WRONG

Why English ain’t from England, and “ain’t” ain’t a bad word

BILL BROHAUGH

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brohaugh, William.

Everything you know about English is wrong / by Bill Brohaugh. p. cm.

1. English language—Etymology. 2. English language—History. 3. English language—Terms and phrases. 4. English language— Usage. I. Title.

PE1574.B63 2006

422-UC22

2007046889

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

BG 10 987654321

Dedication

Howz mom 'n’m?

Thank you, Gary Burbank, for giving radio voice these past twenty years to my wackiest thoughts. I am honored and thrilled on those occasions when I can make you laugh, sir—because you have made me laugh so much harder.

And given that The Gary Burbank Show is a community, I’m honored to also bow graciously to Burbank writers who have become more than challenging colleagues, but also fast friends, in alphabetical order ranked according to their smell: John Bunyan, Tim Mizak, Jim Probasco, Mary Tom Watts, Kevin Wolfe.

I must be off.

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to

• Jack Heffron for his first recognition of this book’s possibilities

• Annie Sisson for not questioning why her husband kept chortling fervently at the keyboard at odd hours of the night

• Sandra Bond for laughing at mostly the right times (at the book, anyway) and subsequently selling the book anyway

• Dennis Chaptman for friendship and for challenging me to surrealistic humor extremes with his own surrealism

• Shakespeare for spelling it theater and to me for getting out of the theater biz just in time

• Mad magazine and, independently, Jay Ward of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame, for perhaps shaping my preadolescent sense of humor too damn much, as well as Richard Armour (and mostly Richard Armour) and the style of written humor that tickled and propelled me at an impressionable age (who else could demonstrate that footnotes could be rollickingly funny?)

• And, oh yeah, to Green Acres. I suspect I may be the first to thank Green Acres in a book’s front matter, but as far as humor goes, Green Acres is the place to be.

Introduction

“The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.”

—Derek Walcott

Never trust a bookstore employee who, when asked where to find etymology and word books, leads you to the word-search puzzle rack.

In the true story that prompted this advice, I stared at the pulp- paper acrostics and cryptograms and crosswords. Though a bit flummoxed, I realized that I should forgive this earnest associate. After all, English itself is, in a broad sense, a word puzzle, and like both those puzzles and the queries of where the etymology section of the bookstore is, sometimes people try hard yet come up with wrong answers. Our understanding of English—its history, its rules, its use—is often misconceived, misguided, misinformed, or based on some lie someone told us, probably via email, cuz it made a good story.

Yet, what a wondrous language. Puzzle me this language always, despite its inherent confounderies.

Yes, English is Swiss'-cheesed with pitfalls, almost all of our own fermenting. Yes, there are 512.6 ways to pronounce the letter

Bill Brohaugh

viii

combination o-u-g-h from through to tough to cough to plough to jlough to Brohough (a branch of my family). Yes, English is known kto khave kmore kpotential ksilent kletters kthan kactual kones. Yes, we confuse our own spelling by respecting the languages we borrow from to the point of retaining both original spelling and pronunciation 2 (for example, we spell rendezvous and say ron-day- voo but we don’t write rondayvu or say wren-dees-vows). Yes, the whole language is, in modern terms, a “mash-up” that allows slang words like mash-up and slang to not only enter the language but also become living, vibrant vocabulary. Yes, English is distended with exceptions, oddities, antiquities, fossils, distractions, oxymorons, shifts, speed bumps, flipflops, flummeries, and words with there homonym 3 disasters. And, yes yes yes, everything you know about English is wrong because of all the above.

Yet, all these negative yeses reflecting the influences, the exceptions, the what-the-hells-do-those-words-mean (not to mention the fact that I can create odd plural words like “what-the-hells-do-those- words-mean”)—all these negative yeses bring to our language a flexibility, a luxuriant breeding ground for poetry, the foundation of spelling bees, and (most important to this book) a dizzyingly high platform for argument both fun and intense.

