Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 14

With regard to or with regards to?

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“Give my regards to Jean when you see her” I said to a friend the other day. (If I were considerably younger, I would no doubt have said “Say ‘hi’ to Jean…”)

“Giving your regards to someone” is a standard, if now old-fashioned, phrase that many people have used or will at some stage use.

Signing off an email with “Warmest regards” (my usual one) or some other formulation containing regards is also standard and uncontentious.

But a problem arises when that use of regards is unwittingly transferred to the set phrases “with regard to” and “in regard to.” Obviously, those phrases are used in rather different contexts: “Give my regards to” is mainly oral, while “in regard to” and “with regard to” are typical of writing – and not every kind of writing at that. Typically, they populate (some might say “infest”) formal, probably academic writing. (As it happens, this blog about the issue was sparked by spotting a professor, no less [or should that be “fewer”?

Spanish words borrowed by English: alligators and cockroaches

 

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Both are loanwords

What is a loanword? It sort of does what it says on the tin. It is a word one language loans or lends to another (though the lender doesn’t usually get it back, and no interest is paid, boom boom). And the word loanword is itself a loan translation, purloined from German Lehnwort. (Actually, the term ‘loanword’ is not quite as straightforward as that, but for the moment, let’s keep things simple, eh?)

English is full of loanwords, as are most, if not all, European languages.

Both come from Spanish

Our alligator combines the Spanish word for ‘lizard’ lagarto, and the Spanish definite article el ‘the’. So, if you run the two together you get elligarto, which eventually was standardized as alligator, though spelt in at least a dozen different ways before standardization.

The word first appeared in its Spanish form lagarto in translations into English in the second half of the 16th century. It made one of its early appearances in Romeo and Juliet, when [image error]Romeo is describing an impecunious apothecary’s shop:

And in his needie shop a tortoyes hung, An allegater stuft, and other skins Of ill shapte fishes, and about his shelves…

That is the spelling in the 1599 Quarto; in the 1597 Quarto it is Aligarta, which illustrates just how indeterminate the spelling originally was.

[image error] Take away the OTT ruff, and he could be your average hipster, if rather better-looking than most.

In the first half of the 17th century we find Sir Walter Raleigh and Ben Jonson still using the more Spanish spelling: Alegartos and Alligarta respectively. So why did the letters rt of that final -arto or -arta get swapped round to -ator? The OED suggests that it was by association with the agent suffix -ator, found in administrator, imitator, and so on.

This change of form suggests the influence of folk etymology: the process by which people distort the shape of a strange, unfamiliar word to make it fit in with a more familiar word or pattern. Folk etymology is the villain behind many eggcorns.

(Curiously, there is a homonym of alligator, marked as obsolete and rare by the OED, shipped in straight from Latin in the sixteenth century. It means ‘someone who binds’ from the classical Latin alligātor from the verb alligāre, ‘to tie, bind’, etc., related to the Latin ligāre, which gives us, for example, ligature, and has been taken into Spanish as ligar.)

Hardly anyone who reads this will be ancient enough to remember the catchphrase my older brother Rupert taught me: ‘See you later alligator’, to which the appropriate reply is ‘In a while, crocodile!’ It first appeared in 1954, but was popularized thereafter by a Bobby Charles song of 1955. I think it didn’t reach my ears, courtesy of Rupe, till the early 1960s.

A cacarootch by any other name would be just as revolting

The ultimate shape of the word alligator suggests the influence of folk etymology on a mere suffix. With cockroach, the process transformed both elements of another Spanish word, cucaracha, into recognizable English ones: cock + roach. Many people will know the original word from the popular Mexican song:

La cucaracha, la cucaracha,

ya no puede caminar

porque no tiene,

porque le falta

las dos patitas de atrás.

(The cockroach, the cockroach

Can’t walk anymore

Because it hasn’t

Because it’s missing

Its two rear leglets.)

The repellent bug first appeared in print in 1624 in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles by John Smith, a picaresque character who was a soldier and Virginia’s first colonial governor:

A certaine India Bug, called by the Spaniards a Cacarootch, the which creeping into Chests they eat and defile with their ill-sented dung.

Its spelling, like that of alligator, inevitably went through several mutations, before folk etymology pinned it down to its modern shape. For a long time it was hyphenated, and appears as Cock-roach in Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).

Chaise lounges

Since we’ve mentioned folk etymology, a more recent example of folk etymology in action is chaise lounge, adapted from the French chaise longue. The word longue undoubtedly looks odd in English (a rare parallel is tongue), but a chaise longue is ideal for lounging; the alteration therefore seems quite logical. (Some, like Le Corbusier’s iconic creation, are more for show than serious lounging.) [image error]While chaise lounge is predominantly American, and not generally recognized as a correct British spelling, the OED shows it first in an impeccably British source: an edition of The Times of 1807.

 

A silk purse out of a sow’s ear: meaning and origin

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Five-minute read, and worth every second of your very valuable time. (Which is rather less time than it took me to write it.)

The other day someone on Twitter referenced the proverb “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” They didn’t use the phrase in that standard form but played with it: “somewhere out there a sow is missing an ear”, meaning that someone had indeed tried to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. This set me thinking about several questions: what the phrase actually means, how old it is, where it comes from and how the idea it encapsulates might be expressed in other languages.

