Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today, we're going to talk about dime idioms and syllable acronyms.
A grammarpalusian named David sent me down a shiny little rabbit hole, or maybe I should say a coin slot with this one.
He wrote in about the idiom to turn on a dime, or sometimes to turn on a dime and give you back change.
David wrote...
These days it's used mostly in reference to someone rapidly changing their mind, often to diametrically oppose what they previously said.
In origin it seems to have been 1930s powerboat advertising to emphasize the maneuverability of high-powered boats, and it later got picked up by car enthusiasts.
The current usage seems more recent, 21st century.
At least, that's what turns up in Google Ngram searches.
So, thanks to David, today we're talking about dime idioms, some that have been around for more than a century, others that still jingle in modern speech and will even bust a little assumption.
You might have heard about the word dime itself.
Let's start with David's question and go back even farther than those sleek 1930s powerboats.
Because although the powerboat ad hypothesis is pretty widespread, it turns out that in American English turn on a dime was already kicking around by the 1890s.
And before that, horse trainers were bragging that their mounts could turn on a five-cent piece.
Across the Atlantic, British riders had a similar turn of phrase in the late 1800s.
Turn on a sixpence, usually reserved for polo ponies or cavalry horses that could spin sharply in a tight space.
The image was the same, a creature pivoting on the space of a tiny coin.
And by the time motorboats and cars came along, the metaphor was ready-made for anything with impressive maneuverability.
Those 1930s powerboat ads David mentioned certainly helped cement the phrase in the public mind, though painting pictures of nimble craft whipping around on a sparkling lake.
Car lovers soon adopted it for agile sports cars, and pilots even used it for quick-turning aircraft.
But the coin-turn idiom didn't stay parked in the garage.
Over time, turn on a dime rolled into figurative territory.
These days, you might use it for anyone who can change their mind faster than you can say wait, weren't you just toddlers cats, politicians or anyone else whose direction can spin faster than a well-trained polo pony?
Stop on a dime.
The braking cousin of turn on a dime probably grew from the same mechanical age excitement.
A dime is small, so stopping on one suggests precision, the kind you want from your brakes.
By the early 1920s, car ads were breaking stops on a dime.
It's still used in the literal sense for sharp halts, but it works just as well for metaphorical ones too.
Quitting a habit, ending a meeting, or stopping a bad idea before it leaves the group chat.
Now, for one that sounds like someone's been sitting on a very awkward spot for too long.
Get off the dime is American slang from the early to mid-20th century, meaning quit stalling and get moving.
Sports writers used it for players stuck in their starting stance.
Military officers used it for troops who needed to start advancing already.
The dime here is the tiny spot you're glued to and the urgent need to get moving.
And moving on, let's dip into the bargain bin of idioms and look at a dime a dozen.
In the early 1900s American markets actually sold goods eggs peaches, even cigars at 12 for 10 cents.
A newspaper ad might offer pencils a dime a dozen.
It quickly took on a figurative meaning, something so common it's practically worthless.
You might say typos on the internet or a dime, a dozen, although I hope your phone's predictive text doesn't do you dirty quite that often.
And while we're talking about retail, before dollar stores and same-day shipping, we had the five and dime, a variety store where many items cost just five or ten cents.
Frank Woolworth built an empire on them in the late 1800s, and even when inflation made the name wildly optimistic, it stuck.
Today, dime store might be used to evoke affectionate nostalgia, all creaky floors and candy jars.
Or as a mild insult, as in, oh, that's just a dime store novel.
The tone is all in the delivery.
And then there's the phrase to drop a dime on someone.
In the mid-20th century, local payphone calls cost 10 cents.
To drop a dime was to make a call, often to the police.
So to drop a dime on someone meant to inform on them.
And the term stuck even after calls went up to a quarter, as common sayings are wont to do.
Now you can drop a dime figuratively without touching a coin or even knowing what a rotary phone is.
And if you just googled rotary phone, I promise I'm not mad.
It's just a little older than you are.
Now, if you've ever been slowly drained by small, relentless charges service fees, processing fees, mandatory convenience fees you've been nickled and dimed.
The phrase shows up in mid-20th century complaints about petty financial demands.
Sometimes we use it in a metaphorical sense, too.
Think of phrases like I get nickled and dimed with so many little tasks that I can't get my bigger projects done.
And now for that trivia twist I promised.
The word dime is actually older than the coin.
The U.S.
