Interesting English Notes
 Why do we say “bless you” or “gesundheit” when people sneeze?
Many people have become accustomed to saying “bless you” or “gesundheit” when someone sneezes. No one says anything when someone coughs, blows their nose or burps, so why do sneezes get special treatment? What do those phrases actually mean, anyway?
Wishing someone well after they sneeze probably originated thousands of years ago. The Romans would say “Jupiter preserve you” or “Salve,” which meant “good health to you,” and the Greeks would wish each other “long life.”
The phrase “God bless you” is attributed to Pope Gregory the Great, who uttered it in the 6th century during a bubonic plague epidemic (sneezing is an obvious symptom of one form of the plague).
The exchangeable term gesundheit comes from Germany, and it literally means “health.” The idea is that a sneeze typically precedes illness. It entered the English language in the early part of the 20th century, brought to the United States by German-speaking immigrants.
Virtually every country around the globe has its own way of wishing sneezers well. People in Arabic countries say, Alhamdulillah, which means, “praise be to God.” Hindus say, “Live!” or “Live well!” Some countries have special sneezing responses for children. In Russia, after children are given the traditional response, bud zdorov (“be healthy”), they are also told rasti bolshoi (“grow big”). When a child sneezes in China, he or she will hear bai sui, which means, “may you live 100 years.”
For the most part, the various sneeze responses originated from ancient superstitions. Some people believed that a sneeze causes the soul to escape the body through the nose. Saying “bless you” would stop the devil from claiming the person’s freed soul. Others believed the opposite: that evil spirits use the sneeze as an opportunity to enter a person’s body. There was also the misconception that the heart momentarily stops during a sneeze (it doesn’t), and that saying “bless you” was a way of welcoming the person back to life.
We now know that sneezing is a reflex action and is most often the sign of something relatively benign, such as a cold or allergy. A sneeze also can be provoked by being outside in the sunlight or from smelling a strong odor. Still, we persist in the custom of saying “bless you” or “gesundheit,” mainly out of habit and common courtesy.
Why is there often more than one word in English for the same or almost the same concept?
The English language is a great borrower, a melting pot – much like the country itself. The influence of so many other languages and English’s various main sources – Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, and French – mean that we have synonyms when many other languages do not. The richness of the English vocabulary and the wealth of available synonyms mean that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers.
English is the only language that has books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. In fact, there may actually be no lexemes which have exactly the same meaning. There may be no true synonyms. It is usually possible to find some nuance which separates them, or a context in which one of the lexemes can appear but the other(s) cannot. The nuances can include dialect differences, stylistic differences, collocational differences, or differences of emotional feeling or connotation.
Why are pounds, when used as a weight, abbreviated “lbs”?
The origin is in the Latin word libra, which could mean both balance scales (hence the symbol for the astrological sign Libra, which was named after a constellation that was thought to resemble scales) and also a pound weight, for which the full expression was libra pondo, the second word being the origin of pound.
What is the ‘@’ sign called in English?
Officially, this symbol is called “commercial at”. Unofficially, most people seem to refer to it as the “at sign” or just “at”. Recently, there has also been a movement to call it the “atmark”. There are also numerous nicknames for it, including snail, curl, strudel, whorl, and whirlpool.
Why is New York City called “The Big Apple”?
The phrase “The Big Apple” referring to New York City was first used in a 1909 book, The Wayfarer in New York edited by Edward S. Martin. In a metaphor explaining the sentiment in the Midwest that the city receives more than a fair share of the nation’s wealth, he explains: “New York [was] merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley, and whose branches spread from one ocean to the other... [But] the big apple [New York] gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.”
“The Big Apple” took on a different connotation when it was made popular in the 1920’s by the New York Morning Telegraph sports writer John J. Fitzgerald. He heard it used by African-American stable hands at the racetrack in New Orleans when referring to New York’s racing scene which they considered the “big time.” Fitzgerald liked the phrase so much he titled his racing column “Around the Big Apple.” In the introduction to his column from the February 18, 1924 issue Fitzgerald writes: “The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.”
What are retronyms and are they important?
