Grammar Girl here.
I'm Inyan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today, in honor of Halloween, we're going to talk about words for fear.
And then we'll look at why wherefore doesn't mean what many people think it means.
But before we start I want to respond to a thoughtful comment from a listener named Nathan about the section in the blue idioms piece last week where we described some medical conditions that make people's skin turn blue.
We then ended that part saying, let's hope these conditions become even more rare.
Well, to me it was kind of a throwaway line to transition to the next section, which was about the word blue, meaning rare.
But Nathan pointed out that since the only symptom we described was skin color, it felt pretty icky.
Like we were saying we wanted there to be fewer people with different skin colors.
And it's a completely valid point.
I didn't think of it that way.
And I certainly didn't mean it that way.
And I'm sorry that it could have been interpreted that way.
Thanks for the message, Nathan.
Picture this.
Juliet stands on her balcony dramatically crying out to the night Romeo Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
And what do most people think she's asking?
Where are you, Romeo?
But plot twist, wherefore actually means why, not where.
Juliet isn't playing hide and seek with her beloved.
Instead, she's having an existential crisis, basically asking, why do you have to be Romeo Montague?
Why couldn't you be literally anyone else with a different last name?
This classic mix-up reveals a truth about Shakespeare.
His words are linguistic time travelers that have been playing tricks on modern readers for more than 400 years.
And wherefore is just the beginning of this word-based mischief.
And wherefore confusion happens because our brains automatically connect it to where.
After all, they look like cousins, right?
But this word is actually what linguists call a false friend, a term that sounds like it should mean one thing, but actually means something completely different.
We covered false friends in episode 1041 if you want to learn more.
But here's another word that sends modern readers down the wrong path.
The word marry, spelled M-A-R-R-Y.
When you see it in Shakespeare, your brain probably jumps to weddings and I do moments.
But much of the time, Shakespeare uses marry as an interjection, not a verb.
Originally an oath meaning by the Virgin Mary.
By Shakespeare's time it had become a way to say indeed, or to express surprise.
Take this line from Henry IV.
The young lion repents, Mary not in ashes and sackcloth.
While the speaker isn't talking about anyone getting married, they're basically saying indeed, the young lion repents, but not dramatically so.
Shakespeare used Mary to express surprise, give emphasis to words, or respond to questions.
Think of it as the Elizabethan equivalent of well, indeed, or you bet.
And why is Mary spelled with two R's when the original reference comes from the name?
Mary spelled with one.
Well, it's a minced oath, a softened or altered form of swearing by the Virgin Mary that removes the common name and replaces it with something less recognizable.
Gosh, heck, and dang are also examples of minced oaths.
And here are a few more linguistic twists from Shakespeare's plays.
Soft sounds like it should describe something fluffy or gentle.
But in Shakespeare's world, soft was an exclamation meaning hold, be quiet, or wait a minute.
In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo saying, "'Soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' was actually him exclaiming, "'Wait, what light is that shining through the window over there?'
And that question itself is metaphorical because that light Romeo's talking about is Juliet herself.
And here's another one.
Fair seems pretty straightforward, until you realize.
Shakespeare often used it where we would say beautiful.
A fair maiden isn't necessarily pale, she's simply attractive.
Conceited today suggests someone who's full of themselves, but in Shakespeare's time, conceit most often meant an idea, imagination or witty invention, rather than arrogance.
So if someone was described as having good conceit, it meant they had clever thoughts, quick imagination or mental ingenuity.
For example, in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says conceit more rich in matter than in words.
Brags of his substance, not of ornament.
Here, conceit means thought or imagination, not pride.
The word conceited could occasionally mean imaginative or full of fanciful ideas, but more often it meant something like having a concept or idea in mind.
In modern terms.
Juliet was saying something more like my thoughts are deeper than my words can show.
What matters is the substance, not the fancy packaging.
And here's one more.
Today, we think of shift in terms of changing gears or work schedules.
