American Heritage Dictionary editor Steve Kleinedler was recently interviewed by Sarah Grey for Conscious Style Guide. They discuss pronoun usage, the use of die by suicide in place of commit suicide, and Latinx, among several other topics.
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Have you ever been to Baden-Baden or Walla Walla? Have you worn a tutu or a lava-lava? Have you eaten a bonbon or suffered from (let’s hope not!) beriberi? All of these words display reduplication, the repetition of a smaller element to form a word. Reduplication can be found in languages from around the world; the examples above come from French, German, Sahaptin, Samoan, and Sinhalese, though all of them have been naturalized as English words. And in English too, reduplication is a productive process, responsible for giving us the nouns boo-boo, ha-ha, dum-dum, and no-no, the verb pooh-pooh, and the adjective rah-rah, among others.
But exact reduplication, in which a single element is repeated in its entirety, isn’t the most common form of reduplication in English. More often, the element is repeated with variation. For instance, in “rhyme reduplication,” the two elements are the same except for their initial consonant sound (or lack thereof). The popular 1959 song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” contains not one but two such rhyme reduplications; other examples include fuddy-duddy, hurdy-gurdy, hoity-toity, lovey-dovey, okey-dokey, razzle-dazzle, roly-poly, super-duper, and tussie-mussie.
In other cases the reduplicated elements are identical except for their vowel sounds. This kind of reduplication, sometimes called “ablaut reduplication” by linguists, is especially common in English; it occurs in chitchat, crisscross, dilly-dally, ding-dong, fiddle-faddle, flimflam, flipflop, hee-haw, hip-hop, jimjams, knickknack, mishmash, ping-pong, riffraff, riprap, seesaw, shilly-shally, sing-song, teeter-totter, tick-tock, ticky-tacky, tittle-tattle, wishy-washy, and zigzag. Do you notice a pattern in this list? In nearly every instance, the first element has the (ĭ) vowel of pit. The exceptions (hee-haw, see-saw, and teeter-totter) all have the (ē) vowel of be. Both (ĭ) and (ē) are formed with the tongue relatively far forward and raised in the mouth. By contrast, the second element in each case has (ă) as in pat, (ä) as in father, (ŏ) as in pot, or (ô) as in paw—a group of closely related vowels that are all produced with the tongue further back or lower in the mouth. In linguistic terms, we would say that each of these reduplications involves a shift from a generally close front vowel to a more open or more back vowel. Why should this be? Nobody really knows, although the phenomenon is probably related to other patterns of vowel shift in English, such as the rule that irregular verbs tend to have more close or front vowels for their present tense (e.g. bring, give, see, think) and more open or back vowels for their past tense forms (e.g. brought, gave, saw, thought).
Bye-bye—or, if you prefer, ta-ta!
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The American Heritage Dictionary editorial staff is pleased to announce that the most recent round of revisions and additions has been incorporated into our online dictionary at ahdictionary.com! All of these revisions and additions will also be included in the AHD app’s next update.
During the last nine months, the dictionary staff and consultants have reviewed over 2,000 entries and revised over 1,000 entries, including the addition of over 200 words and senses.
New words and senses include:
Revisions include:
the styling of cellphone as a single word (although cell phone is still an acceptable variant)
the pronunciation of quinoa
Updated usage notes include:
If you’re interested in the history of words, you’ll want to check out the expanded etymologies at these entries:
In the weeks to come, we’ll be posting essays about particular revisions and additions that we’re adding this week. In the meantime, we encourage you to check out the entries for the words shown above!
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In a post several years ago, we discussed the phenomenon of functional shift, the process in which words belonging to one part of speech are repurposed as other parts of speech. That post primarily focused on the “verbing” of nouns, as when the noun contact begat the verb contact, but functional shift can follow countless other paths.
For instance, a noun can take on a new life as an adjective, as happened to the nouns legion and myriad, both of which originally referred to a large number of people—a legion was a Roman military unit of 3,000 to 6,000 troops, while myriad meant “a group of 10,000, especially 10,000 troops.” Both words are now often used adjectivally to mean “very numerous,” as in The problems facing the new Middle East peace plan are legion or The speaker described the myriad difficulties of earning approval for a new vaccine.
Verbs can turn into adjectives too, as when the verb spare (spare a dime) became the adjective spare (a spare tire). Or they can turn into nouns, as when the verb kill (killed the deer) became the noun kill (skinned and butchered his kill) many centuries ago, or more recently when the verb reveal (revealed my new look) gave rise to the noun reveal (a shocking reveal in the show’s season finale).
