Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 9

“All of a sudden” or “all of the sudden”? And “out of the sudden”? Commonly confused words (29-30)

29 & 30 of 44 commonly confused words and phrases.

Ain’t English wonderful!

Or, more truthfully, ain’t its speakers wonderful!

Despite all attempts to confine the language, some speakers will always manage to wriggle out of any straitjacket. Here’s a case in point: there’s a standard adverbial all of a sudden. But there’s also a minority variant, ?all of the sudden. And then there’s ?out of the sudden.

Actually, while all of a sudden trips naturally off the tongue or the keyboard (to coin a phrase), its grammar is mildly interesting for the reasons given at the end of this blog. But back to the topic in hand…

Quick takeaways All of the sudden is used – by a minority of speakers, possibly younger speakers.Most people will consider it wrong.Historically, there has been a lot of a/the variation in the slot ‘of – sudden’, but not with all of a sudden .Contrary to rumour, the Bard of Avon did not coin the phrase all of a sudden (see citations lower down).Take Our PollAll of the sudden

‘Don’t be daft!’ I hear you say. ‘Nobody says that, do they?’ (‘Pshaw and fiddlesticks. Pig ignorance, I call it!’)

We can’t tell exactly how many people say it, but it does occur in written corpus sources. In the Corpus of Contemporary American (COCA), all of the sudden occurs 294 times, compared to all of a sudden’s whopping 6,836 occurrences.

What’s noticeable, first, is that the biggest chunk is in the spoken segment (58%). In the academic segment there is just one example.

Second, frequency, though still very low, seems to be increasing over time: from 0.3 per million (1990–1995) to 0.67 (2010–2015).

Third, the percentage in COCA of all of the sudden out of the totals of both versions is 4.1%, so it’s very much a minority phrasing – at the moment. Similarly small percentages are reflected in the data in the Global Corpus of Web-Based English (GloWbE) and in the NOW (News on the Web) corpus – 5.3% and 3.7%.

Fourth – and many British speakers will sigh, shake their heads, and tut-tut at this point – all of the sudden is chiefly U.S. and Canadian: in NOW it is seven times more frequent per million words in U.S. English than in British English.

Out of the sudden

You what? Yessiree!

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!

I heard an American witness to the horrific events in Nice using the phrase. It was completely new to me, so I thought I’d check it out. A Google search throws up 169,000 results. I skimmed  the first few pages. Of course, many of them are not a set phrase at all, but rather out of  + DET/the + ADJ/sudden + N, e.g.  ‘…when we stepped into the lively, warm, candlelit bar out of the sudden April downpour, it was a welcome sight.’

But many of them are the set phrase, e.g.

Yesterday I played a bit with the setup, enjoyed some games on FBA and then out of the sudden, the hotkey has no function anymore.

What is one to make of this? It looks like a combination of out of the (blue) + (all of a/the) sudden.

It’s not really a standard eggcorn: there is no obvious homophone link  — all of a/out of the are hard to confuse, aren’t they?; there is no clear meaning re-interpretation, because the change is largely syntactic; and it affects more than a single word. But, hey presto, there’s a potential term for it: a blidiom, i.e. an idiom blend.

Perhaps it is very much a spoken phrase, which then ends up being written online and thereby picked up by Google. That would explain why Google has so many examples despite the phrase’s rarity in both GloWbE and NOW. In the first, the string out of the sudden occurs 20 times, but only 13 are the set phrase, the other seven having a noun following; in NOW, only one out of six is the set phrase, which might just possibly reflect the fact that NOW consists of news sites, whereas GloWbE consists 60 per cent of informal blogs.

Is there any reason why it has to be all of A sudden?

Idiom, dear boy, idiom. As Fowler said (accept the gendered reference as standard for its time): ‘that is idiomatic which it is natural for a normal Englishman to say or write; …;  grammar & idiom are independent categories’.

It’s the current majority convention, but it wasn’t always so.

Historically, there has been a lot of see-sawing, not only between the indefinite/definite article but also with the preposition: variations – without the word all – are of/on/upon/at/in + a/the + sudden.

Is it possible That loue should of a sodaine take such hold?

The Taming of the Shrew, before 1616, i. i. 145

As he gazed, he saw of a sudden a man steal forth from the wood.

Conan Doyle, White Company, 1890.

My Crop promis’d very well, when on a sudden I found I was in Danger of losing it all again.

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719

The earliest OED (1558) citation of the phrase is in the form of the sudden:

To be…done…for more reasonable hier in hope of present payment then can be had or done upon the soden.

in A. Feuillerat Documents Office of Revels Queen Elizabeth, (1908) 17

The first citation of the ‘canonical’ form – at least under the entry for sudden, I’m still searching elsewhere in the OED – is this, nearly 130 years later than the first, 1558, citation:

All of a sudden, and without any…previous Instructions, they were heard to speak…in the fifteen several Tongues of fifteen several Nations.

J. Scott,  Christian Life: Pt. IIII. vii. 601, 1686

Do usage guides say anything?

There was some discussion a while back on Stack Exchange. A specious suggestion that all of the sudden might be logical when referring back to an event already mentioned, thereby justifying the specificity of the definite article, received the memorably aphoristic reply: ‘Idiom trumps logic’. Fowler would undoubtedly have concurred most enthusiastically.

Paul Brians’ Errors in English Usage notes it, while the Phrase Finder mentions it, attributes it wrongly to Shakespeare, and suggests it is preferred by ‘the young’.

Oh, and the WordPress spell checker ain’t having none of all of the sudden.

Some grammar pointsSudden is primarily an adjective, but here it’s being used as a noun. There’s nothing too unusual about that in itself: ‘out of the blue’ similarly turns an adjective into a noun.Before searching in COCA, I had expected all of a to be immediately followed by a singular noun in most cases. In contrast, nearly all examples are for the set phrase all of a sudden . The very few examples with a noun are all of the type all of a + SG N’S + SG/PL N as in ‘all of a cell’s DNA/a hospital’s procedures’.The only other set phrase that crops up in COCA is all of a piece, e.g. ‘The aim of American movies in the thirties…was to appear seamless, all of a piece…’.All is being used here as an intensifying adverb, as in ‘She’s come over all shy’, a use marked in Oxford online as informal. Another example given by Oxford is ‘He was all of a dither’.

Whereas or where as? One word or two? Commonly confused words (27-28)

6-minute read

(27 & 28 of 44 commonly confused words)

(This is an updated and substantially expanded version of an earlier post.)

Where as???

Yonks ago, reading The Times, I was struck by this sentence: ‘He was apolitical. He never mentioned Iraq, where as some students were vociferous.’

Hence this post.

Is it correct to write whereas as two words nowadays?

Short (and long) answer: no.

Moreover, any spellchecker software worth its salt will flag it up for you.

It had never occurred to me before that whereas might be two words.

Of course, it could easily be since it is simply a combination of where and as.

Several ‘words’ are sometimes written as one unit and sometimes as two, for example under way and underway, on line and online, and so forth. Sometimes, whether you write them one way or t’other is simply a matter of house style or language variety or personal preference. At other times, the difference can be grammatical, e.g. anymore.

But whereas is not one of those. No current dictionary that I know of accepts the two-word spelling. In contrast, the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors specifically cites whereas (along with whereabouts, whereby, whereof, wheresoever, and whereupon) as ‘words’ that must be conjoined.

A quick check in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) shows that whereas whereas as a single word appears over 100,000 times, as two words it’s in the hundreds.

The ratio is somewhat higher in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), giving where as at around 3 per cent of occurrences, and in the Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE) it is even higher, at around 6 per cent.

In that last corpus how often it is used per million words varies considerably from country to country (data from 20 countries is included). By that yardstick, British English usage is 50 per cent higher than U.S. or Canadian. Intriguingly, highest of all is Pakistan, at nearly twice the British English frequency.

It is impossible to give an exact figure for it as two words because searching for the string where as also retrieves sentences such as ‘Wolfowitz joined the bank in 2005 after working at the Pentagon, where as deputy defense secretary he was…’. However, a quick visual scan of where as suggests at least 95 per cent are miswritings of whereas. As has been pointed out, a more fastidious punctuator would have inserted a comma between where and as in examples like the one just cited, but the modern fashion is that less is definitely more in terms of commas.

The OEC data also suggests that split where as occurs often in news and blog sources (come back subs, all is forgiven!). Just what do they teach those journalists these days?

Was it ever two words?

Historically, it was originally two words. In its very earliest use – in a written citation from about 1350 – it was a relative adverb corresponding to where, a use which is preserved in The Book of Common Prayer (1549) section on Holy Communion:

That … oure heartes maye surely there bee fixed, where as true ioyes are to be founde.

The earliest OED example of whereas used as a subordinating conjunction is from The Paston Letters (1426–7), in the meaning, now largely confined to legal writing (of which more later), ‘taking into consideration the fact that’:

Where as þe seyd William Paston, by assignement and commaundement of þe seyd Duk of Norffolk…was þe styward of þe seyd Duc of Norffolk.

(As you will no doubt have worked out, the þ symbol stands for the ‘th’ sound. It was used in Old English, is still used in Icelandic, and is called a thorn since it begins that word.)

In its principal modern meaning (‘in contrast’) to introduce a concessive clause, it first appears in Coverdale’s Bible (1535), also as two words:

There are layed vp for vs dwellynges of health & fredome, where as we haue lyued euell.

(From Book 2 of Esdras, not included in the AV.)

The first OED citation for it as one word is in Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1 (written before 1616).

