1120. This week, we look at tricky uses of the word "epicenter" and how people feel about using it metaphorically. We also look at where the word “brother” came from and how it branched into “bro,” “boy,” and even “buddy.”
1120. This week, we look at tricky uses of the word "epicenter" and how people feel about using it metaphorically. We also look at where the word “brother” came from and how it branched into “bro,” “boy,” and even “buddy.”
The "brother" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about tricky uses of the word "epicenter" and about the origin of the words "brother" and "bro."
by Mignon Fogarty
But first, I have a quick follow-up to our piece on idioms with the word "dime" last week because my husband tells me we missed a big one. During the "drop a dime" section, he said he kept waiting for me to talk about basketball!
So the Oxford English Dictionary says that the basketball use of "drop a dime" is "chiefly North American" and goes all the way back to 1988. It means "to make a precise or well-timed pass to a teammate for a shot at the basket." So it's essentially an assist, and it has expanded to use in other sports too. Thanks, Pat!
by Mignon Fogarty
I recently asked my social media followers how they felt about the use of the word "epicenter" in two sentences: one positive and one negative.
The positive sentence said, "The café was the epicenter of the neighborhood's social life."
And the negative sentence said, "Wall Street was the epicenter of the financial crisis in 2008."
I wanted to know if people thought one use was more acceptable than the other in formal writing, like in a press release or report.
"Epicenter" originally described the point on Earth's surface directly above an earthquake's focus, but it started taking on metaphorical meanings around 1900, and literary folks have been arguing about it ever since. One question has been whether it's OK to use "epicenter" for anything other than earthquakes — but there's a second, thornier question: Since earthquakes are bad, should people stick to using "epicenter" for just bad things?
And the responses surprised me!
As a group, my social media followers seem less accepting of "epicenter" in the positive sentence than the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel members were back in 1996. These were the language experts who weighed in on tricky usage questions for the dictionary, and I would have expected them to be far more conservative than modern day social media commenters — even commenters on a page called Grammar Girl, which would likely skew more linguistically conservative than the general social media population.
More than 550 of my LinkedIn followers responded, and if you add up everyone in my survey who accepted the positive sentence in some way, the number was 51%. A smaller number of people replied on Facebook, and they were even less likely to accept the positive use. I don't want to combine the numbers because I asked the question in a slightly different way, so let's just use 50% as the rough number of my followers who were OK with a positive use. It's probably a little high, but it will work.
So in 1996, 62% of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel approved of a similar positive sentence. Fifty percent (50%) of you versus 62% of the experts more than 30 years ago.
Many of the people who commented did feel like the word had really strong negative associations. Arizona said her idea of an "epicenter" is "cause or origination of disaster," and that's the only way she'd use it. Christina could only imagine accepting the café example if it was followed by descriptions of "fistfights, drunken debauchery, loud music, and frequent police interventions."
Lucas had maybe the clearest way of explaining the problem. He said, "Don't use negative metaphors for positive situations and vice versa." He suggested replacing "epicenter" with "beacon" in both sentences to see the difference. To him, epicenters are negative and beacons are positive, so saying Wall Street was the beacon of the financial crisis sounds as weird to him as saying a cafe is the epicenter of a neighborhood's social life.
The most interesting thing, though, was that reading through the comments, I discovered a bunch of objections that I haven't seen in dictionaries or usage guides. Several people objected not just to using "epicenter" positively, but to using it for small things. An earthquake is a big deal, and some of you think "epicenter" should be reserved to refer to something that is also a big deal. For example, ML Hartman said using "epicenter" for something as small as a neighborhood café was "overkill," and Christine called it "unnecessarily dramatic."
So, I can see that. Earthquakes are massive events. If you're going to borrow that metaphor, maybe it should be for something equally significant. The financial crisis? Sure. Your neighborhood café? That's like using "tsunami" to describe spilling your coffee.
On the other hand, since we're taking comments from my husband this episode, he counters that most earthquakes are actually small.
A follower named Gary, actually preferred the positive "café" example to the negative Wall Street example because it referred to a specific physical location, which aligns better with the geological definition. Wall Street, he argued, is more of a concept or general area than an exact spot where something can happen.