The language category known as retronyms refers to phrases created because an existing term that was once used alone needs to be distinguished from a term referring to a new development or variation, such as “snow skiing,” and “conventional weapons.” We use them and create them almost every day, but most people do not even know what they are. And don’t reach for your dictionary; you probably won’t find them there!
In its early years, television was just television. But with color television came the retronym “black-and-white TV” and with digital television we now have the retronym “analog TV.” It is like being confronted with a “rotary phone” and having no idea how to use it. A “full-service gas station” that offers “free air” almost seems like something from a bygone era.
Is there a system for forming derivatives of place-names?
Many English and non-English place-names have special names for the inhabitants (person from) and adjectival forms (pertaining to). These are called demonyms.
Some are conventional, e.g., “Parisian” from Paris and “Roman” from Rome. Typically, names ending in the letter a add an n to the end to make an adjective, while other vowels add an an. Other strategies to create demonyms are: -ite (mostly for cities; Vancouverite), -er (mostly for cities; Londoner), -ish (Spain > Spanish), -ese (mostly non-English, non-European; Taiwanese), -i (mostly Middle East; Irani, Israeli), and -man/-woman (Englishman, Englishwoman).
In some cases, both the location’s name and the demonym are produced by suffixation, e.g., England and English (derived from the Angles). In some cases, the derivation is concealed enough that it is no longer morphemic, e.g., France > French. In some cases there is no obvious relation, e.g., Netherlands > Dutch.
Many demonyms cannot be deduced and therefore one needs to refer to a dictionary, encyclopedia, geographical dictionary, almanac, or other reference book. In most cases, an inhabitant of the place will be the same as the adjectival form, e.g., American, American; Californian, Californian.
What is the “rule” for using “an” with words beginning with “h”?
Usage on this point is open to debate. The fact is, as often happens in real English, the rules are more complicated than the ones taught in school. And there’s some difference between spoken and written English.
The school rule is that an must be used before words beginning with h in which the h is silent, such as (h)onourable. That’s correct, but many people – often without knowing it – follow an extended rule: that in speech an appears before a word beginning with h if the first syllable of that word is unstressed, whether or not the h is silent. If you listen carefully you can tell in such cases that the h is also partially or wholly elided away; that’s because it’s quite hard in rapid speech to articulate an unstressed a before an unstressed h without putting some other sound in between and losing the full strength of the h. But it’s common to write a.
But not always. In the Independent of 14 November 2005, a story included the line, “being housed in an historic building with very particular architectural features”. The Newcastle Evening Chronicle for 15 November 2005 had “Today they addressed Tories at an hotel near Newcastle”. It would be possible to find thousands of other examples in recent decades, to which could be added copious cases of an hypothesis, an heroic, an horrific, and others. All these reflect the actual spoken usage.
The situation is complicated by a shift that has been taking place in the pronunciation of words with initial h over the past couple of centuries. At one time, many more words were said with the h silent. This explains the appearance of an in old texts where we would now use a; the classic case is that of the King James Bible, where – to take the first example out of dozens – in Genesis the text reads “And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years”. A good example is that of herb, which Americans today continue to say the way their English forefathers did, without the initial h. British English has moved on, and it is now thought uneducated for British speakers to say ‘erb.
To complicate the matter, usage is shifting. Younger people prefer a more often in such cases in speech as well as writing. Forms like an hotel are heard from, and written by, older people in the main.
 Why is ketchup also called catsup?
Ketchup was one of the earliest names given to this condiment, so spelled in Charles Lockyer’s book of 1711, An Account of the Trade in India: “Soy comes in Tubbs from Jappan, and the best Ketchup from Tonquin; yet good of both sorts are made and sold very cheap in China”. Nobody seems quite sure where it comes from. It’s likely to be from a Chinese dialect, imported into English through Malay. The original was a kind of fish sauce, though the modern Malay and Indonesian version, with the closely related name kecap, is a sweet soy sauce.
