934. Ever wondered why "whyever" isn't as popular as "wherever," "however," or "whenever"? Join me as we delve into the world of "-ever" words and their curious usage. We explore the relationship between words like "forever" and "never," and reveal how the "-ever" suffix can intensify meaning. Plus, find out why watching British TV might lead you to use "whyever." But that's not all. This week, we tackle a burning listener question: how do you pronounce Latin abbreviations like "et al."? Should you say the abbreviation or the full phrase? And what about other common Latin abbreviations such as "ibid" and "circa"? Tune in to learn the ins and outs of these tricky linguistic tidbits, and impress your friends with your newfound pronunciation prowess!
934. Ever wondered why "whyever" isn't as popular as "wherever," "however," or "whenever"? Join me as we delve into the world of "-ever" words and their curious usage. We explore the relationship between words like "forever" and "never," and reveal how the "-ever" suffix can intensify meaning. Plus, find out why watching British TV might lead you to use "whyever."
But that's not all. This week, we tackle a burning listener question: how do you pronounce Latin abbreviations like "et al."? Should you say the abbreviation or the full phrase? And what about other common Latin abbreviations such as "ibid" and "circa"? Tune in to learn the ins and outs of these tricky linguistic tidbits, and impress your friends with your newfound pronunciation prowess!
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Whyever would we use the word “whyever”?
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, we look at the fascinating “-ever” words and how to pronounce Latin abbreviations such as “et al.”
by Mignon Fogarty
Here’s a listener question:
"Hello, Grammar Girl. My name is Will. I'm a relatively new listener from Seattle. Love your work, and I have a question about a particular word you said in your episode about killer bunnies in medieval manuscripts. You said the phrase ‘whyever they were drawn.’ Now this got me thinking about the six W's of storytelling that we all learn: ‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘when,’ ‘where,’ ‘why,’ and ‘how.’ We find these words are often combined with ‘ever’ to form compound words: ‘whoever,’ ‘whatever,’ ‘whenever,’ ‘wherever,’ and ‘however.’ But this sixth word of this form—’whyever’—is not common. In fact, I can't remember ever hearing or reading it before that episode of your podcast even though it's a very useful word. So my questions to you are: Have you always used the word ‘whyever’? Do you know why it's less common than the other five similar words? And is it more accepted in some dialects of English than others? Thank you, and have a great day."
Thanks for the call, Will.
For some background, let’s first talk about the “-ever” words we use more often: “wherever,” “however,” “whenever,” and so on. These words can have other meanings too, but in general, adding the “-ever” suffix adds an “it doesn’t matter” meaning.
For example, I could say, “Put the cupcakes where you want.” But if I say, “Put the cupcakes wherever you want,” it has more of a sense of “it really doesn’t matter where.” Put them here. Put them there. Put them, put them anywhere.
If instead of “Decorate the envelope how you want,” I say, “Decorate the envelope however you want,” it has more of a sense that it really doesn't matter how you do it. Knock yourself out.
Same thing with “whenever.” “Let me know whenever you are ready,” just feels less demanding than “Let me know when you are ready.” Whenever. No rush. It doesn’t matter.
These “-ever” words can also have a more intense feeling and aren’t always interchangeable with the base word without the suffix. For example, here’s a sentence with “wherever” in which you can't just substitute “where”: “Wherever I put that painting, it still feels like the eyes are looking at me.” In this case, “Wherever” means something like “no matter where.”
“However Squiggly tried, he couldn’t reach the chocolate on the top shelf,” means “no matter how Squiggly tried.”
“Whenever I see that dog, I just have to smile,” means “Every. Single. Time I see that dog, I have to smile.” It’s emphatic.
According to Etymonline, people started adding the “-ever” suffix to words in late Old English to create this generalizing or intensifying effect.
“Whyever” is a little different though. First, as you noticed, we don’t use it very much. Dictionary.com and the online American Heritage Dictionary don’t even list it, although it’s in the three other dictionaries I checked.
And second, it doesn’t have that “it doesn’t matter” feeling. It does, however, do the intensifying thing.
Collins Dictionary calls it an “emphatic form of ‘why’ used in questions” — as in “Whyever not?” For example, if you tell me you went to the Ghirardelli store in San Francisco — but you didn’t buy any chocolate — if I’m curious, I’d probably ask “Why not?” But if I’m astonished or incredulous, I might ask more emphatically, “Whyever not?!” It means something more like “Why on earth not?”
Collins also notes that it is a “low frequency” word, and it has a tag on the entry that says “in British English.” And I noticed that in my last example, “Whyever not?” had a British feel to it for me. It sounded like something I’d hear in “Downton Abbey” or something like that. “Mary isn’t coming down to breakfast? Whyever not?”
A Google Ngram search confirms that “whyever” seems to be more common in books categorized as British English.
And I will say that “whyever” actually can be used in that “it doesn’t matter” way, but it looks as if it’s exceedingly rare. It wouldn’t be wrong to say something like “I don’t care why he does it. If he brings us chocolate, he can do it whyever he wants,” but it would probably sound weird to a lot of people.
And that takes us back to Will’s question: Why did Samantha write, “whyever they were drawn” about the killer bunnies in medieval manuscripts? Well, I asked her, and she doesn’t know! She said she just spontaneously used it while she was writing, and she remembers having a fleeting thought that it was a bit out of the ordinary or nonstandard, but that’s about it. Based on what I found, I wondered if she watches a lot of British TV shows, and she said she does! So that very well could be the reason “whyever” was floating around in her mind.