A follower named Damien didn't like the positive sentence because in his mind, the word "epicenter" relates to an event rather than an ongoing situation.
And finally there was one true stickler named Doug who wanted to throw out both the positive and negative sentences because technically, an epicenter is on the surface above the earthquake's center, not the actual center itself. So unless you're describing something that's near but not quite at the center, you're using it wrong. And while I appreciate the geological precision, I'd say that ship has sailed. And Bryan Garner agrees. Garner's Modern English Usage says the metaphorical sense of epicenter (for a center of devastation) is fully accepted.
One thing that I feel like does come up when I ask these kinds of questions is that just by asking, I'm giving the impression that there's a problem to be found somewhere; so even if people may not have thought about it before, now they're looking for what could be wrong with one or both of the example sentences. A lot of people did seem to know about the objection to "epicenter" being used positively, but not everyone, and given the number of people who came up with objections I've never heard before, I do think it's likely that some of them were scrutinizing the examples in search of a problem they might not have noticed in a different, everyday situation.
One slight difference in the way I asked the question and the way the usage panel members in 1996 were queried is that the usage panel was asked if they would use "epicenter" themselves in edited prose, and I asked my social media followers if they'd tell someone else it was wrong if they'd been asked to review a document.
Those are slightly different standards, but if anything, I feel like the Usage Panel question was more likely to elicit a negative response. I think it's easier to say "Nah, I don't like it and I wouldn't use it myself," than it is to tell someone else they shouldn't use it. Yet the Usage Panel, which was commenting on their own use, was still more accepting of the positive use of "epicenter."
So where does this leave us? Well, if you're writing something formal and you want to use "epicenter," you're probably safe with negative contexts. Wall Street as the epicenter of a financial crisis? Most people are fine with that. But your local coffee shop as the epicenter of community life? Maybe find another word. Garner suggests that "center" is a perfectly useful word in such sentences.
by Valerie Fridland
Whether you're calling a male sibling "brother" or just using the word for someone close enough to feel like one, you're using a word that's had a long history in English. But did you know that modern words like “boy” and “buddy” also come from this ancient word?
The word “brother” itself is even older than English, thought to have descended from a long-dead language known as Proto-Indo-European, which existed about 6,000 years ago and was the precursor to not just English, but also languages like Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. In fact, a similar word to “brother” existed in all three, namely, Greek “phrater,” Latin “frater,” and Sanskrit “bhratar,” all from what has been hypothesized to have been the word “bhrater” in their shared Indo-European source language.
Though it's hard to know if the word carried any additional sense beyond "male sibling" in Indo-European, it's clear that by the time it made it into Latin and then English, the word could already refer to figurative, and not just literal, brothers.
This figurative leap beyond actual brotherhood might have gotten started because it was the tribal or kinship bond, rather than exact sibling status, that was the most important sense of the word. Because the closeness of a connection rather than a specific familial tie was a focus, it would easily allow the word to be further extended to those united in some fundamental way, for instance, spiritually or in close friendship, even when no blood tie existed.
"Bro," the short form for "brother" that seems to be everywhere these days, also has a longer history in English than you might suspect. "Bro." (followed by a period) is found in written documents as early as the 16th century where it was used as an abbreviated spelling for the full word “brother,” though people would've pronounced the full word when reading aloud. It isn’t until the 19th century that people actually say "bro," first typically as part of an animal or person’s name, as in “Bro’ rabbit” as written in dialogue from 1832 or “Bro’ Bill” appearing in 1865.
By the early 20th century, “bro” by itself began to be used as a greeting among men or in reference to a fellow man, particularly in Caribbean or Southern African American varieties of English. For instance, we find an early 20th century example in “Bro,' I can't go, I sick bad,” an example in the Oxford English Dictionary from a collection of stories by inhabitants of an island in the Bahamas in 1918.
Modern pronunciations like “brah” and “bruh” are also not as new as you might think. They too appear to be different regional ways of saying "brother," found as far back as the 19th century, and are mainly used in Caribbean, Hawaiian, and African American communities.
