Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today we're going to talk about moguls and the word a while.
Last week, when I was working on the segment about words you'll hear during the Winter Olympics, I realized that there was enough to say about the word mogul, that I could do a whole piece on it.
First, there's the winter sports meaning.
But then there's the completely unrelated powerful person meaning, as in media mogul or movie mogul.
Same spelling, totally different origins.
So today, we'll look at both of them, plus a couple of bonus meanings I found along the way.
If you've ever been on a steep ski slope and found yourself bouncing over rounded mounds of packed snow, ranging in size from a throw pillow to a giant beanbag chair, but harder, you've experienced moguls.
Skiers actually cause the moguls themselves as they carve their turns, pushing the snow into mounds along the way.
And once a mogul starts to form, it tends to get bigger as more skiers wind their way around it, deepening the troughs and packing more snow onto the bump.
Sources don't completely agree on the origin of the name for this kind of mogul.
Edam Online says it's probably from a Scandinavian source, comparing it to a Norwegian dialect word meaning a heap or a mound.
But most other sources point to a southern German dialect word meaning mound or hillock.
Regardless of the origin, though, the idea is the same.
It comes from a word meaning a small hill or mound.
And that's essentially what a ski mogul is.
As for when the word entered English, the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1953, where a writer for the Albuquerque Journal described watching skiers turning and jumping over the moguls.
The writer then explains that moguls are bumps, which suggests the word was still pretty new.
Mogul skiing eventually became a competitive sport, and the first major mogul competition took place in 1971.
Moguls appeared as a demonstration event at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, and by the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville moguls had become an official medal event.
And it was actually the first freestyle skiing discipline to earn that status.
This year we have another new mogul competition too, because the dual mogul competition is making its Olympic debut.
But there's another kind of mogul, too.
The one you see in phrases like media mogul or movie mogul.
This one has a completely different backstory and it goes all the way back to the Mughal Empire, spelled M-U-G-H-A-L.
And yes, that word is related to Mongol, as in Mongolia.
The Mughal Empire of India was founded in 1526 by Babur, a prince from what is now Uzbekistan.
And his family tree was pretty impressive.
He was a descendant of the Turkic conqueror Timur on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's side.
And his descendants ruled a huge swath of South Asia for more than three centuries.
At its height, the Mughal Empire was one of the biggest and wealthiest empires in the world, and it produced, among other things, the Taj Mahal.
Europeans who had contact with the Mughal Empire were awed by its wealth and power, and especially around the time of Babur's grandson, Akbar the Great, began referring to the ruler as the Great Mughal or the Grand Mughal.
The word Mughal itself, spelled all sorts of ways over the centuries, comes from Persian and Arabic words for Mongol, according to Edom Online, referring to Babur's descent from Genghis Khan.
By the mid-1600s, people were using mogul lowercase as a general label for anyone who wielded enormous power or influence.
The OED dates this broader sense to 1653, when it appeared in a satirical English publication called Mercurius Democritus.
And it's interesting to see how this word for power has paired up with different industries over time.
A Google Ngram search shows that movie mogul was the go-to pairing for most of the 1900s.
For example, people used it to talk about the Hollywood studio heads of the Golden Age.
But around 1990, media mogul became more popular.
Which makes sense given the rise of media conglomerates and figures who controlled television, newspapers and eventually, digital media.
The powerful people weren't in control of just movies anymore.
And while I was reading through the OED's entry on mogul, I came across an obsolete meaning I'd never seen before.
From the 1740s through the 1870s, a mogul was a playing card, specifically one stamped with a drawing of the great mogul emperor, to suggest it was a high-quality card.
A manufacturer named Blanchard first used the Great Mogul stamp in 1741, and it became such a popular symbol of quality that other manufacturers started using it too.
By 1842, an article in Bradshaw's journal said, quote, unquote.
And in 1853, a weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens called Household Words said that if a card had no speck or blemish, it was quote laid aside as a mogul unquote.
There was even a lawsuit over it.
Edelman Line cites a 1742 court case Blanchard v Hill, in which Blanchard sought an injunction to stop a competitor from stamping his cards with the great mogul design essentially an 18th century trademark dispute.