Where’s it from?

The English phrase could well be Scottish in origin, if that isn’t an oxymoron. A variant first appeared in 1518 in The Egloges (Eclogue v. 360) by the Scottish renaissance poet Alexander Barclay (?1475-1552).1 Barclay’s version is none can … make goodly silk of a gote’s fleece. It wasn’t until 1579 that it first appeared in what I will pompously call its “canonical” form (purely because for some weird reason that’s a phrase I relish): Seekinge … too make a silk purse of a Sowes eare (S. Gosson, Ephemerides of Phialo).

By 1672 it was current enough to be included in W. Walker’s Dictionary of English and Latin proverbs, and the 1699 A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew (a slang dictionary of the time) claims it to be Scottish, and even puts it under the entry for luggs (nowadays lugs), which is Scots for “ear” (though informal and regional English has “lugholes”). Ye can ne [cannot] make a Silk-Purse of a Sowe’s Luggs, a Scotch Proverb. (Incidentally, to file a proverb under its very last word would nowadays be lexicographically eccentric.)

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The citations following that  in the OED are not from Scottish sources, with the exception of a 12 July 1812 letter from Sir Walter Scott to Byron, in which he writes “I am labouring here to contradict an old proverb, and make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” referring to his attempts to create a farm out of unforgiving terrain.  However, not cited in the OED is its appearance in the 1776 A collection of Scots proverbs, more complete and correct than any heretofore published as “Ye canna make a silk purse of a sow’s lug” by the poet Allan Ramsay.

What does it mean?

Another question raised in my mind was whether people below a certain age would get the reference. For example, sometimes when I’ve used a phrase with my niece, who is in her early forties, she will say “That’s a phrase mum would use”, meaning that she herself and people her age wouldn’t. People certainly google it to see what it means, suggesting that, unlike you, gentle reader, they are in the dark about it. And if they do google it, they’re likely to find a definition that runs along the lines of “you can’t produce something good, beautiful or fine from naturally inferior or ugly materials.”

To my mind, that style of definition suggests you can only use the phrase about objects, not people, which is manifestly not so. The four most modern OED citations are all about people, including this from 1978: She and her colleagues in the teaching profession are expected to turn children like that into silkpurses, able to count, to spell, to read, to write, to understand, and so on. Jrnl. Royal Soc. Arts 126 339/2

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The proverb is alive and kicking, for example, in the Global Corpus of Web-based English with 154 examples, the UK being the highest flesh-to-luxury-fabric converter. (“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” has with 155 almost exactly the same number.)

Equivalents in other languages

The next question is, how do other languages express this idea? One can never assume or take for granted that an idiom or proverb in one language has an equivalent in another. (And still less that that other language will use the same images.) However, looking at a small selection of languages it turns out that a similar idea is indeed “lexicalized”. That fact could point to a set of reactions—if not universal, at least widespread—to given social situations.

I looked at Oxford Dictionaries’ versions for French, Italian, German and Portuguese. They don’t list one for Spanish, but I will offer my own, which is a phrase I first heard an Argentine friend use years ago and it always conjures up a rather colourful image in my mind. Here are the literal translations followed by the original language.

One point that emerges clearly—at the risk of stating the obvious—is that the proverbs offered as equivalents do not necessarily have the same extension, in the logical sense, or range of application as the English. For example, while the English applies to things and people, the Spanish and French look as if they apply to people only.

Spanish: A monkey, for all that it dresses in silk, is a monkey and a monkey it will stay. El mono por más que se vista de seda, mono es y mono queda. (Note the rhyme.)

Or, if you want an English rhyme and an invented proverb, A monkey, even if dressed in silk, still belongs to the monkey ilk.

French: The herring barrel will always smell of herring. La caque sent toujours le hareng.

(glossed on the Fr-Eng side as ‘you can’t hide your origins’)

A friend who is an expert in the field suggests that a closer equivalent is “You can’t make flour from a sack of bran”, On ne peut pas tirer de la farine d’un sac de son, but it’s really rather rare.

Italian: Offers two options–You can’t get blood out of a turnip. Non si cava sangue da una rapa

And

The cask gives the wine it has. La botte dà il vino che ha (note that here’s another rhyme)

Portuguese: A stick [i.e trunk or stem] that is born crooked never will straighten up/dies crooked. Pau que nasce torto nunca se endireita/pau que nasce torto morre torto.

German: Out of a pig’s ear no silk bag/purse can be made. Aus einem Schweinsohr lässt sich kein seidener Beutel machen.

Now, is the German a loan from English, or vice versa? Or do they have a common source? Finally, my Greek correspondent tells me that there doesn’t, to her knowledge, seem to be anything equivalent in Modern Greek, while my Croatian informant suggests “[can’t] make gold from mud” praviti od blata zlato.

Finally, my ever-helpful Irish correspondent points out that the Irish Cuir culaith shíoda ar ghabhar, is gabhar i gcónaí é, translated as “Put a silk suit on a goat, it’s always (still) a goat”, bears a strong resemblance to the Spanish.

