Mark Israel's AUE FAQ (September 1997), updated by Bob Cunningham and Mike Barnes.
This FAQ has 220 topics, all on one page. Each link below takes you to one of those topics. If you'd prefer to have the same information with each topic on a separate page, go to the fast-access FAQ. See also the FAQ Supplement and Places to find FAQ documents.
-1. For those who have asked for a URL for the newsgroup, I'll
try: <news:alt.usage.english>
0. Yes, I know that this file is too big for some newsreaders. If
you are cursed with such a newsreader, you can ftp this file from
"rtfm.mit.edu", directory "pub/usenet/alt.usage.english", file
"alt.usage.english_FAQ". (It's also on the World Wide Web:
[...]).
[See page Places to find Mark Israel's FAQ on this site for
places to find the FAQ on the web.]
Or you can send me [...] e-mail and I'll send it
to you in pieces. Sorry for the inconvenience, but there are
more of us who appreciate the convenience of a single file.
[The e-mail address given is no longer current.]
1. Please send suggestions/flames/praise to me by e-mail rather than
post them to the newsgroup. The purpose of an FAQ file is to
reduce traffic, not increase it.
2. This is in no sense an "official" FAQ file. Feel free to start
your own. I certainly can't stop you.
3. Please don't expect me to add a topic unless (a) you're willing
to contribute the entry for that topic; (b) the topic has come up
at least twice in the newsgroup, *or* the entry gives information
that cannot readily be found elsewhere; and (c) if the topic has
been controversial in the newsgroup, your entry attempts to
represent conflicting points of view. Thanks to all who *have*
contributed!
alt.usage.english is a newsgroup where we discuss the English
language (and also occasionally other languages). We discuss
how particular words, phrases, and syntactic forms are used; how
they originated; and where in the English-speaking world they're
prevalent. (All this is called "description".) We also discuss
how we think they *should* be used ("prescription").
[Read more about "prescriptivism".]
alt.usage.english is for everyone, *not* only for linguists,
native speakers, or descriptivists.
Things you may want to consider avoiding when posting here:
(1) re-opening topics (such as singular "they" and "hopefully") that
experience has shown lead to circular debate. (One function of the
FAQ file is to point out topics that have already been discussed ad
nauseam. You can find an archive of articles posted in
alt.usage.english and other newsgroups at <http://www.dejanews.com>.
Type in a search string in the form "alt.usage.english AND keyword".
Note that Deja News offers a choice of two databases: Current or
Old. "Current" contains the most recent few weeks of articles;
"Old" goes back to the start of the archive in March 1995.)
[See additional comments about deja.com.]
(2) questions that can be answered by simple reference to a
dictionary.
(3) generalities. If you make a statement like: "Here in the U.S.
we NEVER say 'different to'", "Retroflex 'r' is ONLY used in North
America", or "'Eh' ALWAYS rhymes with 'pay'", chances are that
someone will pounce on you with a counterexample.
(4) assertions that one variety of English is "true English".
(5) sloppy writing (as distinct from simple slips like typing
errors, or errors from someone whose native language is not
English). Keep in mind that the regulars on alt.usage.english are
probably less willing than the general population to suffer sloppy
writers gladly; and that each article is written by one person, but
read perhaps by thousands, so the convenience of the readers really
ought to have priority over the convenience of the writer. Again,
this is *not* to discourage non-native speakers from posting;
readers will be able to detect that you're writing in a foreign
language, and will make allowances for this.
(6) expressions of exasperation. In the course of debate, you
may encounter positions based on premises radically different
from yours and perhaps surprisingly novel to you. Saying things
like "Oh, please", "That's absurd", "Give me a break", or "Go
teach your grandmother to suck eggs, my man" is unlikely to win
your opponent over.
You really *are* welcome to post here! Don't let the impatient
tone of this FAQ frighten you off.
There are other newsgroups that also discuss the English
language. bit.listserv.words-l (which is a redistribution of a
BITNET mailing list -- not all machines on Usenet carry these) is
also billed as being for "English language discussion", but its
participants engage in a lot more socializing and general chitchat
than we do.
There is a mailing list for copy-editors. To subscribe, send
e-mail with the text "SUBSCRIBE COPYEDITING-L Your Name" to
listproc@cornell.edu .
sci.lang is where most of the professional linguists hang out.
Discussions tend to be about linguistic methodology (rather than
about *particular* words and phrases), and prescription is severely
frowned upon there. Newbies post many things there that would
better be posted here.
alt.flame.spelling (which fewer sites carry than carry
alt.usage.english) is the place to criticize other people's
spelling. We try to avoid doing that here (although some of us do
get provoked if you spell language terms wrong. It's "consensus",
not "concensus"; "diphthong", not "dipthong"; "grammar", not
"grammer"; "guttural", not "gutteral"; and "pronunciation", not
"pronounciation").
alt.usage.english.neologism is described as being for
"meaningless words coined by psychotics". Fewer sites carry it,
and it gets little traffic; the people who do post to it are
generally not negative about neologisms.
rec.puzzles is a better place than here to ask questions like
"What English words end in '-gry' or '-endous'?", "What words
contain 'vv'?", "What words have 'e' pronounced as /I/?", "What Pig
Latin words are also words?", or "How do you punctuate 'John where
Bill had had had had had had had had had had had the approval of the
teacher' or 'That that is is that that is not is not that that is
not is not that that is is that it it is' to get comprehensible
text?" But, before you post such a question there, make sure it's
not answered in the rec.puzzles archive, available at [...]
[The rec.puzzles archive is now at <http://rec-puzzles.org/>.]
The "-gry" answer is now also to be found below in this FAQ.
Wordplay for its own sake (anagrams, palindromes, etc.) belongs
in alt.anagrams. There are also long lists of such things in the
rec.puzzles archive. "The Word Gamer's Paradise" at
<http://fun2play.com/> may also be of interest.
misc.education.language.english is a newsgroup devoted to the
teaching of English (especially as a second language).
comp.edu.languages.natural is devoted to software for assisting
language instruction.
misc.writing is devoted to writing, and especially to the
concerns of people trying to establish themselves as professional
writers.
alt.quotations is the place to ask about origins of quotations
(although there is no firm dividing line between those and phrase
origins, which belong here). You can access the 1901 edition of
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations at:
[...]
[That URL will still get you to Project Bartleby, but it does so
by transferring to a new URL. The direct URL to Project Bartleby is now
<http://www.bartleby.com/>, and the URL for Bartlett's Familiar
Quotations is <http://www.bartleby.com/99/index.html>.]
Language features peculiar to the U.K. get discussed in
soc.culture.british as well as here. Before posting to either
newsgroup on this subject, you should look at Jeremy Smith's
British-American dictionary, available on the WWW at:
<http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionary/dict.html>
[See ucle_announcement.html to read about
a new related newsgroup, uk.culture.language.english.]
[The newsgroup alt.english.usage has similar content to that of
alt.usage.english. Its posting volume has grown to about ten
or fifteen percent of the AUE volume.]
If you have a (language-related or other) peeve that you want
to mention but don't particularly want to justify, you can try
alt.peeves. ("What is your pet peeve?" is *not* a frequently asked
question in alt.usage.english, although we frequently get
unsolicited answers to it. If you're new to this group, chances are
excellent that your particular pet peeve is something that has
already been discussed to death by the regulars.)
If you're interested in the peculiarities of language as used by
computer users, get the Jargon File, by anonymous ftp from
prep.ai.mit.edu (18.71.0.38) under pub/gnu, or on the WWW:
[...]
[The Jargon File with frames is at
http://catb.org/jargon/html/frames.html;
a version without frames is at
http://catb.org/jargon/html/go01.html.
A web page that carries the masthead "Cool Jargon of the Day",
is at <http://www.jargon.net/cool/>. It features a different
selection from the Jargon File each day.
There are links to other Jargon File resources at
<http://catb.org/jargon/alternates.html>.
Of particular interest is "UMEC's Jargon Server" at
<http://mask.tf.hut.fi/cgi-bin/jargon>. It allows you to
type in an item and search directly for its definition. At
the time of this writing (2007-May-10), it is using version
4.2.0 of the Jargon File. The version at catb.org
is currently 4.4.7.]
(also available in paperback form as The New Hacker's Dictionary,
ed. Eric S. Raymond, 3rd edition, MIT Press, 1996, ISBN
0-262-68092-0). Words you encounter on the Net that you can't find
in general English dictionaries ("automagic", "bogon", "emoticon",
"mudding", the prefix "Ob-" as in "ObAUE", "prepend") you may well
find in the Jargon File. You can discuss hacker language further in
the newsgroup alt.folklore.computers, or in the moderated newsgroup
comp.society.folklore .
Two newsgroups that don't deal with the English language but
that people often need directing to are: sci.classics (now
preferably humanities.classics), for questions about Latin and
ancient Greek; and comp.fonts, for questions about typography.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed. (OED2) (Oxford
University Press, 1989, 20 vols.; compact edition, 1991 ISBN
0-19-861258-3; additions series, 2 vols., 1993, ISBN 0-19-861292-3
and 0-19-861299-0), has no rivals as a historical dictionary of the
English language. It is too large for the editors to keep all of
it up to date, and hence should not be relied on for precise
definitions of technical terms, or for consistent usage labels.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Merriam-Webster,
1961, ISBN 0-87779-201-1) (W3) is the unabridged dictionary to check
for 20th-century U.S. citations of word use, and for precise
definitions of technical terms too rare to appear in college
dictionaries. People sometimes cite W3 with a later date. These
later dates refer to the addenda section at the front, *not* to the
body of the dictionary, which is unchanged since 1961. W3 was
widely criticized by schoolteachers and others for its lack of usage
labels; e.g., it gives "imply" as one of the meanings of "infer" and
"flout" as one of the meanings of "flaunt", without indicating that
these are disputed usage. Others have defended the lack of usage
labels. An anthology devoted to the controversy is Dictionaries
and THAT Dictionary: A Case Book of the Aims of Lexicographers and
the Targets of Reviewers, ed. James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt
(Scott Foresman, 1962); a more recent book, The Story of Webster's
Third : Philip Gove's Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics by
Herbert C. Morton (Cambridge University Press, 1995, ISBN
0-521-46146-4) is heavily biased in favour of W3. Merriam-Webster
is working on a 4th edition, with completion expected around the
year 2000.