But in Shakespeare's time, a shift was a clever contrivance or a way of making do.
From that meaning came shiftless, which originally described someone who lacked resourcefulness or ingenuity.
Over the centuries, the sense narrowed into today's meaning, which is lazy or lacking ambition.
Language evolution is like a massive, centuries-long game of telephone.
Words start with one meaning, get passed through generations of speakers and emerge with completely different jobs.
Shakespeare's plays capture English at a particular moment in this evolution close enough to modern English that we think we understand it, but different enough to create these delightful misunderstandings.
Understanding that you're dealing with these word tricks can take reading Shakespeare from a frustrating puzzle to an exciting detective game.
Every merry soft and wherefore becomes a clue about how people actually spoke and thought in Elizabethan England.
The real magic happens when you crack these codes.
Suddenly, Shakespeare's characters become more human, their jokes get funnier and their emotions hit deeper.
Those sneaky words aren't trying to confuse you.
They're inviting you into a linguistic adventure that spans centuries.
After all, what's more romantic than finally understanding what Juliet was really asking all along?
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.
It's the time of year for pumpkin spice lattes, carved pumpkins, and ghosts and ghouls.
So today we're gonna look at words for the feelings you might get walking through a spooky cemetery or a haunted house.
Let's start with the basics, fear.
In Old English, fear was danger rather than something you felt.
Fear was about sudden peril or attack, such as the hazards travelers faced on dangerous roads.
It was related to the Old Saxon word for ambush and the Old Norse word for misfortune or plague.
By the 1100s it had come to describe the feeling you get when you're in such a situation, although the Oxford English Dictionary says it was reserved for violent extremes.
So I imagine it wouldn't have described the feeling of unease on a dark, lonely road, but would have described the feeling in the middle of an attack by marauders.
EtymOnline ties the word fear to a Proto-Indo-European idea of risk and trying, which also shows up in words like peril experience, experiment and pirate.
There's another very old root with the same spelling.
That can mean to pass through or to travel through.
But sources don't agree on whether it's related to the root that gives us fear.
Still, some people say that, etymologically speaking, fear is an experience, something you go through.
Terror is one of the words that stepped up to fill that idea of the violent, extreme distress that used to be covered by the word fear.
It's a newer word than fear, coming into English from both Old French and Classical Latin in the late 1400s, according to the OED.
And it was a feeling right from the beginning.
Extreme fear that overwhelms thought.
If you see a hand slowly claw its way out of a fresh grave and your mind goes blank, that's terror.
If extreme fear overwhelms not just your thoughts but your ability to move, you're petrified, which literally means turned to stone from Latin petra meaning rock.
The word originally referred to things in the natural world that had been turned to stone, but the metaphorical meaning related to fear emerged in English in the 1700s.
Fright is similar to terror, but technically more sudden.
In Old English it referred to general fear, but in the 1300s it came to mean sudden fear, violent terror or alarm.
If your friend jumps out from behind a grave and scares you, that's a fright.
And if you're in poor health, you could actually die of fright.
In fact, haunted houses in the United States often have warnings telling people not to enter if they have heart conditions, asthma or other kinds of medical problems.
You could first describe a person as scared in English in the 1500s, according to Edam Online, although the verb goes back much further.
The word came from the Old Norse skira with that sk beginning.
We've talked about a couple of times recently as being a hint that a word comes from Old Norse, as in sky skin, skip and skirt.
I tend to think of being scared as being less intense than being terrified or petrified, and not as sudden a feeling as being frightened.
Like I might feel scared walking through a dark cemetery.
But I also might be scared of getting pumpkin guts on the white sweater I borrowed from my mom.
Afraid started life in English in the 1300s as a past participle.
It was the verb afray, A-F-F-R-A-Y, plus E-D, and it meant to be alarmed or frightened.
It goes back to vulgar Latin that meant to take out of peace.
So when you're afraid, etymologically, your peace is disturbed.
It's a steady general purpose label for being in a state of fear.
