour is the opposite of warm or affectionate. As the OED puts it, ‘humorous or derogatory. A man wearing black-and-white evening dress, esp. one having a stiff or pompous demeanour.’

The earliest use comes from that now defunct engine of lively prose and teenage excitement, Melody Maker, 1 April 1967:

Good Music had the sort of melody and clipping beat that even Victor Sylvester didn’t have to alter so that the Brylcreemed penguins and their sequined partners could jig about in the ballrooms.

Even better, because it suggests pomposity beyond the starchiness, is this from 1996:

When, for the third time, a penguin with attitude announced the absence of a number of menu dishes, I felt distinctly uneasy.

Eat Soup Dec. 45/2

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Away from the realms of imaginative writing, penguin suit for evening dress and white shirt is a phrase that anyone might use. It dates back to the very beginning of the 1960s (I bought myself a penguin suit. M. Terry, Old Liberty 36, 1961), while this next quote neatly epitomises the convention-hating attitude of the decade:

Some smooth bastard in a penguin suit. R. Jeffries Traitor’s Crime iv. 46, 1968.

What was news to me, courtesy of the OED, is that penguin suit can also mean astronauts’ gear:

The astronauts donned the tight-fitting overalls, known as a penguin suit, in which tension is produced by several layers of rubberized material.

N.Y. Times, 10 June 1971

The most visible penguin in people of a certain age’s lives will no doubt have been the one on the covers of the hugely successful Penguin paperback series, launched in 1935 and still going strong. The symbol was chosen as something ‘dignified but flippant.’

Those paperbacks did not stand up to repeat handling. I remember dutifully covering mine with transparent adhesive plastic (now, memory, just what was it called?) to make them last longer and stop grubby fingerprints or Marmite stains sullying their sunshiny orange. You had to spread the plastic ever so, but ever so carefully to make sure no bubbles or blisters disfigured your book’s synthetic second skin.

Some choice quotations about the Penguin paperbacks are at the end of this blog.

[image error] A: Gor, he ditn’t, did he?
B: I think he did.

Meanwhile, English being so footloose – nay, cavalier – with parts of speech, it was inevitable that Penguin books should hatch a verb. Its parent seems to have been a rather snotty GBS in a 1941 letter:

I have had to let Pygmalion be penguined. My days of respectable publishing are over, I fear.

24 Feb. inColl. Lett. 1926–50 (1988) 597

The phenomenon of Penguining is past its peak; nowadays much fiction and non-fiction appears first in hardback and then paperback, regardless of publisher. In this quote, the author is looking back to that golden age.

For an author, to be ‘Penguined’ was a mark of high merit.

J. Sutherland, Bestsellers ii. 30, 2007.

Finally, the Chambers Dictionary of Slang and Wiktionary concur that penguin is slang for a nun (black habit, with white wimple, coif, etc.). Wiktionary also claims it is a juggling manoeuvre: ‘A type of catch where the palm of the hand is facing towards the leg with the arm stretched downward, resembling the flipper of a penguin’.

And last of all, Urban Dictionary suggests it describes a way of keeping warm: ‘When two or more people try and stand as close together as possible with both hands in their pockets to avoid cold weather and strong winds.’ That is a deeply attractive metaphor, but I have no idea whether people actually use it.

Penguin Books

The TLS gives them its blessing, 1 August 1935:

We shall look forward to more Penguin Books, and we wish the experiment—a bold one—all success.

Orwell reads a stack of them to while away the time as he sits on a roof in Barcelona in the early days of the Spanish Civil War:

Sometimes I was merely bored with the whole affair, paid no attention to the hellish noise, and spent hours reading a succession of Penguin Library books which, luckily, I had bought a few days earlier; sometimes I was very conscious of the armed men watching me fifty yards away.

Homage to Catalonia x. 177, 1938 (1937)

Dame Iris in the person of one of her characters dismisses Penguin’s polaiht English fiction:

There were a few Penguin novels, but they looked dull English tea-party stuff.

I. Murdoch Unofficial Rose v. 51, 1962

And someone writing in The Scotsman skewers the pretensions of a fresher:

A spotty first-year student in faculty scarf and tweed jacket, reading a Penguin Classic while trying to light a brand-new pipe.