[In March 2002, a Merriam-Webster representative was unable
to provide an estimated completion date.]
Please don't refer to any dictionary simply as "Webster's".
Books in Print has 5 columns of book titles beginning with
"Webster's", from many different publishers!
One-volume 8"x10" dictionaries are popularly known as "collegiate
dictionaries", but they should be called "college dictionaries" or
"quarto dictionaries", since "Collegiate" is a trademark of Merriam-
Webster. The college dictionary most frequently cited here is
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (Merriam-
Webster, 1994, ISBN 0-87779-712-9) (MWCD10). Merriam-Webster
publishes sub-editions of its Collegiate dictionaries, so look at
the copyright date to see exactly what you have. The most
comprehensive British college dictionary is Collins English
Dictionary (3rd edition, HarperCollins, updated 1994, ISBN
0-00-470678-1). Our British posters seem to refer more often to
The Concise Oxford Dictionary (9th Edition, Oxford University
Press, 1995, 0-19-861319-9) (COD9) and The Chambers Dictionary
(Chambers, 1994, ISBN 0-550-10256-6). Some of us believe that the
editorial standard of the Concise Oxford has declined since H. W.
Fowler and F. G. Fowler brought out the first few editions; some of
the partisans of COD9 seem to have bought it COD9 simply because it
said "Oxford" on the cover, and not compared it with other
dictionaries.
If you're interested in etymology, get The American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language (3rd edition, Houghton Mifflin,
1992, ISBN 0-395-44895-6) (AHD3) or Webster's New World College
Dictionary (3rd edition, Macmillan, 1996, ISBN 0-02-860333-8).
[There is now a Fourth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary
of the English Language.]
These are two of the few dictionaries that trace words back to their
reconstructed Indo-European (Aryan) roots. AHD3 is particularly
useful because it lists the etyma all together in an appendix.
Because the appendix was pared in the third edition, The American
Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, by Calvert Watkins
(Houghton Mifflin, 1985), although out of print, is not obsolete.
Although AHD3 looks larger than a college dictionary, its word
count puts it in the college range. If you want an up-to-date
dictionary that is larger than a college dictionary, get the Random
House Unabridged Dictionary (2nd edition, Random House, revised
1993, ISBN 0-679-42917-4) (RHUD2).
[More Dictionaries]
You *cannot* access the OED online, unless you or your
institution has paid to do so. The second edition is copyright, and
allowing public access to it would be *illegal*. A public-access
version of the first edition is conceivable, but I don't know of
one.
[Michael Quinion has a discussion of the online OED,
a subscription service that should be of interest mostly to
institutions or well-heeled individuals, at
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/oedonline.htm>.
This service went online in March 2000.]
The OED is available on CD-ROM for PCs, and server-style for UNIX
systems. For info on obtaining the UNIX version in North America,
phone the Open Text Corporation in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada:
e-mail "info@opentext.com".
[An e-mailer has told me -- on 15 March 2001 --
that he has requested further information from
<info@opentext.com>, and they have replied that they are
"not in that line of business any longer".]
Don't ask us where to buy the CD-ROM
version: your local bookshop can order it for you. If you want to
submit citations for the next edition of the OED, you can contact
the OED staff directly at "oed3@oup.co.uk".
The online OED is encoded with the Standard Generalized Markup
Language (SGML), which is ISO 8879:1986 and is discussed in obscure
detail on the comp.text.sgml newsgroup. The funny-looking escape
codes beginning with "&" are known as "text entity references". The
ISO has defined a slew of such for use with SGML: publishing
symbols, math and scientific symbols, and so on. A good place to
start learning about SGML is "A Gentle Introduction to SGML" at
<http://etext.virginia.edu/bin/tei-tocs?div=DIV1&id=SG>. There's
also the book Industrial-Strength SGML: An Introduction to
Enterprise Publishing by Truly Donovan (Prentice Hall, 1996, ISBN
0-13-216243-1).
Merriam-Webster's MWCD10 is publicly accessible at
<http://www.m-w.com>.
Project Gutenberg has put out two versions of an unabridged
dictionary published early in this century by the company that is
now Merriam-Webster. One version is in HTML format and comes to 45
Mb when unZIPed. The other is plain text and comes in several ZIP
files with names such as pgwXX04.ZIP, where the XX are the initial
letters of words included. All are available in
<ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/etext96>.
[For complete information on getting Project Gutenberg files by
e-mail, go to <http://promo.net/pg/list.html>.]
They're also on the Web at <http://promo.net/pg/>.
Any "Webster" dictionary that you find anywhere else on the Net
is probably an out-of-date bootleg. Keep in mind that any
dictionary containing such words as "beat.nik" and "tran.sis.tor" is
too recent to be in the public domain.
[The link to Random House Webster's College Dictionary
that was formerly at this point no longer works.]
The Macquarie dictionary is accessible online at [...].
[Macquarie no longer provides a free dictionary at the URL
that was previously given here. However, they do have one
at <http://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/>.]
Roget's Thesaurus (1911 version, out of copyright) is available
from: [...]
[The URL that was given here no longer works. Instead try
<http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/ROGET.html>.]
[Bartleby.com offers two editions of Roget's Thesaurus,
1922 and 1995. There are links to them at
<http://www.bartleby.com/thesauri/>. (There is a recent print
edition of Roget's Thesaurus. Michael Quinion reviews it at
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/penguinthesaurus.htm>.)]
The Oxford Text Archive at [...]
[You can read about accessing the Oxford Text Archive at
<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~albion/links/res-oxford.html>.]
has Collins English Dictionary (1st edition) converted to a Prolog
fact base; the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary; and the MRC
Psycholinguistic Database (150,837 word forms, expanded from the
headwords in the Shorter Oxford, with info about 26 different
linguistic properties). Read the conditions of use for the Oxford
Text Archive materials before using; most texts are available for
scholarly use and research only.
The best "Word of the Day" service is the one run by
Merriam-Webster at <http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl>; it can
also be subscribed to by e-mail. Other Word-of-the-Day services
are at <http://www.wordsmith.org> (run by Anu Garg, who also
offers dictionary, thesaurus, acronym, and anagram services by
e-mail), [...], [...]
[<http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?action=dly__alph_arc&fn=word>
(Random House's Maven's Word of the Day),
<http://www.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd>(OED Word of the Day).]
[For an up-to-date list of online dictionaries, see the
Links page or Intro B.]
The Oxford Companion to the English Language (ed. Tom McArthur,
Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-19-214183-X) is an
encyclopaedia with a wealth of information on various dialects, on
lexicography, and almost everything else except individual words
and expressions. Success With Words (Reader's Digest, 1983, ISBN
0-88850-117-X) is especially suitable for beginners.
Randolph Quirk et al. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English
Language Longman, 1985, ISBN 0-582-51734-6
Otto Jespersen A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles
7 volumes, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1909-1949
[See more grammars.]
David Crystal The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language Cambridge
University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-521-26438-3
David Crystal A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics
Blackwell, 1985, ISBN 0-631-14081-6
William Bright, ed. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics
4 vols., Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-19-505196-3
R. E. Asher, ed. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics
10 vols., Pergamon, 1994, ISBN 0-08-035943-4
The best survey of the history of usage disputes and how
they correlate with actual usage is Webster's Dictionary of English
Usage, Merriam-Webster, 1989 (WDEU -- recently reprinted as
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, ISBN
0-87779-131-7).
Among conservative prescriptivists, the most highly respected
usage book is the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H. W.
Fowler -- 1st edition, 1926 (MEU); a facsimile of the original
edition was published by Wordsworth Reference in 1994 (ISBN
1-85326-318-4). The 2nd edition (MEU2), revised by Sir Ernest
Gowers (Oxford University Press, 1965, ISBN 0-19-281389-7) is
generally respected, although not idolized, by Fowler's devotees.
A "third edition", The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (MEU3),
by Robert Burchfield (who edited the OED supplement), appeared in
1996 after a long wait (Oxford University Press, ISBN
0-19-869126-2). It retains virtually none of Fowler's original
text, is a sharp philosophical departure from Fowler, and has
many errors, although it does contain some information not to be
found elsewhere. Oxford University Press has announced that it
will keep MEU2 in print as a paperback. (What was initially
announced as an independent revision of MEU by the late Sir Kingsley
Amis has turned out to be "not a revision of Fowler in any way, but
rather a from-scratch usage book of the discursive-paragraph sort":
The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage, HarperCollins, 1997,
ISBN 0-00-255681-2).
The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White
(Macmillan, 3rd ed. 1979, ISBN 0-02-418190-0) and Wilson Follett's
Modern American Usage (Hill and Wang, 1966, ISBN 0-8090-0139-X)
have their partisans here, although they aren't as *widely*
respected as Fowler.
Liberals most often refer to the Dictionary of Contemporary
American Usage, by Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans (Random House,
1957, ISBN 0-8022-0973-4 -- out of print).
Jack Lynch ([...]) has a style guide that he
originally wrote for business writers and modified for an English
Literature course that he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania:
[...]
[The new e-mail address is here.
The new URL is <http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/>.
At his new Web site he describes his present situation as
follows: Assistant Professor in the English department of
the Newark campus of Rutgers University, specializing in
English literature, especially of the eighteenth century.]
Some topics that some people expect to be covered in this FAQ file,
such as "affect" vs "effect", "compose" vs "comprise", and "i.e." vs
"e.g.", actually belong in a list of things that writers need to be
cautioned about; you'll find them in Jack's guide.
A more comprehensive, but more simple-minded, guide, by the
English Department of the University of Victoria, Canada, is at: [...]
[The URL that is given returned "failed to locate the server".
The following URL apparently reaches the intended guide:
<http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/>]
Bill Walsh, copy desk chief of the Washington Times, has a
"Curmudgeon's Stylebook" at <http://www.theslot.com/>.
Project Bartleby at Columbia has an incomplete copy of the 1918
edition of Strunk's book The Elements of Style (before White got
to it), with some simple hypertext markup: [...].
It also has the second edition of <I>The King's English</I> by H. W.
Fowler and F. G. Fowler (1907): [...].
[The direct URL for Project Bartleby is now
<http://www.bartleby.com/index.html>.
The Elements of Style is at <http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html>, and
The King's English is at <http://www.bartleby.com/116/index.html>.]