I deriued am From Lionel Duke of Clarence…; whereas hee, From Iohn of Gaunt doth bring his Pedigree.

So, while there are historical precedents for the two-word spelling, whereas is one of those words that current spelling convention decrees should not be sundered.

As the first clause, beginning a sentence?

Majority usage seems to favour putting the concessive clause introduced by whereas as the second (or further) part of the sentence, as in the Shakespearean example earlier and as in the following:

He’s the one who is moving on whereas her parents are stuck with the story, are stuck in the past.

He lived through his era, whereas so many of his friends died in racing accidents.

It is worth noting that the comma preceding whereas seems to be optional in these examples, though I think, being generally a pro-comma man, I would often be tempted to insert one,

Now, the clause starting with Whereas is quite often put first in the sentence, as in this next example:

Whereas there used to be a dozen different sets of potentially applicable organic standards, now there’s only one.

Some people object mightily to this use and suggest that it is somehow wrong. My counterarguments would be that a) it is widespread (which isn’t, admittedly, necessarily a recommendation); b) putting it first makes it possible to give end focus to the second clause, as in the example above; and c) that the OED notes ‘(The principal clause usually precedes, but sometimes follows as in 2.)’. The number 2 the OED refers to is that legal use as a preamble we’ve already encountered.

As regards relative frequencies of the two structures, a simple comparison of whereas and Whereas in a carefully balanced OEC general corpus gives a ratio of very roughly 4:1. However, in a corpus of academic journals, that ratio increases to about 13:1 – which suggests that the academics in question prefer to go with the traditional clause order – or their editors do.

That ‘legal’ whereas

We’ve just looked at whereas used to connect clauses while contrasting them.

As in the Paston Letter quotation earlier, the word is often used, especially in U.S. laws, to introduce a clause, or usually several clauses, setting out the reasons for something.

Brian Garner, the doyen of writing on legal usage, suggests that such use in a preamble is the ‘archetypal legalism’ and is best replaced by a heading such as Recitals or Background, containing simple clauses. He also notes that whereas one arbiter of style has disparaged the use of whereas instead of while as ‘stuffy’, whereas can play a useful role: it is preferable to while when while is potentially ambiguous as between its temporal and its concessive meaning:

I developed the arguments and marshaled authorities, while [read whereas if the idea of simultaneity is absent] she wrote the brief itself.

Does it have other meanings?

Yes.

1. Historically, it was used adverbially to mean simply ‘where’, as noted at the beginning of this post and repeated below, but that use died out long ago, except as a poetic archaism, as illustrated in the second quotation below from the Arts & Crafts designer and writer William Morris:

That…oure heartes maye surely there bee fixed, where as true ioyes are to be founde.

 

And quickly too he gat | Unto the place whereas the Lady sat.

W. Morris, Earthly Paradise ii. 655, 1868.

2. Whereas is also a noun.

It can mean ‘A statement introduced by “whereas”; the preamble of a formal document.’

While the contrary remains unproved, such a Whereas must be a most inadequate ground for the present Bill.

S. T. Coleridge, Plot Discovered 23, 1795.

The rule seems to be that if a candidate can recite half a dozen policy positions by rote and name some foreign nations and leaders, one shouldn’t point out that he sure seems a few whereases shy of an executive order.

Slate.com, 2000.

The above is a superlative example of the creative potential of the idiom frame ‘a few X short/shy of a Y’, e.g. ‘a few fries short of a Happy Meal’.

As a further historical footnote, it is interesting that the legalistic, ritual use of whereas as a preamble to legal documents led to its being used as a noun, defined as follows in the Urban Dictionary of its day, Grose’s 1796 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: 

To follow a whereas; to become a bankrupt…: the notice given in the Gazette that a commission of bankruptcy is issued out against any trader, always beginning with the word whereas.

References

“whereas, adv. and conj. (and n.).” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/228215. Accessed 4 January 2021.

Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, 3rd edn. Accessed online 4 January 2021.

New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, eds., Stevenson, A. and Brown. L. Accessed online 4 January 2021.

We will not waver, we will not tire. Waver or waiver? Commonly confused words (25-26)

We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail.

With those stirring, rhetorically honed words, President George W. Bush concluded his Address to the Nation on 7 October, 2001, launching Operation Enduring Freedom, in response to the attack on the World Trade Center.

If you search for them on Google, you will often come across ‘waiver’ instead of waver, which highlights the common confusion of the two words.

(This blog is about 25 & 26 of 44 commonly confused words.)

waiver, waver; waive, wave

Quick ‘takeaways’

These four words can cause considerable confusion.

To waver is mostly a verb.
A waiver is a noun, but is quite often wrongly used as a verb.
Occasionally the spelling waver is wrongly used instead of waiver for the noun.
The verbs wave and waive also sometimes get muddled up.
What follows are definitions of these words, and examples with correct or mistaken spelling.


1 waiver vs waver
Definitions & examples
1.1 to waver

If something such as flame or a flag wavers, it quivers or flutters in the air. Related to that idea, but recorded earlier in the OED, is its meaning with regard to people’s feelings, ‘to be indecisive’, and mental states ‘to fluctuate; to falter’. Things that typically waver are abstract nouns such as faith, loyalty, concentration, confidence and physical attributes such as voices and smiles. People also waver in or from sentiments like loyalty, determination, beliefs, etc.

TIP: If you think of someone or something wavering, they are as unsteady or changeable as a wave. Or, as the Bible (Authorized Version/King James) puts it:

But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.

James i. 6

1.1.1 Examples

 

…a video sequence of candles burning is particularly effective, as it is only when the flame occasionally wavers that the onlooker realises it is a moving image at all.

Architecture Australia (magazine).

Smith’s concentration wavered just enough in the following over.

Times of India.

The House came to a hushed standstill as Burke –  voice wavering – told MPs to give it a rest.

The Age, (Austr.).

Despite the problems cited in the assessment, Mr. Karzai has not wavered in his determination to complete the transition by spring, said several officials.

NYT.

1.2 a waiver

A waiver relates to the verb to waive (see 2.1 below) and, according to the Collins English Dictionary, means:

a) the voluntary relinquishment, expressly or by implication, of some claim or right
b) the act or an instance of relinquishing a claim or right
c) a formal statement in writing of such relinquishment

TIP: a waiver is ultimately related to the word waif, as in poor waif, and waifs and strays.

1.2.1 Examples

However, immigration officers have been told they have the discretion to grant a character waiver in cases where it would be “unduly harsh” to decline a visa.

NZ Herald.

The form contained a waiver of parental rights with respect to children resulting from any retrieved eggs.

Findlaw.com, (US).

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

1.3.1 waiver wrongly used as a verb for waver

The one stakeholder, in fact the largest stakeholder, whose support for strong action on climate change has not X waivered [read “wavered”], is young people, who have the most to lose from inaction. The Age, (Austr.).

“I have been saying for years that many charities are ripe for exploitation due to lack of professionalism and X  waivering [read “wavering”] from asking hard questions, and this proves it,” she says. Telegraph.

This misspelling also applies to the derivative waver, i.e. someone who waves a flag.

I’m a third-generation flag X waiver [read “waver”] and a second-generation military brat. Airman (magazine), (US).

1.3.2 waver for waiver

I believe that the US and the European Union have a visa X waver [read “waiver”] agreement. Oz Report.

2 to waive / to wave
Definitions & examples
2.1 to waive

If you waive something such as a fee, a right, privilege or a requirement, you decide not to impose it on someone else, or to make use of it yourself.

2.1.1 Examples

I feel that Amazon should waive the return fee and give me back my inventory.

StartUp Nation, (US).

But there are plenty of examples, plenty of precedents where White House officials have gone to testify before Congress. They have waived that executive branch privilege, if you will.

CNN Transcripts.

Mr Wilson’s interview meant that he had waived his legal confidentiality as a former client of the firm.

Blog, (NZ)

2.2 to wave

It hardly needs saying that to wave generally means to move your hand, or an object held in your hand, to convey a signal or message. Typical things you wave are hands, fingers, flags, placards, banners, handkerchiefs, magic wands, sticks, and swords. You can also wave goodbye or farewell.

TIP: A well-known example from poetry is Stevie Smith’s Not Waving but Drowning, whose first verse runs:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

2.2.1 Examples

It was his usual rhetorical trick: framing any call to act or lead as a demand to wave a magic wand that he does not have.

Telegraph.

Haji Mohammad Naim testified in his native Pashto through an interpreter, speaking loudly and quickly and frequently waving a finger in the air.

Telegraph.

2.3.1 waive wrongly used for wave and vice versa

Sometimes people use waive for wave:

… an ocean of Ahmadinejad supporters X waiving [read “waving”] Iranians flags and traditional Shia banners. Guardian, Comment is Free.

More commonly, the mistake is the other way round.

Digital wallet Coinbase is also X waving [read “waiving”] all fees on Black Friday so that Bitcoin users can buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoins all day. Telegraph.

But after finding out that his team had lost, he decided to X wave [read “waive”] his exemption, and stand equal with his other losing team mates. Blog, (Brit.)

3 waver as a noun, and other derivatives of waver

waver can be a noun with some meanings of the verb:

Before Vince came to visit he asked, with a slight waver in his voice, if he’d be meeting my parents this time around. Philadelphia Weekly.

A person who wavers is a waverer (an uncommon word):

Call them the waverers or, worse for Mr. Obama, the drifters: people who provided his comfortable margin of victory in 2008 but are now overcome by doubts about his presidency … NYT.

