In this week’s bonus, guest host Valerie Fridland continues her conversation with Laurel Brinton. We look at why we keep replacing “very” and how “very” once meant “true.” Then we look at the mystery of “what have you” and Canadian words like “loonie,” “toonie,” and “muddy buddy.”
In this week’s bonus, guest host Valerie Fridland continues her conversation with Laurel Brinton. We look at why we keep replacing “very” and how “very” once meant “true.” Then we look at the mystery of “what have you” and Canadian words like “loonie,” “toonie,” and “muddy buddy.”
Find Laurel Brinton at blogs.ubc.ca/laurelbrinton.
Find Valerie Fridland at ValerieFridland.com.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Valerie Fridland: Welcome, Grammarpaloozians! Valerie Fridland here, filling in for Mignon Fogarty. We are talking today with Dr. Laurel Brinton, professor emerita of English language at the University of British Columbia and a leading scholar of how English has changed over time, and one of my personal favorite linguists to read her work.
Now, in the main segment, we spent a lot of time talking about something called discourse markers, and these are the things like "well," "like," "you know," and "I mean." But Dr. Brinton has done so much work on so many things that people use every day and don't even think about, so I thought we'd dive into some of those here today.
One of the things, Dr. Brinton, that I've heard you talk about and also read some of your work on is how we seem to keep inventing new ways to do something called intensification, which essentially is the linguistic way of talking about things we say instead of "very." So, you know, we can be very hot, or we can be really hot, or we can be totally hot, absolutely hot, or even hella or hecka hot. So, why do we come up with so many different ways to do this, and, you know, how did they begin?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: They begin usually as regular, sort of adverbs often expressing manner or many of the just typical adverbial meanings.
Valerie Fridland: And what do you mean by an adverb of manner, just for people that may not be a linguist?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: "He spoke quietly" or something, you know, something like that.
Valerie Fridland: So sort of describe how you spoke, sort of the manner in which you spoke. I got it. Okay.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: And then they acquire these intensifying meanings, which is really the speaker expressing their subjective opinion about where something is on a scale. So if I say it's very hot, I am placing hotness on a scale, and I'm saying something is high up on this scale of hotness.
Because I think because these are subjective, they do tend to over time weaken and just need to be replaced. So it's very typical of intensifiers that they weaken. Anything that I think expresses personal opinion can become weakened.
So we have, as you said, you know, instead of "very," we have all sorts of other ones. Some are quite old, like "extremely," "incredibly," "exceedingly" come from the 16th century. Then we get "remarkably" in the 17th century. Then we get "amazingly" in the 18th century. And then we get "awfully" in the 19th century. And if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, it still says that's colloquial. So, even though it goes back to the 19th century, it's thought to be colloquial.
So these are ones that have come into the language, but we have something like "right," which was a very common intensifier in Middle English, which is now not used as an intensifier except in certain dialects of English.
Valerie Fridland: Can you give an example of how you'd use "right"?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: "It's right expensive," meaning it's very expensive, although we can say, "It's downright expensive."
Valerie Fridland: I wonder if that's a derivative. Do you think that “downright” comes from saying for "right" when it was used as an intensifier?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Well, no, it developed on its own as well. So, yeah, so "right" is gone. The Old English intensifier was "swa," and that's gone, which has become "so." But it's become "so," the word "so," and we can also use "so": "It's so expensive."
And so I've looked at some intensifiers that are not intensifiers, but are downtoners. So we can move things up on the scale, but we can also move things down on the scale. And they also undergo loss and are replaced. So I've looked at "far from"—it's far from certain; it's "nearly"—it's nearly complete; and then "practically"—it's practically full.
Valerie Fridland: I see.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: So "practically" is a nice example of one that started just as a regular, you know, "She spoke practically," not that she nearly spoke, but she spoke in a practical manner, or "I did it in a practical manner." And so it began as just a manner adverb, but then over time it started to be used as a downtoner.