There is an "anti-grammar" at: [...www.unl.edu...]
[A relatively new and quite impressive usage guide is the The American
HeritageŽ Book of English Usage, "A Practical and Authoritative Guide
to Contemporary English. With a detailed look at grammar, style,
diction, word formation, gender, social groups and scientific forms,
this valuable reference work is ideal for students, writers,
academicians and anybody concerned about proper writing style." It's
free online at <http://www.bartleby.com/64/>.]
Jesse Sheidlower, an editor at Random House Dictionary Dept.,
posts a "Word of the Day" column (articles cover all kinds of
English-language topics, not just vocabulary building) at [...]
[Jesse Sheidlower left Random House 1 October 1999. His
successors took over "Word of the Day", calling themselves
"the Mavens". All the articles are available at
<http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?action=dly__alph_arc&fn=word>.
On 5 November 2001 the Mavens announced that there would
be no new articles posted to the site.]
Evan Morris (words1@interport.net) posts his syndicated newspaper
column, "The Word Detective" [...]:
[The Word Detective is now at http://www.word-detective.com.]
Richard Lederer posts excerpts from his columns and has many
useful links at:
<http://pw1.netcom.com/~rlederer/index.htm>
Terry O'Connor (toconnor@peg.apc.org) posts "Word for Word", his
column in the Queensland newspaper The Courier-Mail:
[...]
["Word for Word" is now at http://plateaupress.com.au/wfw/wfwindex.htm.]
Jed Hartman (logos@kith.org) has a weekly column on words and
wordplay, "Words & Stuff", at:
<http://kith.org/logos/words/words.html>
Collins Cobuild offers a column called WordWatch [...]:
[WordWatch has been replaced by Word Exchange at
http://www.collins.co.uk/wordexchange/.]
The OED posts its newsletters: [...]
[The OED Newsletters are now available at
<http://www.oed.com/public/news/>
More general information about the OED is at
<http://www.oed.com>.]
The Editorial Eye posts many of its articles:
<http://www.eei-alex.com/eye/>
Michael Quinion adds a neologism a week in his World Wide Words:
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>
De Proverbio, an electronic journal of international proverb
studies, is at: [...]
[De Proverbio is now at http://www.deproverbio.com/]
The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press,
1993, ISBN 0-226-10389-7) covers manuscript preparation; copy-
editing; proofs; rights and permissions; typography; and format
of tables, captions, bibliographies, and indexes.
Norman E. Steenrod, Paul R. Halmos, Menahem M. Schiffer, Jean A.
Dieudonne How to Write Mathematics American Mathematical
Society, 1973, ISBN 0-8218-0055-8
Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, & Paul M. Roberts Mathematical
Writing Mathematical Association of America, 1989, ISBN
0-88385-063-X
A. P. Cowie and Ronald Mackin Oxford Dictionary of Current
Idiomatic English: Verbs with Prepositions and Particles, Vol. I
OUP, 1975, ISBN 0-19-431145-7
Rosemary Courtney Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs Longman,
1983, ISBN 0-582-55530-2
F. T. Wood English Verbal Idioms London: Macmillan, 1966,
ISBN 0-333-09673-8
F. T. Wood English Prepositional Idioms London: Macmillan, 1969,
ISBN 0-333-10391-2
Be warned that every book on phrase origins so far published
has etymologies that are more speculative and less rigorous than
those in general dictionaries.
Christine Ammer Have a Nice Day -- No Problem! : A Dictionary of
Cliches Plume Penguin, 1992, ISBN 0-452-27004-9
Robert Hendrickson The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and
Phrase Origins Facts on File, 1987, ISBN 0-86237-122-7 (The
paperback reprint, The Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase
Origins, is no longer available.)
Nigel Rees Bloomsbury Dictionary of Phrase and Allusion
Bloomsbury, 1991, ISBN 0-7475-1217-5
Ivor H. Evans, ed. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
14th ed., Harper & Row, 1989, ISBN 0-304-31835-3
Charles Earle Funk 2107 Curious Word Origins, Sayings, and
Expressions from White Elephants to Song & Dance (an omnibus of
four earlier books, 1948-58) Galahad, 1993, ISBN 0-88365-845-3
There are many *hundreds* of differences between British and
American English. From time to time, we get threads in which
each post mentions *one* of these differences. Because such a
thread can go on for ever, it's helpful to delimit the topic
more narrowly.
The books to get are The Hutchinson British/American Dictionary
by Norman Moss (Arrow, 1990, ISBN 0-09-978230-8); British English,
A to Zed by Norman W. Schur (Facts on File, 1987, ISBN
0-8160-1635-6); and Modern American Usage by H. W. Horwill
(OUP, 2nd ed., 1935).
You can order British books from Bookpages at
[...],
[An AltaVista search on 'bookpages' turns up the
following tidbits:
Amazon recently acquired the UK book
website "Bookpages". They have a URL:
[...]
They are currently (2000-Nov-10) answering to
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/>.]
and U.S. books from Amazon Books at <http://www.amazon.com>.
[A Web search will turn up many places to buy U.S. books
online. Two that are comparable to amazon.com are Barnes
& Noble, <http://www.barnesandnoble.com/>, and Borders,
<http://www.borders.com/>. It's wise to compare prices,
though.]
Jeremy Smith (jeremy@peak.org) has compiled his own
British-American dictionary, available on the WWW at
<http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionary/dict.html>. He plans to
publish it as a paperback. There is another British-American
dictionary, maintained by Mark Horn (ttwy08a@prodigy.com), at
[...].
[The "britspk" URL doesn't work, and I haven't been able
to find a URL that seems to be the same dictionary.]
For Australian English, see The Macquarie Dictionary of
Australian Colloquial Language (Macquarie, 1988,
ISBN 0-949757-41-1); The Macquarie Dictionary (Macquarie, 1991,
ISBN 0-949757-63-2); The Australian National Dictionary (Oxford
University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-19-55736-5); or The Dinkum
Dictionary (Viking O'Nell, 1988, ISBN 0-670-90419-8). You can
order Australian books from the Australian Online Bookshop at
<http://www.bookworm.com.au>. Robert P. O'Shea
(r_oshea@otago.ac.nz.) has an online dictionary at
<http://psy.otago.ac.nz:800/r_oshea/slang.html>.
For New Zealand English, there's the Heinemann New Zealand
Dictionary, ed. H. W. Orseman (Heinemann, 1979, ISBN
0-86863-373-9); and A Personal Kiwi-Yankee Slanguage Dictionary,
by Louis S. Leland Jr. (McIndoe, 1987, ISBN 0-86868-001-X).
For South African English, see A Dictionary of South African
English, ed. Jean Branford (OUP, 3rd ed., 1987, ISBN
0-19-570427-4).
For Canadian English, see A Dictionary of Canadianisms on
Historical Principles (Gage, 1967, ISBN 0-7715-1976-1); the
Penguin Canadian Dictionary (Copp, 1990, ISBN 0-670-81970-0); or
the Gage Canadian Dictionary (Gage, 1997, ISBN 0-7715-7399-5).
You can order Canadian books from Canada's Virtual Bookstore at
[...].
["Canada's Virtual Bookstore" no longer seems to exist.
Site visitors are automatically redirected to amazon.com.]
For Irish English, see Padiac O'Farrell's How the Irish speak
English (Mercier, 1993, ISBN 1-85635-055-X); Patrick W. Joyce's
English as We Speak it in Ireland (Wolfhound, 2nd ed., 1987, ISBN
0-86327-122-7); or Niklas Miller's Irish-English, English-Irish
Dictionary (Abson, 1982, ISBN 0-902920-11-1); or search for titles
containing the word "dictionary" at the Read Ireland Bookstore at
<http://www.readireland.ie>.
A "Scots Leid Haunbuik an FAQ" is available at [...].
[That FAQ no longer seems to be available.]
For English in India, see Ivor Lewis's Sahibs, Nabobs and
Boxwallahs: A Dictionary of the Words of Anglo-Indian (OUP, 1991,
ISBN 0-19-562582-X).
Books on "bias-free"/"politically correct" language
Rosalie Maggio The Bias-Free Word Finder: A Dictionary of
Nondiscriminatory Language Beacon, 1992, ISBN 0-8070-6003-8
Nigel Rees The Politically Correct Phrasebook: What They
Say You Can and Cannot Say in the 1990s Bloomsbury, 1993,
ISBN 0-7475-1426-7
Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf The Official Politically
Correct Dictionary and Handbook Villard, 1993, ISBN
0-679-74944-6 (This book should be consulted with care.
Anything attributed to "The American Hyphen Society" is in fact
satire made up by friends of the authors.)
James Lipton An Exaltation of Larks Viking Penguin, 1991,
ISBN 0-670-3044-6
Ivan G. Sparkes Dictionary of Collective Nouns and Group Terms
Gale, 2nd ed, 1985, ISBN 0-8103-2188-2
Rex Collins A Crash of Rhinoceroses: A Dictionary of Collective
Nouns Moger Bell, 1993, ISBN 1-55921-096-6
There's an online collection at [...].
[There are lists of collectives at
<http://www.ojohaven.com/collectives/>
<http://www.sonic.net/~melissk/beastly.html>
<http://www.nzbirds.com/Collective.html>
and probably many other places.]
Julian Franklyn A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang 3rd ed.,
Routledge, 1990, ISBN 0-415-04602-5
Paul Wheeler Upper Class Rhyming Slang Sidgwick & Jackson,
1985, ISBN 0-283-99295-6
John Meredith Dinkum Aussie Rhyming Slang Kangaroo, 1991,
ISBN 0-86417-333-4
The largest collection on the Web seems to be [...].
[Simon Foote's collection is no longer on the web.
Try http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/.]
Basic English (where "Basic" stands for "British American
Scientific International Commercial") is a subset of English with
a base vocabulary of 850 words, propounded by C. K. Ogden in 1929.
Look at [...] if you're interested. (We're not.)
[The new address is http://www.basiceng.com/.]
