“You can observe a lot by just watching,” Yogi Berra once supposedly said. To which I’ll add, you can learn a lot about developments in the language by just hanging out on Twitter and Facebook. To prove the point, here are some highlights of a week just passed on those sites.
To start out, I noted this tweet from John Dean (yes, that John Dean):
The link is to a photo of Meghan Markle’s dog peering out of a limo, but what interested me was Dean’s use of pix — traditionally slang plural for “pictures” — in the singular, instead of pic. It struck me — and I tweeted — that I had heard that before. The lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower responded with a clever takeoff on a famous Variety headline: “STICKS NIX HICK PIXES.” The writer Joshua J. Friedman did some actual research, searching Twitter for the phrase “a pix” and reporting that he came up with a bunch of examples. I just did the same search myself and also came up with a lot of hits, for example:
Word person Nancy Friedman commented that the same thing has been going on with tix being used as singular for “ticket.” A search reveals she is correct:
There are a handful of singular pixes in the Google Books database, the earliest from a 1998 novel; singular tix does not appear. Neither is it in any dictionary I consulted, including Urban Dictionary and Green’s Encyclopedia of Slang, both of which I would advise to get on the case.
A couple of days later, still on the theme of the royal wedding, John P. Evans, an Englishman, tweeted a link to a segment on John Oliver’s HBO show, Last Week Tonight.
John remarked: “This whole thing is a cringefest but one thing that baffles me (almost as much as that famous British phrase ‘top o’ the mornin’!') is how many of them seem to think ‘Cheerio’ means ‘Hello’??”
I asked him about the actual meaning of cheerio, which I realized I was unclear on, and he responded: “It means ‘goodbye’! Merriam-Webster says ‘occasionally a greeting’ but I’ve certainly never heard it used that way …”
Another Englishman, Ellis Pratt, weighed in: “I was taught it originally meant ‘Chairs to go.’ When people travelled in sedan chairs in early 1800s.” That etymology is out and about but pretty clearly is false. The Oxford English Dictionary says the word came from the nautical expression “Cheero!”: “Used as a friendly greeting or a call to attract attention.” The OED also sheds light on the hello/goodbye controversy. The main definition is “Used to express good wishes upon parting … “; the first citation is from a 1914 Rupert Brooke letter: “Cheeryo! (as we say in the Navy).” There’s also a “used as a friendly greeting” definition, but the dictionary says it’s “now rare”; in keeping with wedding coverage, the two most recent of the three citations are from American sources.
That same day, the lexicographer Kory Stamper — a smart and lively presence on Twitter — had a tweet I liked:
I’ll resist the urge to mansplain, other than to say that the OED thinks it’s a word, with citations dating to 2008.
The next day, someone I follow retweeted this:
Don’t worry if you’re clueless on the nature of the BBQ controversy or the identity of Mistah F.A.B. What’s important is the odd-sounding phrase “is brothers with” instead of the customary “is @Mistah FAB’s brother.” A search revealed it’s fairly common on Twitter, and I expect it to gain popularity. That’s because it echoes another formulation I first heard from my students and now is pretty common: “I’m friends with him” instead of “He’s my friend” or simply “We’re friends.”
Why the new, longer construction? I don’t know, other than to say it’s consistent with a currently fashionable verbal ungainliness that I have referred to as “clunk.”
Finally, a Facebook rabbit hole. Stuart Semmel, a Yale historian and astute observer of language, put up a poll asking people which phrase was more familiar to them: A, “The be all and end all” or B, “The end all be all.” I, like virtually all of his friends, chose A (which derives from a line in Macbeth), and in fact don’t recall ever encountering B. But B is a thing, specifically among young people: Stuart’s post was prompted by his teenage daughters’ use of it. (A usually has an “and” in it, while B does not.)
The phrase was used at least one time before the 21st century, according to the OED, by Thomas P. Thompson in the Westminster Review, 1830: “This is the end-all and be-all of the anti-liberals’ piety.” But that appears to be an outlier. To my knowledge, it doesn’t pop up again till 1986, in a line in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off posted by one of Stuart’s friends: “… Because she will have given him what he has built up in his mind as the end all, be all of human existence.” More recently, it’s been a favorite of the writers of South Park, including this line of dialogue from a South Park video game: “Monica: Well look, Babe is my friend. I think she’s really great. I don’t know if she’s the end all be all of girls, I mean … she’s a little two-faced if you ask me.”
Well, it’s time to start a new week on Twitter. So cheerio.