Everything You Know About English Is Wrong makes no attempt to settle the arguments, and, in fact, (warning, verb use of advocate lurking) I devil’s-advocate occasionally purely to spur arguments. On these pages, I regularly cross the line between descriptivism (“Hey, grammar is as grammar does”) and prescriptivism (“Conjugate properly or I’ll rap your knuckles with a ruler, child!”). I take flexibly inflexible stands on issues; point to little-known facts; force uptight word watchers (those I’ve termed “the persnickitors”) to tighten up even

U.S. cities excepted, including Vye-enna (Vienna), Georgia; Ver-sayles (Versailles), Indiana; Lye-ma (Lima), Ohio; Kay-ro (Cairo), Syrup—1 mean, Illinois; and Mos-ko (Moscow—oops, we changed that one to not reflect how English speakers would pronounce Moss-cow), Idaho. ! It’s a joke. Honest. So their!

further by forcing them to follow their own rules. I make up a couple of things; repeat a few thoughts; point out “incorrect” answers to the puzzle we speak daily (from misconceptions about word histories to specious grammatical edicts to confusions about meanings, spellings and quotations). I repeat a few thoughts; I throw out some earthy words (you’ve been warned); and I battle with the persnickitors, with your sensibilities, and even with myself. Hopefully in good fun (yes— hopefully).

Please, the fun. The fun and the insight. I like what Dr. Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton of the University of Texas at Austin told the BBC when asked about the overall topic of language disagreements: “When they have spent hours arguing over whether it is correct to say, ‘It is I’ or ‘It is me,’ you have to wonder if they shouldn’t be exploring something else about their relationship.”

A Note to Kind and Forbearing Readers

In Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, I twist the occasional word and torture a few others, absolutely with intent. Similarly, I romp through a few, shall we say, innovative sentence structures. (I can’t blame this on Steve Martin and the words he puts in Harris Telemacher’s mouth in Martin’s comedy LA. Story when I do so, but I’ll take the opportunity to quote him anyway: “the interesting word usements I structure.”) 4

Kind and forebearing readers, please always assume that such twists, tortures, and romps are always intentional. If I make an actual mistake anywhere on these published pages, I will alert you to said mistake right on the spot.

Thank you.

Bill Brohaugh

The En glish Delusionary

A brief glossary of words I created for this volume of delusion-

busters, for my own amusement and your annoyance:

• Anacronymizer. A creator of anachronistic acronyms.

• Babblisciousness. Really babblascious babble.

• Bullshitternet. Nonsense you find on the Internet.

• Catapostrophe. Bad use of apostrophes.

• Chitchatternet. Blather you find on the Internet; not nearly as pejorative as bullshitternet.

• Definitive. A “definite” fact that’s usually wrong.

• Delusionary. For a definition, consult “The English Delusionary” on page i.

• Donee Words. These are “dunce words for the nonce”—words I have created for the purposes of smartassery in a particular entry. Words like smartassery.

• Etymologia Mythica. Yeah, that would be my guess, too.

• Flabasciousness. See babblisciousness.

• Lyricritic. A persnickitor who attacks song lyrics.

• Microparse. To analyze a word or sentence down to its atoms, while forgetting that unlike matter, words often have no such structure. For an example, see “Double Negatives,” page 122.

• Notymology. A blend word: not(et)ymology.

• Persnickitor. A hypersensitive stickler grammarian, one who screeches about using hopefully (see page 117) and other poster children of “bad” use of language without considering the depth and function of English. If you’re persnickety, you persnicket. You are, therefore, a persnickitor.

Bill Brohaugh

• Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle. The phrase refers to acronyms. For full explanation, see page 57.

• Xtreme Etymological Stasis. Abbreviated XeS and pronounced by no mere coincidence “excess” (by me, anyway). This is the “if you’re going to play that game” rule. A quick and simplistic example explored in more detail later: If you insist that kudo is an abominable mangling of the singular word kudos, then you must similarly insist that pea (the tasty vegetable you shouldn't eat with a knife) is an unacceptable mangling of the now obsolete singular word pease.