E-prime is a subset of standard idiomatic English that eschews
all forms of the verb "to be" (e.g., you can't say "You are an ass"
or "You an ass", but you can say "You act like an ass"). The
original reference is D. David Bourland, Jr., "A linguistic note:
write in E-prime" General Semantics Bulletin, 1965/1966, 32 and
33, 60-61. Albert Ellis wrote a book in E-prime (Sex and the
Liberated Man). You can also look at the April 1992 issue of the
Atlantic if you're interested. (We're not.) The following book
contains articles both pro and con on E-Prime: To Be or Not: An
E-Prime Anthology, ed. D. David Bourland and Paul D. Johnston,
International Society for General Semantics, 1991, ISBN
0-918970-38-5. The most pertinent Web page seems to be [...]
[A pertinent Web site appears to be
<http://www.ctlow.ca/E-Prime/E-Prime.html>
A Google search on "e-prime" has yielded numerous hits.]
Beware of using ad hoc methods to indicate pronunciation. The
problem with ad hoc methods is that they often wrongly assume your
dialect to have certain features in common with the readers'
dialect. You may pronounce "bother" to rhyme with "father"; some of
the readers here don't. You may pronounce "cot" and "caught" alike;
some of the readers here don't. You may pronounce "caught" and
"court" alike; some of the readers here don't.
The standard way to represent pronunciation (used in the latest
British Dictionaries and by linguists worldwide) is the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For a complete guide to
the IPA, see Phonetic Symbol Guide by Geoffrey K. Pullum and
William A. Ladusaw (University of Chicago Press, 1986, ISBN
0-226-68532-2). IPA uses many special symbols; on the Net, where
we're restricted to ASCII symbols, we must find a way to make do.
The following scheme is due to Evan Kirshenbaum
(kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com). The complete scheme can be accessed on
the WWW at:
<http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/>
[There's a PDF version of Evan Kirshenbaum's
definition of ASCII IPA at
<http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf>.
It's also at <http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf>.
It has graphical illustrations of the IPA symbols.
The plain HTML version is also at <http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/index.html>.
Evan has stated "The PDF file is the one that should be
treated as authoritative (to the extent that any of this is)."]
I show here only examples for the sounds most often referred to in
this newsgroup. Where there are two columns, the left column shows
British Received Pronunciation (RP), and the right column shows a
rhotic pronunciation used by at least some U.S. speakers. (There's
a WWW page that shows what the IPA symbols look like [...].)
[You can see what the IPA symbols look like in the IPA guide at
the AUE Web site.]
The IPA itself has a home page:
<http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html>.
The consonant symbols [b], [d], [f], [h], [k], [l], [m], [n], [p],
[r], [s], [t], [v], [w], and [z] have their usual English values.
[A] = [<script a>] as in:
"ah" /A:/ /A:/
"cart" /kA:t/ /kArt/
"father" /'fA:D@/ /'fA:D@r/
"farther" /'fA:D@/ /'fArD@r/
and French bas /bA/. This sound requires opening your
mouth wide and feeling resonance at the back of your mouth.
[A.] = [<turned script a>] as in British:
"bother" /'bA.D@/
"cot" /kA.t/
"hot" /hA.t/
"sorry" /'sA.rI/
This symbol (for the sound traditionally called "short o")
is not much used to transcribe U.S. pronunciation. [A] or
[O] is used instead, according to which vowels the speaker
merges; but the sound *used* by *many* such speakers will
certainly be *heard* by Britons as [A.]. The sound is
intermediate between [A] and [O], but typically of shorter
duration than either. Imagine Patrick Stewart saying "Tea,
Earl Grey, hot."
[a] as in French ami /a'mi/, German Mann /man/, Italian pasta
/'pasta/, Chicago "pop" /pap/, Boston "park" /pa:k/. Also
in diphthongs: "dive" /daIv/ (yes, folks, the sound
traditionally called "long i" is actually a diphthong!),
"out" /aUt/. Typically, [a] is not distinguished
phonemically from [A]; but if you use in "ask" a vowel
distinct both from the one in "cat" and the one in "father",
then [a] is what it is.
[C] = [<c cedilla>] as in German (Hochdeutsch) ich /IC/
[D] = [<edh>] as in "this" /DIs/
[E] = [<epsilon>] as in:
"end" /End/ /End/
"get" /gEt/ /gEt/
"Mary" /'mE@rI/ /'mE@ri/
"merry" /'mErI/ /'mEri/
Some U.S. speakers do not distinguish between "Mary",
"merry", and "marry".
[e] as in:
"eight" /eIt/ /eIt/
"chaos" /'keA.s/ /'keAs/
[g] as in "get" /gEt/
[I] = [<iota>] as in "it" /It/
[I.] = [<small capital y>] as in German Gl"uck /glI.k/.
Round your lips for [U] and try to say [I].
[i] as in "eat" /i:t/
[j] as in "yes" /jEs/
[N] = [<eng>] as in "hang" /h&N/
[O] = [<open o>] as in:
"all" /O:l/ /O:l/
"caught" /kO:t/ /kO:t/
"court" /kO:t/ /kOrt/
"oil" /OIl/ /OIl/
The [O] sound requires rounded lips, but lips making a
a bigger circle than for [o]. If you do not use the
same vowel sound in "caught" as in "court", then you are
one of the North American speakers who use [O] only
before [r]: you do not round your lips for "all" and
"caught", and you should use some other symbol, such as
[A] or [a], to transcribe the vowel.
[o] as in U.S.:
"no" /noU/
"old" /oUld/
"omit" /oU'mIt/
The pure sound is heard in French beau /bo/. British
Received Pronunciation does not use this sound,
substituting the diphthong /@U/ (/n@U/, /@Uld/, /@U'mIt/).
If you are one of the few speakers who distinguish such
pairs as "aural" and "oral", "for" and "four", "for" and
"fore", "horse" and "hoarse", "or" and "oar", "or" and
"ore", then you use [O] for the first and [o] for the
second word in each pair; otherwise, you use [O] for both.
[R] = [<right-hook schwa>], equivalent to /@r/, /r-/, or even /V"r/
[S] = [<esh>] as in "ship" /SIp/
[T] = [<theta>] as in "thin" /TIn/
[t!] = [<turned t>] as in "tsk-tsk" or "tut-tut" /t! t!/
[U] = [<upsilon>] as in "pull" /pUl/
[u] as in "ooze" /u:z/
[V] = [<turned v>] as in British RP:
"hurry" /'hVrI/
"shun" /SVn/
"up" /Vp/
U.S. speakers tend not to use [V] in words (such as "hurry")
where the following sound is [r]: they would say /'h@ri/.
And some U.S. speakers, especially in the eastern U.S.,
substitute [@] for [V] in all contexts. If you do not
distinguish "mention" /'mEn S@n/ from "men shun" /'mEn SVn/,
then you should use [@] and not [V] to transcribe your
speech.
[V"] = [<reversed epsilon>] as in:
"fern" /fV":n/ /fV"rn/
"hurl" /hV":l/ /hV"rl/
Many U.S. speakers substitute [@] for [V"], so they would
say /f@rn/, /h@rl/. Many other U.S. speakers pronounce "fern"
with no vowel at all: /fr:n/, /hr:l/. If you are one of the
few speakers who distinguish such pairs as "pearl" and "purl"
(using a lower, more retracted vowel in "purl"), then you can
transcribe "pearl" /p@rl/ and "purl" /pV"rl/.
[W] = [<o-e ligature>] as in French heure /Wr/, German K"opfe
/'kWpf@/. Round your lips for [O] and try to say [E].
[x] as in Scots "loch" /lA.x/, German Bach /bax/
[Y] = [<slashed o>] as in French peu /pY/, German sch"on /SYn/,
Scots "guidwillie" /gYd'wIli/. Round your lips for [o] and
try to say [e].
[y] as in French lune /lyn/, German m"ude /'myd@/. Round your
lips for [u] and try to say [i].
[Z] = [<yogh>] as in "beige" /beIZ/
[&] = [<ash>] as in:
"ash" /&S/ /&S/
"cat" /k&t/ /k&t/
"marry" /'m&rI/ /'m&ri/
[@] = [<schwa>] as in "lemon" /'lEm@n/
[?] = [<glottal>] as in "uh-oh" /V?oU/
[*] = [<fish-hook r>], a short tap of the tongue use by some U.S.
speakers in "pedal", "petal", and by Scots speakers in
"pearl": all /pE*@l/. If you are a U.S. speaker but
distinguish "pedal" from "petal", then you do not use this
sound.
- previous consonant syllabic as in "bundle" /'bVnd@l/ or /'bVndl-/,
"button" /bVt@n/ or /bVtn-/
~ previous sound nasalized
: previous sound lengthened
; previous sound palatalized
<h> previous sound aspirated
' following syllable has primary stress
, following syllable has secondary stress
[There is an ASCII IPA guide and tutorial here, with audio
pronunciation examples by both dilettantes and experts.]
Here is the scheme compared with the transcriptions in 4 U.S.
dictionaries. (Most British dictionaries now use IPA for their
transcriptions.)
[While it's true that some British dictionaries use IPA for
pronunciation transcriptions, an important exception is The
Chambers Dictionary -- both the 1993 and the 1998 editions.
They do not use IPA.]
Merriam-Webster American Heritage Random House Webster's New World
[A] a umlaut a umlaut a umlaut a umlaut
[A.] (merged with [A]) o breve o (merged with [A])
[a] a overdot (merged with [A]) A a overdot
/aI/ i macron i macron i macron i macron
/aU/ a u overdot ou ou ou
[C] (merged with [x]) (merged with [x]) (merged with [x]) H
[D] th underlined th in italics th slashed th in italics
/dZ/ j j j j
[E] e e breve e e
/E@/ e schwa a circumflex a circumflex (merged with [e])
/eI/ a macron a macron a macron a macron
[g] g g g g
[I] i i breve i i
[I.] ue ligature (merged with [y]) (merged with [y]) (merged with [y])
[i] e macron e macron e macron e macron
[j] y y y y
[N] <eng> ng ng <eng>
[O] o overdot o circumflex o circumflex o circumflex
/OI/ o overdot i oi oi oi ligature
/oU/ o macron o macron o macron o macron
[S] sh sh sh sh ligature
[T] th th th th ligature
/tS/ ch ch ch ch ligature
[U] u overdot oo breve oo breve oo
[u] u umlaut oo macron oo macron oo macron
[V] (merged with [@]) u breve u u
[V"] (merged with [@]) u circumflex u circumflex u circumflex
[W] oe ligature oe ligature OE ligature o umlaut
[x] k underlined KH KH kh ligature
[Y] oe ligature macron (merged with [W]) (merged with [W]) (merged with [W])
[y] ue ligature macron u umlaut Y u umlaut
[Z] zh zh zh zh ligature
[&] a a breve a a
[@] schwa schwa schwa schwa
- superscript schwa syllabicity mark unmarked '
Auditory files demonstrating speech sounds can be obtained by
anonymous ftp from ftp.cs.cmu.edu (or on the World Wide Web at [...]).