Other even less frequent derivatives are waveringly, and wavery:

The accrued biographical experience that produces place attachment…appears to help produce such hope (sometimes expressed waveringly by respondents) about a place that is always at risk to disaster. Reconstruction, (US).

… possibly the prettiest song Chernoff has written yet, with his wavery and unsteady vocals rising above a background of acoustic guitar, violin, haunting back-up vocals, … Stylus (magazine), (US).

Origins

To wave comes from the Old English verb wafian, whose Germanic base also gives rise to waver, and is first recorded c. 1000. (The unrelated noun wave, relating to water, is a sixteenth-century adaptation of the earlier form waw or waȝe).

Wave as a noun, meaning an action of waving, is derived from the verb and is first recorded from 1688.

To waive comes from the Anglo-Norman verb weyver, a variant of Old French guesver, ‘to allow to become a waif, to abandon’, probably of Scandinavian origin.

The noun waiver is either a version of that weyver infinitive used as a noun, or a combination of the verb waive + the -er suffix.

To waver comes from Middle English waver, wever, related to Old English wǣfre, “restless”.

As a final verbal image for wave — though not the wave we’ve been talking about so far, so this is a bit of a cheat — here are some lines from Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach (1867)

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

 

Bonk, betrothed, boogie, swot, yonks & other words the young don’t know.

Several weeks back I delved into ten of the twenty words of which the ‘younger generation’ (now, there’s a phrase nobody uses anymore) were revealed by survey to have little ken. To recap, ‘in no particular order’, those words were sozzled, bounder, cad, trollop, tosh, wally, balderdash, nincompoop, brill and randy.

I can report in a Muppet newsflash from the language front (i.e. peeps on Twitter) that a) the Queen Mother is reputed to have said of the Conservative politician and ‘personality’ Lord Boothby that he was ‘a bounder but not a cad’, a distinction which is too subtle for me to fathom; and b) that ‘brill’ did not, as I had thought, die an undignified death circa 1995 but still lives on in the speech of ‘the younger generation’ – well, one of them, anyway, and a thespian, to boot.  

This week I attempted but failed to be briefer about the remaining ten. Two are rather ancient (betrothed, henceforth); two are very much of their – recent – historical period (disco, boogie); the remainder sound rather British and somewhat informal (in alpha order, bonk, kerfuffle, lush, minted, swot, yonks).

This time round, where possible, I’m using the Merriam-Webster (M-W) online dictionary for the links to headwords and definitions

henceforth – ‘from this point on’
The M-W site lists this as in the top 2 per cent of lookups. At first, I wondered why, but then thought there are at least two reasons. For a start, what M-W doesn’t note is that this word is decidedly formal. (The Collins Cobuild dictionary, which is aimed at learners of English, labels it as such.)

I mean, can you imagine saying it?

No, I thought not.

‘Ironically’, you say?

Ok, at a pinch.

It’s a word that belongs to the written register – and even then positively oozes tints of officialese. It’s old, for sure. M-W dates it to the fourteenth century, which the OED [December 2019 entry] confirms (c.1350). A second reason for its being looked up is that it consists of two parts neither of which is used much in current speech: hence (‘from here’) and forth (‘out and away’ or ‘from now’), which are both literary/formal/archaic.

Apart from those reasons for henceforth’s ‘popularity’, a couple of other things strike me as worth commenting on. First, you might well find it in the phrase ‘from henceforth’, which, technically, is a sort of tautology: ‘from’ is already in the meaning. As the OED notes: ‘Uses of henceforth following a redundant from are more common in the Middle English period than uses without from. Uses without from (see sense 1) are now more common.’

Second, it’s a combination of forms (in this case adverb + adverb) that seems to me to hark back to the Germanic roots of English. I’m trying to learn Danish and it appears to have lots of words like this: herovre/derovre (‘over here/there’), herfra/derfra (‘hence/thence, from here/there’).

betrothed – M-W gives it two meanings, one for the adjective and one for the noun,

‘engaged to be married’ (1557) and

‘the person to whom someone is engaged to be married’ (1594).

The adjective often goes with ‘couple’:

The betrothed couples are surprised to find that they are sharing their marriage with a funeral.

The noun collocates with possessives, e.g., his, her, my, Gordon’s, etc:

Her faith in her betrothed had been restored.

The genre in which the word shows up more than any other in my corpus is fiction.

In keeping with the archaic flavour of the noun my etc. betrothed, the two examples given in M-W are from George Eliot and Trollope. The two modern examples from the internet that M-W supplies are both for the adjective. The noun nowadays would, surely, be mostly replaced by ‘fiancée’ or even ‘partner’.

Betrothed is an adjectival use of the participle of the verb to betroth, ‘promise to marry’ or ‘to give in marriage’. An example in the corpus I consulted glosses it with ‘engaged’:

In earlier times, people were betrothed (became engaged) as children.

Like henceforth, the word is often looked up: according to M-W it’s in the top 3 per cent of words consulted on their site. Why is that? Well, I suppose, out of context, even if you break it down into its constituents be + troth, you are still not going to get at the meaning.

The verb is from Middle English bitreuðien, which combines the once very productive prefix be- (before, becalm, befuddle, beguile, bejewelled and a very long etc.) with treuðe, treowðe, ‘truth’. The second element was later assimilated to the word ‘troth’, which was originally a variant spelling of ‘truth’ but then narrowed to mean ‘one’s solemn promise or undertaking to do something’. It lingers on in the phrase ‘to pledge or plight one’s troth’:

People are always plighting their troth to and/or screwing their cousins in Hardy and Austen.

as an OED citation has it.

People can plight their troth metaphorically:

Another reason for plighting your troth to a party that will not be led by a prime minister.

and similarly, but rather tongue in cheek:

…a sensible survival instinct that has not always been visible since Cameron and Clegg first plighted their troth in the No 10 rose garden in May 2010.

(A dig at the Conservative/Liberal Democrat pact to form the UK government in 2010,)

Similarly to ‘to plight one’s troth’, people can be betrothed to a cause or an idea:

Are Nicola Sturgeon and the majority within her party really so betrothed to the idea of the UK being part of the European Union that…

‘wedded’ is probably more commonly used in this context.

Finally, how to pronounce it?

There are two parts to this question. First, does the –troth part sound like loathe or like loth? Is it /bɪˈtrəʊð/ or /bɪˈtrəʊθ/? Collins goes with the first alone, while Oxford Online (for British English) allows both. Second, the ‘o’ sound. M-W online give the voiced version first (like loathe) but thereafter has a version with short ‘o’ sound (like moth) and the voiceless ‘th’. Oxford Online for American English does likewise.

Now on to two words redolent (not to say reeking) of their era.

disco – has two M-W meanings as a noun:

1: a nightclub for dancing to live and recorded music.

2: popular dance music characterised by hypnotic rhythm, repetitive lyrics, and electronically produced sounds.

The first meaning dates to 1957, the second to 1976. But the real heyday of the word must have been the 1970s. Think Saturday Night Fever. Even better, think the parody dance sequence in Airplane. Monday nights in 1976 and 1977 for me were at Bang on Charing Cross Road, which truly lived up to the OED description of a disco as ‘A nightclub or similar venue at which recorded music is played (usually by a DJ) for dancing, typically having a powerful sound system, a dance floor, and elaborate lighting effects.’

Yo!

The lighting effects were bedazzlingly spectacular, co-ordinated as they were by a lighting engineer, and the music – the verrrrrrrrrry latest from Stateside – had that hypnotic beat that physically propelled you onto the dancefloor. One such mesmerising track was A Taste of Honey’s ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’ (1978) , which we’ll come onto under the next word, boogie.

Meanwhile, it’s all too easy to forget that disco is a truncated version of a borrowed word, French discothèque. The original accent dropped off somewhere mid-Atlantic. In the meaning ‘nightclub for dancing …’ discotheque is first attested in writing (1960), which is later than disco. How can that be? Well, there was a specific venue called Discotheque mentioned in the entertainment magazine Billboard as far back as 1952. So the word must have been prominent enough in the ether for it to be shortened to disco by 1957.

I wonder if one of the reasons for the shorter form – apart from the widespread tendency to shorten polysyllabic words in English such as pram, info, admin, etc. – was the spelling. The –thèque suffix could be a bit of a bugger if you didn’t know French: discoteck would spell it as it sounds. That –thèque, incidentally,was lopped off French bibliothèque ‘library’ and shunted onto disco to create the original meaning of discothèque, ‘a record library’ (1929).

The OED archly labels the place meaning ‘now somewhat dated’. Mind you, say you were organising a wedding with dancing afterwards with a DJ – wouldn’t that be a disco? At least in my (rather retro) neck of the woods, googling ‘disco’ retrieves several outfits who are still in business and unashamed to style themselves ‘mobile discos’. That’s right: the plural is –os, not –oes.

boogie – The word has a long and complex history which lack of space prevents me from expatiating on. Suffice it to say that as a noun it was part of African-American slangy language from 1929 onwards, and before it was verbed was best known outside A-A circles as a bluesy style of piano-playing, also known as boogie-woogie. The verb is first attested in writing and in the meaning ‘to dance’ from as long ago as 1944, in the US:

Now, Homey, forget your mama, forget your papa too; And ‘boogie’ with real feeling ‘in a room where lights are blue’.