Valerie Fridland: I see, sort of limiting the degree to which someone does something, as opposed to like "very," which is like raising how much the degree that something happened.
So one example you'd brought up, I think "awfully" is one of those that's sort of funny because you say, "I'm awfully happy," which means you're very happy, right? It's expressing a big degree. But the word "awful" actually meant something very different in older forms of English. So how does an adverb go from being something bad to now just being something good or intense or extra?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: You know, originally "full of awe." So it was something good, but then the word itself, even not the intensifier, but the word itself underwent a semantic change and became something bad. So this is a process called pejoration, and lots of words undergo pejoration. They start out with neutral meanings or positive meanings, and then they acquire negative meanings over time. So it's a fairly common kind of semantic change. So that's what happened with "awfully"—full of awe. I guess you could be full of awe that would then make you scared of something.
Valerie Fridland: I guess that's true. The other one I think of is, you know, "horribly." You could be horribly happy. I think that tends to be a little more British than American English, but "horrible" is bad, but "horribly" can be good. You could be horribly hurt, which is bad. That's one of those that hasn't completely lost its badness?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Yeah, I think if you looked at where you find "horribly" as an intensifier, it would probably be mostly found in negative contexts, like "That was horribly rude," "I was horribly unhappy." And "horribly happy" to me sounds a bit strange.
Valerie Fridland: I've seen it in texts where it's, you know, "horribly excited," right, where it's almost like it's used it's sort of I think it's one of those what I like about "horribly" is it looks like one of those to me where you can sort of see how it starts to creep up into this place where it doesn't really mean anything other than intensity at a certain point, because it's used in places where you kind of don't want to be excited, but you're horribly excited anyway, right? So it's sort of like a bad excitement that is good. And then it slowly creeps to just being "very," right?
Because I think one of the things that's interesting about "very" is it's fairly old, right, it's several hundred years old that we've used it as an intensifier, but originally it didn't mean extreme either, right? "Very" had a very different meaning, and there's "very" again.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: It comes from the French word meaning "true," yeah, so "truly," "true."
Valerie Fridland: Right. So it's a fun example of sort of how we go from that, you know, I think in many of the cases that you've talked about in the main episode, too, where things go from having this content meaning—"very" meant "true"—to just sort of meaning some sort of sense or emotion or interpersonal communication, because intensifiers seem to me a little bit about extravagance as well, where, you know, they're about building up someone's excitement. Like it's not just good, it's really good! And then someone's more likely to listen to you about it being good, and, you know, I wonder if that plays a role in the reason we come up with new ones all the time, because if you're just using "very" all the time, it's boring.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Yes, yeah, I think certainly, yeah, it's extravagance, so we need things that are more attention-getting.
Valerie Fridland: Right, right, so you've got to come up with like "hella" and "hecka," right, which are not native to my vocabulary, but they definitely get my notice when I hear my students using them.
So now that's something I think people do notice sometimes, you know, you'll hear comments about the new intensifiers people use, like, you know, comments about "hecka," for example.
But one thing that you've studied that is really fascinating, and I don't think people think about even though they use them all the time, are what you sort of refer to as two-part verbs, which are things like "find out," "give up," "take off," "look up," "calm down." And, you know, by attaching that little second piece, you have like a phrasal verb or a two-part verb, but it completely changes the meaning. So you can be giving, and that's a very different thing than giving up. So tell me a little bit about how that happened and why we do that.kle
Dr. Laurel Brinton: In Old English, the way this was done was with prefixes on the verb. So we still have some prefixed verbs like "forego," "forgive," "forbid," "forsake," "forewarn," or "outrun" or "outgrow," or "overeat," "override," and then "upgrade" or "upset." And you can see here, if you take the prefix off, they have very different meanings. The prefixed verb and the non-prefixed verb have very different meanings.
So primarily in Old English, it was these prefixed verbs, and then in Middle English especially, we start getting these what are called post-verbal particles, these little things that follow the verb. And what's interesting about them, well, lots of things interesting about them, one thing is that they don't have their concrete meaning. They're all adverbs or prepositions, usually with spatial meanings like "up" or "over" or "through."