1 Barclay’s Egloges are adaptations of Latin originals written by Italian renaissance scholars including Pope Pius II, who not only visited (and hated) Scotland before he became Pope but also managed to sire a child here. (Which raises the fascinating prospect of a renaissance Pope having several hundred modern descendants in Scotland!) The Barclay Eclogue (v) in which the proverb appears is based on the fifth and sixth Eclogues of the Italian poet and humanist Baptista Mantuanus (1447-1516), who exerted a major influence on sixteenth-century British authors, is cited by Holofernes in Love’s Labours Lost and was known simply as “Mantuan”. It is interesting that Barclay’s paraphrase seems to be a very early example of this influence. A quick skim of the relevant Mantuan eclogues did not reveal any obvious set phrases borrowed by Barclay, and so it would seem the proverb was his inspired invention, and his alone.

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a silk purse out of a sow’s ear: meaning and origin

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Five-minute read, and worth every second of your very valuable time. (Which is rather less time than it took me to write it.)

The other day someone on Twitter referenced the proverb “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” They didn’t use the phrase in that standard form but played with it: “somewhere out there a sow is missing an ear”, meaning that someone had indeed tried to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. This set me thinking about several questions: what the phrase actually means, how old it is, where it comes from and how the idea it encapsulates might be expressed in other languages.

Where’s it from?

The English phrase could well be Scottish in origin, if that isn’t an oxymoron. A variant first appeared in 1518 in The Egloges (Eclogue v. 360) by the Scottish renaissance poet Alexander Barclay (?1475-1552).1 Barclay’s version is none can … make goodly silk of a gote’s fleece. It wasn’t until 1579 that it first appeared in what I will pompously call its “canonical” form (purely because for some weird reason that’s a phrase I relish): Seekinge … too make a silk purse of a Sowes eare (S. Gosson, Ephemerides of Phialo).

By 1672 it was current enough to be included in W. Walker’s Dictionary of English and Latin proverbs, and the 1699 A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew (a slang dictionary of the time) claims it to be Scottish, and even puts it under the entry for luggs (nowadays lugs), which is Scots for “ear” (though informal and regional English has “lugholes”). Ye can ne [cannot] make a Silk-Purse of a Sowe’s Luggs, a Scotch Proverb. (Incidentally, to file a proverb under its very last word would nowadays be lexicographically eccentric.)

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The citations following that  in the OED are not from Scottish sources, with the exception of a 12 July 1812 letter from Sir Walter Scott to Byron, in which he writes “I am labouring here to contradict an old proverb, and make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” referring to his attempts to create a farm out of unforgiving terrain.  However, not cited in the OED is its appearance in the 1776 A collection of Scots proverbs, more complete and correct than any heretofore published as “Ye canna make a silk purse of a sow’s lug” by the poet Allan Ramsay.

What does it mean?

Another question raised in my mind was whether people below a certain age would get the reference. For example, sometimes when I’ve used a phrase with my niece, who is in her early forties, she will say “That’s a phrase mum would use”, meaning that she herself and people her age wouldn’t. People certainly google it to see what it means, suggesting that, unlike you, gentle reader, they are in the dark about it. And if they do google it, they’re likely to find a definition that runs along the lines of “you can’t produce something good, beautiful or fine from naturally inferior or ugly materials.”

To my mind, that style of definition suggests you can only use the phrase about objects, not people, which is manifestly not so. The four most modern OED citations are all about people, including this from 1978: She and her colleagues in the teaching profession are expected to turn children like that into silkpurses, able to count, to spell, to read, to write, to understand, and so on. Jrnl. Royal Soc. Arts 126 339/2

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The proverb is alive and kicking, for example, in the Global Corpus of Web-based English with 154 examples, the UK being the highest flesh-to-luxury-fabric converter. (“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” has with 155 almost exactly the same number.)

Equivalents in other languages

The next question is, how do other languages express this idea? One can never assume or take for granted that an idiom or proverb in one language has an equivalent in another. (And still less that that other language will use the same images.) However, looking at a small selection of languages it turns out that a similar idea is indeed “lexicalized”. That fact could point to a set of reactions—if not universal, at least widespread—to given social situations.

I looked at Oxford Dictionaries’ versions for French, Italian, German and Portuguese. They don’t list one for Spanish, but I will offer my own, which is a phrase I first heard an Argentine friend use years ago and it always conjures up a rather colourful image in my mind. Here are the literal translations followed by the original language.

One point that emerges clearly—at the risk of stating the obvious—is that the proverbs offered as equivalents do not necessarily have the same extension, in the logical sense, or range of application as the English. For example, while the English applies to things and people, the Spanish and French look as if they apply to people only.

Spanish: A monkey, for all that it dresses in silk, is a monkey and a monkey it will stay. El mono por más que se vista de seda, mono es y mono queda. (Note the rhyme.)

Or, if you want an English rhyme and an invented proverb, A monkey, even if dressed in silk, still belongs to the monkey ilk.

French: The herring barrel will always smell of herring. La caque sent toujours le hareng.

(glossed on the Fr-Eng side as ‘you can’t hide your origins’)

A friend who is an expert in the field suggests that a closer equivalent is “You can’t make flour from a sack of bran”, On ne peut pas tirer de la farine d’un sac de son, but it’s really rather rare.

