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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today, we're going to talk about why kids say they're versing other teams and players and then I have a whibblin' about a thingamajig.
I often get questions about why kids say they're versing other kids.
For example, Ron M. remembers his sons starting to use the phrasing when they became WrestleMania fans and says he even hears professional sportscasters say it.
A listener named Jackie says her kids talk about versing other kids in soccer games, and a follower who goes by Meemaw on Blue Sky described hearing people say, In last night's match, Tigers versed Cubs.
So when I first started getting questions about versing to mean playing years ago, I thought it might be a regionalism, like how people are more likely to say spendy in Oregon than in Florida.
So I surveyed people on the Grammar Girl Facebook page, and what I found instead is that it's an age-related phenomenon.
People say versing everywhere, but they're often kids.
Although it's not unheard of. of among older people, back in 2012, my Facebook followers reported hearing it most often from elementary school kids.
The Oxford English Dictionary says this use is chiefly US, but among my followers, it seemed to be especially common in Australia and New Zealand.
Now, it could just be a statistical blip because I have fewer followers in those countries than in the U.S., But Karen from Eastern Australia wrote, Verse is a very common formulation here, especially among TV sports journalists.
I even saw it on a billboard outside our local football stadium.
Team A versus Team B. If you go to the transcript of this article at quickanddirtytips.com, you can see the map I made from people's responses.
So there are many reports of people hearing kids say they're versing other teams in the 80s and 90s.
In 1984, the New York Times included versing in an article about New Yorkese. defining it as, quote, high school slang, meaning to compete against another school's team, as in we're going to be versing the Brown Bombers next week.
Unquote. Linguist Ben Zimmer pointed me to the oldest example I could find, which is from 1981.
It appears in a comment on the Language Log website and comes from a note in the journal American Speech that appears to be the same kind of message I get.
Someone named Charles Doyle wrote, From more than one speaker recently, I've heard verse used to mean oppose in a contest. as in the Braves versed the Dodgers last night.
Presumably, the verb derives from the preposition versus.
Is it new? Is it widespread? Would it be spelled V-E-R-S or V-E-R-S-E?
So way back in 1981, people were already asking why others were talking about versing other teams.
And it's not exclusive to physical sports.
A listener named Bob says his sister would use it for competitions where to play didn't seem right. isn't talking about versing other kids in a spelling bee.
You wouldn't play someone in a spelling bee.
And it also appears to have strong ties to video games.
A lot of parents who commented seemed to think that their kids made it up, and they didn't realize it was widespread.
And one possibility is that 40-plus years ago, kids did occasionally make it up by mistaking the preposition versus for a verb.
It's actually quite logical for kids to think that if Sue dances with Joe, goes with Sue is dancing with Joe. and if Squiggly sees aardvark, goes with Squiggly is seeing aardvark, that Mrs. Smith's class versus Mr. Javier's class leads to Mrs. Smith's class is versing Mr. Auvier's class.
Versus sounds like a verb to them, not the preposition that it is.
So it's reasonable to think that every once in a while kids did make this mistake and used versing for a while until someone corrected them or they got older and realized it was wrong.
However, anecdotal evidence seems to point to versing spreading more widely through video games that came out in the 90s.
Ben Zimmer noted in a post to linguistlist.org that you could find many comments that used versing to mean playing, on gaming news groups back in the mid-90s.
For example, one gamer offered this advice on a Sony video games list in 1995.
When versing the black car, remember that the first is a warm-up lap.
A couple of my Facebook commenters noted that their kids started saying versing when they started playing Pokemon, and Pokemon was created in the 90s.
The first entry for versing showed up on the Urban Dictionary site in 2004. reads, quote, derived from the common term versus in video games, where choices are either player one or player two, commonly listed as VS period. unquote.
Marty on my Facebook page said her boys use it, end quote.
I tried to correct them, but learned it's gaming lingo, end quote.
So my theory is that either kids were exposed to phrases like A versus B, much more often because of video games, and they started making the verb mistake themselves more often and in groups where it got reinforced,
Or that some of the games that came out in the 90s actually used versing as a verb.
Either way, it spread and became more accepted.
At this point, I'd say that versing still falls into the category of slang.
To me, it seems similar to woot or pwned, which also have roots in gaming.
Older people might not have heard these before, but most kids know what it means.
It has a place in niches like gaming and maybe even sports in some regions.
But it would seem wrong to most people who saw it in USA Today or on CNN.
Next, I'll finish with a few fun extras.
