Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Positive 'anymore.' 'Wreaked' or 'wrought'? Seat of your pants. Pecan pie.

Episode Summary

1037. This week, we answer a few questions that have popped up from previous episodes: What's up with the "positive anymore"? What is havoc? Is it wreaked or wrought? And more!

Episode Notes

1037. This week, we answer a few questions that have popped up from previous episodes: What's up with the "positive anymore"? What is havoc? Is it wreaked or wrought? And more!

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Episode Transcription

Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, I have a bunch of fun follow-ups from things that came up in recent episodes.

Back in episode 1027 when I interviewed forensic linguist Natalie Schilling about how criminals' language can give them away, one of the answers was that criminals provide clues when they use regionalisms and don't realize they're doing it. These are words that are used only by people from certain locations — and she mentioned that she uses what linguists call the positive "anymore" and for years didn't realize it wasn't widespread. And a few of you asked me for more information about the positive "anymore," so here's a segment on that by Neal Whitman:

Positive Anymore

by Neal Whitman

In July 1994, "The New Yorker" published a short piece by Jack Winter called “How I Met My Wife.” The story is a barrage of sentences like this one: “I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to….” Sentences like this one sound odd because the idioms in it are usually used in negative sentences; for example, "That’s nothing to sneeze at," or "The movie is OK, but it can’t hold a candle to the book."

Because of this restriction, linguists call words and phrases like these negative polarity items. Actually, that name’s not entirely accurate, since negative polarity items also occur in questions, like "Is that anything to sneeze at?" or in a few other constructions, such as "Few books can hold a candle to Pilkey’s 'Captain Underpants' series." Still, negative polarity items, or NPIs, is the name that has stuck.

And not all NPIs are idioms. One of the most common NPIs in English is the word "any." You can say "I didn’t see any turtles," or "Do you have any gum?" or "Few people have any idea what goes on here," but sentences like "I saw any turtles," "She has any gum," and "Lots of people have any idea what goes on here" — they just don’t make sense.

However, there’s one NPI in English that in some dialects has broken free of negations and questions. It’s the word "anymore." Just about every English speaker will accept "anymore" as a negative polarity item, in sentences like "I don’t love you anymore," or "Why don’t we ever go out anymore?"

On the other hand, most English speakers stumble over sentences like these:

•       Kids grow up fast anymore.

•       It’s always rainy anymore.

•       Anymore, I do the cooking.

If those sentences sound fine to you, then your variety of English grammar allows what linguists call "positive anymore." If they don’t sound fine, then feel free to mentally replace "anymore" with "these days" or "nowadays."

Although it’s not a good idea to use the positive "anymore" in your formal writing, you should know that it’s not a grammar mistake; it’s a regionalism. The Oxford English Dictionary labels positive "anymore" as a feature of Irish English, and has its earliest citation from 1898 in Northern Ireland. It also tags positive "anymore" as colloquial American English, and according to the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project’s web page on positive "anymore," positive "anymore" is most common in the Midwest. There’s also a small pocket of positive "anymore" speakers in Arizona.

That’s all—or should I say, “There isn’t any more.”

That segment was written by Neal Whitman, who has a PhD in linguistics and blogs at LiteralMinded.wordpress.com.

So for the purposes of forensic linguistics, you can imagine that maybe police have a ransom note or a threatening text message they know comes from somewhere in Arizona. If the writer, like Natalie, wasn't aware of using such telltale wording, and used the positive "anymore" in the message, it could help the police narrow down the search to that small region where they know people use that particular language quirk. 

‘Wreaked’ Versus ‘Wrought’

by Mignon Fogarty 

Next, in episode 1030 about archaic phrases, we mentioned the phrase "wreak havoc," and people wanted to know about both the word "havoc" and about when you use "wreaked" versus "wrought." 

What Is Havoc?

So, you can wreak devastation or revenge, but most often it seems people and storms are described as wreaking havoc. Well, what is this “havoc”? 

Originally, someone in the army would cry havoc — literally call out the word “havoc” — to give soldiers the order to start pillaging and just generally cause chaos. Havoc! It appears, for example, in Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar”: 

Caesar's spirit shall, with a monarch’s voice, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

The origin of "havoc" isn't clear — no credible source seems certain of where it came from — but the word “havoc” might come from a Latin word that meant “to have or possess,” which kind of fits with the idea of soldiers running around grabbing things. And it eventually became a noun meaning "destruction, confusion, disorder" and so on.

Later, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “play havoc” and “make havoc” became phrases, and  even later, the phrase “work havoc” appeared.

Now, moving on to "wreaked" and "wrought," in Old English, “wreak” meant “to avenge,” but much like the word “havoc,” it got tamer over time. It now means something more like “to inflict or cause something,” usually damage or destruction. So if you have wreaked havoc, you have inflicted all that destruction, confusion, and disorder.

But "wrought," is actually an entirely separate word. It's an archaic past tense of the verb “to work.” And remember, "work havoc" was a phrase that people used alongside "make havoc" and "play havoc."