Valerie Fridland: And can you give an example of like what would be a Middle English verb that had those on them?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: What's interesting is that they lose their concrete meaning. So I can drink something up, or I can drink it down, and "up" and "down" don't have their concrete meaning anymore, but they have this meaning probably more of completion. So I drank it completely if I drank it up or drank it down.
Valerie Fridland: So you're not standing up while you're drinking or sitting down while you're drinking, which would be kind of the concrete meaning, but it's sort of just, yeah.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Or the drink is not going up or down—well, it is going down probably, but it's not going up. But there's not much difference between drinking up or drinking down, or burning up or burning down. Again, it indicates that this thing is sort of completely burned. So they lose their concrete meaning, and they get these and often, but not always this case, this meaning of completion, that something is done to completion.
Valerie Fridland: I see, interesting.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: And what's also interesting about the particles is that they're movable. So I can say, "I worked out the answer," or "I worked the answer out." So the particle can be right next to the verb, or it can be following the direct object.
Valerie Fridland: So that they haven't really in our brains completely connected like when you're talking about in the Old English one where it would be like "overeat," where they become part of the verb, because you couldn't say, "over the hamburger eat," or, you know, "I overate at the buffet," or something, "over at the buffet eat." That doesn't work, so I see that's sort of different.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: They can't be moved, yeah. So they're movable, so the questions that arise people are worried about is, you know, how much of a unit is the verb and the particle? Do they form a unit? But if they do, then why can you move the particle after the direct object? So these phrasal verbs, they seem to work together semantically, but the two parts can be separated.
Valerie Fridland: So there's like a grammatical, or the way that they function in sort of how the sentence structure is, versus the meaning, which seems to require they be interpreted together, because I can't say, "I worked the problem," and mean the same thing as "I worked the problem out." So if you work the problem out, you actually solve the problem, but if you work the problem, you may not solve it, so that meaning is very different, I see. So the meaning requires them both be understood together, but you can actually move them in terms of the grammar around. That's really fascinating.
And are those particles you're talking about, they're generally prepositions, is that typically the class that they're drawn from?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: And was there a stage like when you have something like "overeat" or "upset," was there a stage when you think back way before they became combined words like that, that they were also separate, and then they just got started getting said together, or do we not really have proof of that?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: No, we don't know, because you'd have to go back to pre-Old English, so.
Valerie Fridland: We don't really have written records of that. No iPhones back then!
Dr. Laurel Brinton: No. Some of these particles cannot be moved. So if you say, "I slipped on the banana peel," you can't say, "I slipped the banana peel on."
Valerie Fridland: Oh, that's true.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: So there "slip" and "on" go together and the "on" can't be moved. These are called prepositional verbs, and so they're grammatically different, because this little word is considered a preposition that has to have its object following it. And so we have these phrasal verbs, where they have these movable particles, and then we have these prepositional verbs, where they don't have the movable particle, but again, in both cases, you have to, for the interpretation, you interpret them together, the "slip on."
Valerie Fridland: So the fact that we can't move those—I'm thinking of like "glance at" is another one of those. You can't say, "I glanced the mirror at," but you can say, "I glanced at the mirror," and it seems to be part of the things.
So the, you know, fact that they can't move actually tells us they are different in terms of the brain, how we would categorize them as a speaker, right? So obviously there must be two different categories then, which is why we give them two different names, which is sort of what linguists do, right? It's a great example of how we look at these patterns and say, "Oh, if we use them differently in this way, and we seem to inherently understand this as speakers—because I don't say I glanced the mirror at, that would be weird—that must mean somehow my brain organizes that information differently." So that's such a great example of kind of how this really fine-grained analysis works in giving us insight into how we actually process the information. So cool. Those two-part verbs are really cool.