Look in "/user/ai/areas/nlp/corpora/pron" and
"/user/ai/areas/speech/database/britpron".
[That anonymous ftp source no longer seems to be available. The web addresses are now
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/nlp/corpora/pron/0.html and
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/speech/database/britpron/0.html.] [There are audio files made by speakers in various parts
of the world in the AUE Audio Archive.
On the Links page there's a list of links to several
places where audio files are available.]
A rhotic speaker is one who pronounces as a consonant postvocalic
"r", i.e. the "r" after a vowel in words like "world" /wV"rld/. A
nonrhotic speaker either does not pronounce the "r" at all /wV"ld/
or pronounces it as a schwa /wV"@ld/. British Received
Pronunciation (RP) and many other dialects of English are nonrhotic.
Many nonrhotic speakers (including RP speakers, but excluding
most nonrhotic speakers in the southern U.S.) use a "linking r":
they don't pronounce "r" in "for" by itself /fO:/, but they do
pronounce the first "r" in "for ever" /fO: 'rEv@/. Linking "r"
differs from French liaison in that the former happens in any
phonetically appropriate context, whereas the latter also needs
the right syntactic context.
A further development of "linking r" is "intrusive r".
Intrusive-r speakers, because the vowels in "law" (which they
pronounce the same as "lore") and "idea" (which they pronounce
to rhyme with "fear") are identical for them to vowels spelled
with "r", intrude an r in such phrases as "law [r]and order" and
"The idea [r]of it!" They do NOT intrude an [r] after vowels that
are never spelled with an "r". Some people blanch at intrusive r,
but most RP speakers now use it.
Those who round their lips when they say it would probably
transcribe it /dOg/; those who don't round their lips, /dAg/.
Very few people in North America distinguish all three vowels
/A/, /A./, and /O/. Speakers in Eastern and Southern U.S. merge
/A./ and /A/, so that "bother" and "father" rhyme. Speakers in
Western U.S. and in Canada merge /A./ and /O/, so that "cot" and
"caught", "Don" and "Dawn" are pronounced alike. Some speakers
merge all three vowels. The Oxford Companion to the English
Language says: "The merger of vowels in tot and taught begins
in a narrow band in central Pennsylvania and spreads north and
south to influence the West, where the merger is universal. [...]
In New England, where the merger is beginning to occur, speakers
select the first vowel; in the Midland and West, the second vowel
is used for both." Although /A./ is seldom used to transcribe
American pronunciation, the vowel transcribed /O/ may sound like
/A./ to non-American speakers, or it may sound like /O/.
There is a further complication with "dog": U.S. dictionaries
give the pronunciations /dOg/, /dAg/ in that order (and similarly
with some other words ending in "-og", although which ones varies
from dictionary to dictionary). "Dawg", the name of the family dog
in the comic strip "Hi and Lois", may be intended to convey the
pronunciation /dOg/ to (or from) people who usually pronounce the
word /dAg/; or it may be intended as how a child in a community
where /A./ and /O/ are merged might misspell "dog".
There is a general tendency in English whereby when a word with a
stressed final syllable is followed by another word without a pause,
the stress moves forward: "kangaROO", but "KANGaroo court";
"afterNOON", but "AFTernoon nap"; "above BOARD", but "an aBOVEboard
deal". This happens chiefly in noun phrases, but not exclusively so
("acquiESCE" versus "ACquiesce readily"). Consider also "Chinese"
and all numbers ending in "-teen".
When "have to" means "must", the [v] in "have" becomes an [f].
Similarly, in "has to", [z] becomes [s]. When "used to" and
"supposed to" are used in their senses of "formerly" and "ought",
the "-sed" is pronounced /st/; when they're used in other senses,
it's /zd/.
In many dialects, "the" is pronounced /D@/ before a consonant,
and /DI/ before a vowel sound. Many foreigners learning English are
taught this rule explicitly. Native English-speakers are also
taught this rule when we sing in choirs. (We do it instinctively in
rapid speech; but in the slower pace of singing, it has to be
brought to our conscious attention.)
Words that have different pronunciations for specialized
meanings include the noun "address" (often stressed on the first
syllable when denoting a location, but stressed on the second
syllable when denoting an oration) "contrary" (often stressed on the
second syllable when the meaning is "perverse"); the verb "discount"
(stressed on the first syllable when the meaning is "to reduce in
price", but on the second syllable when the meaning is "to
disbelieve"); the verb "process" (stressed on the second syllable
when the meaning is "to go in procession"); the noun "recess"
(stressed on the first syllable when it means "a break from
working", but on the second syllable when it means "a secluded
part"); the verb "relay" (stressed on the first syllable when it
means "to pass on radio or TV signals", but on the second syllable
when it means "to pass on something that was said"); and the verb
"second" (stressed on the first syllable when it means "to endorse
a motion", but on the second syllable when it means "to temporarily
re-assign an employee". "Offence" and "defence", usually stressed
on the second syllable, are often in North America stressed on the
first syllable when the context is team sports. (In the U.S., of
course, they are spelled with -se .)
Words whose spelling has influenced their pronunciation
"Cocaine" used to be pronounced /'coU cA: in/ (3 syllables).
"Waistcoat" used to be pronounced /'wEskIt/. "Humble" and "human"
were borrowed from French with no [h] in their pronunciation.
"Forte" in the sense "strong point" comes from French fort=
"strong, strong point"; the English spelling is what the OED calls
an "ignorant" substitution of the feminine form of the adjective
for the masculine noun. But even in the French feminine form
forte, the "e" is not pronounced.
"Zoo" is an abbreviation of "zoological garden". The (popular
but stigmatized) pronunciation of "zoological" as /zu:@'lA.dZIk@l/
(as opposed to /zoU@'lA.dZIk@l/) is due to the influence of "zoo".
"Elephant" was "olifaunt" in Middle English, but its spelling was
restored to reflect the Latin "elephantus". Similarly, "crocodile"
was "cokedrill".
"Golf" is Scots. The traditional Scots pronunciation is /gof/.
"Ralph" was traditionally pronounced /reIf/ in Britain -- Gilbert
and Sullivan rhymed it with "waif" in H.M.S. Pinafore; that's how
the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams pronounced his name; and even
today actor Ralph Fiennes (of Schindler's List fame) is said to
pronounce his name /reIf faInz/.
[Joe Carl White submitted the following comment:
To be specific, Gilbert is the one who rhymed it with "waif";
Sullivan provided the music for Little Buttercup to tell us
all about it:
In time each little waif
Forsook his foster-mother,
The well born babe was Ralph--
Your captain was the other!!!"]
"Medicine" and "regiment" were two-syllable words in the 19th
century: /'mEdsIn/ and /'rEdZm@nt/. /'mEdsIn/ can still be heard
in RP. In 19th-century England, "university" was pronounced
/,ju:nIv'A:sItI/ and "laundry" was pronounced /'lA:ndrI/.
King Arthur would have pronounced his name /'artur/. The h's in
"Arthur" (now universally reflected in the pronunciation) and
"Anthony" (reflected in the U.S. pronunciation) were added in the
15th century -- ornamentally or, in the case of "Anthony", because
of a false connection with Greek anthos="flower".
The new pronunciations in such cases are called "spelling
pronunciations". The "speak-as-you-spell movement" is described in
the MEU2 article on "pronunciation".
Strictly, an acronym is a string of initial letters pronounceable
as a word, such as "NATO". Abbreviations like "NBC" have been
variously designated "alphabetisms" and "initialisms", although some
people do call them acronyms. WDEU says, "Dictionaries, however,
do not make this distinction [between acronyms and initialisms]
because writers in general do not"; but two of the best known books
on acronyms are titled Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations
Dictionary (19th ed., Gale, 1993) and Concise Dictionary of
Acronyms and Initialisms (Facts on File, 1988).
The Network Dictionary of Acronyms is available through World Wide
Web (<http://www.ucc.ie/info/net/acronyms/acro.html>) or by e-mail
(send the word "help" to freetext@iruccvax.ucc.ie).
"All ... not" cannot be condemned on the grounds of novelty, as
"All that glitters is not gold" and "All is not lost" show. "All
that glitters is not gold" is from Parabolae, a book of poems
written circa 1175 by Alanus de Insulis, a French monk: Non teneas
aurum totum quod splendet ut aurum = "Do not hold as gold all that
shines like gold". It was Englished by Chaucer in the Canterbury
Tales (1389) as: "But al thyng which that shyneth as the gold /
Nis nat gold, as that I have herd it told." (Shakespeare used the
wording "All that glisters is not gold" in The Merchant of Venice;
"glister", an archaic variant of "glisten", is still sometimes heard
in allusion to this.) "All is not lost" occurs in Milton's
Paradise Lost (1667).
The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs gives the proverbs "All
truths are not to be told" (1350), "All things fit not all persons"
(1532), "All feet tread not in one shoe" (1640), "All are not saints
that go to church" (1659), and "All Stuarts are not sib to the king"
(1857). It gives no proverbs at all beginning "Not all".
"All ... not" can, however, be condemned on the grounds of
potential ambiguity. When I proposed the sentence "All the people
who used the bathtub did not clean it afterwards" as ambiguous,
many people vigorously disputed that it was ambiguous. But they
were about evenly split on what it did mean! (John Lawler writes:
"There's a very large literature on quantifier ambiguities. Guy
Carden did the definitive early studies in the '60s and '70s, and
many others have contributed since then.") "Not all the people who
used the bathtub cleaned it afterwards" (or, if the other meaning is
intended, "None of the people who used the bathtub cleaned it
afterwards") is free of this ambiguity.
("Not all" can also be used rhetorically to mean "not even all",
but only in an exalted style incompatible with bathtubs: "Not all
the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an anointed
king" -- Shakespeare, Richard II, 1595.)
Fowler quoted a correspondent who urged him to prescribe "not
all", and commented: "This gentleman has logic on his side, logic
has time on its side, and probably the only thing needed for his
gratification is that he should live long enough."