Adjectives, for their part, can become nouns (My bad!) or verbs (attempted to better her situation) or, in a pinch, adverbs (Do not go gentle into that good night!). Adverbs can become nouns (the great hereafter), and prepositions can become nouns (have an in at the company) or verbs (offed a rival mob boss). Both conjunctions and interjections can be redeployed as nouns as well (no ifs, ands, or buts; said our goodbyes).
Speaking of interjections, they can be formed out of almost any other part of speech. They can be nouns (Rats!), verbs (Damn!), adjectives (Cool!), adverbs (Well!), or conjunctions (As if!). Could even a preposition be used as an interjection? If it hasn’t happened yet, there’s no reason why it couldn’t at some point in the future…
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In its most usual form nowadays, a wake is a gathering of people in the presence of a dead body to honor the deceased and to console one another. Most often such a gathering takes place during visiting hours at a funeral parlor. But historically, a wake involved one or more people who remained in the presence of the body continuously until the time of burial. It was thus a kind of vigil—someone would have to stay up all night near the body, possibly for several nights. Thus the name: the noun wake comes from the Old English verb wacian, “to be awake, keep watch.”
The closely related Old English verb wæccan gave rise to the verb watch, and thus gave its name to another sort of vigil, the watch night. A watch night is a religious service held on New Year’s Eve, traditionally lasting up until midnight. Watch night services date back to 18th-century England, the first citation for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary being from the journal of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. But in the United States they are especially associated with African American churches (many but not all of which belong to the Methodist tradition) and have acquired a new significance since the 19th century.
When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862, freeing all enslaved people in those states or parts of states currently in rebellion against the Union, the proclamation did not take effect immediately. Rather, it was to take effect on January 1st, 1863. As one might expect, that date became a matter of great interest in the intervening months, as news of the proclamation spread throughout the states of the Confederacy. On the night of December 31st, African Americans both enslaved and free celebrated the watch night with great anticipation, and ever since then the New Year’s Eve watch night vigil has had the dual character of both religious service and historical commemoration.
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At Hanukkah, many Jews enjoy eating latkes, pancakes usually made of grated potato, often mixed with minced onion for flavoring and egg as a binder, fried in a generous amount of oil and served with toppings such as sour cream or applesauce.
The word latke is Yiddish; it comes (via the Ukrainian oladka and, before that, the Old Russian olad'ya), from the Greek word eladia, the plural of eladion, meaning “little oily thing.” Eladion, in turn, is the diminutive form of elaion, “olive oil,” which comes from elaiā, “olive.” The English words olive and oil, too, are both distantly descended from that same elaiā—olives having been the chief source of oil for the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean. In those civilizations, olive oil was used not only for cooking but also as a cosmetic or medicinal treatment for the skin, as a lubricant for chariot wheels and machinery, and, crucially, as a source of illumination. And it is as a source of illumination that oil is of special importance to the celebration of Hanukkah.
According to the Talmud, after an army of Jewish rebels led by the Maccabees recaptured Jerusalem from the culturally Greek empire of the Seleucids in 164 BCE, they discovered that there was only one day’s supply of ritually pure oil left for the lamp in the newly-rededicated Temple. Miraculously, that one-day supply kept the lamp burning for eight days, until a new supply of oil had been prepared. It is in commemoration of this miracle that Hanukkah lasts eight days and is traditionally celebrated with oily foods; the branched lamp, or menorah, that is lit each night during the holiday symbolically represents the temple lamp, though modern menorahs usually use candles rather than burning oil.
If you are celebrating Hanukkah this season, here’s hoping that your oily latkes don’t burn, and that the candles in your menorah do!
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Recently, executive editor Steve Kleinedler was a guest on NPR’s Here and Now to talk about new words and senses that have been added to the American Heritage Dictionary this year. We invite you to take a listen.
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You may occasionally hear people quibble (or even quarrel) over the correct pronunciation of forte in a sentence like You calculate the tip—math isn’t my forte. The most common pronunciation, and the one we list first in the dictionary, is “FOR-tay,” as if it were the same word as the musical direction forte, “in a loud, forceful manner.” Traditionalists, though, point out that the forte that means “something in which a person excels” isn’t the same word as the musical forte. The musical forte comes from Italian, a language in which final vowels are regularly pronounced; the other forte is from French forte, the feminine form of fort, meaning “strong.” In French, final vowels are most often silent, and indeed in the French forte the e is not pronounced.