Scotsman (Nexis) 11, Nov. 5 2002

 

Catfights and Dogfights and Gender

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Of stereotyped animals

There are clear patterns in the use of gendered animal metaphors and images that mirror larger societal prejudices of thinking and acting. Most animals, I suspect, are thought of as male, the unmarked sex. Where the female term is prominent or at least current in everyday language – cow, heifer, mare, sow – its metaphorical application to human females is unflattering, to say the least. An exception is the fairly recent cougar – not on the face of it female when referring to the animal – to mean attractive older woman in search of a younger lover. But even that image has overtones of predatoriness and stealth (cougars are  ‘big cats’ after all) that might not be considered wholly desirable or positive.

Turning to one of our two most popular pets, cats too are an exception in that the unmarked term seems to be female, the marked term being tomcat. Dogs adhere to the norm, ‘male’ being unmarked, since you have to specify female as bitch, which is never a compliment (except in the Halestorm song ‘You call me a bitch like it’s a bad thing’).

The qualities stereotypically attributed to the two animals in literature and language tend to follow stereotypical gender lines and contrast starkly. Cats are seen as self-centred and self-preserving (the cat would eat fish but would not wet her feet), pleasure-loving (like the cat that’s got the cream), fickle and possibly deceitful or spiteful (bitchy, catty), and erotically indolent. Or they are mysteriously erotic, as in one of Baudelaire’s two Le Chat poems reproduced below.

The exceptional cat portrayed as male in the Tom and Gerry cartoons has a completely different character: hyperenergetic, loyal (to Gerry, when it counts), and less resourceful than Gerry.

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Dogs, generally speaking, are viewed as loyal, determined and resourceful (Lassie; it’s dogged as does it), easily pleased (like a dog with two tails), even a bit blokeish (Churchill the bulldog in the ads for the British insurance company of the same name, and bulldogs in many other ads historically.)

Of catfights and dogfights

These stereotypes play out where you might not expect them, in catfight (1824 in literal sense) and dogfight (1656, literal). A Martian might be forgiven for thinking that the two should be equivalent and simply mean a fight. But each has developed differently connoted metaphors. Catfight meaning ‘a vicious fight or altercation’ and,  as the OED notes, ‘esp. between women’ came thirty years after the literal meaning, in 1854 from a U.S. source:

The object is to keep the women and babies, as much as possible, apart, and prevent those terrible cat-fights which sometimes occur.

B. G. Ferris, Utah & Mormons xviii. 308

That first citation is definitely feminine, but the next two seem to be gender-neutral (1888 & 1931). In fact, the later one refers to something as serious and masculine as wars, while seeking to trivialize them by using the term:

History is the recital of wars, the peaceful years are but pauses between the cat-fights.

R. A. Tsnaoff Nature of Evil xi. 289, 1931

Then the next one, in 1964 is definitely female, referencing The Marriage of Figaro:

Act I especially seemed heavily overproduced, with (for example) the courtesy duet between Susanna and Marcelina [sic] becoming all but a cat-fight.

Times, 196415 Aug. 10/5

as is this cracker from Julie Burchill:

The noble thespian lesbian tradition of the celluloid catfight, from early James Bond films to late Duran Duran videos.

Sex & Sensibility, 1986 (1992) 59

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From its seventeenth-century literal meaning, dogfight took centuries to sprout its ‘extended’ meaning, as the OED calls it, of ‘a disturbance or mêlée; a ferocious struggle for supremacy’. Like catfight, it too is first cited in a U.S. source:

Anxiously the two men watched the political ‘dog-fight’ between Douglas and Buchanan, hoping for a disruption in the Democratic party.

J. F. Newton,  Lincoln & Herndon 139, 1910

The subsequent OED citations all suggest what are traditionally male milieux, such as parliament, annual general meetings and employee–employer relations.

A second new meaning was hatched towards the end of the First World War, namely, ‘an aerial battle between military aircraft at close quarters’:

Now a general combat ensues, in which each man must fight independently. All semblance of formation is lost; the mêlée is called a ‘dog fight’.