Now, so I have read in an interview that you gave somewhere else that you actually like to keep a running list as you listen to people talk about things that strike your fancy as something you might want to investigate or just seem curious. What are some examples that you've heard lately that you're interested in?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Well, I've worked on a few recently: "for all I care." And so you can say, "You can leave right now, for all I care," or "It might rain all day, for all I care," so expressing indifference. So that's one I've worked on recently.
But it's often used with hyperbolic statements like, "You can rot in hell, for all I care," or you can do something that you know that the hearer is not going to do or is not going to happen. So that's an interesting thing. And it's also interesting because it has to be interpreted negatively. So it means, "I don't care," but it's positive, yeah, "for all I care."
Valerie Fridland: Right, that's interesting. And so when did that one, do you know from your research when we started using it in that way?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: I think the earliest examples I found were in the mid-19th century.
Valerie Fridland: I see. So it has been around for a while, but it's not really, it’s not some archaic form that we kept around.
Because I think I read in that interview that one of the ones you had written down and then found was a really actually older use, it was a pretty old form, is "or what have you" that you had heard people use. So tell us about how that one dates back.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Okay, so there are various forms of this. This is what's called a general extender. So that means it's a little word we add at the end, usually after "and" or "or," when we list a set of things. Like one example of a very common general extender is "and stuff." You know, "I brought apples and oranges and sandwiches and stuff," and so you're not specifying all the things, so it's called a general extender.
So there are all of these sort of related general extenders which I looked at together: "what you will," "what else," "whatsoever," "whatnot," and "what have you." And what's interesting about "what have you" is that all the other ones are fairly old, but "what have you," it's very hard to find where it comes from, and it has this very archaic syntax, because we wouldn't say, "what have you." We would say, "what you have." We would expect it to be "what you have"—
Valerie Fridland: Or "what do you have," where it would have that "do" in it.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Right, "what do you have." And so it's hard to actually find a source for that. I found some possible sources, but it was very recent, like 19th century, and so that one's kind of a mystery.
Valerie Fridland: Interesting. But you're right, a good clue is that it does have this really old syntax, so it can't be that recent, because we don't normally just start talking in like Shakespearean English.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: No. "What you will," which is also kind of archaic-sounding, is very old, so that's understandable, and it's sort of falling out of use.
Valerie Fridland: And how old was that one, when does that date back to?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Oh, that I think dates from certainly the 16th century or before.
Valerie Fridland: Wow, wow. And you know what I hear a lot with just my daughter—I have an 18-year-old daughter—but even a few years ago when she was hanging out with her 16-year-old friends from high school, one expression that's a general extender that I was always surprised that was so popular in her friend set was "or whatnot," or "and whatnot," which seemed so adult, right? It seemed to me like an old expression, but she, you know, had one friend particularly that would say, "I'm doing this, this, and, yeah, you know, whatnot." And I always thought, "Boy, you know, are you 80?" It sounded so old. Have you learned anything about "whatnot"?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Yeah, that is quite old, so I looked at that together with these other "what" forms, and yeah, I haven't looked at how common it is in contemporary English. Your daughter's usage sounds a bit strange to me. Maybe sort of one of her friends started using that and then it started being used in the friend group sort of as an in-group marker or something?
Valerie Fridland: I think I've heard it is more widespread than that. I don't know if it's regional, but it does seem to be something I'm wondering if maybe it's someone on social media that used it—
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Could be, and I wouldn't be aware of that.
Valerie Fridland: Right, you get more performative speech in that context, but someone cool and maybe it gets picked up, because that would be something accessible. But yeah, it's a funny thing to hear a 16-year-old say, for sure.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: And you know one other thing that you worked on—I mean, you've done all sorts of stuff that's so cool—but you also worked on a dictionary of Canadian English, correct?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Yeah, mhm.
Valerie Fridland: Can you give me just a couple of your favorite Canadianisms?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Okay. So for people who are interested, this is "The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles," and it's online and available, and so you can just Google that and find it, and you can browse through all the Canadianisms there.