Everything You Know About English Is Wrong:

The Tut-Tutting Lectures

The English Deceptionary

We begin Everything You Know About English Is Wrong with some simple word histories that we know to be deceptively wrong, because they are—as we see quickly with our first entry—unintentionally but decidedly pure . . .

BULL

File under “Shit, Bull”: “Bull!” is not necessarily a scatological epithet.

If you believe that hull is short for bullshit, you are in essence bullshitting yourself.

Just as you don’t mutter “Horse!” as a shortening of the horse- excrement epithet, you aren’t speaking of bovine droppings when you use the word bull. The origins of this meaning of bull aren’t fully clear, but the word did not result from earthy shortening. Bull could be related to the verb “to bull,” which descends from the old French bouler, “to deceive.” In English, bull the verb meant “to deceive or cheat” by the mid-i5oos, and “to boast vacuously” by the mid 1800s. By the early 1600s, bull the noun versus bull the verb meant something that couldn’t be, something self-contradictory. And its sense of “nonsense, insincerities, or lies” has been around since by 1915. But though bull is now synonymous with BS, it is not the same word.

And I wouldn’t horse you about that.

HISTORY

File under “Story, His or Hers?”: History is not a compound of “his story.” Maybe.

When the word history was first used (by the late 1300s), it could mean any kind of recounting—true or false. A history could be false, and still be a history. So let’s take a look at the history, both true and false, of the word history (which I would like to call history- squared or meta-history, except for the fact that we are looking at the word and not the study).

We’ve all heard of herstory, a clever but perhaps overused play on word. The word in question is, of course history, regenderized for a feminist twist. Many if not most people who use herstory know that the his in history is not the complement of hers; they’re simply employing the same sort of wordplay that has given us such frequent and less-serious constructions as hersterectomy, himnia/hisnia, womenopause and womenstruation, and galnocologist. On the other hand, others promote the folk etymology that history compounds his and story seriously, whether or not they actually believe it. I like what I spotted on a blog entry about the word: “It should be history ... for reasons of historiography (or, if you will— though I hope you won’t—herstoriography: but can anyone say herstoriography with a straight face?).”

The truth is that history traces back through Latin as historia, which was borrowed from the Greek word meaning “narrative, recounting, or something learned by inquiring.”

So you can see that there’s no maleness to the word, despite the masculine disguise of the syllable his . . . though let’s be true to the word history by learning something else by inquiring. If we take an additional step back, we find that the Greek historia is derived from

the word histor, which had such meanings as “knowledge,” “learning,” and . . . um . . .“wise man.” So, the wise man told ... his story.

BONFIRE

The eighteenth-century wordmaster was not always right.

Bonfire: “a fire made for some publick cause of triumph or celebration.” So writes the estimable Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1755’s Dictionary of the English Language. And because Johnson was writing about the English language, he of course ( bien sur!) imposed some French origins into a genealogically consistent native English word: bonfire. -Fire means, well, “fire.” Bon-, Dr. Johnson espouses, is bon —“good,” in French.

Well, that’s all well and bon, except that in this case bon is native English for “bone.” Not “good-fire,” but “bone-fire.” Including live human bones. Joan of Arc and supportive bones died in a bonefire. It’s this grisly origin of the word that leads some people to cling to Dr. Johnson’s etymology. But that, as the editors of The Merriam- Webster New Book of Word Histories argue, doesn’t make etymological sense. Marrying French and native English is rare, and French’s bon had been borrowed into English as boon (e.g., “boon companion”), and not bon.

Despite Dr. Johnson’s mistaken contention, bonfire is a bad word. No bons about it.

QUICKSILVER

File under “Silver, Quick (and Hi Ho!)”: Think fast: quicksilver is not speedy.

In a sad irony of word histories, the word quicksilver seems to be on its deathbed, in danger of being totally displaced and buried by the synonymous word mercury.