So you can see that if people were talking about “working havoc,” then they would also logically have said they “wrought havoc” — using the past-tense form — when they were talking about the past. In fact, Oxford Dictionaries says “wrought havoc” is an acceptable variant of “wreaked havoc.”

And here’s a little more about the words “wreak” and “wrought.”

‘Wreak’ and ‘Wrought’

As for “wrought,” besides being an archaic past tense form of “work” in the sense of meaning “to shape or to forge,” today, it's also an adjective, and you'll hear it being used  in phrases such as “wrought iron,” which is essentially iron worked into different shapes. 

‘Wreak Havoc’ or ‘Wreck Havoc’?

Finally, a common mistake is to say that someone “wrecked havoc” instead of “wreaked havoc.” The words may sound a lot alike, but you don’t “wreck” havoc. 

So remember, you can “wreak havoc” and “work havoc,” and if you did it in the past, you may have “wreaked” or “wrought” havoc. But just don’t wreck it.

'Seat of Your Pants'

by Aine Yore, MD

Next, I got an interesting piece of feedback from a pilot in Seattle named Aine about the phrase we recently used, "fly by the seat of your pants." And I thought you all might enjoy it. Aine wrote:

The phrase "Flying by the seat of one's pants” has a specific, technical meaning in aviation …

While the general sense of “proceeding by intuition” is certainly accurate enough, there is actually an important, tactile element to the term. When one initiates a turn in an airplane, it requires coordinated inputs from the ailerons (rolling) and the rudder (yawing, or turning). How much rudder to add to a given turn is a difficult judgment and will vary based on the airplane, speed, and angle of bank. 

If you have too little rudder, you are described as “slipping” through the turn; too much rudder, and you are “skidding" into the turn. These impart a lateral force onto the plane and its occupants. In a slipping turn, you feel like you’re sliding to the outside of the plane, and in a skidding turn, you feel like you’re falling into the turn.

This is important for two reasons — both of these “uncoordinated” turns are viscerally uncomfortable for passengers, but a skid can easily evolve into a spin, and then everyone is having a bad day!

When you are learning to fly, it’s important to learn to recognize when you are making an uncoordinated turn. There’s an instrument on the panel for this purpose, aptly enough called the “slip/skid indicator,” or more formally the “turn and bank indicator” but when you are, say, maneuvering close to the ground, you need to keep your eyes outside of the airplane, not on the instruments!

So, in “flying by the seat of your pants” you learn to recognize the lateral forces from an uncoordinated turn at the point where your body interfaces with the aircraft — your rear end! You can quite literally feel your butt slide into or out of the turn on the seat. And this is what I thought was so cool about the phrase — it’s rare than an idiom derives from such a discrete, tangible source. 

One small distinction I would add: while in general use, the idiom often connotes someone who is acting without a plan or forethought, or even recklessly, in the aviation community it is a phrase applied to a very capable pilot, with excellent “stick and rudder” ability, who is able to fly by the seat of their pants!

And that was fabulous, Aine. Thanks so much for sharing that bit of insider perspective and knowledge about flying!

Bilingual follow-up story

Finally before we get to the familect, I have a follow-up story from Dennis about being bilingual.

Hi, Grammar Girl.

This isn't exactly a familect story, but your discussion of learning languages reminds me of my sister's experience.

She took French for four years in high school, and all her best friends were speaking French, so they all spoke French to each other more often than English, partly to practice and partly to -- so no one else would know what they were saying.

And her boyfriend also took French, so when he graduated and joined the Coast Guard, they wrote letters to each other in French, and when she graduated and went to college, she took French for her first semester and decided to try German her second semester.

Her German teacher said she spoke German with a French accent, not an English accent, which is her native language.

By the way, my name is Dennis in San Francisco.

Thanks, Dennis! This reminded me so much of the Coffee Break Spanish podcast, which has been around as long as Grammar Girl and which I've always loved. But I'll never forget the first time I listened to it, because Mark Pentelton, the host and also the founder of the whole Coffee Break Languages network — Mark is Scottish! And it just kind of blew my mind at first trying to learn Spanish from someone with a Scottish accent. Like, it was just not what I was expecting when I turned on that show.

Familect

And finally today, I have a familect story:

Hi, Grammar Girl. I have a funny story.

My family and I usually go to Felipe's in Los Angeles before we go to Dodger Games for lunch. And one time we went to Felipe's and decided to order a slice of pecan pie.

Now my husband and I have a tradition of sharing most of the things we order. And as I was finishing my sandwich, I turned to the friend on my right to have a chat with her, only to turn back around to my husband and our shared meal to realize that the pecan pie we had ordered to share was completely gone.

And he instead had a sheepish look on his face. He just couldn't help himself.

So to this day, our family calls pecan pieing somebody is when you take their share of something when it's meant to be split.

I thought you'd enjoy it.

I did enjoy it. That feels like a widely applicable familect. Thanks so much! 

If you want to share your familect, a word of phrase your family uses based on some shared experience that nobody else would understand, you can do that in a voice chat on WhatsApp, or you can still call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL, and all of those are in the show notes, which you can find in your podcast listening app. I want to hear your stories!

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And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily," which — hint, hint —makes a great gift. That's all. Thanks for listening.