And then there were a couple of fun and interesting things I came across in my research that I want to share.
The word “ever” itself is very old, going all the way back to Old English where it looks like it originally meant “throughout all time,” but the OED says it has been mostly replaced in that use by “forever,” which if you haven’t noticed before, has two parts: “for” and “ever.” “Forever.” “For ever.”
And perhaps less obviously, the word “never” also comes from that use of “ever.” There’s an obsolete adverb “ne” (N-E) that was a simple negative that got tacked onto the word “ever,” to give the meaning “not ever”: “Ne-ever.” “Never.”
Finally, I had fun reading about the elaborate and archaic word “whithersoever.” “Whither” is an archaic form of the word “where.” It’s a place you are going, so someone might have asked, “Whither are we going?” And “whithersoever” is an emphatic form of that. And there appears to be a song called “I, Don Quixote” that some people remember from the 1972 movie "Man of La Mancha" with the lines “And the wild winds of fortune will carry me onward, whithersoever they blow.”
So thank you for the question, Will, which gave me the chance to learn all about these fascinating and sometimes archaic “-ever” words.
by Mignon Fogarty
Next, I have another listener question.
"Hi, Mignon. I have a question regarding whether one should spell out or actually just read out, if that makes sense, things like abbreviations such as ‘et al.,’ because I just heard someone reference a research paper, and she mentioned that it was written by ‘so and so et al.’ So should have that have been ‘so and so and others’ or is it the norm and the expectation actually just verbalize ‘et al.’? Thank you."
Thank you! As a former scientist and science writer, I heard “et al.” a lot in scientific talks at conferences, and people always just said the abbreviation. “In a previous study by Smith et al.” and so on.
And just because I know people will probably ask, I’ve always said and heard it as “et all,” but dictionaries list that pronunciation and “et Al,” so it seems like both are correct.
So for most Latin abbreviations in English, like “et al.” — which you correctly note means “and others” — we don’t say the whole thing. We say the abbreviation that we write as if it were a word, as an acronym. Another one like that you’ll find in citations is “i-b-i-d,” which is an abbreviation for the Latin word “ibidem,” which means “in the same place.” You can use it in footnotes or citations to say the reference is the same as the one that came before it, so you don’t have to write out the whole thing again. And people usually pronounce that as “ibid,” not “ibidem.”
And sometimes we spell the abbreviations as initialisms. For example, when we use “a.m.” and “p.m.” for the time, we say “a-m” and “p-m,” we don’t say “am” and “pmm,” and we also don’t say the full phrases, “ante meridiem” and “post meridiem,” which mean “before noon” and “after noon.” Same with “i.e.” and “e.g.”
But occasionally we do say the whole word, like with “etcetera.” We write “etc.” but we don’t say it “etc,” or “E-T-C,” maybe because that’s just harder to say. But we also typically say “circa” when we see the abbreviation “c.” before a year, which means “around, about, or approximately” in Latin. “Circa 1400.” And it would be just as easy to say “c” as it would be to say “circa,” so I don’t think ease of pronunciation is actually, or at least always, the factor here.
The bottom line is that I’m not aware of any rules for pronouncing Latin abbreviations, and I couldn’t find any when I looked. I think they have just developed as conventions, and occasionally some people do deviate. But it wouldn’t be common for someone to see the Latin abbreviation and say the English translation such as “and others” for “et al.” Thanks again for the question!
And one final interesting thing about “et al.” that I see people do wrong sometimes is that you put a period only at the end of the whole thing. It’s “et-al-period.” Sometimes people also put a period after “et” in the middle, but that isn’t right because the full Latin phrase is “et alli,” meaning “and others,” so “et” is a whole Latin word that means “and.” It’s not an abbreviation for anything.
And finally, before we get to the familect, I have a correction from the episode we did on TV language a few weeks ago. We called “CDC” and “WMD” acronyms, but technically, they are initialisms. An initialism is an abbreviation you pronounce by spelling out the letters, such as “C.D.C.” and “a.m.” and “p.m.,” which I mentioned in the last segment. An acronym is an abbreviation you pronounce like a word such as “NATO,” “NASA” and “ibid.” And both initialisms and acronyms are included in the bigger category of abbreviations. We actually did a segment about the differences about a year ago, so thanks to the caller who must have been paying attention.
Next, here’s Karen with a familect story.
"Hi Mignon. This is Karen from Kansas. I wanted to tell you about our familect. It's ‘juna,’ and juna is a spoon, and it has always been a spoon. And I found out much later in life that it's because my dear mother, who's been gone for many, many years, couldn't say the word ‘spoon’ when she was little. So she always called it a ‘juna.’ So when I was growing up, it was a juna. And when my children were growing up, it was a juna. And now my grandchildren — guess what — call a spoon a juna. Thanks."
Thanks, Karen. That’s pretty amazing that “juna” has continued for so many generations.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. I know some of you must still have them! Call from a nice quiet place, and we might play it on the show.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to our audio engineer, Nathan Semes; and our director of podcasts, Adam Cecil, who prefers a can of soda to fountain soda or soda in a glass or plastic bottle. Thanks also to our digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings; our ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; and our marketing associate, Davina Tomlin.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.