If the haunted house is too much for your grade schooler and you want to bail through a side exit, you can just say we need to leave.
He's afraid.
Afraid is also an unusual adjective because it almost never comes before a noun.
In grammar speak, you'd say it's usually a predicate.
For example, think of the schoolhouse rock song about adjectives.
We sang, "'He was a hairy bear, he was a scary bear,' and we described him with adjectives."
Well, hairy and scary are adjectives just like afraid, but we wouldn't say he was an afraid bear.
It only sounds right to say the bear was afraid, using afraid in the predicate position after a linking verb.
So afraid is weird that way, but it's not completely alone.
Asleep and alive are similar.
You'd say the bear is asleep or the bear is alive, but it would sound wrong to talk about the asleep bear or the alive bear.
And, as far as I can tell, it's just a coincidence that those three words all start with the letter A.
If you are horrified by what you see in the haunted house, you might get goosebumps or the hairs on the back of your neck might stand up.
The word horror goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root that meant to bristle, and horror was originally a physical thing, something that was rough, and later the shivering or shaking you get when you're sick.
For example, in this 1743 quote in the OED from a book about surgery quote it generally seizes the patient with a horror or shivering unquote.
It had a lovely poetic use, too, about rippling, as in this citation from 1765.
A gentle horror glides over the sea's smooth surface.
Today.
Merriam-Webster describes horror as a painful and intense fear, dread or dismay and intense aversion or repugnance.
And if you've ever heard something referred to as a chamber of horrors, that phrase goes back to Madame Tussauds' wax museum, which had a famous room by that name with wax figures of criminals.
For example, the OED has a citation from Amy Carlton, a Victorian book for young adults, that says I want to see the chamber of horrors.
It's full of wax models of the most wicked people that ever lived.
Madame Tussauds wasn't what we think of today as a commercial haunted house, but her chamber of horrors and her earlier exhibition of death masks and decapitated wax figures from the French Revolution were a macabre precursor to what's often called the first haunted house, the Orton and Spooner Ghost House, built for a British fairground in 1915.
That was a walkthrough with scary costumed actors, spooky lighting and steam-powered effects like air jets and moving floors.
So, whether you're brave enough to walk through a chamber of horrors or prefer to stay home with a pumpkin spice latte, now you know more about the words you can use to describe your emotions this Halloween.
Finally, I have a familect story.
I'm Gary here from Pittsburgh.
My story is a friend-elect story.
A group of us teach together.
A group of guys have been teaching together for years.
And a few years ago, one of our buddies was moving and he asked if we'd come over and help him.
Of course, we said, not a problem.
We'd be happy to.
And he said, don't worry.
It's not going to be too much heavy lifting.
You know, it'd be...
It'll be pretty easy, more of a social event than anything.
So we showed up and expected to fill maybe a truck and enjoy the rest of the day kind of hanging out.
Well, when we got to his house, he had his couch, his love seat, his washer, his dryer, his refrigerator that he was taking with him, as well as just a crazy amount of boxes still sitting in all of his rooms.
And we were like, a social event, huh?
So what we thought would be a truckload or less turned into about six or seven truckloads and a very long day.
Not that we minded it, but to this day we still harass him about the fact that how badly he misjudged what needed to be moved that day.
So, for instance, if we have leftover mashed potatoes at dinner and I grab too small of a bowl and I can't fit all the potatoes into that bowl, I go oh man, I pulled a tom on this one.
So anytime anything spatially doesn't fit into something else and we misjudge it, we call it a Tom.
Love the show.
Keep doing what you're doing.
We appreciate you.
Take care.
Oh, thank you, Gary.
You sound like a good friend moving all that heavy stuff for Tom.
If you want to share the story of your familect a special word or phrase you use with your family or a friend elect, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
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Thanks, Dan.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip of day book, The Grammar Daily.
That, oh my gosh, it's already time to start thinking about this makes a great holiday gift.
And that's all.
Thanks for listening.