D. Burley, Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, 36; 1944

The most recent citation from the OED updated entry [September 2018] is from 2012, in a context which might suggest nostalgia. As I suggested earlier, its heyday was definitely in the last century and I suspect it had withered from most people’s lips well before 2012.

bonk – The relevant meaning here is ‘to have sexual intercourse with’. M-W notes it as ‘chiefly British and informal’, and it is only the third meaning shown.

Bonk the verb first came into the world – in print, at least – in 1929 as a ‘conversion’ of the British interjection of the same year, which is clearly onomatopoeic. As the OED comprehensively notes ‘Representing an abrupt, typically hollow-sounding, heavy thumping noise, as of a blow, or one hard or unyielding object striking another.’ The verb in this sense is ‘to strike something hard or unyielding’ and the second OED citation shows a writer trying to convey a sequence of disparate noises:

The carrier men…bonked and rattled and squerked the package through the almost too small doorway and set it down with a thump.

N. Hunter, Professor Branestawm’s Treasure Hunt i. 13, 1937  

The sexual meaning is first recorded from 1975. Its achievement, at least in Britain, was to give people a word they could use without stammering or blushing to describe an act which theretofore could only be described by euphemism, coarse slang or the starchy language of medicine. Here instead was a ‘fun’ word: short, somewhat childish yet sooo satisfying to say. It had a sort of ‘naughty but nice’ feel, risqué, but then again, not really. And it seemed a lot less crude and slangy than s**g. Dot Wordsworth waxes lyrical about it while surprised how many of the surveyed respondents appeared not to know it (37%).

In the US, so the OED informs me, boink is the usual form, though it lagged a decade behind bonk in acquiring gonads. As for the parallelism between the sexual act and violent or confused movement, just think grind, hump, tumble, s**g, sc**w, shaft and so forth.

There’s another meaning to bonk, which is to hit that brick wall of exhaustion during intense sport cycling or marathoning, for instance. Whether it can be said with a straight face I have no idea.

To its credit, bonk gave birth to the term bonkbuster, now sadly fallen from favour. It means a novel with frequent, explicit sexual encounters. In the UK Jilly Cooper was once widely acknowledged as the queen thereof and in the States it was Jackie Collins. I make no apologies for quoting at length the following magnificent extract from The Independent:

…Collins still has what it takes to be nasty, filthy and disgusting. Turn to the first page of Poor Little Bitch Girl and you find that age has not mellowed nor sanitised her prose: ‘Belle Svetlana surveyed her nude image in a full-length mirror, readying herself for a $30,000-an-hour sexual encounter with the 15 -year-old son of an Arab oil tycoon.’ Whether you read the book with a straight face or enjoy its tongue-in-cheek subtext, Collins remains mistress of her own genre of Hollywood bonkbuster-cum-crime thriller.

kerfuffle – One of the citations M-W give at the start of their entry is from J.K. Rowling. Which might explain why a mere 20 per cent of eighteen- to thirty-year-olds professed ignorance of it, unlike, say, sozzled, which scored twice as high (40%), or low, depending on how you view limited vocabulary. I’m pretty sure this must be a word I learned growing up, i.e. en famille, rather than from reading. As M-W explain, the word is not that old, 1908 according to them, although the (unrevised) OED entry makes it much later at 1946. Whatever. The fact is that kerfuffle is a regularised spelling of a much earlier Scots noun generally spelled curfuffle (1813) meaning ‘flurry, agitation’. Curfuffle the noun is in turn a nominalisation of the verb to curfuffle, which goes all the way back to the sixteenth century and means to disorder or ruffle something The OED [originally 1893] entry has a nice example:

‘His ruffe curfufled about his craig’.

[His ruff all crumpled around his neck]
R. Sempill Bp. of St. Androis in Ballates (1872) 215, 1583 

And curfuffle the verb, in turn, comes from combining an earlier Scottish to fuffle, similar in meaning to curfuffle, with, possibly, a Gaelic word car, meaning ‘to turn, to twist’.

lush – This link is to Collins dictionary because Merriam-Webster does not include the relevant meanings, which are clearly British. And those meanings are a) ‘sexually desirable or attractive’ and, by extension of that, b) ‘very good or impressive’.

I couldn’t say when this was at its zenith. I remember being struck about twenty years ago by people younger than me using it, and I may have used it myself at that time. The word lush itself goes as far back as c.1440 when it meant merely ‘lax’ or ‘flaccid’. Only in the nineteenth century did it acquire the meaning ‘succulent and luxuriant’ of vegetation. Shakespeare used it in The Tempest: How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green! (ii. i. 57). And, so I glean from the OED, that use gained traction – among poets to begin with – because of an emendation to the text of The Tempest by the first serious Shakespearean editor, Lewis Theobald (1688–1744), who replaced luscious below with lush for the sake of metre. (As the line stands, it has 11 syllables.)

Oberon:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine.

The OED [1989 entry] assigns the ‘sexually attractive’ meaning to 1891, in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles, under a general category meaning ‘luxurious’:

The æsthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush womanhood.

Tess II. xxv. 55

The next citation the OED lists is from Punch in 1939:

Business-men from neutral countries should be met with red-carpeted gangways and military bands, and passed in lush motor-cars from one feast to the next.

Punch 8 Nov. 517/1

In an update to that entry [March 2007] lush is ascribed the ‘slang’ and ‘chiefly British’ meaning of generically ‘excellent’ or ‘great’. Surprisingly (to me) it goes back to 1928 and was apparently influenced by comparison with luscious.

It was used (1953) in the BBC radio show Much Binding in the Marsh (1944–1954) which starred, among others, Kenneth Horne of later Round the Horne fame, as quoted in Partridge’s slang dictionary:

1246/2  ‘Would you like to hear it?’ ‘Oh rather! That would be absolutely lush.’

K. Horne & R. Murdoch Much Binding in Marsh in New Partridge Dict. Slang (2006) II.

For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with this peculiarly British and now rather dated expression of emphatic agreement, rather in the quotation above would have been said with a long second syllable /ˈrɑːˈðɜː/ or /ˌrɑːˈðəː/. 

minted – Again, we have to refer to a British dictionary for this British slang term meaning ‘wealthy, well-off’. Now, it really is pretty recent as slang goes, namely, 1995. The meaning must have been influenced by the phrases ‘to make a mint’ and ‘to be worth a mint’, mint in both cases referring to where coins are created; so someone who is well off might be metaphorically thought of as having minted their own wealth. It must still be current because only 15 per cent of respondents failed to recognise it.

swot, swat – Yet again, unknown to M-W because British, hence the link here to Collins. Thinking about it, I suppose it does have a rather antique patina, perhaps more as the noun insult against someone than as the verb, to swot up on something. In origin it’s a nineteenth-century term and a dialect variant of sweat. According to the OED, it was a Scot at the military college Sandhurst who first used it, meaning mathematics, and people adept at that were called ‘good swots’. By natural extension swot then came to mean someone considered more than usually studious, hence tending to be ridiculed by school contemporaries. It’s been suggested that a swot would tend to be reticent or secretive about their swotting and also more likely to be a woman than a man. And Boris Johnson gave the term some prominence by calling David Cameron a ‘girly swot’, which led to a Twitter hashtag #girlyswot and women labelling themselves as such and proud to be so.

Since school is the environment where the accusation of being overstudious is most likely to be levelled, and since teenage slang changes very fast, it is no surprise that other insults have been and gone over the years. I’m told by a slangographer that currently ‘bash’ is in vogue, while keener (which the OED records as Canadian and Bristolian, a curious combination, first cited 1973) has been in fashion. By a simple twist of fate, sweat is also apparently a current insult, harking back to the origins of swot. And then, so I’m told, there’s square, vintage circa 1990. All I can say is swot is an insult I don’t remember from school because we were all expected to study and therefore swot would, if anything, be praise not criticism. 

yonks – another one that is decidedly non-American. It can be used in various structures with negatives, such as not… for yonks, not…in yonks, as in ‘There’ll be people you haven’t seen for yonks’; in phrases such as it’s been yonks since, yonks ago; and you can even say that something will take yonks. But for yonks predominates.

Dictionaries label it British, but my corpus shows it’s widely used in other Englishes outside North America, and especially in Australia.

As for its origins, they remain murky. It first appeared in the 1960s, and its first OED citation is this:

I rang singer Julie Driscoll… She said: ‘I haven’t heard from you for yonks.’
1968   Daily Mirror 27 Aug. 7/1  

A connection with the phrase in donkey’s years has been suggested.

References
“Betroth.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/betroth. Accessed 16 Oct. 2020.

“betroth, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/18355. Accessed 16 October 2020.

“Betrothed.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/betrothed. Accessed 16 Oct. 2020.

“betrothed, adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/18357. Accessed 16 October 2020.

“Bonk.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bonk. Accessed 27 Oct. 2020.

“boogie, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/21407. Accessed 26 October 2020.

“Boogie.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boogie. Accessed 27 Oct. 2020.

“curfuffle, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/46022. Accessed 27 October 2020.

“Disco.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disco. Accessed 27 Oct. 2020.

“discotheque, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/53963. Accessed 18 October 2020.

“Henceforth.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/henceforth. Accessed 16 Oct. 2020.

“henceforth, adv.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/85900. Accessed 16 October 2020.

“kerfuffle, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/103007. Accessed 27 October 2020.

“Kerfuffle.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kerfuffle. Accessed 27 Oct. 2020.

“lush, adj.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/111345. Accessed 28 October 2020.

“swot | swat, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/196060. Accessed 28 October 2020.

“Tautology.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tautology. Accessed 18 Oct. 2020.

“troth, n. and adv. (and int.).” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/206742. Accessed 16 October 2020.

“yonks, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September

 

peek, peak or pique. It piqued my interest or peaked my interest? Take a peek or peak? Commonly confused words (23-24)

(23 & 24 of 44 commonly confused words)

Overview

Definitions of each word

Examples

History of each word

Self-test

Peak, peek and pique. To take a peek, to feel piqued, etc.

All three words sound exactly the same and you can use them all as nouns or verbs so it is perhaps inevitable that people sometimes muddle them up.

Quick definitions & examples
peak

A peak is the highest point of something, either physically or metaphorically, and if something peaks, it reaches its highest point:

Colors feel appropriate as well, from the brilliant white of snow-capped peaks to the deep blues in shots of water.

DVD Verdict.

Urban renewal has been in practice in the industrialized nations since the 1800s, but it hit its peak in the 1940s and 1950s.

Blog.

In the Nielsen poll, Mr Abbott’s personal popularity peaked more than two years ago and the longer-term trend has been down.

The Age (Aus).

peek

A peek means ‘a quick or furtive look’ and if you peek, you ‘look quickly or furtively into or at something’. By extension, if something peeks out of something, it emerges or pokes out from it. If you ‘take a peek‘ at something, you have a quick look at it.

Security is tight and few are prepared to let outsiders peek inside.

Scotland on Sunday.

She gets her hair cut at the Muslim-owned beauty shop upstairs; she hands candy to the Somalian children who peek shyly in her store.

Boston Globe.

She noticed snowdrops peeking up through the grass beneath the trees, and pussy willows furring the hedge.

Source unknown.

“They’d push them across the table and say, ‘You might want to take a peek at this,'” he said.

NYT.

pique

Pique is a feeling of irritation or sulkiness resulting from a perceived slight, and, more rarely, means a quarrel. If something piques your curiosity, interest, appetite, and the like, it arouses it. In this meaning the verb is often passive. If you feel piqued, you feel resentful. In a rarer meaning, if you pique yourself on something, you take pride in it.

Among those in the audience was Ed Miliband, whose intellectual curiosity was piqued.

New Statesman.

‘You don’t have to lecture us, Lizzy’, Kitty said, somewhat piqued.

Date & source unknown.

Yet right and left alike pique themselves on this imbecile prejudice.

Guardian, Comment is Free.

At the same time—and perhaps not illogically—she piqued herself on her talent for bedroom diplomacy, working hard to persuade the President to place women in important posts.

Telegraph.

…the Champ, after all, had once hurled his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River, in a fit of pique at some alleged racial insult in Louisville.

Believer Magazine.

Is the Attorney-General motivated by pique rather than by principle, and has she seriously considered her motives in bringing this case forward?

New Zealand Parliamentary Debates.

Linguistic explanations?

Probably, deep down in our mental lexicons we have all stored this knowledge about these words, but in writing it is all too easy to bang down the wrong one.

Some cases may be eggcorns. For example, as the eggcorn database points out, a phrase such as ‘to peak someone’s interest’ instead of ‘pique’ can be interpreted as a causative use of peak, that is, it means ‘to cause someone’s interest to peak’, just as ‘to walk the dog’ means ‘to cause the dog to walk’. Similarly, if the ‘sun peaks over the horizon’, the image could plausibly be of the sun moving towards its zenith.

That said, however, editors and alert readers will still regard the use of one spelling for the other as a mistake, and such use is not legitimized by dictionaries. The Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage sagely advises:

‘A writer needs to keep the meaning in mind and match it to the correct spelling.’

And in some cases, e.g. ‘peek someone’s interest’, it is difficult to think of a convincing semantic explanation.

Peak wrongly used

The main villain of the piece seems to be peak, perhaps because it is the most common lemma of the three. It often replaces peek (noun) in the collocations to have a peek, to sneak a peek, to take a peek.

A Google search for ‘take a peek’ in inverted commas throws up 14,600,000 results. It often seems to be used as a trite advertising trope, to titillate, tease, and tantalize the reader (That’s enough alliteration! – Ed) and make them imagine they are enjoying the privilege of an advance or exclusive look at something special, e.g. ‘Take a peek into the life of a nanny to the super-rich/into X’s exclusive Chelsea Home/into the new [fill in as appropriate]’. (Pass the sick bag, please.)

Searching for ‘take a peak’ also throws up vast numbers. Some are deliberate puns (e.g. ‘Take a peak: fun new places to stay in European ski resorts’), but many are instead by mistake for the peek spelling: ‘Take a peak through the keyhole of three beautiful festive homes’ [read ‘peek’] (This appeared in the online version of a newspaper on 18 December.)

Other examples from the Oxford English Corpus include:

That means no sneaking a peak [read ‘peek‘] at work emails from outside the office, even if they are expecting non-work messages. Telegraph.

While one distracts a guard’s attention, the second – while pretending to be on the phone – can take a peak [read peek] at the guest list and get some names which they can then use. Telegraph.

With the verb such substitution seems less frequent, but does occasionally happen, e.g. I kept peaking [read ‘peeking‘] at my watch. Blog.

Peak as a verb is also used where pique is correct, as in the next two examples.

It peaked [read ‘piqued’] my curiosity enough to buy the CD today during lunch. Blog.

Two aspects of Hox genes have peaked [read ‘piqued’ the interest of phylogeneticists. American Zoologist.

TIP: A good grammar/spellchecker should pick up these confusions.

TIP: If you’re British, think of the Peak District, i.e. an area of high summits. (You will also find this spelled wrong, as The Peek District, but it is not very common.)

History
Peak…

as a noun has an immensely convoluted etymology, as the OED explains, deriving ultimately from the Old English word piic, meaning a pickaxe, or pick for breaking up the ground. It was first used to refer to the pointed summit of a mountain in the early 17th century. Its metaphorical use to refer to the zenith or highest point of something is late-18th century. The verb use ‘to reach a peak or highest point’, e.g. prices, floods, etc., is modern: the first OED citation is from 1937.

peek

This started life as a verb in the 14th century (the OED defines it as ‘To look through a narrow opening; to look into or out of an enclosed or concealed space; (also) to glance or look furtively at, to pry.’), and possibly derives from the word of similar meaning to keek.

(The OED points out the similarity of peek to peep and peer, words with the same/similar meanings Remembering that might help with spelling).

It became a noun by the common process of conversion, i.e. using an existing word in a different part of speech category, a use first recorded by the OED from a citation of 1636.

pique

As its spelling might suggest, this word comes from French: from the Middle French word pique, meaning ‘quarrel, resentment’, which in turn comes from the verb piquer, ‘to prick, pierce, sting’.

The OED first records the noun in a letter of 1532 by Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister.

The verb is first recorded in a written source of 1664.

(You will also find the spelling pique for piqué, a type of stiff cotton fabric.)

The three words discussed become incestuously entangled in all sorts of ways, as the following examples demonstrate. If you want to try correcting them, the answers are shown at the end. These are all authentic examples from natural language, that is, NOT made up to illustrate the point.

Star Clipper offers antique vessel aficionados an opportunity to take a peak inside this unique club for the modest cost of a 10-day passage. Boat (US).
The sun was barely peaking over the horizon when he pulled himself from the bed. US fiction.
He opened each door slowly and quietly, only so far as he needed to peak. British fiction.
The reason that I’m asking is I’ve recently found my interest peeked in these two areas. Babelith Underground Forums, (Br).
…they call me when they’re at the peek of it and they want to keep momentum going. CNN Transcripts.
About 50 people take part in the annual grape harvest, just at the peek of maturity in order to bring in the grapes at the best possible moment to insure the highest quality wine possible.
Inferno represents Argento at the pique of his technical and experimental prowess. DVD Verdict.
…frankly we can’t afford for me to get head over heels into every little hobby that peeks my interest, otherwise by now I would have taken those horse riding lessons, violin lessons, and be a world famous ice-skater! Blog.





peek
peeking.
peek.
piqued.
at the peak of it.
at the peak of maturity.
at the peak of.
piques.

References:

“peak, n.2 and adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/139282. Accessed 29 November 2020.

“peek, v.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/139673. Accessed 29 November 2020.

“pique, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/144464. Accessed 29 November 2020.

Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage, 2002.

elicit vs illicit. What’s the difference? Commonly confused words (21-22)

Quick ‘takeaways’

Elicit and illicit do not mean the same thing at all. Elicit is a verb only**; illicit is solely an adjective.
Beware of accidentally using illicit as a verb when you want to talk about evoking a reaction or extracting information.

Correct: He used good actors who are capable of eliciting genuine sympathy from the audience.

Incorrect: It’s likely to X illicit a collective groan.

Beware of using elicit as an adjective.

Correct: The Grenadines, with their many uninhabited islets, are a transhipment point for illicit drugs from South America to the United States.

Incorrect: It was hard to imagine why his wife should believe that there were women just waiting to entice him into an X elicit liaison

If you want to test yourself straight away, you can jump to a little self-test at the end of this post.

If not, what follows may help you avoid confusing them.

Why are they confused?

Simples! They sound identical, as their phonetic representation shows:

elicit /ɪˈlɪsɪt/

illicit /ɪˈlɪsɪt/

So, they are examples of homophones: words that sound exactly the same but have different spellings and meanings.

A crucial distinction is that elicit is a verb. It can therefore have all the verb parts, i.e. elicits, eliciting, elicited.

Illicit is an adjective and has only the one form as an adjective. Its derivatives are illicitly and illicitness.