Italian: Offers two options–You can’t get blood out of a turnip. Non si cava sangue da una rapa

And

The cask gives the wine it has. La botte dà il vino che ha (note that here’s another rhyme)

Portuguese: A stick [i.e trunk or stem] that is born crooked never will straighten up/dies crooked. Pau que nasce torto nunca se endireita/pau que nasce torto morre torto.

German: Out of a pig’s ear no silk bag/purse can be made. Aus einem Schweinsohr lässt sich kein seidener Beutel machen.

Now, is the German a loan from English, or vice versa? Or do they have a common source? Finally, my Greek correspondent tells me that there doesn’t, to her knowledge, seem to be anything equivalent in Modern Greek, while my Croatian informant suggests “[can’t] make gold from mud” praviti od blata zlato.

1 Barclay’s Egloges are adaptations of Latin originals written by Italian renaissance scholars including Pope Pius II, who not only visited (and hated) Scotland before he became Pope but also managed to sire a child here. (Which raises the fascinating prospect of a renaissance Pope having several hundred modern descendants in Scotland!) The Barclay Eclogue (v) in which the proverb appears is based on the fifth and sixth Eclogues of the Italian poet and humanist Baptista Mantuanus (1447-1516), who exerted a major influence on sixteenth-century British authors, is cited by Holofernes in Love’s Labours Lost and was known simply as “Mantuan”. It is interesting that Barclay’s paraphrase seems to be a very early example of this influence. A quick skim of the relevant Mantuan eclogues did not reveal any obvious set phrases borrowed by Barclay, and so it would seem the proverb was his inspired invention, and his alone.

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Yogurt or yoghurt? Wherefore the ‘h’?

Yogurt or yoghurt?

[image error] Mmm, still not quite as heavenly as what I remember.

Yoghurt was responsible for my second gustatory (i.e. “taste”) epiphany, back when I was an 18-year-old stripling on my first solo holiday, touring the classical sites. I do not recall whether I had eaten homegrown British versions before – back then, yoghurt was not everyday fare –, but if I had, they were blown out of the water by the nectar and ambrosia Greece fed me. On Mykonos it was bliss every morning to sit by the harbourside in the lambent morning sun sipping Greek coffee in between letting tongue-caressing, creamy γιαούρτι topped with honey seduce my virgin taste buds. (That’s enough! What do you think this is? Fifty shades of yogurt? Editor.)

Which spelling is correct?

A tweep asked me about this the other day. I’ll try to answer, drawing principally on the OED. The lady raised the issue because her son works in an upmarket British supermarket beginning with W… and had noticed that both spellings were used. Said lady is an editor, so it’s good to see that apples don’t fall far from trees.

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The short answer is, of course, both are “right”. How you spell it personally, if you need to spell it at all, can simply be a matter of taste (boom-boom). In fact, the OED lists a staggering 34 variant spellings down the centuries for this loanword from Turkish, and we might have ended up spelling it jaghur, yaourt (as in modern French) or even giaourti, as in Greek, or any of the other variations. The OED divides the recorded forms into those with/without h (there are more, historically, of the first) and those with/without g (e.g. yagourt vs yaourt). It points out that this multiplicity of forms is because writers writing it in English used the spelling of the language they were borrowing from, as for example in this translation from French:

A kind of Butter-milk by them [sc. Turks] called Yogourt [Fr. yogourt], which they drink.

A. Lovell tr. J. de Thévenot Trav. into Levant ii. 25  

At its first appearance in English it was just one letter adrift from the modern spelling:

Neither doe they [sc. the Turks] eate much Milke, except it bee made sower, which they call Yoghurd.

Samuel Purchas.

The catchy title of his book – they sure don’t make them like that anymore – is Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his pilgrimes. Contayning a history of the world, in sea voyages & lande-travells, by Englishmen & others…Some left written by M. Hakluyt at his death. More since added. In fower parts

And the earliest citation in the OED for the h-form is from 1925 and for the h-less form from 1956.

Nowadays, there are a mere two geographical variations, or flavours, if you will. As the OED entry (third edn., Sept. 2016) notes:

“The spelling yoghurt is frequent in British written sources, as also in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. However, yogurt (which is by far the dominant form in the United States) predominates in most everyday contexts in Britain, as for instance in food packaging.”

[image error] Turkish poached eggs with yoghurt: now, that sounds good for breakfast.

To ‘g’ or not to ‘g’, that is the question.

As we’ll see, when we look briefly at history, there’s a reason for that g. Our first question, though, is whether to h.

In the Oxford database I generally use, the spelling yoghurt is “lemmatized” on yogurt, which means that yogurt is taken to be the main form, as per the OED. Here’s a table with the results, followed by some explanation.

Variety of English
Yogurt(s)
Yoghurt(s)


 
# examples
 Frequency (%)
# examples
Frequency (%)


British
1,961
198.2
338
16.5


US
75
4.8
5,158
161.3


OZ
237
143.0
41
12.0


NZ
157
215.6
10
6.7


India
84
103.6
76
45.4


SA
40
91.0
21
23.1


Irish
141
85.6
134
39.4


Total
3,369
 
6,955
 

Notes: a) Yogurt(s) and Yoghurt(s) cover all four spellings/forms for each, i.e. yogurt, Yogurt, yogurts, Yogurts; b) the totals exceed the sum of the rows because some figures are omitted.