But I think some of my favorite, I guess, well, this is a very common one, but the $1 coin that was invented in Canada to replace the $1 bill is called a loonie, and what's interesting about this, it depicts a loon on it, the bird, and the name "loonie" arose almost immediately. The coin was put in circulation, and almost immediately everyone was calling it a loonie. So just so quickly it came into use, and now it's almost a standard term. If I were talking to a clerk in a store, I would use the term "loonie," you know, and that's a standard term.
Valerie Fridland: That's interesting.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: And then we got a $2 coin, and so it had to be called a toonie. So we have loonies and toonies. So those are nice ones.
What other ones? Oh, "all-dressed." So you can get a pizza that's all-dressed, or potato chips that are all-dressed, and this actually comes from French Canadian, and it means that it has everything on it. So an all-dressed pizza has everything on it, and all-dressed chips, potato chips, have everything.
Valerie Fridland: I see. Huh, that's interesting. I'm trying to think of how chips what would you put on chips? Like are you talking about french fries or actual potato chips?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: I don't know, I guess it has a lot of different flavors, I don't know.
Valerie Fridland: Maybe I'm just hungry, but I'm like, huh, is that barbecue, what's on an all-dressed chip? I've never heard that one. I have heard loonie, but I'll just start using that in my repertoire when I want something, you know, when I go to In-N-Out Burger, I'll say, "I need the burger all-dressed." Maybe we can start a trend.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: One that isn't in the dictionary, and it may be sort of limited to Vancouver, when my daughter entered day care, they said she has to have a muddy buddy.
Valerie Fridland: A muddy buddy?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: What is a muddy buddy? I had no idea what a muddy buddy was. Well, it's the Vancouver version of a snowsuit, but because it rains and doesn't snow in Vancouver and it's muddy, you need some little outfit that the child can wear to put on when they take them out on a rainy day, so this is a muddy buddy.
Valerie Fridland: Oh my gosh, I love it.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: I was just checking the dictionary, and it's not in the dictionary, so we should put it in there, but—
Valerie Fridland: It's too novel, maybe, but I love it. I mean, I just love the creativity of speakers. I think that we think about change in this negative way because it's not what we say, but there's so many amazing, brilliant things we do with language that sometimes I don't think we applaud our creative capacity quite enough.
So thank you so much for talking with us today. I am always thrilled to read anything by you, and this has been so enlightening and fascinating.
But I do want to get, before we head out, three book recommendations of books that you've read recently or you like or you've given away as gifts that you would recommend to the audience.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: So I decided to reread "Middlemarch" by George Eliot, because it's one of the great novels of all time, and I hadn't read it since I was in university. So it took me a lot longer now to read it than it did when I was in university, but I certainly recognized its greatness when I was rereading it. So that's one that I have been reading recently.
And then I read Elizabeth Strout's most recent book, so I thought, well, I would go back and read—she has two series, and one has to do with Lucy Barton, and so I've been reading the Lucy Barton books. I think she's a fine writer, she's really an excellent writer. Oh, and I listened to a long broadcast about her, a long podcast about her most recent book, and so that made me think more about her writing, so I went back to read so I'm rereading some of her older books. So those are two things.
And then I guess in my retirement, I've taken up bridge, so I've been reading my bridge book to learn bridge, finding it a challenge to learn, so, yeah, so my bridge book is another book that I've been reading on bidding, how to bid in bridge.
Valerie Fridland: Well, that sounds like a great retirement activity to take up. Well, those are good. I'm definitely going to have to check out the Elizabeth Strout books on your recommendation. I'm not sure I have "Middlemarch" in me, but maybe in my retirement, I'll hit that up.
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Brinton, for joining us today. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Is there any place that people can go to find out more about you?
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Yes, so I do have a website. It's blogs.ubc.ca/laurelbrinton, all one word. So blogs.ubc.ca/laurelbrinton.
Valerie Fridland: Okay, we'll make sure that's also listed in the show notes so people can just click on it to find you. Again, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you.
Dr. Laurel Brinton: Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure.