The 100th Grammar Dance article, and it's a doozy

This being my 100^th Grammar Dance article, I thought I’d make it a doozy–that is, I thought I might track down the origins of the word, “doozy.”  

I first heard it watching American cartoons in the 1960s. Just before Bugs Bunny’s antagonist falls off a cliff, into a mine or down an elevator shaft, Bugs would often offer the faux-kindly advice, “The first step’s a doozy!” As a child, I contextualized it to mean an extreme version of whatever category “the doozy” occupied, and accepted it on its face. 

The word’s archaic charm kept it in my unquestioned active vocabulary for decades, and I sometimes employed it when I wished to invoke a mood of waxed-mustache anachronism for an impressive person, place or thing. When I finally took it upon myself to find out about the word's history, I was a little disappointed. I imagined its source being its onomatopoeic resemblance to someone falling, Bugs Bunny-style, down a well or a conflation of "ooh" and "huzzah." Alas, no.

 

“Doozy” is probably the result of the gradual evolution of the word, “daisy,” which in the late 19^th century was a common metaphor for any exemplary thing. “Doozy” begins to emerge in the earliest part of the 20^th century as a comic replacement where “daisy” might have been used before. 

 

There is also a theory that the word derives from popular Italian actress Eleonora Duse, who lived at the turn of the century. Credible or not, this is the etymology I prefer to believe, as she was one of the great stage artists of her time and was known for tackling deeply challenging material.

There is also a theory that it derives from the Duesenberg automobile, whose legendary luxury is tempting to associate with “doozy,” but its usage predates the car company’s widest popularity, so that is unlikely.

 

Most signs point to the mundane transition of “daisy” into “doozy” over the course of the 19^th century’s departure and the arrival of the 20^th, likely at the hands of a series of grinning, bow-tied goobers seeing their first steamship or a nicely carved walking stick. 

That’s where most of the evidence lies, but as is the case with beliefs of such low stakes as these, strongly holding to them even in error bears little consequence. So, in furtherance of the arts and in furtherance of the feminine, I am throwing in all the way with the Eleonora Duse theory, as wrong as I surely am. 

Warren G Harding's coining of the word, "normalcy" is 100 years old this year

The word “normalcy” may seem perfectly normal, but it’s not. Its two chief oddities are that it is having its 100^th birthday this year and that it was created by an American president. 

Normality, which means the same thing as normalcy, has been around since the 16^th century. It was a term for a 90-degree angle in carpentry and carried the second meaning of the way we know it today, as the state of conforming to some generally agreed-upon set of expectations. “Normalcy” only comes into use with Warren G. Harding’s presidential campaign of 1922. 

 

There were some uses of “normalcy” in expressing a sense of the perpendicular in carpentry through the 19^th century, but the way it is known today only begins with Harding’s plea for a “Return to Normalcy” after World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. The coining was successful, as it resides in all major dictionaries and relative to “normality” is the preferred usage for many Americans. According to a Google search hit count, however, “normality” outperforms “normalcy” ten to one.

 

My ear prefers “normalcy” to “normality” if I wish to imply something welcome. If it is a safe and warm place of manageable, predictable equilibrium, then “normalcy” it is. If I am characterizing a rigidly off-putting adherence to irrelevant social hierarchies, “normality” might be preferred. There’s a certain jeer to it that fits an invective a little better. 

 

As a prescriptivist, I’m supposed to hear “normalcy” as a bombastic neologism fit only for corrupt presidents (he did help free Eugene Debs, which cuts a lot of ice with me and bears mentioning), but in my opinion there’s better music to  “normalcy” than its more correct counterpart. Unless I went to throw a barb at some icon of conformism, like that corrupt philanderer, Warren G. Harding, I don’t normally use “normality.” As a general rule, both normalcy and normality are to be avoided as descriptions of individuals, mostly because no one is or was normal, Warren G. Harding included. He was a weirdo.

Homonyms, homographs, homophones, oh my!

While there is some disagreement about the distinction between homonyms and homophones, no bar fights have ever broken out over homographs, that is to say, words that are spelled alike but mean different things. 

Punch, for instance. Whether thrown or drunk, “punch” is spelled the same way. It is a homograph pair whose two meanings are pronounced the same. Some homographs sound different, as in describing the brevity of sixty seconds as a minute minute, but even with that second feature (usually one more than is needed to begin a dispute), few grammarians, however sad and lonely, raise an objection to the blanket statement that all word pairs with identical spelling and disparate senses qualify as homographs. 

 

Many homographs are also homophones, which are characterized by their sounding alike, as in the two versions of “punch” above. They are spelled alike and they sound alike, but they mean different things, so they fit the requirements of both categories. "Minute" and "minute" as described in the previous paragraph qualify as a homograph pairs but not as homophones. 

 

I made allusion to some grammar violence in the first paragraph, and homonyms is where you run into it. Many a lip has been bloodied by pinch-nosed prescriptivists who roar into conflict if nastily provoked over the win currently enjoyed by the modern preference of describing both homographs and homophones as homonyms. These hidebound grammar thugs point to the -nym suffix as meaning “name” and as such prefer it to refer only to word pairs that are spelled alike but differ in both pronunciation and meaning. 