The “Frequency” column shows as a percentage how much more/less often the word form shows up in that section of the database (corpus) compared to the whole corpus. So, for yogurt in British English that figure is nearly twice 100% whereas for U.S. English it is vanishingly low. Confirming the OED note quoted earlier, frequencies for OZ, NZ, and SA English are high, while India is also over 100 per cent. Irish English seems to fall into line with British.

In contrast, U.S. usage for yoghurt has high frequency, whereas the other varieties shown have lower ones, especially British and New Zealand English. In keeping with that, the Oxford NZ and their OZ dictionaries have yoghurt as headword, as does Macquarie.

So what’s with the g?

The word is from Ottoman Turkish yoġurt (1451; Turkish yoğurt). Now, that letter g represents a sound which differs radically from the two sounds English speakers associate with letter g (girl vs gin, or /g/ vs /dʒ/.) Technically, so the OED informs me, “Ottoman Turkish -ġ- (corresponding to Turkish -ğ- ) originally stood for a voiced velar fricative consonant and was variously transliterated in European languages by -g- , -gh- , and -h-.” Now, a voiced velar fricative does not exist in English, but it – or slight variants of it – does in Spanish, as in the word amigo.  If you listen carefully to some Spanish speakers speaking English, they seem to almost entirely abolish certain consonants, one of them being what we would call the “hard” g in girl, when it comes between vowels.

Try saying the English word ago while keeping your throat open to say the letter g – hard, I know, but it can be done – and you’ll get a bit of an idea of the sound. Anyway, the point is that the sound is “soft” to the point of being imperceptible to ears unused to it. Which explains why some languages, as mentioned earlier, have a yourt without the g.

And as for that h, it has also been suggested, in a comment on Lynne Murphy’s blog about yog(h)urt, that at the time the word was introduced into English Turkish was written in Arabic script: “the modern letter ğ was usually written غ. This letter is usually transcribed as gh, for example in Maghreb, Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan.”

mitigate vs militate. Is mitigate against correct?

militate vs mitigate

Only two letters/phonemes distinguish them, but their meanings are worlds apart—theoretically, at least.

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mitigate

Mitigate, from Latin mītigāre, is transitive, means, broadly speaking, ‘to make something less severe or rigorous’ and is applied to pain and otherwise undesirable circumstances. It was brought into English as early  as 1425 in a medical context translated from French (Auicen mytygateþ þe akyng with opio ‘Avicenna mitigates the pain/soreness with opium’). Some typical nouns used with it are risk, impact, effect, damage, loss, and suffering, e.g.

Currently, research in the North Central Region is focusing on methods that mitigate the adverse impacts of agricultural drainage.

Some representative literary examples: Let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners—Virginia Woolf, 1925; The King’s eventual course of action did nothing to miti­gate the conspirators’ difficulties—Antonia Fraser, 1979; A great yellow sun like a runaway balloon shone from a deep blue sky, and a cooling breeze from the lagoon mitigated the heat—L. Wilkinson, 1992; The church, nevertheless, had some influence in mitigating the rigour of criminal law— J. M. Kelly, 1992

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militate

Militate is intransitive in the meaning that concerns us, and is used with the preposition against. If A militates against B, A is in some way stopping B happening, or is a factor hindering B, or runs counter to B, e.g:

These disagreements will militate against the two communities coming together;

Three facts, however, militate against this possibility;

There are, however, powerful political forces that militate against any enduring settlement.

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that they sometimes get confused.

Three types of confusion happen.

First, mitigate against is used instead of militate against to mean ‘be a factor working against’. This originally U.S. malapropism goes back at least to 1893 (The fact that..the annual product of silver at this ration has been greater than the product of gold does not mitigate against the argument—N. Amer. Rev.Feb. 176) and no less a literary light than Faulkner used it in 1932. The OED makes no mention of its doubtful status, although the Oxford Online Dictionary does. It has been a usage chestnut for decades, at least since Gowers’ 1965 edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage . Although it is now not rare, it will still be regarded by many people as a mistake.

For example, the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage recommends not using it to mean ‘to run counter to’. A minuscule straw poll of editors suggests most would query it. It is neither very common nor very uncommon: the database I consulted had 14,351 examples of mitigate, of which 476 (i.e. 3.3 per cent) were followed by against. Some examples of this contested use, for which militate against would be correct, or at least preferable, are: *But the time factor may have mitigated against that course—Times, 1977; *But those very factors mitigate against it attracting funding—Art Throb, 2000

mitigate against instead of mitigate

A second contested use is mitigate with the superfluous against instead of the transitive mitigate on its own even when the sense is the one mentioned earlier of ‘lessening the severity of something’:

?He said the party planned to talk to colleagues in the South African Development Community (SADC) to seek help in mitigating against the threat—Daily Telegraph 2009.

IMHO, any editor would have to be extraordinarily persuasive to convince, say, the author of the following that the sentence needed correcting to simple mitigate: ?According to Cisco, creating a strong password policy is the most effective way to mitigate against dictionary attacks.