Popular Science Monthly, 1918 Dec. 27/3

Modern data strongly suggests that the gender dichotomy for the two words has intensified. Not to mention the U.S. all-girl tribute band and the 2016 film, Catfight: a black and blue comedy.

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To put it bluntly, men don’t usually take part in catfights, nor women in dogfights. And if men do take part, there is a sneering twist to the word, as in examples 5 & 6 below.

The words that typically associate with each of the –fight compounds overlap hardly at all.

Catfights may be unseemly, topless, celebrity, drunken, literary, verbal and even erotic, but dogfights are none of those things. Instead, they are fierce, tense or intense, online and political.

People love catfights (shades of the male lesbian fantasy, perhaps, as embodied in the cover of Real Men) or get into them whereas they merely witness dogfights, or are embroiled in them or survive them. Sport is the field (sorry) in which most dogfights occur, particularly end-of-season dogfights to avoid relegation.

The number of women who are seeking treatment at hospital casualty units after being injured in drunken catfights is rising sharply, consultants warn.
A celebrity catfight may soon take place between Harry Potter author JK Rowling and quiz show host Anne Robinson. Both have been nominated by students as potential rectors of St Andrew’s University in Scotland.
It means Yorkshire [sc. cricket team] are sure to be involved in a fierce dogfight over the coming weeks and the scrap starts on Friday at Headingley…
Rarely has a so-called relegation dogfight deserved its do-or-die billing more than this one did for Thistle’s [sc. football team] young managerial duo of Derek Whyte and Gerry Britton.
This week, Kimbo and superbitch John get into a catfight over taxation, while Pete gets jealous because it was all his idea in the first place.

From a satirical piece about an Australian election.
We love a good catfight, which is why we were delighted to see former Out publisher Henry Scott let loose with a few hisses against the merging gay-media triumvirate of PlanetOut, Gay.com, and the Advocate.

Publishers of gay media being implicitly feminized.

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;

Retiens les griffes de ta patte,

Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,

Mêlés de métal et d’agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir

Ta tête et ton dos élastique,

Et que ma main s’enivre du Plaisir

De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,

Comme le tien, aimable bête

Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,

Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum

Nagent autour de son corps brun.

A freeish translation by Roy Campbell that mirrors the original rhyme scheme:

Come, my fine cat, against my loving heart;

Sheathe your sharp claws, and settle.

And let my eyes into your pupils dart

Where agate sparks with metal.

Now while my fingertips caress at leisure

Your head and wiry curves,

And that my hand’s elated with the pleasure

Of your electric nerves,

I think about my woman — how her glances

Like yours, dear beast, deep-down

And cold, can cut and wound one as with lances;

Then, too, she has that vagrant

And subtle air of danger that makes fragrant

Her body, lithe and brown.

Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

Till the cows come home: origins and examples

[image error] Cows near a river. Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691). Look at those clouds. The cows are just an excuse for a glorious cloudscape.

What about that phrase ‘till the cows come home’? Why don’t people just say what they mean, which is either ‘forever’ or ‘for an indefinitely long time’?

The question answers itself in a flash. Till the cows come home, like many metaphors, adds colour, emphasis, atmosphere, even a bit of pizzazz. How dull and dreary communication would be if we just stuck to the literal and used words like Lego blocks, clunkily building up our sentences word-brick by word-brick. Till the cows come home certainly chimes loudly enough with the British public to turn not one but two books with that title into Sunday Times bestsellers this year.

And not only that: if you tend to ‘see’ words and phrases, it adds a vivid image. For me it evokes the sight of dappled Guernseys ambling along a muddy path towards the byre or milking parlour, their brimful udders swaying pendulously. For painters of the Dutch Golden Age specializing in landscapes (a word English nabbed from Dutch), cows munching contentedly in their pastures or standing stolidly near a river were a symbol of hard-won tranquillity and prosperity after an almost century-long struggle for freedom.

What do you see?

Sometimes till the cows come home conveys that simple meaning of ‘indefinitely’, with no other implication or connotation, and can even be used in a positive, upbeat context:

So eat them [sc. olives] till the cows come home in pubs or restaurants to help take the edge off your appetite.