While the relationship between these shortened forms and “brother” is pretty obvious, less obvious is the relationship between “brother” and the words “boy” and “buddy.”
Let’s start with the word “boy,” a word that already followed a bit of a strange path over the history of English. It didn’t show up until the 13th century and was first used as a term for a male servant. It finally arrived at its modern meaning, that of "male child," around the 15th century. I’m sure anyone who had a lot of chores assigned as a kid might see the connection, but the fact that it was often used with a derogatory sense early in its history does suggest it has undergone quite an improvement in meaning.
Its origin is a bit murky, and there are several completely different theories about how it came into English, including suggestions that it was from a Germanic-based proper name ("Boia") that was found in Old English or, alternatively, that it was a borrowing from Old French.
But, even farther back, in terms of its earliest or original source, a widely discussed theory is that it comes from baby talk, namely a toddling attempt to pronounce some version of the linguistically challenging word “brother,” or, more likely, its Proto-Indo European counterpart. Since the "b" sound is a very frequent sound babbled by babies, while "r" is not, this would give rise to “bo” or “bobo” as a baby word, also explaining “Bube” meaning “boy” in German, as well as similar "b" or "p" words for “boy” found across non-Germanic languages (like Persian Latin). How it got from a meaning of "brother" to one of male servant is unclear, but it may be that young males were often the ones inhabiting the role of servants, and voila, “boy” became a way of referring to them.
Finally, we get to the word “buddy” which, like modern “brother,” is often used today in casual conversation to address someone considered a friend or sometimes even a stranger, as in “Hey buddy, how’s it going.” Buddy’s origin, like “boy,” is not that clear, but some people think it could be a regional pronunciation of the word “brother,” perhaps coming from the addition of a "y" suffix on a “brudda”-like pronunciation used by some people in the Caribbean. Dating back to the late 1700s, people have used "buddy" informally to address a friend or a pal, and, starting in the 1800s, sometimes people also used it as a casual way to refer to a brother.
With the exception of “boy,” the takeaway here from how these words have all evolved seems to be that brotherhood has long been understood not just to be the result of blood ties, but of the fellowship and shared experiences that make us all part of a larger brotherhood (or sisterhood!) of being human.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
Sources
Gorrie, Colin. (July, 30, 2025). “Boy” is a weird word. From baby talk to term of abuse. Dead Language Society. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web
Liberman, Anatoly (2000). The etymology of English boy, beacon, and buoy. American Journal of Germanic Linguistics & Literatures 12(2): 201–234.
Martin, Katherine. (April 30, 2016). How brothers became buddies and bros. OUP Blog. https://blog.oup.com/2016/04/brothers-buddies-bros-oed-update/
Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Boy, n.¹ & int. In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved August 27, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9377728539
Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Bro, n. In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved August 29, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6395516903
Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Brother, n. & int. In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved August 29, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1153528478
Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Buddy, n. In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved August 29, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7372042303
Pieniądz, A., & Kijak, A. (2023). The Meaning of the Terms “Brother” and “Brotherhood” in Early Medieval Sources. In Fraternal Bonds in the Early Middle Ages (pp. 29–52). Amsterdam University Press.
Finally, I have a familect story.
I have a familect for you. In Wisconsin where I live, lots of cities have names related to indigenous words and they're often similar, multi-syllable with a hard K sound. And one year, one day years ago, my family was in the car headed toward Oconomowoc, which is north. So when my husband started driving south, I said, "I thought we were going to Oconomowoc." He said, "We are," "But Oconomowoc is north," I said, "and it looks like you're driving to Mukwanago." And he just shrugged and said, "Mukwonago, Oconomowoc." And so now when anyone in our family mistakes one word for another, we all just shrug and I would say, "Mukwonago, Oconomowoc."
Thank you! Wherever you were going, I hope you made it!
If you want to share the story of your familect, a special word or phrase you use with your family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Morgan Christianson in advertising; Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts; Nat Hoopes in marketing; Dan Feierabend in audio; and Rebecca Sebastian in marketing, who says her parents wanted to name her India, but her Grandfather said if she was going to be named after a country, it had to be Italy.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip a day book, "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.