[image error] Tsk, tsk! Zap the ‘against’, fella!

Finally, and only very occasionally, militate is used transitively by mistake for mitigate:

*Sex workers remain and continue to be one of the main sources of the spread of HIV/AIDS. So anything that can militate the spread should be welcome —Times (Zambia), 2005.

Lastly, another standard use is worth noting. It is militate intransitively followed by in favo(u)r of, to mean ‘to exert influence or to campaign for’ and ‘to be an argument in support of’: The non-market institutions that militate in favor of greater income equality—trade unions, the public sector, regulatory constraints on financial speculation—took it on the chin —New Republic, 1992.

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A part vs apart. A part of or apart of it, New York, New York?

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The other day I noticed a tweet about a big demo in London – the demonstrators wanted to revoke some obscure Article or other, I can’t quite recall which, or what it’s all about. Anyway, one of them tweeted that they were ‘proud to be apart of it’. It should, of course, be a part.

The first time I saw this supergluing of ‘a’ to ‘part’ I was puzzled. And still I remain puzzled, though less so; less, because the obvious has been pointed out to me: when you say a part and apart, they sound more or less the same and are therefore what are called homophones. In other words, they’re like their and they’re, which you will often see confused.

So far so good. But, but, but (splutter) to use one for the other still doesn’t make any kind of sense to me.

However, there are several sites that have notes or blogs warning against muddling the two up. So it must be true that people do muddle them up. And those same blogs usually lay their hands on grammar, mentioning off-putting word such as ‘adverb’ and the like. But surely the people who make the mistake in the first place wouldn’t know an adverb if they found it in their soup?

The same sites try another tack, which is to suggest that ‘apart’ will often go with ‘from’, while ‘a part’ will often go with ‘of’. Mmm. (To be said with a lingering falling tone denoting considerable scepticism, if not astounded disbelief. My mother-in-law is rather good at it.) The only problem is that those words follow the mistake, and the people who make it do not tend to post-edit what they write, let alone what they say.

However, if you need help in this area, I’d say one way to remember when to write apart as one word is to think of the verbs it often goes with: drift apart, fall apart, tear/rip apart, break apart, pull apart, tell apart and so forth. With none of those does ‘of’ go.

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And not editing might be a part of the issue. Occasionally I find that I have unwittingly keyed then for than (e.g. bigger then him) or their for they’re. There might therefore be an explanation (or a part of one) that runs something like this: where homophones exist, and users are not policing what they write, the form that was most recently used/is uppermost in the user’s mind is the one that will be keyed. The beauty of this theory is that it is hard to see how it can be proved or disproved. Woteva. Even supposing it is true, however, it’s hard to believe that for most people apart is more frequent than a part, isn’t it?

Think again.

In the 2014 Oxford Corpus I consulted apart occurs 148,655 times vs 71,253 times for a part. Which might lend some weight to my pseudo-theory. In contrast, when you look at the string a part of, the picture is rather different: a part of is exemplified 55,198 times vs apart of 635 times in the same corpus (that is, just over one per cent). Which doesn’t, of course, disprove my theory.

If you need a mnemonic – forget about the impossible mn, just pronounce it nimonick – think of New York, New York. ‘I want to be a part of it, is matched by ‘I’ll make a brand new start of it’ – not abrand new start of it. I know, it’s not the same, but I’mclutchingatstraws here. Perhaps I’ll just go with the metropolitan elitist maxim: ‘In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the wise.’ (Richard Duppa, Maxims, 1830)

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Start spreadin’ the news, I’m leavin’ today

I want to be a part of it

New York, New York

These vagabond shoes, are longing to stray

Right through the very heart of it

New York, New York

I want to wake up, in a city that doesn’t sleep

And find I’m king of the hill

Top of the heap

These little town blues

Are melting away

I’ll make a brand new start of it

In old New York

If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere

It’s up to you, New York, New York

 

smoky or smokey? Which is correct?

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Is it smoky or smokey?

If you’re thinking about the adjective (e.g. a whisky with smoky notes), the standard and more frequent spelling is smoky. However, smokey is an acceptable variant – though certain people will probably consider it wrong.

The other day a friend was shocked and dismayed to see the spelling smoky on a packet of Marks and Spencer food, was sure that he had always spelled it smokey and found the other spelling new-fangled. What is the truth of the matter?

It depends where you look. The OED has as its headword smoky. However, both Merriam-Webster online and Oxford online give smoky as the headword, with smokey as a variant. M-W puts the words ‘less commonly’ before smokey. And the OED lists smokey among the variant forms, with the note that it is common in the U.S. from 1800 onwards.

So, what’s going on?

In theory there’s a simple rule, but, as we all know, ‘It’s the exception that proves the rule’. And the rule is: When you add the letter -y to a noun ending in –e to create an adjective from that noun, you tend to drop that –e. Think of noise to noisy, bone to bony, breeze to breezy, and so forth. Simples, eh?

Well, not quite so simples. While there can be no doubt about many such words (chancy, crazy, easy, gory, greasy, grimy, hasty, icy, mangy, etc.), there are also several where dictionaries show both forms. Examples are fluk(e)y, lac(e)y, pac(e)y, and spik(e)y. And, of course, smokey.