This misspelling of "a lot" is frequently mentioned as a pet
peeve. It rarely appears in print, but is often found in the U.S.
in informal writing and on Usenet. There does not seem to be a
corresponding "alittle".
The spelling "alright" is recorded from 1887. It was defended
by Fowler (in one of the Society for Pure English tracts, not in
MEU), on the analogy of "almighty" and "altogether", and on the
grounds that "The answers are alright" (= "The answers are O.K.") is
less ambiguous than "The answers are all right" (which could mean
"All the answers are right"). But it is still widely condemned.
The prescriptive rule is to use "you and I" in the same contexts
as "I" (i.e., as a subject), and "you and me" in the same contexts
as "me" (i.e., as an object). In "between you and me", since "you
and me" is the object of the preposition "between", "me" is the only
correct form. But English-speakers have a tendency to regard
compounds joined with "and" as units, so that some speakers use "you
and me" exclusively, and others use "you and I" exclusively,
although such practices "have no place in modern edited prose"
(WDEU). "Between you and I" was used by Shakespeare in The
Merchant of Venice. Since this antedates the teaching of English
grammar, it is probably *not* "hypercorrection". (This is mentioned
merely to caution against the hypercorrection theory, not to defend
the phrase.) Shakespeare also used "between you and me".
Use of a plural verb after a singular noun denoting a group of
persons (known as a noun of multitude) is commoner in the U.K. than
in the U.S. Fowler wrote: "The Cabinet is divided is better,
because in the order of thought a whole must precede division; and
The Cabinet are agreed is better, because it takes two or more
to agree."
[See further comments on group names.]
The idiom "couldn't care less", meaning "doesn't care at all"
(the meaning in full is "cares so little that he couldn't possibly
care less"), originated in Britain around 1940. "Could care less",
which is used with the same meaning, developed in the U.S. around
1960. We get disputes about whether the latter was originally a
mis-hearing of the former; whether it was originally ironic; or
whether it arose from uses where the negative element was separated
from "could" ("None of these writers could care less..."). Henry
Churchyard believes that this sentence by Jane Austen may be
pertinent: "You know nothing and you care less, as people say."
(Mansfield Park (1815), Chapter 29) Meaning-saving elaborations
have also been suggested: "As if I could care less!"; "I could care
less, but I'd have to try"; "If I cared even one iota -- which I
don't --, then I could care less."
Recently encountered has been "could give a damn", used in the
sense "couldn't give a damn".
An earlier transition in which "not" was dropped was the one that
gave us "but" in the sense of "only". "I will not say but one
word", where "but" meant "(anything) except", became "I will say but
one word."
Other idioms that say the opposite of what they mean include:
"head over heels" (which could mean turning cartwheels, i.e. "head
over heels over head over heels", but is also used to mean "upside-
down", i.e. "heels over head"); "Don't sneeze more than you can
help" (meaning "more than you cannot help"; "help" here means
"prevent"); "It's hard to open, much less acknowledge, the letters"
(where "less" means "harder", i.e. "more"); "I shouldn't wonder if
it didn't rain"; "I miss not seeing you"; and "I turned my life
around 360 degrees" -- not to mention undisputedly ironic phrases
such as "fat chance", "Thanks a *lot*", and "I should worry".
We get frequent complaints about the occurrence of "of" in
unedited prose where the meaning is "have". "Have" contracts to
"'ve", so "could've", "might've", "must've", "should've",
"would've", etc. (and their negatives, "couldn't've", etc.), should
be so spelled. People have testified that it's got beyond a
spelling mistake: they've heard "would of" spoken with a clear
pause between the words.
WDEU says: "The OED Supplement dates the naive (or ignorant) use
of of back to 1837. [...Y]ou had better avoid it in your own
writing. [...] Bernstein 1977 allows that a schoolchild cannot be
blamed for could of -- once."
"Different from" is the construction that no one will object to.
"Different to" is fairly common informally in the U.K., but rare in
the U.S. "Different than" is sometimes used to avoid the cumbersome
"different from that which", etc. (e.g., "a very different Pamela
than I used to leave all company and pleasure for" -- Samuel
Richardson). Some U.S. speakers use "different than" exclusively.
Some people have insisted on "different from" on the grounds that
"from" is required after "to differ". But Fowler points out that
there are many other adjectives that do not conform to the
construction of their parent verbs (e.g., "accords with", but
"according to"; "derogates from", but "derogatory to").
The Collins Cobuild Bank of English shows choice of preposition
after "different" to be distributed as follows:
"from" "to" "than"
----- ---- ------
U.K. writing 87.6 10.8 1.5
U.K. speech 68.8 27.3 3.9
U.S. writing 92.7 0.3 7.0
U.S. speech 69.3 0.6 30.1
The OED's first citation for "done" in the sense of "finished" is
from 1300, and it has been in continuous use since then. It was
used in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer ("When the Clerkes have dooen
syngyng"); by Francis Bacon ("Dinner being done, the Tirsan
retireth", 1611); by John Donne ("And having done that, Thou haste
done, I have no more", 1623); by Dryden ("Now the Chime of Poetry is
done", 1697); and by Dickens ("when the reading of this document is
done", 1859). According to The Oxford Dictionary of English
Proverbs (OUP, 3rd ed., 1970, ISBN 0-19-869118-1), the proverb
"Man's work lasts till set of sun; woman's work is never done" is
first recorded with the words "is never done" in 1721.
In the early 20th century, for some reason objections to the use
of "done" in the sense of "finished" arose in the U.S. It became
regarded as colloquial, and in 1969 only 53% of AHD's usage panel
approved of it in writing. Although these objections have now
subsided, one should still beware that the two senses of "done" may
cause ambiguity: does "The work will be done next month" mean "The
work will get done next month" or "The work will be done by next
month"?
The use of "be done" with a personal subject, meaning "have
finished", is described by the OED as "chiefly Irish, Sc., U.S., and
dial." The first citation is dated 1766, and is from Thomas Amory,
a British writer of Irish descent: "I was done with love for ever."
American users have included Thomas Jefferson ("One farther favor
and I am done", 1771); Mark Twain ("I am done with official life for
the present", 1872); and Robert Frost ("But I am done with apple-
picking now", 1914). Users in the British Isles have included
Robert Louis Stevenson ("We were no sooner done eating than Clumsy
brought out an old, thumbed greasy pack of cards", 1886) and George
Bernard Shaw ("You can't be done: you've eaten nothing", 1898).
"Be finished" is also used in the sense of "have finished".
Jespersen's first citation is from Oliver Goldsmith ("When we were
finished for the day", 1766). English-speakers should be careful
not to render this construction literally into other languages:
Partridge recounts the story of an Englishman who in a French
restaurant said Je suis fini to the waiter, who looked at the
"finished" customer with some concern.
Any of "be done", "be finished", "have done", and "have finished"
may be followed either with a gerund, or with "with" plus any
noun phrase. If "with" is not used and the noun phrase is not a
gerund, then only "have finished" may be used ("have done" would not
have the sense "have finished" here). Use of "with" changes the
meaning: "I have finished construction of the building" means that
the building is fully constructed, whereas "I have finished with
construction of the building" means merely that *my* part is over.
These uses of "be done" and "be finished" are examples of
what Fowler called the "intransitive past participle", where,
instead of the more usual transformation:
"A {transitive verb}s B" -> "B is {transitive verb}ed"
we see the transformation:
"A {intransitive verb}s" -> "A is {intransitive verb}ed"
Fowler gives the examples: fallen angels, the risen sun, a
vanished hand, past times, the newly arrived guest, a grown girl,
absconded debtors, escaped prisoners, the deceased lady, the
dear departed, coalesced stems, a collapsed lorry, we are agreed,
a couched lion, an eloped pair, an expired lease.
Double "is", as in "The reason is, is that..." is a recent U.S.
development, much decried. According to MEU3, it was first noticed
in 1971 and had spread to the U.K. by 1987. Of course, "What this
is is..." is undisputedly correct.
"Due to" meaning "caused by" is undisputedly correct in contexts
where "due" can be construed as an adjective (e.g., "failure due to
carelessness"). Its use in contexts where "due" is an adverb
("He failed due to carelessness") has been disputed. Fowler says
that "due to is often used by the illiterate as though it had
passed, like owing to, into a mere compound preposition". But
Fowler was writing in 1926; what hadn't happened then may well
have happened by now.
"Functionality" is often attacked as a needless long variant of
"function". But they are differentiated in meaning. "The function
of a screwdriver is to turn screws. Its functionality includes
prying open paint cans, stirring paint, scraping paint, and acting
as a chisel. The function is what it is designed to do. The
functionality is what you can do with it." -- Evan Kirshenbaum.
A thing's functionality includes its functions if and only if it
does what it was designed to do. This specialized meaning of
"functionality" is not yet in most dictionaries. The earliest
citation we have was found by Fred Shapiro in the June 1977 issue of
Fortune: "The way to grow, an I.B.M. maxim says, is to 'increase
the functionality of the system,' or, in plain English, to give the
customer the capacity to do more than he wants to do in the
knowledge that he inevitably will."
Mark Odegard suggests a similar distinction between "mode" and
"modality": "A 'mode' is a way of doing something. A 'modality'
is doing something according to a protocol."
Outside technical contexts, the word "functionality" may well
strike some readers as jargonistic. Thought may be needed to
find a substitute that works in the context. "Utility" is
sometimes suggested, but consider: "The utility of mainframe
computers has declined sharply over the past decade; their
functionality has remained the same." Here, "their capabilities
have remained the same" might be the best solution.
"Singular 'they'" is the name generally given to the use of
"they", "them", "their", or "theirs" with a singular antecedent such
as "someone" or "everyone", as in "Everyone was blowing their nose."
(It does not refer to the use of singular verbs in such mock-
illiterate sentences as "Them's the breaks" and "Them as has,
gets." Any verb agreeing with a singular "they" is plural:
"Someone killed him, and they are going to pay for it.")
Singular "they" has been used in English since the time of
Chaucer. Prescriptive grammarians have traditionally (since 1746,
although the actual practice goes right back to 1200) prescribed
"he": "Everyone was blowing his nose." In 1926, Fowler wrote
that singular "they" had an "old-fashioned sound [...]; few good
modern writers would flout the grammarians so conspicuously." But
in recent decades, singular "they" has gained popularity as a result
of the move towards gender-neutral language.