Like their Eastern forerunners, Western ketchups were dipping sauces. The first ketchup recipe appeared in Elizabeth Smith’s book The Compleat Housewife of 1727 and included anchovies, shallots, vinegar, white wine, sweet spices (cloves, ginger, mace, nutmeg), pepper and lemon peel. Not a tomato in sight, you will note — tomato ketchup was not introduced until about a century later, in the US, and caught on only slowly.
The confusion about names started even before Lockyer wrote about it, since there is an entry dated 1690 in the Dictionary of the Canting Crew which gives it as catchup, which is another Anglicisation of the original Eastern term. Catchup was used much more in North America than in Britain: it was still common in the middle years of the 19th century. Indeed, catchup continued to appear in American works for some decades and is still to be found.
There were lots of other spellings, too, of which catsup is the best known, a modification of catchup. You can blame Jonathan Swift for it if you like, since he used it first in 1730: “And, for our home-bred British cheer, Botargo, catsup, and caveer”. [Caveer is caviar; botargo is a fish-based relish.] That form was also once common in the US but is much less so these days, at least on bottle labels: all the big US manufacturers now call their product ketchup.
Why is “-en” the plural of ox?
According to the Concise OED, the suffix -en, among other things, forms the plural of ‘a few nouns such as children, oxen’. However, I cannot find the noun childr in any dictionary. What is the origin of this strange plural-making suffix? What other examples, if any, are there in addition to oxen?”
English grammar a thousand years ago was more like that of modern German, with endings for the noun that varied according to the job it was doing in the sentence. There were about a dozen markers for the plural in all.
As the language changed in the centuries after the Norman Conquest most of these were lost. The last survivors were -s and -en, the two most common plural markers in the old language; for a while the two vied for supremacy. The rare plural forms like oxen are left over from that period, with -en used for a very few words that fought off the encroachment of -s.
Children is a special case. One of the plurals of child was childer. This was once common in several English dialects; it used one of the Old English endings, -er, that vanished from the language in medieval times (it survives in German). This was then re-pluralised using -en in some parts of the country, perhaps under the belief that childer was actually singular. It seems that the same thing happened in Dutch, to make the modern plural kinderen. The English plural should similarly have been childeren, but the first e vanished, as it often does in unstressed syllables in the middle of words. The intermediate plural childer survives only in some local dialects.
In chicken, the -en ending isn’t a plural, but a diminutive, expressing small size or affection, which also turns up in kitten and maiden. Chicken is derived from the same root as cock (through several layers of change) and originally referred to a young bird; chick looks as though it ought to be the root from which chicken was derived, but actually it’s an abbreviated form of chicken that appeared in the 14th century.
The only other common plural in -en that survives in the modern language is brethren. This came from an older spelling of brother as brether, and lost the middle e just as children did. For a while both brothers and brethren meant the same thing, but the latter gradually shifted sense to refer to a spiritual relationship.
Was the pronoun “he” or “she” invented first?
You might think that words like he and she are so basic and essential a part of the language that they must have been around long before anybody had writing, so that we would have to assume their history was inaccessible and that the only sensible answer is “Nobody knows”. But it turns out that much of the story lies well within historical times, even though it’s complicated and not altogether understood.
He is about four centuries older than she – it turns up first in a work translated by King Alfred in about the year 893. So it forms part of Old English, which is so different from modern English that it’s quite another language. Its feminine equivalent was formed by a change in the spelling, to heo. This is the word that King Alfred and his people would have used.
How she appeared is still unclear, but what is certain is that a change in pronunciation took place in some English dialects around the 12th century that made heo sound the same as he. There’s a famous case of a medieval poem, Alysoun, in which the lovelorn swain had to refer to his sweetheart as he because that was the only pronoun he had available (he had to write “He may me blisse bringe”, meaning “She may bring me bliss”). This was an intolerable state of affairs and a new word had to be sought. It’s likely that it was borrowed from the feminine form of the English word meaning “that”, seo.
By the way, this explains why he has the obviously connected object form him but she corresponds to her. There wasn’t a problem with the object forms and they have stayed faithful to their originals of more than a thousand years ago. But the change of heo to she severed the initial letter link with her.
Submitted by Erin Bouma
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