Much more often, however, we use it to highlight the futility of some action, to suggest that it is against all odds for an event to happen. It’s often associated with talking and verbs in the same lexical field, such as debating, arguing, and so forth. The idea is of an endless ‘talking shop’:

The debate on whether the death penalty must be abolished or not will go on till the cows come home.

You could argue about it till the cows come home – and Kiwis frequently have.

Perhaps I m just embittered by experience, but I think most teenagers have been a pain in the bottom since their invention decades ago. One can pander till the cows come home, but it won’t make a scrap of difference.

But why cows in the first place? And why home? Except in the deepest depths of winter, most dairy cows in Britain will be let out to graze on grass and pasture. In high summer, they can be outdoors for most of the day, from early in the morning – with an interval for morning milking – until it’s time for milking again in the early evening. That makes for a long day and thus motivates, even nowadays, the idea of an endlessly long stretch of time.

[image error] Different cows by a river. Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691). Here the cows occupy more of the picture space and Man is involved, but only as the target of the rays of sunlight breaking through the clouds. Quiet genius!

‘Home’ historically must have been a byre or milking shed.  And in the past, the cows might be left out all day, or even overnight, until ready to be milked. That, at least, is one explanation for the phrase. In its favour, the ponderous, unruffled, almost languid way in which cows walk can, from a human perspective, slow down time almost to a standstill. Think the spondee of the lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea and the long vowels and diphthongs in the rest of that line.

Another explanation mooted is that the period of time evoked refers to the whole of the summer, when cows in Scotland were put out to pasture, returning home only when grazing became scarce at the end of the season. This, however, seems to be based on the unsubstantiated claim that the phrase is Scottish, as reported in the Times in January 1829:

If the Duke [sc. of Wellington}will but do what he unquestionably can do, and propose a Catholic Bill with securities, he may be Minister, as they say in Scotland “until the cows come home”.

Whether the phrase was originally Scottish, who can say. The claim is probably fake news. What is certain is that it is first recorded in plays by the Elizabethan stage’s Ant and Dec, those sub-Shakespeares Beaumont and Fletcher.

In fact, originally only one methane polluter was involved because the idiom was: till the cow come home. And in case you’re wondering whether that verb form come is a misprint, it isn’t. It’s the subjunctive being used with reference to future time, just as it is in come what may (= whatever may occur in the future) and the now decidedly old-fashioned till kingdom come, which echoes the Lord’s Prayer thy kyngdom come. Thy will be done.

In contrast to typical negative modern uses, in both B&F plays –– the activities to be indulged in till the cow come home are pleasurable:

Kiss till the Cow come home, kiss close, kiss close knaves .

My Modern Poet, thou shalt kiss in couplets .

and

Good morrow! Drink till the cows come home, ’tis all paid, boys .

That B&F used the phrase twice suggests it was already well known at the time they wrote; this is supported by another 1610 quotation, from Alexander Cooke’s extreme Puritan rant Pope Joane: a dialogue between a papist and a protestant, in a passage in which priests are accused of all manner of libertinage:

…he [sc. the Priest] conforts with his Neighbour Priefts, who are altogether given to Pleasures; and then both he, and they, live, not like Chriftians, but like Epicures; drinking, eating, feafting, and revelling, till the Cow come Home, as the Saying is.

Cooke’s diatribe is in Latin and English; the Latin matching ‘till the cows come home’ is the bland Tempora tota consumunt (‘they spend all their time’). Clearly, using his native tongue enabled him to ride high on his hobby horse. In an earlier section he foams at the mouth thus: So that now it is all one, to make a Wench a Nun, and to make her a Whore.

Mother Teresa would turn in her grave.

The first modern version noted by the OED is from Swift’s A Complete Collection of genteel and ingenious Conversation (1738):

I warrant you lay a Bed till the Cows came Home.

The most up-to-date quotation I found in the news is a review from Digital Camera World Magazine which uses the phrases in its positive, Jacobean sense:

And with a FREE 4TB hard drive, 64GB SD card and battery grip, you’ll be able to keep shooting till the cows come home!

1610, Scornful Lady; 1609–12, The Captain.

[image error] Different again cows by a river. Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691). Here the moo-moos are almost centre stage. Or are they? The sky is still dominant. And what thoughts is the cowherd thinking underneath that hat?