The Amateur Etymologist

The plural of cannon is...

At dinner with colleagues while on a business trip in Manila, one of them asks, "Do you know what the plural of mongoose is?"

I know the answer. It's mongeese. But I try to be modest about it. "It's mongeese I think," I tell him.

"Really? They're not related to geese you know," he says. "The plural of a moose isn't meese," he adds.

"I'm pretty sure it's mongeese," I say, now not so sure. (Later I check. The plural is either mongoose or mongeese.)

Another colleague pipes up. "Do you know what the plural of cannon is?"

The folks at the table look around at each other. "I don't suppose it's cannons?" someone suggests.

The knowing colleague shakes his head. "This one I know for sure. I got it wrong at a spelling contest. I'll never forget it. The plural of cannon is cannon."

I didn't know that. And Iater I check. He's right. Of course, dictionaries will say the plural can be cannons but really, the plural of cannon is cannon. Wow, the things you learn at the dinner table.

Best English ever!

While on a trip to Jeju, Korea, I came across this sign in the lift of a hotel. I just had a to take a photo of it. I don't even know where to begin to correct this. I guess it would help if I knew what it was trying to say!

Just now

Funny how simple English phrases can meaning totally different things to different people. Take the phrase just now. The definition is "a short time ago".

Example: I had lunch just now and bumped into an old classmate.

Seems straightforward enough. But when my family lived in Japan, my father had Japanese colleagues and I remember he related a hilarious incident concerning the phrase just now. He had asked someone if a task had been completed, and the man replied, "Yes, just now!"

Great, thought my dad. He went to inspect the work but found the task not done. "I thought you said it was done," he said to the man.

"Yes, just now!" came the reply and the man proceeded to start the task. My father was bewildered for a moment, and then realised that the other man had used just now to mean, "starting in a short time." I always laugh at this memory. It reminds me that English isn't straightforward and its shades of meanings can trip up even the best of us.

Em dash vs En dash

There are several types of dashes in the English. There's the hyphen ( - ), the en dash ( – ) and the em dash ( — ). What's the difference?

The hyphen is the most common dash. Technically, it's not a dash, it's a hyphen, for there is a 'family' of dashes and the hyphen isn't one of them. But for most people, the hyphen is also called a dash. Most people know where and when to use a hyphen. You use it to connect two words to make it into an adjective. You use it to break up a word that is running to the end of the line and you want to write half on the top line and the rest on the next line. You break up the said word at a the end of a syllable and use a hyphen to indicate the rest of the word is on the next line.

What about the en dash? The en dash is so called because traditionally, the width of the dash was the approximately the width of the letter n. The most common use of the en dash is used to indicate a range of numbers like "6–8 years of planning". The en dash can be used for other sets of numbers like date and time. This is easy enough to write on paper, but gets trickier to do with software. Most people simply substitute a hyphen when indicating a range of numbers. If you're picky, on Microsoft Office Word, you can select the Insert menu, then select "Symbol", then select "Special chacters" then pick out the en dash. You can also learn the keyboard shortcut indicated inside this menu and use that the next time.

The em dash is—you guessed it—the width of the letter m. It is used to indicate an interruption in the middle of a sentence (like in the previous sentence) or used to indicate that a sentence has been interrputed and did not end.

For example: I did not say that you could—

Notice that there is no other punctuation mark and that there is no space between could and the em dash. Also, notice that when the em dash is used in a pair for a parenthetical interruption in a sentence, there are no spaces before or after the em dashes. This actually, makes for an interesting auto shortcut in Microsoft Word. To insert an em dash into your sentence, simply type a word, then without inserting any space type two consective hyphens, then the next word and then finally add a space and you will see Word convert the two hyphens into em dashes.

For example type this: is--you guessed 

And Word will convert it to the following when you hit the spacebar after the letter u: is—you guessed 

Isn't that a neat trick?

Humble pie

To eat humble pie means to eat a figurative serving of humiliation, usually accompanied by forced submission, an apology or a retraction. But why is this figurative food a pie?

This goes back the 17th century when poor English folks are a pie made up of the innards of a deer (heart, liver, kidney and other offal.) These inexpensive innards were combined with apples, currants, sugar and spices. Servants often dined on this while their masters dined on the venison.

Some etymologists claim this pie was called "numble pie". Others claim it stemmed from "umble", a reference to umbilical cord, yet another part of the offal. Whichever the case, the pie eventually became "umble pie". And since after the Middle Ages, many English words were pronounced without the initial "h" (e.g., hotel), the dish began to be spelt as "humble pie". This was a fitting spelling as it was a poor man's dish.

To add colour to the discussion, the word humble comes from the Latin word for earth, humus. We usually think of humble folks as being "down to earth" so it's not hard to imagine a pie filled with dirt that you have to eat when you are humiliated.

The skin of my teeth

I've used this expression countless times before and never realised it had its roots in the Hebrew language. I discovered that while reading, The Origin of the Bible. The expression is a Hebrew one that first appeared in this form in the Geneva Bible (1560). In Job 19:20, it reads:

My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.

This was a change from an earlier translation by Miles Coverdale (1535) which reads:

My bone hangeth to my skin, and the flesh is away, only there is left me the skin about my teeth.