For a defence of singular "they", with examples from Shakespeare,
Jane Austen, and others, see Henry Churchyard's page [...].
[On 15 July 1999 Henry Churchyard made the following
announcement: My "Singular their" page has moved [...] to
<http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html>;
the mirror is still in place at
<http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/austheir.html>.]
But note that
not all of us are as keen on singular "they" as Henry is. Asked to
fill in the blank in sentences such as "A patient who doesn't
accurately report ___ sexual history to the doctor runs the risk of
misdiagnosis", only 3% of AHD3's usage panel chose "their". AHD3's
usage note says: "this solution ignores a persistent intuition
that expressions such as everyone and each student should in
fact be treated as grammatically singular." An example from Fowler
wittily demonstrates how singular "they" never seems to agree
perfectly: "Everyone was blowing their nose"? "Everyone was
blowing their noses"? "Everyone were blowing their noses"?
Proposals for other gender-neutral pronouns get made from time to
time, and some can be found in actual use ("sie" and "hir" are the
ones most frequently found on Usenet). Cecil Adams, in Return of
the Straight Dope (Ballantine, 1994, ISBN 0-345-38111-4), says that
some eighty such terms have been proposed, the first of them in the
1850s. John Chao (chao@hoss.ee.udel.edu) was constructing a long FAQ
on this topic: [...]
[Some remarks about John Chao's work with gender-neutral
pronouns are at
<http://www.kith.org/logos/words/lower2/eepicene.html>.
John Chao's FAQ on gender-neutral pronouns is at
<http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/index.html>.]
Discussions about gender-neutral pronouns tend to go round and
round and never reach a conclusion. Please refrain.
(We also get disputes about the use of the word "gender" in the
sense of "sex", i.e., of whether a human being is male or female.
This also dates from the 14th century. By 1900 it was restricted
to jocular use, but it has now been revived because of the "sexual
relations" sense of "sex".)
First of all, "God rest you merry, gentlemen" is correct,
not "God rest you, merry gentlemen." The verb "rest" is used
here in the way now most familiar from the phrase "rest
assured". In earlier English it was used with a variety of
other complements: the OED has "rest thee merry" from 1400;
"rest you well" from 1420; "God rest you merry", "rest you
fair", and "rest you happy", and "rest myself content" from
Shakespeare; "rest thee tranquil" from Shelley, and "rest thee
sure" from Tennyson.
The nouns "rest"="repose" and "rest"="remainder" are
etymologically unconnected: the former is from Germanic
(whence German Ruhe); the latter is from Old French rester
from Latin restare from re-="back" + stare="stand". Some
dictionaries connect "rest" as in "rest you merry" with
"rest"="remainder" rather than "rest"="repose". So "God rest you
merry" would mean "May God keep you (or make you and keep you)
merry." Semantic leakage from "rest"="repose" would explain why
we never see uses like "rest agitated" or "rest you sad."
People sometimes wonder whether "rest you merry" should
be "rest you merrily". Rest assuredly that it shouldn't. :-)
The song is now widely misunderstood as being addressed to "merry
gentlemen", first because this use of "rest" is now obsolete except
in the phrases "rest assured" and "rest easy", and secondly because
the familiar tune supports that stress pattern. A tune "once
ubiquitous in the West Country" of England and that better supports
the stress pattern of "God rest you merry, gentlemen" is given in
The Oxford Book of Carols (by Percy Darmer et al., Oxford, 1928)
and can be heard in The Carol Album, conducted by Andrew Parrott
(EMI, 1990, 0777-7-49809-2-0).
The other dispute about this phrase is whether the pronoun should
be "you" or "ye". In the references to the song retrieved by
AltaVista, "ye" outnumbers "you" by 5 to 1. Traditional grammarians
would prefer "you", since the pronoun is the object of the verb
"rest" and hence should be in the accusative. Although there was
some historical use of "ye" in the accusative (e.g., Thomas Ford's
madrigal "Since first I saw your face I resolved / To honour and
renown ye"), in the prestigious English of the King James Version of
the Bible, "ye" was always nominative and "you" was always
accusative. (This is counter-mnemonic, since "thou" was nominative
and "thee" was accusative.) The Oxford Book of Carols quotes the
words from a broadsheet published circa 1800 as: "God rest you
merry gentlemen". In A Christmas Carol (1843), Charles Dickens
wrote: "The owner of one scant young nose [...] stooped down at
Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol: but at the
first sound of 'God bless you, merry gentleman! May nothing you
dismay!' Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that
the singer fled in terror [...]".
The traditional, undisputed senses of these words are active:
"in a hopeful manner", "in a thankful manner".
The OED's first citation for "hopefully" in the passive sense
(= "It is to be hoped that") is from 1932, but no unmistakable
citation has been found between then and 1954. (WDEU has three
ambiguous citations dated 1941, 1951, and 1954.) WDEU's first
citation for the passive sense of "thankfully" (= "We can be
thankful that") is from 1963. These uses became popular in the
early '60s, and have been widely criticized on the grounds that
they should have been "hopably" and "thankably" (on the analogy of
"arguably", "predictably", "regrettably", "inexplicably", etc.),
and on the grounds that "I hope" is more direct.
The disputed, passive use of "hopefully" is often referred to as
"sentence-modifying"; but it can also modify a single word, as is
hopefully clear from this example. :-) Most adverbs that can modify
sentences -- including "apparently", "clearly", "curiously",
"evidently", "fortunately", "ironically", "mercifully", "sadly", and
the "-ably" examples above -- can be converted into "It is apparent
that", etc. But a few adverbs are used in a way that instead must
be construed with an ellipsis of "to speak" or "speaking". These
include "briefly" (the OED has citations of "briefly" used in this
way from 1514 on, including one from Shakespeare), "seriously"
(1644; used by Fowler in his article DIDACTICISM in MEU), "strictly"
(1680), "roughly" (1841), "frankly" (1847), "honestly" (1898),
"hopefully", and "thankfully". Acquisition of such a use is far
from automatic; for example, no one uses "fearfully" in a manner
analogous to "hopefully".
AHD3 says: "It might have been expected that the flurry of
objections to hopefully would have subsided once the usage became
well established. Instead, increased currency of the usage appears
only to have made the critics more adamant. In the 1969 Usage Panel
survey the usage was acceptable to 44 percent of the Panel; in the
most recent survey [1992] it was acceptable to only 27 percent.
[...] Yet the Panel has not shown any signs of becoming generally
more conservative: in the very same survey panelists were disposed
to accept once-vilified usages such as the employment of contact
and host as verbs." AHD3 quotes William Safire as saying: "The
word 'hopefully' has become the litmus test to determine whether one
is a language snob or a language slob."
Discussions about "hopefully" and "thankfully" go round and round
for ever without reaching a conclusion. We advise you to refrain.
See under "Subjunctive" below. The following pair of
sentences shows the traditional and useful distinction:
"If I was a hopeless cad, I apologize."
"If I were a hopeless cad, I would never apologize."
"Impact", which comes from Latin impactus, past participle of
impingere = "to push against", is first recorded in English in
1601 in the form of the past participle, "impacted". The verb "to
impact", meaning "to press closely into or in something", dates from
1791. The noun "impact" dates from 1781. The (undisputed)
expression "impacted wisdom tooth" dates from 1876.
There is another English verb derived from Latin impingere:
"to impinge", first recorded in 1605. "To impinge on" shares with
"to impact" the sense "to come sharply in contact with", and some
people consider it stylistically preferable. Unlike "to impact",
"to impinge on" has acquired the figurative sense "to encroach on",
possibly through confusion with "to infringe". This sense is
attested from 1758 on.
The usage dispute centres on the use of the verb "to impact (on)"
in the sense "to affect, to have an effect on, to influence". The
OED's earliest citations where this is clearly the sense are: for
"impact on", 1951; and for transitive "impact", 1963.
Opposition to these uses is widespread. 84% of AHD3's Usage Panel
disapproved of "social pathologies [...] that impact heavily on such
a community"; and 95% disapproved of "a potential for impacting our
health". Among the objections to such use of "impact" are that it
sounds pretentious and bureaucratic, and that it may connote to the
reader violence that the author did not intend. The latter
objection can apply also to "impact" the noun. Kenneth Hudson, in
The Dictionary of Diseased English (Macmillan, 1977), noted:
"'Yves St. Laurent's Triangles give even more design impact to your
bed' (Washington Star, 17.10.76) is not the happiest of sentences.
'Make a nice bed look even better' would have been more reassuring."
is not standard English, although "It needs to be cleaned", "It
needs cleaning", and "I need it cleaned" all are. "It needs
cleaned" is common informally in some parts of the U.S., and in
Scotland, where it may have originated.
Fowler says: "me is technically wrong in It wasn't me etc.;
but the phrase being of its very nature colloquial, such a lapse is
of no importance".
The rule for what he and others consider technically right is
*not* (as is commonly misstated) that the nominative should *always*
be used after "to be". Rather, it is that "to be" should link two
noun phrases of the same case, whether this be nominative or
accusative:
I believe that he is I. Who do you believe that he is?
I believe him to be me. Whom do you believe him to be?
According to the traditional grammar being used here, "to be" is not
a transitive verb, but a *copulative* verb. When you say that A is
B, you don't imply that A, by being B, is doing something to B.
(After all, B is also doing it to A.) Other verbs considered
copulative are "to become", "to remain", "to seem", and "to look".
Sometimes in English, though, "to be" does seem to have the
force of a transitive verb; e.g., in Gelett Burgess's:
I never saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one.
The occurrence of "It's me", etc., is no doubt partly due to this
perceived transitive force. In the French C'est moi, often cited
as analogous, moi is not in the accusative, but a special form
known as the "disjunctive", used for emphasis. If etre were a
transitive verb in French, C'est moi would be Ce m'est.
In languages such as German and Latin that inflect between the
nominative and the accusative, B in "A is B" is nominative just like
A. In English, no nouns and only a few personal pronouns ("I",
"we", "thou", "he", "she", "they" and "who") inflect between the
nominative and the accusative. In other words, we've gotten out of
the habit, for the most part.