First, versing actually was a verb about poetry before kids started using it this way.
The Oxford English Dictionary has it being used as far back as Old English to mean to compose or make verses.
My favorite example is a sentence from 1856.
He began to verse extemporaneously in her ear.
Second, versing isn't the only gaming term that's made its way into real life.
Two people reported that their kids say pause or pause game when they need a break when they're playing outside.
Finally, I'll leave you with this joke from Janice C. She asked, if kids say versing to mean playing another team, if they play them again, are they reversing?
This next segment is by Ursula Kenia from the University of Liverpool.
Over 50,000 years ago, humans started speaking and we have not shut up since.
Sometimes, though, we struggle to remember the name of an object, a place, or a person we want to talk about.
The technical term for this phenomenon is lethologica.
Well, severe word finding difficulties can be due to serious neurological issues, such as stroke or dementia.
Drawing the occasional temporary blank is very common.
Unsurprisingly, stress doesn't help and it gets worse as we age.
But what can we do if we're coming up empty yet still want to keep the conversation going?
Well, there are different ways of dealing with this problem.
We can hesitate using so-called fillers like um and uh. to buy us some time in the hope that the right word will make a delayed but triumphant appearance.
We can describe what we mean, hoping to still get the message across.
Took me a moment to figure out that the flat things that look like donuts my daughter was talking about were DVDs.
We may even be able to recall certain formal characteristics of the word, like the first letter or sound or how many syllables it has and generously offer these clues to the puzzled listener.
You know, this guy we met last week, I think his name starts with a G?
This is why we also call this the tip of the tongue phenomenon.
We've almost got it, and our brain is doing its best to use all stored bits of information. for example, on the words pronunciation and meaning, to come up with something useful to say, even if it isn't the correct word itself.
Sometimes, this results in us making up words on the spot, referred to within linguistics as spontaneous or ad hoc coinages.
You may not find them in the dictionary, but they usually still make sense in context. young children already come up with them in an attempt to put into useful practice what they've already learned about language. like this six-year-old referring to a woman's shampoo bottle as a lady thing in a study on language play.
My favorite example in this category, though, is a tweet about a German customer in a Welsh pub who couldn't recall the word cutlery and politely asked for Food weapons.
Now, last but certainly not least, we may use ready-made placeholders like thingamajig, whatchamacallit for an object, or what's-his-name for a person.
Apparently, the struggle to find the right word is real and has been for some time, because the Oxford English Dictionary has its own category for these terms, labeled thing or person whose name is forgotten or unknown.
It includes 64 entries, and some records go back as far as the early Middle English period, 1100 to 1300.
Not all of them are still used today. The last attested use for the strangely evocative Wiblin was 1652, for example. and Juggumbob is marked as obsolete.
Others like Gizmo or Duda are still going strong, though, and you can even buy Whatchamacallits and Whoosiewatsits.
They are chocolate bars made by Hershey's.
There are threads on Reddit dedicated to collecting placeholder words in English and from around the world.
They're worth exploring with gems such as Doomafitchie, the Dutch Huppeldepop, and the German Dingsdebumsde.
So the next time you're using whatchamacallit, appreciate it as your brain is doing its best.
And by the way, do you still remember the technical term for failing to recall the right word I introduced at the start of this piece?
Yes. Congratulations. But no. Well, you and your brain, you know how to handle this.
That segment was by Ursula Kania, a senior lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Liverpool.
It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
Finally, I have a familect story from Chris from the Amateur Traveler podcast.
Hey, Mignon. It's Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler.
When you talked about familex, I was reminded of a story from college where one of my roommates was relaying a story of how he was walking through New York City at night and there was this tall statuesque woman who was walking down the street And she had a cape on and she was singing and he was thinking, well, she's not going to get mugged because she's a character.
And one of my other roommates... had this very quizzical look on his face, and he said suddenly, oh, I thought you meant a chicken.
Well, his father had been in the grocery business, and to him, the word capon got translated as chicken.
And so now that group of friends, if we're ever walking through a dark street at night, might yell out, I've got a chicken.
Thanks, Chris. I confess to subscribing to this theory.
When I occasionally had to walk by myself at night in college, I would absolutely behave erratically hoping it would make would-be attackers think twice.
Maybe carrying a chicken would work too.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family... leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp.
Be sure to call from a nice quiet place.
And if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Dan Feierabend in audio, Morgan Christensen in advertising, Nat Hoops in marketing, and Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts. who learned the country girl stomp line dance last week.
And 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
