It is the origin of idioms that holds out the greatest attraction to those who care about etymology. I have read with interest the comments on all the phrases but cannot add anything of substance to what I wrote in the posts. My purpose was to inspire an exchange of opinions rather than offer a solution. While researching by Jingo, I thought of the word jinn/ jinnee but left the evil spirit in the bottle.
The post Etymology gleanings for February 2016 appeared first on OUPblog.
It is true that the etymology of homo confirms the biblical story of the creation of man, but I am not aware of any other word for “man” that is akin to the word for “earth.” Latin mas (long vowel, genitive maris; masculinus ends in two suffixes), whose traces we have in Engl. masculine and marital and whose reflex, via French, is Engl. male, referred to “male,” not to “man.”
The post Etymology gleanings for November 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.
Several years ago, I wrote a post on the origin of the word frigate. The reason I embarked on that venture was explained in the post: I had run into what seemed to me a promising conjecture by Vittorio Pisani. As far as I could judge, his note had attracted no attention, and I felt it my duty to rectify the injustice.
The post Monthly etymology gleanings for June 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.
After we left school, few of us remembered what an infinitive was. Editors will remind you.
Let's review: The infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: do/to do and be/to be.
1) An infinitive verb almost always begins with to followed by the simple form of the verb.
Examples:
Dick likes to run often.
Dick wants to fly planes.
Dick used to walk to work.
2) An infinitive is not doing the work of the verb of the sentence. Don't add s, es, ed, or ing to the end.
Dick (subject) likes (verb) to run (infinitive) often.
3) Infinitives can be used as nouns, adjectives, or adverbs.
Noun: To jam with the band after work was Dick's incentive to get through the day.Adjective: The only way Dick would survive his boring job was to dream about his gig at the bar.Adverb: Dick, an aspiring songwriter, suffered through his job at the tax office to pay for necessitities until his big break arrived.
4) A split infinitive is inserting a word between to and the verb.
Incorrect: Sally wanted to thoroughly kiss him.
Correct: Sally wanted to kiss him thoroughly.
For effect: Sally wanted to kiss him, thoroughly.
This rule is broken frequently. If you choose to split infinitives, do it intentionally and for emphasis, not because you don't understand the rule.
Revision Tips:
You can search and kill for the word to.
Make sure you type in the search window: (space)to(space).
Otherwise, you will bring up every combination of the letters t and o. The sheer volume may crash your computer.
You could also search and kill for word pairs: wanted to, tried to, ought to, used to, liked to, etc.
Make a list of your favorite bugaboos and prune them into shape.
For all of the revision tips on verbs and other revision layers, pick up a copy of:
By Anatoly Liberman
I have collected many examples about which I would like to hear the opinion of our correspondents. Perhaps I should even start an occasional column under the title “A Word Lover’s Complaint.”
Hanging as. Everybody must have seen sentences like the following: “…as the president, our cares must be your concern.” This syntax seems to be acceptable in American English, for it occurs everywhere, from the most carefully edited newspapers to essays by undergraduate students. The idea of the sentence given above is obvious: “you, being the president…” or “since you are the president…” but doesn’t the whole sound odd? Don’t we expect something like “as the president, you should (are expected to)….” And I find the following passage highly ambiguous: “As a baby, his mother strapped him into the car seat and drove around St. Paul in the middle of the night to lull her boy back to sleep.” Who was the baby: the mother or her son? Wouldn’t it have been better to begin with: “When he was a baby…”?
Splitting all the way. Rather long ago, I wrote a post on the epidemic of split infinitives (the post was titled: “To Be Or To Not Be”). I should reiterate that I am not an enemy of the split infinitive if putting an adverb somewhere at the end of the sentence produces awkward results. But I see no virtue in to not be, and today I would like to offer a few more of my choicest examples. When to get up late became to late get up, writers (or even speakers?) got into the habit of splitting everything they could lay hands on. Naturally, if one may say the court asked the prosecutors to not make the name public and it is better to not think why these things happen (the second quote is from an article by David Brooks; I bet ten or fifteen years ago he would have written it is better not to think, but who is he not to jump—to not jump—on the bandwagon?), it is also legitimate to say giants gave birth to not only the giant race but also…, even though there is no infinitive around. The rest is trivial (more of the same): we made a promise to never surrender and kept it; …might be able to also intervene to help her companions; this word is thought to perhaps stem from baby talk, and staff members also were advised to always call “a data projector” a “Datenprojektor…” (this horror happened in Germany, where there is a movement to substitute native computer terms for the English ones, but the ugly sentence, with its also were…always and to always call, was produced in the United States), and so it goes. Why not might also be able to intervene, never to surrender, is thought to stem perhaps, and always to call? I understand that in long sentences like it’s hard to spontaneously generate a bubble, when… or and ordered the Department of Defense to immediately stop any ongoing effort to
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