Though the Geneva Bible is more succinct in its expression, when I saw Coverdale's translation, I suddenly understood what the Hebrew expression was getting at. Obviously we have no skin on our teeth, but Job is actually referring to his gums, the "skin" around his teeth. At this point in Job's lament, he was saying that he had so little flesh left that the only visible flesh on him were his gums.

That expression has evolved in meaning and has come to mean narrowly escaping a situation by the thinnest margin imaginable. For what can be thinner than the non-existent skin on our teeth?

Writers have been using the expression with this meaning for the longest time. Mark Twain remarked in his book Roughing It, "I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth." And Thorton Wilder wrote a Pulitzer-Prize winning play entitled, you guessed it, The Skin of Our Teeth.

In today's English Bibles, the sense of having narrowly escape is now in the verse. The ESV version of Job 19:20 reads:

My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh,
and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.

The footnotes in the ESV Study Bible do note that modern readers think of the phrase as an idiomatic expression for just barely accomplishing or avoiding something. That meaning certainly fits the verse but readers get a deeper dimension when they realise the original meaning.

How interesting that the Hebrew language has contributed such a quaint expression to the English language.

English approaches one million words

According to the Global Language Monitor, the English language is rushing headlong towards it's millionth word in about 38 days. One million words! Goodness. That's more than any other language. But hang on a minute. What is a word? For example, AskOxford asks, should dog be counted as one word or two words? That's because it is a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently'. And should hot dog be counted as a new word or counted as a construction of hot and dog and therefore not a new word. And what about borrowed words from Latin, Japanese, French and so on that we use but aren't really English words at present? Do we count those?

Some more commentary from AskOxford:

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

According to the Economist, the Merriam-Webster lists about 450,000 words in its lexicon. That count is very different from the OED. Ah! What's a word lover to think? It appears that counting up the number of words in a language is futile. But it's exciting to see English, grow, transform and change over time.  This means we never stop learning about the English language. It also means we need to discard old usage as the language evolves. English is truly is a living language. Every day, some new aspect of it amazes me.

Nauseous vs Nauseated

I've been taught that if I feel like I'm going to throw up, then I'm feeling nauseated. I was also taught that saying "I'm feeling nauseous" is incorrect as nauseous actually means "causing nausea or disgust". In other words, nauseous was best used in sentences like:

• The nauseous fumes from the bus caused the people waiting at the best stop to scatter.

• It's best to boil the kimchi in the soup stock longer if you know your guests are sensitive to its nauseous flavour.

Because English is such a living and dynamic language, the usage of nauseated and the definition of nauseous have been changing rapidly. This is both amazing and frustrating at the same time as it means users of English need to constantly update their knowledge of English. Nauseated still means "to be affected by nausea" but you rarely hear people saying, "I feel nauseated" these days. Instead, you hear people saying, "I feel nauseous." As much as people like me who have learnt the "old" usage would like to keep to that, sometimes we just have to move with the times. That's not to say we can't say "I feel nauseated" anymore, it's just that it's now acceptable to say, "I feel nauseous."

And what about the original meaning of nauseous which is "causing nausea or disgust"? That definition appears to be slowly transferring over to nauseating. So for the two examples above, it's no longer wrong to replace nauseous with nauseating. Although, truth be told, that makes me a little nauseated.

Competitor watch

There is some confusion with the construction competitor watch. Specifically, when one needs to talk about monitoring what the competition is up to, is it better to say competitor's watch or competitors watch, competitor watch or competitive watch?

Well, competitor's watch doesn't mean monitoring the competition. It either means a competitor's timepiece or a competitor's effort at monitoring something. The 's denotes possession, in this case, something in the competitor's possession. So this construction is inaccurate.

Competitors watch is just clumsy. If we want an adjective to modify watch, then it's much better to use the root word competitor. Using competitor in this way makes it an adjective modifying the word watch.

The last one, competitive watch, can also be used. Technically, it's a better construction because competitive is an actual adjective so it's the right word doing the right job.

Therefore, if you're talking about keeping an eye on the activities of a competitor, use competitor watch or better yet, use competitive watch.

Yoroshiku onegaishimasu

English is such a wonderful language and has such amazing ability to describe the depth and breath of human experience. It is also such an adaptable and inclusive language in the sense that it can absorb words from other languages and it continues to morph and change. It's a living language.

Some times though, it utterly fails when you try to find an equivalent English phrase to match a foreign expression. The Japanese phrase "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu" is one such phrase. There is nothing like it in English. "Yoroshiku oneigaishimasu" literrally means "I humbly ask you to be kind to me." But the beauty of that phrase is that it means so much more than that. Generally, the phrase connotes good but ambiguous feelings. And you can use it in great variety of situations.

For example, when you first meet someone for the first time, you say, "Yoroshiku oneigaishimasu." Here it means "Nice to meet you." When you first join a company, you can use the phrase to mean, "Please be kind to me and mentor me well." You can say the same thing when joining a group. In a business context, when you say it to a potential partner, it means "I look forward to doing business with you."

When you assign someone a task to do or ask a friend to do you a favour, the phrase then means, "I'll leave it to you" or "Please take care of it". The phrase can also mean "Please take care of me", "Please remember me" or "I hope we get along well". Between close friends, you can even use the more casual form "Yoroshiku". In this short form, it can also mean, "Say hello for me".

What an amazing phrase. By it's ambiguity, "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu" is such a catch-all phrase that helps you convey respect and courtesy when you are short of something nice to say. If only there were such a phrase in English.