A listener wondered about the word "materiel." What's its deal (and is it related to "personnel")? Plus, "pepper and salt." "Groom and bride." "White and black." Are binomials the same across languages? | Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates. |Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course. |Peeve Wars card game. |Grammar Girl books. |HOST: Mignon Fogarty |VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) |Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network. |Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk. |Links: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/ https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl http://twitter.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
A listener wondered about the word "materiel." What's its deal (and is it related to "personnel")? Plus, "pepper and salt." "Groom and bride." "White and black." Are binomials the same across languages?
| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.
|Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course.
|HOST: Mignon Fogarty
|VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)
|Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
|Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk.
|Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe
https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl
http://twitter.com/grammargirl
http://facebook.com/grammargirl
http://facebook.com/grammargirl
http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl
https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
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.
And happy National Grammar Day, which is March 4, when a lot of you will be listening to this show. You can find some fun songs and stories, and other diversions at NationalGrammarDay.com, and next week, I’ll have the winning poem from the ACES National Grammar Day Poetry contest.
But today, I’ll answer a timely word question, and then I have a big, fun follow-up about the word pairs segment from last week.
What Is Materiel?
First, Doug wrote, “With the recent invasion of Ukraine, I have heard several news, military, and political commentators say “materiel” with regard to (what I have gathered through context clues) is supplies, especially military in nature. I don’t know if this is a real, accepted, word in English, with its own distinct definition — or [if] people are using the foreign pronunciation of ‘material’ and just trying to sound smart?”
Haha, thanks for the question, Doug.
“Materiel” is indeed a word of its own, but it’s a direct borrowing from French. It’s spelled with an E instead of an A near the end, and often has an accent mark above the first E. [So it’s M-A-T-accented E-R-I-E-L.] You’re right that it has mostly come to mean military equipment and supplies, and both the Oxford English Dictionary and Etymonline say it’s used as a distinction from “personnel.” So countries can send both personnel and materiel.
“Personnel” also comes to English directly from French, although there may also be a German connection.
The OED has the first example with a militaristic meaning in 1819 for both words, and I couldn’t find a reason they hopped into English. 1819 is well before World War I. France and the United Kingdom were both involved in the Hundred Days War in 1815, just a few years before “personnel” and “materiel” came into English, so maybe that could have been the time the French words became familiar to the British, but I’m just guessing.
Thanks for the question!
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This listener had a great question about last week’s segment on binomials:
"Hi, Grammar Girl. I have a question about binomials. I was just wondering if the common ‘salt and pepper,’ ‘ham and eggs,’ etc. are the same in other languages. Do they also put ‘salt’ before ‘pepper,’ and ‘ham’ before ‘eggs,’ and so on and so forth? Or are binomials unique in different languages? Thank you."
This was a brilliant question! And I knew from my reading last week that linguists who speak other languages have studied binomials, but I didn’t know the answer to this question, so I asked my Twitter followers, who gave me a bunch of interesting answers!
I threw out four examples, and this is what I got:
Salt and Pepper
These appear in the same order in Arabic, Finnish (“suola ja pippuri”), German, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Spanish (“sal y pimienta”), Swedish, and Vietnamese.
But they’re reversed in Dutch (“peper en zout”), and French is really interesting because apparently it goes different ways for different things. Someone told me it’s “salt and pepper” when talking about food ("du sel et du poivre"), but “pepper and salt” ("poivre et sel") when talking about the color of someone’s hair.
And as you would expect, culture plays a role in this too because not everyone uses salt and pepper in lots of dishes. A follower from southern India says they don’t use a lot of pepper and instead talk about “salt and red chili powder.” And a Chinese follower said you don’t typically find salt and pepper on kitchen tables in China, but they do have a condiment called “pepper salt” (椒盐) that is a mixture of pepper and salt.
Ham and Cheese
I also asked about “ham and cheese” and in retrospect, of course this is heavily influenced by culture because it’s not a meal that’s eaten everywhere, and sometimes it just has the English name because it’s an import. For example, it’s called “ham and cheese” in Japanese, but only because that’s what it’s called in English.
People told me it’s called “ham and cheese” in Arabic, French, German ("Schinkenbrot mit Käse"), and Spanish (“jamón y queso,”), but it’s reversed to “cheese and ham” in Swedish ("ost och skinka"), and Dutch ("kaas en hesp"), and it appears it can go either way in Portuguese ("queijo e presunto" or "presunto e queijo"). And I was very surprised to hear that it’s often called “cheese and ham “ in British English too.