But hang on! Surely there can only be one correct spelling of a word?!? It would be nice if that were true. But just think of the differences between U.S. and World English spelling (favor vs. favour, and so forth). Correctness can be relative.

Now, in the case of smok(e)y there is also the proper noun, which can only be spelled Smokey, as in Smokey Robinson (and the Miracles) and Smokey the Bear, who is a mascot of the U.S. forest service. (Apparently the -ey spelling was deliberately chosen to differentiate him from the adjective.)

Is it an issue?

It can become one. In 2018 there were major fires in the U.S. West and people tweeted about the resulting smoke using either spelling. There’s an investigation here. According to it, as already noted, the OED suggests that smokey is particularly common in the U.S. A professor interviewed for the article suggests that this arose because of a nineteenth-century U.S. misspelling. I’m not convinced, because the OED shows the smokey spelling in a much earlier dialect glossary: 1639   J. Smyth in Glouc. Gloss. (1890) 201   If many gossips sit against a smokey chimney the smoke will bend to the fairest.

And, according to the OED, a Smokey in certain dialects is a hedge-sparrow (1894).

For what it’s worth, the 2014 Oxford corpus shows 4,295 examples of smoky and 453 of smokey (so a roughly 1:10 ratio). Perhaps surprisingly, British English is the variety that uses that spelling more than any other variety.

As a footnote, Arbroath smokies are spelled thus, and always will be.

And the singular, for the avoidance of doubt (thanks, Margaret!) is smokie, though personally I rather like smoakie. 

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Rees-Mogg and half a loaf is better than no bread.

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To signal his reluctant acquiescence to an agreement he previously opposed,  Jacob Rees-Mogg could hardly have chosen a better phrase then the time-honoured, homely proverb he wielded: Half a loaf is better than no bread. (Although he might as well have used the roughly equivalent but hardly positive ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’)

Half a loaf … is a phrase that everyone will know, and one whose meaning is immediately clear.

Which set me thinking two things, linguistically speaking.

How do European languages express a similar idea, if at all?

And how far back does it go in English?

Well, looking at the languages I have some knowledge of (plus help from friends) throws up interesting results – at least according to the dictionaries I consulted.

It proves the truism that when it comes to idioms looking for ‘equivalents’ can be a bit misleading. (Literal translations are given in brackets in what follows.)

In some cases, the equivalent proposed by the dictionaries (Oxford, Collins) is not figurative at all. This applies to German wenig ist besser als gar nichts (‘Little is better than nothing at all’). And Spanish algo es algo or  peor es nada (‘Something is something’; ‘Nothing is worse’ i.e. ‘Something is better than nothing’).

But when you get to French, perhaps stereotypically, a foodstuff comes in (avert your gaze, vegetarians/vegans): faute de grives on mange des merles (‘When there are no blackbirds, we eat thrushes’).

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Then you get an idiom which has two possible equivalents in English: the Italian meglio un uovo oggi che una gallina domani (‘Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow’, which is really rather more equivalent to ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’). That could be a case of the classic  1 to 2 correspondence between L1 and L2 that often occurs in bilingual dictionaries.

Similarly avian is what is offered for Portuguese: melhor um pássaro na mão do que dois voando (‘Better a bird in the hand than two flying’, i.e. ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’)

A similar proverb exists in Spanish: más vale pájaro en mano que cien volando (‘A bird in the hand is worth a hundred flying’). German also has besser ein Spatz in der Hand als eine Taube auf dem Dach (‘Better a sparrow in the hand than a pigeon on the roof’). And Croatian, rather like German, has bolje vrabac u ruci nego golub na grani (‘A sparrow in hand [is] better than a pigeon on a branch.’)

Finally, Russian has на безрыбье и рак рыба (‘In the absence of fish, a crab is also a fish’. Which has an ‘equivalent’ in English in the less well-known: Better are small fish than an empty dish.)

So, rather tastier and more imaginative images than the boring, doughy, stodgy English one.

How old is the English proverb?

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, it goes back to 1546:  J. Heywood Dialogue Prouerbes Eng. Tongue …For better is halfe a lofe than no bread.

Aphra Behn makes suggestive use of it, according to the OED, in her 1681 play The Rover:

You know the Proverb of the half Loaf, Ariadne, a husband that will deal thee some Love is better than one who will give thee none.

The OED makes Half a loaf… equivalent to ‘something is better than nothing’, which existed in medieval French: mieulx vault aucun bien que neant (c1401, ‘better any good than nothing’).

 

 

 

The more I know of people, the more I love my dog … Más conozco a la gente … Comparisons in Spanish.

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Más conozco a la gente, más quiero a mi perro.

‘The more I know of people, the more I love my dog.’

(For a learning note on the Spanish, please go to the end of the blog.)

The other day this Spanish phrase floated into my head. I was thinking of a dear Argentinian friend whose favourite phrase it used to be. There is also the variant Más conozco a los hombres, más quiero a mi perro. It’s the kind of disenchanted, cynical summation of human nature that you might blurt out after a particularly stressful day.