TIP: Because of the above, if you come across X illiciting, for example, or if you find yourself writing it, you will know that it is a mistake. (An automatic spellchecker would, in any case, flag it up as a mistake.)

TIP: Something illicit borders on being illegal, so remembering the ill– element in both may help. If you elicit a reaction, you evoke it, so remembering the e- prefix (meaning ‘out’) may help.

(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  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.)

Meanings and origins
Meaning

The verb elicit is defined in one dictionary (Collins Cobuild) as follows:

‘If you elicit a response or a reaction, you do or say something which makes other people respond or react.’

Those reactions and responses include physical, bodily reactions such as applause, laughter, chuckles, giggles; and emotional reactions such as emotion, admiration, sympathy, and pity. You can also elicit information, confessions and testimony.

The Yorkshire Gazette recorded how he ‘elicited unbounded applause, and sent his audience home delighted with their evening’s amusement’.

Subsequent staff letters to the college administration, inviting discussion of remaining issues, have not elicited a reply.

Illicit is an adjective meaning ‘not allowed or approved by common custom, rule, or standard’ (Collins Unabridged English Dictionary).

Things that are typically illicit include drugs, substances, liquor, opium, trade and trafficking, on the one hand, and liaisons, trysts, affairs, and sex, on the other.

Less easily influenced is the illicit trade in armaments around the globe.

South Africans don’t tend to dump their illicit sex lives in tacky red-light districts.

The connection of illicit with sex or romance was highlighted in the 1931 film Illicit, in which the heroine, played by Barbara Stanwyck, lives together with her boyfriend ‘out of wedlock’, and so the film must have been pretty racy for its time.

Origins

They may look at first blush as if they are related, but they come from two different Latin roots.

Elicit comes from the past participle of the Classical Latin ēlicĕre ‘to draw or entice (someone) out’.

According to the OED, the earliest written citation for it dates to 1641.

Illicit comes from French illicite, which comes from the Latin adjective illicitus, a combination of the negative prefix il- and licitus, past participle of the impersonal verb licēre ‘to be allowed’. That same Latin verb is the root of licence, licit and leisure.

The first written citation for illicit dates to 1606.

Its derivatives are illicitly and illictness.

How often are they confused?

Without substantial research, it’s impossible to give figures. However, a scan of Oxford English Corpus data suggests that illicit is more often wrongly used as a verb than elicit is as an adjective.

The following examples are typical of the ‘accidents that will occur in the best-regulated’… newspapers, journals, and even High Court transcripts:

The Prince of Wales and his charities have a growing property portfolio, but there is one notable building that is unlikely to X  illicit a bid from the heir to the throne. Telegraph

X Elicitly gathering information is a step too far. Guardian

Raise it for debate in the pub and it’s likely to X illicit a collective groan, but in boardrooms and dressing rooms it has greater currency. Scotland on Sunday

…the cost is high and the prospects of any helpful information being X illicited by the independent analysis, remote. England and Wales High Court Decisions

…such confessions of diabolic sexual attack were merely excuses to cover up the evidence of masturbation or X  elicit affairs. Folklore

Self-test

Having warmed up with the above, you might like to try some verbal gymnastics.

A word is missing from these authentic (i.e. not made up by me) sentences. If you’re game, to complete the meaning choose one of the alternatives shown.

The detective involved was reprimanded for ______ false confessions. a) illiciting; b) eliciting.
Heavy drinking or ______ drug use makes treatment ineffective. a) elicit; b) illicit.
That remark ______ friendly laughter from the audience. a) elicited; b) illicited.
It is a rare film that can ______ that response from me. a) illicit; b) elicit.
These are things that, like Greene’s ______ liaisons , remain to be forgiven. a) illicit; b) elicit.

ANSWERS:

1. b); 2. b); 3. a); 4. b); 5. a).

** There is also an obsolete adjective elicit, defined by the OED as ‘Of an act: Evolved immediately from an active power or quality; opposed to imperate.’

References:

“elicit, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/60453. Accessed 23 November 2020.

“elicit, adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/60452. Accessed 23 November 2020.”illicit, adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/91445. Accessed 23 November 2020.

 

As fit as a butcher’s dog. Boris Johnson’s favourite simile.

6-minute read

Boris really loves his metaphors, doesn’t he, and is (in)famous for them. And one that he has very recently recycled is ‘fit as a butcher’s dog’. He first used it at the tail end of June (see what I did there?) as part of a campaign to improve the UK’s health and beat the obesity epidemic; he had himself photographed doing press-ups and proudly proclaimed himself ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog.’

On Monday 16 November 2020 he was at it again, being ‘fit as a butcher’s dog’ as he videoed (that spelling looks odd but it’s correct) from isolation, looking tousled and slim of face. On a linguistic note, he used the shortened form, without the first ‘as’, which is often what people do with these as similes.

Where does it come from?

He’s drawing on a powerful image which – for me – immediately conjures up a lean, muscled dog in tip-top condition jumping up to take the offcuts his butcher owner is dangling over him.

The OED entry [Sept. 2018] for butcher dates the first written citation of this idiom on its own to 1971:

I was lately out of the navy, 28 years of age and as fit as a butcher’s dog.

Grower 7 Aug. 277/1

(I don’t know what kind of organ Grower was.)

I say ‘on its own’ above, because ‘as a butcher’s dog’ seems to have a less attractive pedigree. At one time, the poor beast has a rather different reputation, as aggressive and surly. This goes back at least as far as John Ray’s 1670 collection of English proverbs and is repeated in several collections of proverbs that Ngrams retrieves.

As surly as a butchers dog.

John Ray, p. 208, 1670

Between Ray and the twentieth century, the negative simile recurred, for instance referring to a person:

Ye’d betther [sic] look out, for she’s as savage as a butcher’s dog.

J. R. Houlding Austral. Capers ix. 77, 1867

Or to an actual kind of dog:

During your rambles…your ears are assailed by the barking of whole packs of nondescripts, from the gigantic butcher’s dog to the contemptible demi-pug.

Sporting Magazine, Jan. 111, 1867

That last quote is a reminder that historically, a butcher’s dog is a large mastiff or possibly even a Rottweiler:

Gret bucher dogges, þe whiche bochers holdeth forto helpe hem to brynge her beestes þat þei bieth in þe contre. (Great butcher dogs which butchers keep to help them lead their animals that they buy in the country.)

a1425  Edward, Duke of York Master of Game (Digby) xv. 72

By 1902 the snarly mutt was trapped in the simile ‘as full of fight as a butcher’s dog’:

He..winds up by rolling home at midnight as full of fight as a butcher’s dog.

Albury (New S. Wales) Banner 26 Dec. 25/4

And then ‘as full of fight‘ finally appears in conjunction with fit in 1915:

A South Coast boy writing home said the Australians in Egypt were fit and as full of fight as a ‘butcher’s dog’.

Kiama (New S. Wales) Independent 19 May 

The last two quotations are Australian, which makes me wonder if that is where ‘fit as a butcher’s dog‘ was first a linguistic puppy. There is some support for that in the number of antipodean idioms featuring angry dogs, as noted by the master of slang, Jonathon Green, here.

The online Phrase Finder provides another butcher’s dog simile with a rather different meaning:

To be like a butcher’s dog, that is, lie by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men.

John Camden Hotten, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words, 1859.

This is noted in Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and Jonathon Green’s Slang Dictionary and dates back to Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 2nd edition, 1788.

Why do we use it?

As mentioned, it’s a compelling visual image. But it’s far from unique: it fits into a pattern of similes that draw on animals as symbols of desirable qualities such as strength, speed, agility and so forth.

I investigated to see how large the menagerie is and came across a few surprises.

What animals can we be as fit as?

In the two data sets I dug into (2014 and 2018), there were the usual suspects.

(Use of as is optional; some similes appear without almost as often as with it.)

(as) fit as a fiddle is the most popular by a long chalk. The original meaning of fit in this simile is ‘appropriate, apt.’ It was only in the nineteenth century that it acquired its current meaning.

From the animal kingdom, in order of popularity, and jostling to be first into the Ark, we have (as) fit as a flea, and (as) fit as a butcher’s dog. So far, so obvious.

Trailing behind them sprints, charges, crawls, springs or swims – yes, swims – a mottled menagerie of buck rats, greyhounds, whippets, bull moose, horses, trout, ferrets, fleas, Mallee bulls, mountain goats and pandas.

Pandas? Read on.

How ‘set in stone’ is the simile?

It’s one of those that allow a certain amount of wiggle room in the noun group.

It’s stating the obvious to say that the animals invoked have to display certain characteristics attributed to them, in reality or by convention. And what are they?

brute strength in horses, bull moose, and Mallee bulls;
litheness, agility, gracefulness (and speed) in greyhounds, whippets, ferrets, trout (?) and mountain goats;
simple speed in buck rats, I presume (try shooing rats away, as I have, and you’ll see what I mean)

As for fleas, well, they do jump around a lot on, from and onto their hosts – so I’m told.

 

Jingle bells…

At the level of sound, it also seems clear why people use some more than others. After fit as a fiddle, fit as a flea is the commonest. Alliteration rules, OK! in both, as it does in fit as a ferret, which also has the repetition of the short /ɪ/ sound.

That double /ɪ/ jingle might partially account for fit as a fiddle’s pre-eminence, that and its antiquity (before 1605 in the OED). Fit as a whippet trumps them both by having the sound thrice. Compare it for pzazz with fit as a greyhound and the winner seems clear. Ramped-up alliteration combined with emphasis accounts for fit as a f****** fiddle. (As fit as a thistle, which also turns up once, can be explained by the almost-alliteration + vowel matching).

