Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today we're going to talk about British and American differences between math and maths and in the hospital versus in hospital.
And then we'll talk about the term spendthrift.
Today we're going to answer two related listener questions.
First, Erin asked whether we have ever done a tip about maths versus math.
I say I like math.
Erin wrote, but I increasingly see more people saying I like maths with an S.
Is it regional?
And another listener asked why she hears some people say in the hospital and others in hospital.
In regard to the first question, there's a short answer and a long one.
The short answer is that this is a regional difference between the US and the UK.
In the US, we tend to talk about math, and in the UK, people talk about maths.
Here's why.
Let's start by establishing that both these words are short for mathematics, the science of numbers and their operations.
The word comes from the ancient Greek, mathematikos.
Its root means to learn.
As an aside, if you've ever wondered why someone who seems to know everything is called a polymath, it's because the math part of polymath ultimately goes back to the same root.
So a polymath is simply someone who's learned a lot.
Now, in the U.S., mathematics was first shortened to math in the mid-1800s.
The Journal of the American Education Society from 1829, for example, lists math, ret and hist short for mathematics, rhetoric and history as sophomore classes.
In 1899 Jack London wrote a letter describing his soon-to-be wife Bess Mattern, as quote well up in the higher math but not in general culture unquote.
His attitude may hint at why their marriage lasted five short years and ended in a contentious divorce.
In the UK, around the same time, a different abbreviation was taking hold.
Citations from 1911 onward show maths being used as the standard term in magazines, letters and books, and that's the term that's still used today.
If you ask someone why they say maths instead of math, they might say it's because mathematics has an S on the end.
Or they may give what seems like another logical answer.
It's because the word mathematics is plural.
See the S on the end?
The problem is, mathematics isn't plural.
It's singular.
It describes a thing, a field of study, not many things.
So the S on the end doesn't indicate plurality.
Rather, it means something totally different.
It functions as a noun marker, turning the adjective mathematic into the noun mathematics.
The letter S does the same thing when it turns the adjective acoustic into acoustics, pediatric into pediatrics and politic into politics.
This use of the letter S isn't very common in English, so it's no surprise that people took the S in mathematics as a marker that the word was plural.
So is the use of maths wrong in the U.S.?
Nah, it just sounds a little out of place.
You could argue that since it's not what we say in the US, or since we usually don't include letters at the end of words when we're abbreviating, or since if people are thinking of it as plural maths developed from an incorrect interpretation of linguistics, it should be banished.
But that's not going to happen.
The word has been increasing in use in the United States dramatically since about the year 2000 and shows no sign of stopping.
That's simply what people say in the UK and in other countries influenced by the UK.
And as long as people around the world keep watching the great British baking show yay, Doctor Who and EastEnders it's probably going to keep spreading.
And here's the hospital question from Kathy that turns out to be related.
Hey, this is Kathy from Maryland.
I have a question for you.
So when I read a novel that's written in England, they would refer to being in hospital.
Americans refer to it as being in the hospital.
Why do British people say in hospital and Americans say in the hospital?
Kathy is right.
People in the UK say they are in hospital, and people in the US say they are in the hospital.
There doesn't seem to be any logical reason why we use the word the here.
It's rarely added for similar terms.
For example, if you were attending college, you wouldn't say you were in the college.
You'd say you were in college.
And if you ended up on the wrong side of the law, you wouldn't say you were in the prison.
You'd say you were in prison.
There are certain instances, though, when you would use the word the.
When we leave off the the, we're indicating that we have a certain ongoing relationship with these institutions.
We're a student at college, for example, or an inmate in prison.
Since people in Britain and America have different health care systems, maybe the British feel that they have more of a relationship with their hospitals than we do in America.
But that's just a wild guess.
We do sometimes use the word the with similar words like college or prison, though.
And when we do, we're usually saying something different.
We're specifying a place.
For example, you could say that you're visiting the college your mom attended or that the electricity was out in the prison nearby.
To wrap up, maths versus math and in-hospital versus in the hospital are regional differences between UK and US English.
There's no established reason these differences developed, at least none that we can pinpoint for sure.
Some things we'll just never know, even if we try to do the maths.
That segment was written by Samantha Enslin, who runs Dragonfly Editorial.
You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
Grammar Girl listener Kate Morical Town wrote in with this question.
I learned that the word spendthrift confuses a lot of my well-educated friends and family.
They thought that since it contains thrift, it means someone who's good with money.