Quicksilver/mercury is an unusual metal in that it exists in liquid form at room temperature (and it bulges in old thermometers at greater-than-room temperature). Oldsters like me remember playing with globules of quicksilver from broken thermometers as kids, watching the blobs race around plates that we tilted to urge the blobs on. We were fascinated as the globules broke up into smaller blobs and coalesced again when they rammed into each other like living unicellular creatures. (Given modern concerns about mercury poisoning, today’s youngsters will likely never again experience such astonishing Mr. Wizard moments.)

The sadness in the death of quicksilver lies partially in losing the innate poetry of the word. Mercury is mildly interesting because of its mythological connections (Mercury the planet racing around the sun in low orbit was named after the speedy Roman god who now has been relegated to commercial flower delivery). Interesting, though bland compared with evocative and vital quicksilver. I’m happy to say that elements of this poetry will be retained though deeply hidden in hydrargyrum, quicksilver’s technical name and the source for HG on the Periodical Table of the Elements. You’ve already spotted the Greek root hydra- in this technical name, which literally means “water silver.”

Yet, the primary and excruciating irony of the death of quicksilver arises from the original meaning of quick. Yes, those globules zipped in speedy races as I tilted and rotated the plate holding them when I was a kid. But their quickness was etymologically deceiving. The original meaning of quick is not “fast” or “speedy.” It is “alive,

infused with life.” Living things move faster than, say, corpses, rocks or clumps of iron (and silver)—and because of that, meanings of quick eventually evolved into our current senses of “speedy, responsive, rapid.” A quick wit is not a speedy wit; it is a wit that is alive. When you chew your fingernails to the quick, you are stripping the dead nails away to reveal the living, bleeding underskin. There is no non sequitur in the slow descent into quicksand, as it is “living sand.”

So it is no mistake that I earlier compared quicksilver globs to one-celled creatures, and that I called quicksilver “vital”—in the sense that vital ultimately means “critical to life itself.”

Quicksilver is silver that lives. We’re losing that word. Its use is dying. Worse yet, in ironies of meanings, it is dying quickly.

PLANTAR WART

Planter’s makes peanuts, and not warts.

The viral warts that afflict the bottoms of one’s feet have nothing to do with the commercial franchise that brings us suave cartoon spokes-legume Mr. Peanut, he of debonair top hat, monocle, and cane. Granted, the agricultural nature of both the commercial Planter’s name and the planting process that brings peanuts to market would link the product to barefoot planters who . . .

Well, my editor just slapped me before I slipped into some bull- shitternet etymology. Anyone who has suffered those painful pedal “warts” has experienced plantar infections. Pedal, “of the foot,” traces back to Latin, as does plantar, with the more specific meaning “of the sole of the foot.” Even though plantar and the plants that planters plant while standing on their plantars trace back to the

Bill Brohaugh

same Latin root (word root, not plant root), you do not suffer planter’s warts (lucky you—they hurt, no matter the spelling); you suffer plantar warts (ouch !—believe me).

So if you have a have a painful plantar wart on your foot, go to a podiatrist. If you have a painful pedal wart on your foot, go to a plantariatrist. And if you have a painful planter’s wart on your foot . . . likely you just stepped on a peanut—please be more careful when shelling those things, would you?

HONCHO

The feminine form of honcho is not honcha, and it’s not honchette, either.

A few years back, an Internet blog entry carried this headline: “Homeland security honcha has phony PhD.” The pedigree of the headline is pretty phony, too—etymologically speaking. The fact is that women can be honchos as easily as men can.

The conversion of the Spanish word honcho into the feminine- inflected honcha would be linguistically learned ... if honcho were a Spanish word to begin with. It’s Japanese: han-cho, meaning “squadron leader.” So what are you really calling a female leader if you designate her as a honcha? On the subject, posted at about the same time as our unpedigreed headline, another blogger, going by the name Big Box of Paints, wrote: “honcha in Japanese is most likely to be read as ... meaning a pure variety of Japanese green tea.”

Ah. The so-called honcha is incorrectly acidic—with a phony Ph-tea.

Everything You Know About English Is Wrong