Also, in English we derive meaning from word position, far more
than one would in Latin, somewhat more than in German, even. In
those languages, one can rearrange sentences drastically for
rhetorical or other purposes without confusion (heh) because
inflections (endings, etc.) tell you how the words relate to one
another. In English, "The dog ate the cat" and "The cat ate the
dog" are utterly different in meaning, and if we wish to have the
former meaning with "cat" prior to "dog" in the sentence, we have to
say "The cat was eaten by the dog" (change of voice) or "It is the
cat that the dog ate." In German, one can reverse the meaning by
inflecting the word (or its article): Der Hund frass die Katze
and Den Hund frass die Katze reverse the meaning of who ate whom.
In Latin, things are even more flexible: almost any word order will
do:
Feles edit canem
Feles canem edit
Canem edit feles
Canem feles edit
Edit canem feles
Edit feles canem
all mean the same, the choice of word order being made perhaps for
rhetorical or poetic purpose.
English is pretty much the opposite of that: hardly any
inflection, great emphasis on order. As a result, things have
gotten a little irregular with the personal pronouns. And there's
uncertainty as to how to use them; the usual rules aren't there,
because the usual word needs no rules, being the same for nominative
and accusative.
The final factor is the traditional use of Latin grammatical
concepts to teach English grammar. This historical quirk dates to
the 17th century, and has never quite left us. From this we get the
Latin-derived rule, which Fowler still acknowledges. And we *do*
follow that rule to some extent: "Who are they?" (not "Who are
them?" or "Whom are they?") "We are they!" (in response to the
preceding) "It is I who am at fault." "That's the man who
he is."
But not always. "It is me" is attested since the 16th Century.
(Speakers who would substitute "me" for "I" in the "It is I who am
at fault" example would also sacrifice the agreement of person, and
substitute "is" for "am".)
The rule usually encountered is: use "fewer" for things you
count (individually), and "less" for things you measure: "fewer
apples", "less water". Since "less" is also used as an adverb
("less successful"), "fewer" helps to distinguish "fewer successful
professionals" (fewer professionals who are successful) from "less
successful professionals" (professionals who are less successful).
(No such distinction is possible with "more", which serves as the
antonym of both "less" and "fewer".)
"Less" has been used in the sense of "fewer" since the time of
King Alfred the Great (9th century), and is still common in that
sense, especially informally in the U.S.; but in British English it
became so rare that the 1st edition of the OED (in a section
prepared in 1902) gave no citation more recent than 1579 and gave
the usage label "Now regarded as incorrect." The 2nd edition of the
OED added two 19th-century citations, and changed the usage label to
"Frequently found but generally regarded as incorrect."
Fowler mentioned it only in passing, and cited no real examples.
In a section whose main intent was to disparage "less" in the sense
"smaller" or "lower", he wrote: "It is true that less and
lesser were once ordinary comparatives of little [...] and that
therefore they were roughly equivalent in sense to our smaller
[...]. The modern tendency is so to restrict less that it means
not smaller, but a smaller amount of, is the comparative rather
of a little than of little, and is consequently applied only to
things that are measured by amount and not by size or quality or
number, nouns with which much and little, not great and
small, nor high and low, nor many and few, are the
appropriate contrasted epithets: less butter, courage; but a
smaller army, table; a lower price, degree; fewer opportunities,
people. Plurals, and singulars with a or an, will naturally
not take less; less tonnage, but fewer ships; less manpower,
but fewer men [...]; though a few plurals like clothes and
troops, really equivalent to singulars of indefinite amount, are
exceptions: could do with less troops or clothes."
Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1934), gave the
usage label "now incorrect, according to strict usage, except with a
collective; as, to wear less clothes." Of the panelists for The
Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975), 76% said that they
observed "less"/"fewer" distinction in speech, and 85% in writing.
The editors noted: "even those panelists who have not observed the
distinction in the past now regard it as a useful precept to bear in
mind in the future."
Partisans of "fewer" use "one car fewer" rather than "one
fewer car", and "far fewer" rather than "much fewer".
For making comparisons (i.e., asserting that one thing is similar
to another), the prescribed choices are:
1. A is like B.
2. A behaves like B.
3. A behaves as B does.
4. A behaves as in an earlier situation.
In 1 and 2, "like" governs a noun (or a pronoun or a noun phrase).
In 3, "as" introduces a clause with a noun and a verb. In 4, "as"
introduces a prepositional phrase. Look at what the word
introduces, and you will know which to use.
In informal English, "like" is often used in place of "as" in
sentences of type 3 and 4. "Like" has been been used in the sense
of "as if" since the 14th century, and in the sense of "as" since
the 15th century, but such use was fairly rare until the 19th
century, and "a writer who uses the construction in formal style
risks being accused of illiteracy or worse" (AHD3). "Like" in 1
and 2 is a preposition; "as"/"like" in 3 or 4 and "as if" are
conjunctions. Fowler put "Like as conjunction" first in his list
of "ILLITERACIES" (he defined "illiteracy" as "offence against the
literary idiom").
In some sentences of type of 3, "as" may sound too formal:
"Pronounce it as you spell it." To avoid both this formality and
the stigma of "like" here, you may use "the way": "Pronounce it the
way you spell it." But this solution is available only if you are
specifying a single way; it doesn't work, for example, in "Play it
as it's never been played before." ("Play it in a way..." might
work here, but lacks the connotations of enthusiasm and excellence
that "play it as" has.)
The most famous use of "like" as a conjunction was in the 1950s
slogan for Winston Cigarettes: "Winston tastes good, like a
cigarette should." The New Yorker wrote that "it would pain [Sir
Winston Churchill] dreadfully", but in fact conjunctive "like" was
used by Churchill himself in informal speech: "We are overrun by
them, like the Australians are by rabbits." "Like" in the sense of
"as if" was, until recently, more often heard in the Southern U.S.
than elsewhere, and was perceived by Britons as an Americanism.
When used in this sense, it is never now followed by the inflected
past subjunctive: people say "like it is" or "like it was", not
"like it were".
Sometimes, "as" introduces a noun phrase with no following verb.
When it does, it does not signify a qualitative comparison, but
rather may:
a) indicate a role being played. "They fell on the supplies as men
starving" means that they were actually starving men; in "They fell
on the supplies like men starving", one is *comparing* them to
starving men. "You're acting as a fool" might be appropriate if you
obtained the job of court jester; "You're acting like a fool"
expresses the more usual meaning.
b) introduce examples. ("Some animals, as the fox and the squirrel,
have bushy tails.") "Such as" and "like" are more common in this use.
For the use of "like" here, see the next entry.
c) be short for "as ... as": "He's deaf as a post" means "He's as
deaf as a post" (a quantitative comparison).
The Little, Brown Handbook (6th ed., HarperCollins, 1995) says:
"Strictly, such as precedes an example that represents a larger
subject, whereas like indicates that two subjects are comparable.
Steve has recordings of many great saxophonists such as Ben Webster
and Lee Konitz.Steve wants to be a great jazz saxophonist like
Ben Webster and Lee Konitz." Nobody would use "such as" in the
second sentence; the disputed usage is "like" in the first sentence.
Opposing it are: earlier editions of The Little, Brown Handbook
(which did not use the hedge "strictly"); the Random House English
Language Desk Reference (1995); The Globe and Mail Style Book
(Penguin, 1995); Webster's Dictionary & Thesaurus (Shooting Star
Press, 1995); Fine Print: Reflections on the Writing Art by James
Kilpatrick (Andrews and McMeel, 1993); The Wordwatcher's Guide to
Good Writing and Grammar by Morton S. Freeman (Writer's Digest,
1990); Word Perfect: A Dictionary of Current English Usage by
John O. E. Clark (Harrap, 1987); and Keeping Up the Style by
Leslie Sellers (Pitman, 1975).
The OED, first edition, in its entry on "like" (which is in a
section prepared in 1903), said that "in modern use", "like" "often
= 'such as', introducing a particular example of a class respecting
which something is predicated". Merriam-Webster Editorial
Department unearthed the following 19th-century citations for me:
"Good sense, like hers, will always act when really called upon",
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814; "A straight-forward,
open-hearted man, like Weston, and a rational unaffected woman, like
Miss Taylor, may be safely left to their own concerns", Jane Austen,
Emma, 1816; "[...] to argue that because a well-stocked island,
like Great Britain, has not, as far as is known [...]", Charles
Darwin, Origin of the Species, 1859.
Fowler apparently saw nothing wrong with "like" in this sense:
in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, he gave "resembling, such as"
without a usage label as one its meanings, and gave the example "a
critic like you", which he explained as "of the class that you
exemplify". And he used it himself in the passage quoted under
"'less' vs 'fewer'" above. More commonly, though, he wrote "such
... as" when using examples to define the set ("such bower-birds'
treasures as au pied de la lettre, a` merveille, [...] and
sauter aux yeux"), and "as" or "such as" when the words preceding
the examples sufficed to define the set ("familiar words in -o, as
halo and dado"; "simple narrative poems in short stanzas, such
as Chevy Chase"). This is the same restrictive vs nonrestrictive
mentioned under "'that' vs 'which'": "Ballads, such as Chevy Chase,
can be danced to" would imply that all ballads can be danced to,
whereas "Such ballads as Chevy Chase can be danced to" would not.
"Such ... as" is now confined to formal use, and for informal
restrictive uses where the example is not introduced merely for the
sake of example, but is the actual topic of the sentence, "like" is
now obligatory: "I'm so glad to have a friend like Paul." Guide
to Canadian English Usage by Margery Fee and Janice McAlpine
(Oxford, 1997, ISBN 0-19-540841-1) rightly points out that "such as"
would not be idiomatic here.
Modern American Usage by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang, 1966)
says: "Such as is close in meaning to like and may often be
interchanged with it. The shade of difference between them is that
such as leads the mind to imagine an indefinite group of objects
[...]. The other comparing word like suggests a closer
resemblance among the things compared [...]. [...P]urists object
to phrases of the type a writer like Shakespeare, a leader like
Lincoln. No writer, say these critics, is like Shakespeare; and
in this they are wrong; writers are alike in many things and the
context usually makes clear what the comparison proposes to our
attention. Such as Shakespeare may sound less impertinent, but
if Shakespeare were totally incomparable such as would be open to
the same objection as like." Bernstein, in Miss Thistlebottom's
Hobgoblins (Farrar, 1971), agrees, calling those who object to
"German composers like Beethoven" "nit-pickers".