Any idea why this word is apparently self-contradictory?
Well, thanks for the fun question, Kate.
If spend means to use up money and thrift means to save it, then surely a spendthrift is what a cautious spender, a clever budgeter.
Well, nope, it's none of the above.
A spendthrift is someone who spends money recklessly.
In other words, the thrift in spendthrift is doing some serious historical cosplay.
Spendthrift is one of those words that sounds like it should mean the exact opposite of what it actually means.
Let's take a closer look at this wonderful little word and meet some of its weird and whimsical cousins from centuries past.
The reason spendthrift confuses us is that the meaning of the word thrift has changed over time.
Today, thrift usually means frugality, wise spending, smart saving.
We might call someone thrifty if they're always finding the best deals.
But when spendthrift first entered the English language in the 1500s, thrift had a broader meaning.
It came from the verb thrive and originally meant prosperity or wealth, the stuff you had because you were thriving.
So put the parts together.
Spend plus thrift equals someone who spends their prosperity.
A spendthrift was someone who squandered their fortune, not someone good with money.
It made perfect sense back then and the word stuck, even as thrift narrowed its meaning over the centuries.
Today, that evolution makes spendthrift sound like a word having an identity crisis.
But it's really just carrying around a piece of its historical baggage, kind of like a thrift store jacket with an old bookmark in the pocket.
Spendthrift wasn't the only thrift compound hanging around English in the 16th and 17th centuries either.
Our ancestors loved a good made-up insult, especially when it involved money.
Here are some of the wonderfully obscure thrift-related words that once colored the language and that might just deserve a comeback.
First, there's dingthrift.
This word is a banger, literally.
A dingthrift is someone who smashes through their wealth.
The ding comes from an old verb meaning to knock or drive away.
So a dingthrift is someone who knocks away their thrift a reckless spender, much like a spendthrift.
First spotted in the mid-1500s.
It's a word that deserves to be yelled across the tavern at a friend who just bought the third round of drinks.
And now we flip to the opposite extreme.
A scrape thrift is a miser, someone who scrapes and scrounges every last coin and hoards it.
Imagine Ebenezer Scrooge counting his pennies by candlelight.
And here's a little bonus trivia.
Scrape penny and nip farthing were real words, too, for similarly stingy folk.
Then we have want-thrift.
We usually link want with desire—when you want something, you desire or crave it.
But want can also be a transitive verb meaning to lack.
Think of the line from the movie The Knight's Tale where the evil knight Adhemar tells the hero William, you have been weighed, you have been measured and you have been found wanting meaning lacking—a line that actually goes back to the book of Daniel in the Bible.
So a want thrift is literally a lack of thrift.
This word was used in Scotland as far back as the 1500s, sometimes as a general noun for wastefulness and sometimes to describe a person who was bad with money.
And now for something a little more wholesome.
Handy thrift referred to the earnings from manual labor, basically the money you made with your own two hands.
It's not about spending or saving, but earning.
It showed up in the late 1500s and likely had more traction in working class and Scottish circles.
So while spend thrifts were throwing away their fortunes, the handy thrifts were out there earning theirs the honest way.
English doesn't form compound insults the way it used to, with the exception of some excellent modern swear hybrids we won't talk about here.
But these thrift compounds tell us something fun about how language used to work.
You'd take a behavior like digging your savings or scraping it together and stick it onto thrift like verbal Lego blocks and just like that you had a new character type.
Today, only spendthrift survives in common usage, and it's still pulling double duty, giving us a vivid image of someone blowing through their wealth, while quietly reminding us that thrift once meant the wealth you could lose.
So the next time someone tries to use spendthrift to mean a money-savvy saver, you can gently steer them toward the truth and maybe even toss in a dingthrift or scrapethrift for good measure.
That segment was written by Karen Lundy, a career writer and editor.
These days, she designs websites for solo business owners who care about both words and visuals.
Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.
And you know what?
This week, I am plum out of familects.
I need your stories if we're going to keep doing this segment.
So give me a call at the voicemail line with the story of a word or phrase your family uses just among yourselves.
You can tell me about your friend elects to that fun inside language you only use with your friends.
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Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Dan Feyerabend in audio, Morgan Christensen in advertising, Nat Hoops and Rebecca Sebastian in marketing and Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, who likes to go out to lunch more than dinner.
You know, and I do too.
It's a nice way to break up the day.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip of day book, The Grammar Daily.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