Another sound feature perhaps worth mentioning is number of syllables. No animal cited has more than two, and many have only one.

How much variation?

Is it an ‘open set’ as linguists would call it: can you just add to it ad infinitum, provided the animal invoked fulfils the criteria? The safest approach seems to be that there is a small established set of animal similes generally recognized by English speakers (‘institutionalized’, to use the jargon) and beyond them a rather larger, fuzzy set where wordplay sometimes has a role.

With the caveat that corpora cannot provide the full picture, on the basis of what I looked at and some further searches, the core, institutionalized group would be, in alpha order:

fit as a butcher’s dog

fit as a ferret

fit as a flea

fit as a greyhound

fit as a horse

fit as a mountain goat

fit as a trout

My late aunt once described my athletic cousin as ‘like a gazelle’ (she runs up mountains!) and, sure enough, as fit as a gazelle shows up more than 5,000 times on Google, but I’m not sure it would be in most people’s mental lexicons.

Are there regional variations?

Fit as a Mallee bull is definitely Australian in origin. The mallee is scrub vegetation ‘consisting of dense scrub dominated by low-growing bushy eucalypts, characteristic of semi-desert areas of Victoria and some other parts of southern Australia’ (OED). For a bull to survive there, it would need to be fighting fit.

Fit as a buck rat seems to be a New Zealand speciality. (Are their rats different?)

Some examples

First, about that panda … it’s an ironically humorous way of saying how unfit the speaker was: Gilbert has just completed a trek up the 19,340ft Mount Kilimanjaro with Wales rugby legend Martyn Williams in aid of Velindre Cancer Centre. He raised more than £ 4,000 in the six-day trek, despite saying he was about as fit as a panda.

chortle.co.uk, 2013

The possibly surprising fit as a trout is, according to the Macquarie Dictionary, a creation of Conan Doyle’s. In my corpus we had, The All Blacks had a light training in sunny Swansea on Monday morning and the big news is captain Richie McCaw is as fit as a trout. The sore hip that ruled him out…

stuff.co.nz, 2015

While not confined to NZ, other searches suggest it is more popular there than elsewhere.

The use of ‘proverbial’ indicates clearly that a simile is standard, as in I think it’s genetic. I don’t drink, I exercise three or four times a week (in the gym – hard training) take vitamins, manuka honey (how expensive is that stuff!), drink green tea endlessly, eat fruit, veg, chicken, brown rice. etc. and I’m still always flaming poorly. Other people abuse themselves constantly and are fit as the proverbial butcher’s dog.

Daily Mail, 2013 (Brit.)

Apart from the previous metalinguistic example, there are minor variations that intensify the image, such as fit as a racing greyhound and‘Chico will take me out and do a bit of jogging along the waterfront,’ says Bobby, who adds worriedly: ‘Have you seen him? He’s fit as a butcher’s whippet’.

thisisplymouth.co.uk, 2014 (Brit.)

And the OED cites Ian McEwan’s variation:

As for Lola—my high-living, chain-smoking cousin—here she was, still as lean and fit as a racing dog.

2001   Atonement 358

First occurrence according to the OED.

This is excellent ynfayth, as fit as a Fiddle.

a1605   W. Haughton English-men for my Money (1616) sig. Gv

1889   As fit as a flea, as ready and eager as a flea for blood.

J. Nicholson Folk Speech E. Yorkshire iii. 19

1960    ‘All right. How’s Bubby?’ ‘Fit as a Mallee bull! Got another tooth.’

Overland (Melbourne) Apr. 7

Note: this is a simplified version of a post from 2019.

References:

“butcher, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/25324. Accessed 18 November 2020.

 

To defuse or diffuse a situation? Commonly confused words (19-20)

Take Our Poll

[19-20 of 44 commonly confused words

What’s the issue?

In a sentence such as

She is coping because she has learned that forgiveness is the only way to diffuse ire and hatred

Birmingham Evening Mail

is diffuse a mistake for defuse?

Most dictionaries do not accept this use of diffuse, but Cobuild, a dictionary for learners of English as a foreign language, does. Presumably, as an impeccably corpus-based venture, its authors examined the evidence of actual use.

The Online Oxford Dictionary has a usage note (discussed later on); and the Cambridge Guide to Modern English Usage considers that when it comes to emotions (for example, as in the sample sentence above), the two distinct verbs overlap and converge.

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What does each word ‘mean’?
defuse: literally

In its literal meaning [sort of obviously, because it consists of the prefix de- + fuse (noun)], defuse means ‘to remove the fuse of an explosive device in order to prevent it from exploding’:

Explosives specialists tried to defuse the grenade;
The device was defused by police bomb disposal experts.

…and metaphorically

in its literal sense, according to the OED, it’s a relative newcomer (1943). As a metaphor (1958), it refers to making a situation less dangerous or volatile. In other words, a situation is conceived of as something explosive, like a bomb. Things that people typically defuse (noun objects of the verb) are situation(s), crisis/crises, tension(s), anger, conflict(s), row(s):

With a joke and a smile he was able to defuse many a tense situation and his presence in any room was unmistakable.

Now he is trying to defuse the crisis that the warmongers have created.

Their diplomacy has been aimed at defusing conflict between the North and the South [sc. Korea].

But defuse has a near-homophone. It is, of course, the verb diffuse. The only thing that distinguishes it from defuse in speech is that its first vowel is a short i, /dɪˈfjuːz/, contrasting with the long i of /di:ˈfjuːz/, rhyming with tea.

Are they synonyms?

There’s the rub. In their core meanings, it seems hard to argue that they are.

diffuse: core meanings

Simplifying its meanings considerably (I hope you’ll allow the unattached participle), if something diffuses, it spreads, and if you diffuse it, you spread it, e.g. information diffuses and you can diffuse it.

(Because the subject of the intransitive use can be the object of the transitive, it falls into the class of verbs classified as ergative. The fullest explanation of the verb’s syntax is in the Cobuild Dictionary).

What diffuses/is diffused can be abstract or concrete, and in the latter case it has a specific physical meaning when light is involved: ‘to cause light to spread evenly to reduce glare and harsh shadows’, e.g. The morning light was diffused to a mucky orange by the pollution of the shuddering city.

Further examples

(From Cobuild and the Online Oxford Dictionary)

Intransitive

His heart sank, fear spread and diffused through his body;
Technologies diffuse rapidly.

Transitive

The problem is how to diffuse power without creating anarchy;
an attempt to diffuse new ideas;
It works efficiently to create and diffuse purchasing power throughout the economy and disseminate liquidity throughout the financial system.

Where is the overlap?

One quite often comes across sentences using diffuse with nouns which seem more appropriate to defuse, both in its literal—bomb, explosive—and metaphorical meanings—crisis, situation, tension, anger, conflict. Are these mistakes or legitimate extensions of meaning and collocation?

It is a moot point. Cobuild recognises it, but Collins, Macquarie and Merriam-Webster do not. Nor is it to be found in most dictionaries for learners of English, such as Cambridge, Macmillan, and the Oxford Advanced Learner’s. This suggests to me the possibility that, whereas the Cobuild editors acknowledged the weight of usage which is tending to legitimise what many people would still consider a mistake, the editors of dictionaries for learners prefer to discourage students from muddling up the two words. (It is also worth pointing out, incidentally, that the WordPress spellchecker flagged diffuse ire and diffuse tension in this blog, and asked if I meant defuse.)

diffuse=defuse? Definition

Cobuild defines the contentious use of diffuse as follows:

‘To diffuse a feeling, especially an undesirable one, means to cause it to weaken and lose its power to affect people’: The arrival of letters from the Pope did nothing to diffuse the tension.

The Oxford Online Dictionary does not include the meaning in its definition of diffuse; instead it has a usage note:

‘Diffuse means, broadly, “disperse”, while the non-literal meaning of defuse is “reduce the danger or tension in”. Thus sentences such as Cooper successfully diffused the situation are regarded as incorrect, while Cooper successfully defused the situation would be correct. However, such uses of diffuse are widespread, and can make sense: the image in, for example, “only peaceful dialogue between the two countries could diffuse tension” is not of making a bomb safe but of reducing something dangerous to particles and dispersing them harmlessly.

In two minds?

I find myself considerably (if one can be, linguistically speaking) in (or of, in the US) two minds. On the one hand, since this form is especially common in newspapers and transcripts, I suspect that urgent deadlines are often responsible, not to mention a certain amount of journalistic sloppiness. If I’m being over-literal, to my mind diffuse = ‘to spread’, and therefore diffusing tension spreads it rather than dissipating it.

On the other hand, for example, in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, defusion strategies have a major role. They are meant to take the heat out of your thoughts and reactions. When I first heard them being mentioned, though, I really wasn’t sure if they were defusion or diffusion techniques. They could equally be diffusion techniques because they scatter and thereby neuter the emotions connected with thoughts.

A legitimate extension of meaning?

However, ‘spreading’ is not the only meaning of to diffuse, and it is here that its physical meaning of ‘dispersing’ light comes into play. Light that is diffused is made softer and less intense, so I suppose that diffusing tension disperses it and thereby renders it less potent. I follow the logic of the Oxford editor’s argument, even though it still reads like special pleading to this old fuddy-duddy (what a wonderful word that is!).

It also worth noting that both Cobuild and the Oxford note reproduced above have the same noun object collocate: tension.