Blanchard lost, and after that, any card maker could use the Great Mogul stamp, and many did.
And one more, the OED also records a railroad meaning.
A mogul was a heavy-duty steam engine.
According to the OED, these moguls were first built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia in 1867 and the name appears in print by 1877.
And this meaning does trace back to the powerful person meaning.
The locomotives were named for their strength and pulling power.
So there you have it.
The skiing mogul comes from either a German or a Scandinavian word for a small mound, and it entered English in the mid-1900s along with the growth of recreational skiing.
The powerful person mogul trace back to the Mughal emperors of India.
Themselves descended from the Mongols and it's been in English since the 1650s.
Along the way, the powerful person meaning was also used as branding for high-quality playing cards and as the name for a powerful steam locomotive.
So the next time you hear someone referred to as a media mogul or you watch a skier barrel down a mogul course in the Olympics, You'll know that these two moguls arrived in English by completely different paths one from the snow-covered slopes of German-speaking Europe and the other from the name for one of the wealthiest empires in history.
Do you know when to write a while as one word and a while as two words?
I confess that I often have to look it up, so let's see if I can help you and myself remember in the future.
So, a while as two words describes a time, a noun.
The article a before the word while is a sure sign that you're dealing with a noun.
Notice how, in the following sentence that you could replace a while with another article noun combination, such as a year.
You could say, it's been a while since Squiggly tried Marmite.
And you could say, it's been a year since Squiggly tried Marmite.
Both of those sentences describe a length of time.
A while is more general and a year is more specific, but they're both a length of time.
Actually, when you use a year like that, it's actually also at least somewhat general, because it probably hasn't been exactly a year since Squiggly tried Marmite, but you get the idea.
A while as one word means for a time, and it's an adverb.
Notice in the following sentence how you could replace a while with another adverb, such as quietly.
You could say go play a while, and you could say go play quietly.
You wouldn't say go play a year or go play an hour.
So you don't want the two-word noun version, go play a while.
You want the one-word adverb, go play a while.
Finally, just to make it confusing, if you rephrase go play a while and replace the adverb with a prepositional phrase, you need the noun again, because an adverb can't be the object of the preposition.
So you have go play a while where the adverb is modifying the verb and go play for a while where the article and noun are the object of the preposition for.
The quick and dirty tip is that a while as one word and a while as two words both describe a vague length of time.
But you can use the one word version when you need an adverb and the two word version when you need a noun.
To tell the difference, you can test your sentence with other nouns and adverbs.
If you can replace a while with another article and noun such as an hour or a year, you know you want the two-word version.
If you can replace a while with another adverb, such as quietly, longer or briefly, you know you want the one-word version.
And as is so often the case, English usage isn't simple.
Most sources I checked the Chicago Manual of Style, Garner's Modern English Usage and the AP Stylebook recommend the guidelines I just gave you.
But I found one dissenter.
An American Heritage Dictionary usage note says that the noun phrase a while can be used adverbially so that both go play a while and go play a while are correct.
Also Merriam-Webster says people often break the rules and the use of a while one word as the object of a preposition, as in go play for a while one word is increasing.
I'm sticking with my advice, but I thought you should know that, although it is the most common advice and the safest choice, it's not universal.
Finally, I have a familect from Melissa.
Hey, Mignon.
I have a familect for you.
I was with my niece, who was about five years old or so at the time, and it was a hot summer day and the sun was just about to go down.
And she looks at me and she says, we better go inside for the critters get us.
And I kind of thought about it and I realized she combined the word critters with predators, which made so much sense because the mosquitoes were literally about to come out and consume us.
Thanks, Melissa.
You're right.
That makes good sense.
Those critter predators.
And before we finish, thanks to all our Grammarpalusian supporters.
Last week, they learned how telemark skiing got its name and which word dominates the dictionary.
And they got a Winter Olympics themed mini crossword puzzle.
The best place to sign up so you can get fun extras too this week is patreon.com slash grammar girl.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Maram El-Mageeb, Nat Hoops, Morgan Christensen, Dan Feierabend, Holly Hutchings and Rebecca Sebastian, who prefers the Enneagram to the Zodiac and is an Enneagram 4.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