 

This notion would provide no distinction then from homograph. The thankfully prevailing view is for homonyms to be the umbrella under which both homographs and homophones reside. In the "all dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs" sort criteria, homonym as a parent category above homograph and homophone serves as a good organizing principle for these grammar terms.

Having cake, eating cake, a phrase's evolution and the Unabomber

Some of the most commonly known quotations are actually misquoted. Here are a few: “Play it again, Sam.” “We're going to need a bigger boat.” “Money is the root of all evil.” These examples’ initial utterance or penning can all be found and examined, and the error can be clearly noted. This makes them misquotes. 

 

Other adjacent categories to misquoting include misattribution and false quoting. The distinction between these two is the existence of a verifiable source. In a typical misattribution, a less-famous person’s bon mot is ascribed to a more-famous person. Voltaire did not write, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire’s biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, coined the expression to describe his outlook on free speech. 

 

In false quoting, some screed or aphorism of unknown origin is falsely assigned to a known wit—George Carlin suffers this mightily. There is a long and dreadful essay that begins, “The paradox of our time in history…” You can find it in a click, and at a glance it is well below Carlin’s standards. False quoting is lampooned to perfection in the iconic Abraham Lincoln meme that reads, “Don't believe everything you read on the internet.”

 

A somewhat different story can be found in, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” It feels like misquoted Shakespeare, but it’s not. Its earliest usage appears in 16^th century letters, suggesting it was an idiomatic saying of the time. The expression is most commonly known in contemporary parlance as I have written it here, but that was not always the case. 

 

The current usage became prevalent after the 1930s, when it was commonly delivered as “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” This logic works in that once eaten, the cake cannot be had. The modern style explains itself by saying once the eating begins, the having stops. Many of literary criticism graduate school’s leading lights have thrashed this one out, so I won’t get into it. What’s interesting is Ted Kaczynski’s involvement in this little usage melee. 

 

In his manifesto—and as a side note, anytime a piece of writing you’ve done is characterized as a manifesto, you’ve probably lost your audience—Ted Kaczynski wrote, “As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society, well, you can't eat your cake and have it too.” It was a sufficiently arcane usage for an FBI linguist to take note and turn up the heat on all of the smartypants suspects. Kaczynski was on FBI radar already, and upon the deeper investigation inspired by this “eat/have” variant, investigators found a letter he had written to his mother where he employed the same usage. The FBI had their man. And they ate him too.

You don't "bring in" the New Year." You "ring in" the New Year.

This New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, you will probably hear the expression, "Bringing in the New Year." That is incorrect. It's "ringing." While the history of the phrase is not certain, it may be a reference to the bells of Trinity Church in New York, which began a midnight New Year's bell-ringing ceremony to celebrate its completion in 1698. Tennyson cements the proper usage to a certainty in his poem, "Ring Out, Wild Bells," a prayer for the ills of the year to be replaced with new hope. You'll hear "bringing in the New Year" in the coming days, and it should now clang in your head like cathedral bells.

Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind

For those that here we see no more;

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Daylight saving time is neither plural nor possessive

Now that its departure is upon us, I thought it worth covering one of the most common grammar mistakes in all of chronology: daylight saving time. It is neither plural (daylight savings time) nor possessive (daylight saving’s time). Under the correct punctuation, the word “saving” appears as a gerund, modifying the word “daylight.” Think of it in its inverse and you’ll hardly be tempted into the errors. You’d never say “savings daylight” or “saving’s daylight.” 

The strict rule-follower will include a hyphen as “daylight” and “saving” combine to create a compound adjective that modifies the word “time.” But “daylight saving time” without the hyphen has ingrained itself into common use to the point where it has earned a bye on the hyphen rule for compound modifiers. 

 

However you choose to present or butcher the expression, in the name of perspective, one should always be mindful that daylight saving time has nighttime losing time as its unavoidable adjunct.  

Unpaired word seeks same for LTR

There is a category of words that have affixes but that without them cease to be words. These are called “unpaired” words or sometimes “orphaned” words, though cultural sensitivity is trending heavily toward a preference for the still sad, “unpaired.” They often appear as what seems to be a negative prefix. The classic example is “inert,” meaning “without effect.” There is no word, “ert,” meaning “having an effect,” or meaning anything else at all. Other examples include “nonchalant” and “indelible.” An interesting anomaly is “disgruntled.” Most people think of it as an unpaired word, but "gruntled" indeed means (though its usage is uncommon) pleased or contented.

 

Words can also have suffixes whose absence renders their parent word gibberish. “Reckless” and “feckless” qualify here. Their causes vary, sometimes in their having been borrowed from other languages, while sometimes the word’s root simply resembles a negating affix. Incorrigible readers may feel free to debunk any of this. I will not become discombobulated, nonplussed or overwhelmed; rather your efforts will be considered intrepid and any disambiguation welcome.