Bride and Groom
“Bride and groom” was all over the place. It’s the same in German (“Braut and Bräutigam”), Swedish, Telugu (a language from southern India), and Vietnamese, but reversed in Chinese (“公 字”), Hindi, Japanese (“shinro shinpu”), Korean, Spanish (“el novio y la novia”), and Russian.
A Finnish follower says they don’t have a consistent way of saying it, and a French follower says they don’t say it as a binomial because the words for “bride” and “groom” are spelled differently but pronounced the same, so it wouldn’t make sense.
Heads and Tails
“Heads and tails” was the last binomial I asked about, and again, quickly realized culture plays a role because everyone’s coins don’t have heads and tails, and in fact, I realized American coins don’t have images of anything resembling a tail.
Tossing a coin goes way back. In Roman times, they’d call “heads and ship” or “Caesar or ship” because the coins had an image of Caesar’s head on one side and a ship on the other. In the Middle Ages, it was sometimes “cross or pile” because the coins had a cross on one side, and then the reverse side was called the "pile" from the French word for the reverse of a coin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Many countries’ coins today do have someone’s head on one side, and then it seems we call the other side “tails” because it’s something of an anatomical opposite of the head. People use the “heads and tails” order in Arabic, Finnish (“kruuna ja klaava”), German ("Kopf oder Zahl"), Hindi, Swedish, Telugu, and Vietnamese. It’s similar in some forms of Spanish where they say “face and crown.”
Both Mexico and Russia have coins with eagles on one side, and they call “eagle or sun” ("águila o sol") and “eagle or tails” respectively.
In French, they have an expression like “can’t make heads or tails of it,” but the order is reversed to “tails or heads of it” (“sans queue ni tête”).
In Japan, they don’t usually flip coins to decide things. My Japanese follower says, “rock, paper, scissors is king” but if they were to flip a coin, they’d refer to the underside and the top side, in that order ("ura omote").
Black and White
Then besides the binomials I asked about, people offered up other interesting examples. People say the equivalent of “white and black” instead of “black and white” in Arabic, Italian (“bianco e nero”), Spanish ("blanco y negro"), and Vietnamese (“trắng đen”).
In Spanish, “sooner or later” is “later or sooner” ("tarde o temprano").
In French, “safe and sound” is “sound and safe” (“saine et sauve”).
“Back and forth” is reversed in both French ("va-et-vient" or "aller-retour") and Finnish (“edestakaisin”).
A follower who used to teach ESL to Portuguese students remembers that they struggled with “fork and knife” and “thunder and lightning” because those orders are reversed in Portuguese.
And charmingly, what we call a walkie-talkie is a “talkie-walkie” in both French and Croatian.
So, where does all this leave us with the rules I told you about last week where things like how often we use a word determines which one comes first, or how important we perceive one element of the pair to be?
Well, you’ll remember I told you they were more like tendencies than rules, and this really drove that home for me.
Also, cultural factors can play a role. For example, in my culture, the bride is the most important person at a wedding, but maybe the bride isn’t the most important person in other cultures.
All these differences also make me suspect that other things I mentioned like how short a word is and what kind of vowels a word has might play a bigger role than I originally gleaned, at least in some cases.
And I think all these differences reinforce the idea that as much as we crave hard-and-fast rules for how things work or are ordered, sometimes the best we can get is hints or weak patterns.
Finally, because I know everyone likes songs, I’ll also pass along something a listener named Doug mentioned. He pointed out that last week I said it might sound weird if I said I had jam and bread for breakfast, but that is a line that Julie Andrews sings in the popular song “Do Re Mi” from “The Sounds of Music”: “tea, a drink with jam and bread” to rhyme with “sew, a needle pulling thread,” so “jam and bread" might actually not sound so odd to people after all.
Anyway, thanks for the question and to all the people on Twitter who answered my call for help. It turned out to be fascinating!
Finally, I have a familect story from Leslie.
"Hi, Mignon. I love love love your podcast. I am calling about a word that our family uses I don't think any other family uses. It's called dramming (D-R-A-M-M-I-N-G), and it stands for being dramatic. So my niece, we started with her, but she's very, very dramatic, and then kid her like, “Oh, are you dramming again?” and it makes everybody smile. So that's it, but thank you again. I'm Leslie in Nashville. OK, bye."
Thanks, Leslie! I love that.
If you want to call with the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, you can leave a voicemail at 83-321-4-GIRL. Call from a nice, quiet place, and I might play it on the show.
I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
Thanks to my editor, Adam Cecil, and my audio engineer, Nathan Semes. Our assistant manager is Emily Miller, our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin, who estimates that they consume about 9 cups of tea a day, and our Ad Operations Specialist is Morgan Christiansen.
That’s all. Thanks for listening.