So, I can see that there may well be a shift in collocational primings going on. In other words, more and more people are psychologically primed by their experience of the word diffuse to associate it with the semantic set of tension, crisis, etc, and to associate that set with diffuse rather than defuse.

However, that collocational shift still raises problems for me. If diffuse is ‘correct’ when used metaphorically, and in specific collocations, e.g. tension/row/controversy/crisis, why would it not be ‘correct’ when applied literally (i.e. ?he diffused the device). But, even though diffuse turns up several times with bomb and words in that set, it still feels completely wrong, at least to me. Of course, one could argue that diffuse in that metaphor is not motivated by a literal meaning, but that seems to fly in the face of what normally happens with metaphors.

Conclusions

There seem to me to be three ways of looking at this issue in ‘correct usage’ terms:

At the strict, i.e. ‘prescriptive’, end of the spectrum, the only correct verb for the contexts discussed above is defuse.
At the other, i.e. ‘descriptive’, end, one could take the view that diffuse is correct in all collocations that match those of defuse, i.e. including its literal use with bombs, etc. Though that use must, surely, have started out as a homophone mistake, we accept that it is now part of standard usage, and therefore applicable in all circumstances.
We adopt a sort of Buddhist ‘middle way’ approach and say that the two words are synonyms in some contexts, but not in others. Thus diffuse tension would be correct, but diffuse a bomb would not. There is nothing linguistically perverse about this, since synonymy operates with meanings, not words, and therefore works with some collocates but not others: a tax bill can be large or hefty, a building can only be large. However, this ‘middle way’ would probably lead to a lot of borderline cases.


Further examples, facts & figures

In the OEC, these two lemmas do not differ much in frequency: they occur just over twice in every million words of text (compared to, say, ‘big’, which occurs nearly 400 times per million).

Their collocations overlap very little: apart from noun objects, as shown below, the adverb quickly and the verbs try and attempt.

There are eight noun objects with which they both collocate. They are listed in descending order, according to the ratio of occurrences of defuse to diffuse: situation, anger, confrontation, standoff, tension, row, crisis, bomb. The ratios range from just under 3:1 for situation to nearly 12:1 for bomb. In other words, for the most literal meaning, diffuse encroaches far less on defuse than it does with less literal meanings.

In absolute rank order as collocates of diffuse, the order for the nouns listed above is: situation, tension, crisis, bomb, anger, row, confrontation, standoff.

Nevertheless, the dispute over the islands will continue to cause political and economic headaches for China and Japan, with neither acting to defuse the tensions—Business Insider;
Yet the frenzied days and sleepless nights seem to have averted a major embarrassment for the administration and defused a crisis that threatened to upend relations between the two countries—NYT;
The Scott report is a time-bomb stealthy politicians and officials are trying to diffuse—Guardian;
Meanwhile, the European Union is trying to diffuse the controversy by calling for a voluntary media code of conduct.—CNN transcripts.

Note: This is an updated version of a previously published post.

References

“defuse, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/49031. Accessed 15 November 2020.

“diffuse, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/52531. Accessed 15 November 2020.

Peters, Pam (2004).The Cambridge Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Cambridge University Press.

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

(17 & 18 of 44 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. I blog 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…

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

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?

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), 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…

Illusive or illusory: 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

Note: This is an updated example of a post published previously.

To decry or descry? 44 commonly confused words (13-14)

[13-14 of 44 words not to confuse]

A rare confusion

Only one letter separates these two not very frequent words, so perhaps it is hardly surprising they are very occasionally confused.

Though related in origin (in fact, descendants of the same Old French verb, see further down) they now have widely different meanings. If you remove the prefix de- of decry, you are left with cry. And in fact, that prefix has historically been interpreted as ‘down’. So, if it helps to distinguish the two words, think of decrying something as crying it down.

A profile of decry

Of the two, decry is by far the commoner, but even so it only occurs about 2.6 times in every million words of texts in the massive Oxford English Corpus (OEC). (For comparison, criticize occurs 40 times every million.)

If you decry something, you publicly express your severe disapproval of it.

As part of its semantic profile, typical objects are the lack or absence of something, the decline in something, the evils of something, and other generally disparaged vices, attitudes and facts such as racism, greed, inequality, hypocrisy.

Typical people who decry things are critics, purists, feminists, pundits, liberals and conservatives. Approximate synonyms are denounce and condemn, which could replace descry in some of the examples below, all of which are authentic (i.e. not made up) and from written texts, mostly in the OEC :

They decried human rights abuses.—Oxford Dictionary Online


She decries the spread of tower blocks and the failure to turn derelict sites into green spaces.—Evening Standard


The Archbishop will also decry the lack of moral vision displayed by MPs compared to the likes of William Wilberforce, who was instrumental in the abolition of the slave trade 200 years ago.—The Telegraph


Feminists have long decried psychology’s devaluing of women’s voices in treatment decisions.— Journal of Marital and Family Therapy


#CameronMustGo: Twitter users decry Cameron’s record.—Guardian

Descry

If you descry something or someone, you catch a glimpse of them, or catch sight of them, often from a distance, or with difficulty. It occurs in a ratio roughly of 1:40 to decry, and is typical of formal, journalistic or literary registers. (Some of the occurrences of the form descried are actually typos for described)

To meet Albert, whom I descried coming towards us.—Queen Victoria’s Journal
Her thoughts were brought to an abrupt end, as she descried two figures on their way up the path—J. Ashe


While he clearly indicates productions he considers successful, I would be hard-pressed to descry a pattern among them.—OEC


Peering over his shoulder, I descried that he was studying ‘Malley’s’16th poem, ‘Petit Testament,’ with its reference to – ‘Quick. Watson,’ he cried. ‘The Shakespeare!’ I sprang to the bookshelves.—Jacket Magazine


Through the murk of battle, the fog of US and British military communiques and the more deftly presented Iraqi bulletins, we can begin to descry the shape of things to come.—Sunday Business Post

The two should not be confused, as has happened in the next examples:

X I have some sympathy with people who descry this, and who argue that society’s easy tolerance of single mothers…is actually fostering moral irresponsibility.—OEC

X Likewise in Canada, any biblical or religious objection proffered against homosexual ‘marriage’ is routinely descried either as ‘homophobia’ or ‘hate.’

Fascinating origins: decry

Decry was first used in the early 17th century in the sense ‘to depreciate by proclamation’ — in other words, a form of devaluation. Its etymology is de– ‘down’ + cry, from the Old French descrier ‘to announce the depreciation or suppression of a currency’ [13C] (Modern French décrier has not inherited that meaning).

The OED first records it in a quotation from the catchily titled 1617 work of the extraordinary Jacobethan traveller and writer Fynes Moryson (of whom more below): An itinerary…containing his ten yeeres travell through the twelve dominions of Germany, Bohmerland [sc. modern Czech Republic], Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turky, France, England, Scotland, and Ireland. Divided into three parts.

(Apparently, the OED contains nearly 1,400 quotations from this work.)

Having a singular Art to draw all forraine coynes when they want them, by raising the value, and in like sort to put them away, when they haue got abundance thereof, by decrying the value.—I. III. vi. 289

And here is a later example of the same meaning by the famous diarist John Evelyn:

Many others [sc. medals of Elagabalus] decried and call’d in for his Infamous Life.—Numismata, vi. 204, 1697

It is quite easy to see how this sense had given rise by 1641 to the metaphorical one of disparaging or condemning something, as in this example from Pepys’ diary for 27 November 1665:

The Goldsmiths do decry the new Act.

Descry

Like decry later on, descry came into Middle English from across the Channel, from that same Old French verb descrier. The OED [December 2015 update] suggests that it is unclear how the ‘catch sight of’ meaning developed from the financial one, but it may have been influenced by or confused with the obsolete spelling descry for our modern ‘describe’.

One of its earliest, and now obsolete, meanings was ‘to proclaim as a herald’, and it has had several other meanings, but at its first appearance in 1440 it already had more or less its modern meaning, as the OED defines it, ‘to catch sight of, esp. from a distance, as the scout or watchman who is ready to announce the enemy’s approach’. It appears in the classic Middle English text Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400):

Þe comlokest [lady] [sc. comeliest] to discrye.

A truly adventurous life

Fynes Morison spent several years travelling through Europe and the Near East, as well as serving on the staff of the English army in Ireland. He seems also to have been a master of disguise, and a polyglot. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography writes:

“Moryson was well equipped to write his Itinerary. By his own account he was fluent in German, Italian, Dutch, and French, and his linguistic ability served him well in regions where an Englishman might expect to meet hostility: he generally posed as German or Dutch in the more dangerous states in Italy, adopting a second cover as a Frenchman when visiting Cardinal Bellarmine at the Jesuit college in Rome; he dressed as a down-at-heel Bohemian servant to avoid Spanish troops in Friesland; he passed himself off as a Pole when entering France; and he was got up as a German serving-man when a party of disbanded French soldiers robbed him near Châlons. Travelling without substantial funds or official protection, he survived at various times by adopting a deferential posture, avoiding eye contact, attaching himself to other parties of travellers, concealing a reserve of cash, and keeping his religious convictions to himself, as when he used ‘honest dissembling’ to pass as an English Catholic when lodging with French friars in Jerusalem.”

This is an updated and corrected version of a post first published in 2014.

References:

“decry, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/48479. Accessed 2 November 2020.

“descry, v.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/50752. Accessed 2 November 2020.

Thompson, E.  (2004, September 23). Moryson, Fynes (1565/6–1630), traveller and writer. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 2 Nov. 2020, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-19385.