Having the phrase in mind, I then asked if people on Twitter knew of equivalents in other languages. An Italian tweep came up the with exact word-for-word equivalent in Italian: più conosco gli uomini, più amo il mio cane (word for word: ‘more Iknow the men, more Ilove the my dog’). She also suggested that it is used in German: Je mehr ich von Menschen sehe, umso mehr liebe ich Hunde! (‚The more I of humans see, so much more love I dogs!’).

Now, if a proverb straddles three European languages, it’s a fair bet there must be a common source somewhere. Often that common source turns out to be Latin or Greek. I wanted to find out what the source of this one was. At the same time, given the huge number of doggy proverbs and sayings in English, and how often some are used (e.g. it’s a dog-eat-dog world) I was surprised this one didn’t ring any bells for me.

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Taking those two points in reverse order (just to keep you on your toes, you at the back!), it does exist in English. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has it in the form ‘The more I see of men the more I love dogs.’

So, my question then becomes, how much do, or did, people use it in English?

My Brewer’s edition (an ancient 14th edition of 1989) describes it quaintly as ‘A misanthropic saying of obvious meaning, attributed to Mme. de Sévigné (1626–1696). Plus je vois les hommes, plus j’admire les chiens; also to Mme Roland (1754–1793) and Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712–1786).’ The multiplicity of alleged authors leads me to think nobody has a scoobie where it comes from.

The phrase as such does not appear in the OED. However,  under the canine meaning of ‘to beg’ (i.e. ‘Said of a dog trained to sit up and hold up its fore paws [sic] when told to beg’) there is a 1927 book title filed for a quotation, namely, More I see of men by E. V. Lucas (iv. 32):

He [sc. a dog] begs even when there is no meal in progress.

Now, to use part of the phrase as an oblique reference in a book title suggests that it would have been widely understood by potential readers in the late 1920s. Which is puzzling, because searches in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Corpus of Historical American English, and the Oxford English Corpus, in various guises, retrieved no examples. The NOW (News on the Web) Corpus (1) and the Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE) (2) produced meagre results compared to the omnipresent ‘Love me, love my dog’. (Phew! It was not just a matter of personal ignorance on my part, then.)

Besides a 1989 example, the Hansard Corpus contains a  single 1919 one:

I listened with very great attention to the hon. Baronet when he made that quotation, and it reminded me of another, which is, ‘The more I see of man, the more I love  my dog,’ and the more I see of some hon Members of this House, the more I can understand their sympathy for the dog.

Google Ngrams takes the phrase as far back as The Spectator in 1888: ‘“The more I see of men, the more I love dogs,” said a somewhat gloomy sage’. (Note the alternation man/men in the different versions.)

Now, Brewer’s was first published in 1870 and revised in 1894 and it is quite possible that the phrase was added at either of those dates (I say ‘quite possible’ since I don’t have access to those editions.) One way or the other, combining The Spectator quotation and those dates suggests it was known in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. But that still doesn’t answer the question of where it came from, ultimately. And just to add to the mystery, a 1973 book from Ngrams attributes the phrase to the sixteenth-century French philosopher Pascal. And while we’re on French leave, Googling the version ‘plus je connais les hommes, plus j’admire les chiens’ retrieves Erik Satie and Mme de Staël (1766–1817) as originators (though she is given the version ‘plus j’aime les chiens’).

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Au secours!

My Italian tweep also suggested Diogenes, the cynic (c. 404-323 BC), which makes sense, given the phrase’s dogginess. Except that there’s one major flaw in that theory. She could not provide me with a source. Nor is it listed among the quotations attributed to him in various classical authors – at least on the Interweb. Meanwhile, the indefatigable Quote Investigator suggests an earliest date of 1822, in the mouth of ‘anonymous’. Its lack of a specific author suggests the phrase was already proverbial by that date. But how we get back well over two thousand years from early nineteenth-century France to an eccentric Grecian philosopher, heaven knows.

On a Spanish-learning note, the form Más conozco a la gente, más quiero a mi perro relates two ideas (clauses) using más + verb twice, just as English uses the more + verb, the more + verb.

The more usual wording in Spanish, though, is cuanto más …, más…, for example:

La clave está en saber que cuanto más hacemos, más podemos hacer.

‘The key lies in knowing that the more we do, the more we can do.’

(Note that cuanto here does not need an accent because it is not being used in a question.)

In this Spanish parallel construction the subjunctive is often used. This is because the first clause can be thought of as a sort of hypothetical future, whereas the second clause will definitely happen if the action in the first clause is realized:

Cuanto más ayude a sus amigos, más harán ellos por usted.

‘The more you help your friends, the more they will do for you.’

However, if the action is taken to be a statement that applies at the moment of speaking, as in our proverb, you do not need to use the subjunctive:

Cuanto más leo, más me apercibo de mis grandes desconocimientos.

‘The more I read, the more I become aware of my great ignorance.’

Más conozco a la gente, más quiero a mi perro.

Other comparative constructions are possible using not más but some other comparative form or structure:

Cuanto más paguemos, mejor será el acuerdo. 

‘The more we pay, the better the agreement will be.’

Here the comparative is mejor. Another frequent word introducing the second clause is menos:

Cuanto más tardemos en vender, menos cobraremos. 

‘The later we sell, the less we will earn.’

Note that subjunctive again in the first clause in these last two, referring to a notional future event.