Incidentally, that French adjective forte was adopted into English in the 1600s as a noun meaning not “a strong point” in general, but specifically “the strong part of a sword blade, between the middle and the hilt.” This fencing usage was soon extended into the general sense that we are familiar with today. Not surprisingly, English fencers of that time also borrowed a French adjective as a term for the weak part of a sword’s blade, the part between the middle of the blade and the point. That word was foible, which meant “weak.” And just as with forte, this fencing term was soon used in an extended sense, to mean “a minor weakness or failing of character.”
We all have our fortes and our foibles, even if we’re not fencers. As for the pronunciation of forte, even if English etymology is an area in which you excel, you may find that a pedantic insistence on preserving historical pronunciations strikes other people as a weakness or even a character flaw. Among the members of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel, nearly three out of four personally prefer the “FOR-tay” pronunciation, a figure that has remained unchanged for the past twenty years.
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In a previous post we examined the origins of the word carabiner, finding that it may ultimately be derived from the ancient Greek kārabos, a word for various kinds of crustacean. But is kārabos related to the English crab? Let us examine the possibilities:
First, could crab have been derived from kārabos? This seems implausible; crab has been in the language for as long as English has been English; we can trace it back past Middle English crabbe and Old English krabba to the Indo-European root *gerbh-, whose basic meaning was “to scratch” and which is the origin of a number of Germanic words pertaining to crawling and scratching. (Crayfish, incidentally, probably comes from *gerbh- as well.)
Well, then, could kārabos have been derived from crab? Obviously it can’t come from the Modern English word, but even the Middle English crabbe and Old English krabba come too late in history to have been the source for kārabos. It’s conceivable that kārabos was originally derived from some earlier Germanic word, but we have no evidence for this. Besides, why would the ancient Greeks, who lived in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean where crustaceans of all sorts are abundant, have needed to borrow their term for crabs from the mostly forest-dwelling tribes of northern interior Europe?
A third possibility to consider is that rather than one being descended from the other, both crab and kārabos descend from the same Indo-European root *gerbh-. This is an appealing hypothesis, but it conflicts with known facts about how Indo-European roots evolved into words in different language families. Though the Indo-European <g> sound became a <k> in Germanic languages, it typically remained a <g> in Greek. And the Indo-European <bh> sound (a breathy, aspirated <b>) that became <b> in Germanic words became a <ph> (a breathy, aspirated <p>) in Greek. In fact, ancient Greek does have plenty of words derived from *gerbh- which precisely follow the expected consonant changes, and they end up looking nothing like kārabos. Instead, they wind up looking like graphē, “writing.” There’s simply no way that kārabos could be naturally derived from the *gerbh- root. The resemblances in sound and meaning are, it would seem, purely coincidental.
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*Here and in the dictionary, we use an asterisk to indicate that the root, stem, or word in question is not attested in any surviving documents but has been hypothetically reconstructed by linguists based on known forms and grammatical principles.
The spring-loaded metal clips called carabiners have been familiar to the general public at least since the 1990s, when lightweight versions of them became popular as keyrings or simply as fashionable accessories, but mountaineers and rock climbers have been using carabiners for much longer, since the early 1900s. And carabiners remain an essential item of gear for technical climbing, used so regularly that climbers often refer to them simply as “crabs” for short.
Climbers weren’t the first to use these metal clips, though. European cavalrymen apparently made use of them to fasten their weapons to their bodies while riding. The name carabiner comes from the German Karabiner, itself a shortened form of Karabinerhaken, “hook for a carbine.” Karabiner is also the German word for a carbine itself, adapted from the French carabine.
Carabine, in turn, comes from the Old French carabin, “soldier armed with a musket.” The origins of carabin are obscure, but it may be from escarrabin, “gravedigger.” Gravediggers got this name from the scarabee or dung beetle, an insect that is famous for taking bits of refuse and burying them in the ground as food for its larvae. In Latin, this beetle was a scarabaeus, from the Greek kārabos, a term used for various beetles but also for crustaceans such as spiny lobsters or crayfish.
At this point, you may find yourself wondering whether Greek kārabos is related to English crab—a supposition that looks plausible given the similarities in pronunciation and meaning. It would be nice to think that when climbers began referring to their carabiners as “crabs,” they were unwittingly harking back to an ancient Greek word for crustaceans.
To be continued…
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