Mint didn't release the first ten-cent piece until 1796, but English speakers had been using the word for centuries before that.
It came from the old French disma, meaning tenth part or tithe.
It had multiple uses but was commonly used to describe a tithe paid to the church.
The French word goes back to the Latin word decima, and that Latin D-E-C root is the same one you hear in decimal, the system based on tens.
So when the new American coin needed a name, dime was already sitting there in the language just waiting to be minted.
So from sharp turns and sudden stops to cheap goods and reluctant snitches, dime has bought its way into English idiom in more ways than one.
Next time you hear someone get off the dime or brag that their new ride can turn on a dime, you'll know they're spending some very old language currency, figuratively speaking, of course.
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.
Fall is finally here, and here in the United States, September or October are when many of the nation's high schools and colleges have their homecoming tradition.
For those of you who don't live in the United States or Canada, homecoming is a week during which a school's former students come back for a visit, and it usually features a football game, a dance and various other school spirit-related activities.
In the last few years, the word homecoming has joined the ranks of words that have given rise to an unusual type of acronym, which is formed by taking not just the first letter of each word in a name, but its initial consonant and first vowel.
I'll call them syllable acronyms.
For homecoming, if you haven't already guessed, it's ho-co.
You can go to TikTok right now.
Click on the ho-co hashtag and find video after video showing the increasingly elaborate ways teenagers will ask someone to be their date for the homecoming dance, and people showing off their homecoming dresses.
According to a 2005 post on Language Log by Ben Zimmer, syllable acronyms started cropping up at the beginning of the 20th century.
In other words, they've been around as long as the majority of our more typical initial letter acronyms.
According to Zimmer, the first syllable acronym was none other than the company name Nabisco, shortened from National Biscuit Company.
So many other acronyms followed that used the syllable CO to stand for company, such as Texaco and Sunoco, that to this day, the most popular pattern for syllable acronyms is a rhyme involving the long O, such as Soho, a New York neighborhood that is south of Houston Street.
Hojo, the hotel chain Howard Johnson or, when I was growing up, the musician Howard Jones who sang 'Things can only get better and don't try to live your life in one day'.
Flo Jo, the American Olympic track and field star Florence Griffith Joyner, and now Hoko.
Incidentally, I've learned that Hoko can also refer to Howard County, a county in Maryland between Baltimore and Washington DC.
There were a lot of Howard County HOCO posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, but if you go back far enough, you can see that the first post using HOCO to refer to homecoming was posted in December 2011.
If you're a high schooler, college student or graduate returning to your alma mater.
I hope you have a fabulous HOCO this year.
That segment was written by Neil Whitman, an independent writer and consultant specializing in language and grammar, and a member of the Reynoldsburg Ohio school board.
You can search for him by name on Facebook or find him on his blog at literalminded.wordpress.com.
Finally, I have a familect from Gabby.
Hi, Mignon.
This is Gabby.
I wanted to share a friend-elect kind of a story with you.
So basically, I have this group of friends that I have grown.
We've grown very close with each other.
And about five years ago, I went to this music festival called Night in the Country in Nevada.
It's a country music festival where you camp and stuff.
And I went with just a few of my friends.
And we all kind of brought our other friends to that the rest of the group hadn't met yet.
And on this trip, one of our friends' friends that got brought that we met for the first time was this guy named Trevor.
And mind you, Trevor is a very interesting person.
I don't really know how to explain it.
He's just a trippy guy.
He's funny without meaning to be funny.
He's also like absurdly tall, like almost seven feet.
He's just, we call him a tree.
But anyway, so mind you, we're all pretty intoxicated and stuff on this trip.
And this is the first time we met him.
And we noticed that he was really good at just disappearing, kind of like wandering off on his own.
In kind of like a random way though, like he would be right behind us and then we would look behind our shoulder again just seconds later and he would be nowhere to be seen.
And mind you, again, he is a tree of a person.
And so you know like you think you'd be able to see him in a crowd or something you know, and he would be gone for like long durations of time too.
So we would kind of like venture off and do other things because, you know, he's a grown person.
He will figure it out, I'm sure.
I think, you know, I don't know.
And so anyway, we like would do our other things and stuff.
And all of a sudden, like we would look behind our shoulder and Trevor would just be standing right there with like a big old goofy grin.
And it was kind of like almost creepy in a way, because it was like you know, like it was like he was never not there.
And he continued to do this like on the trip all the time.
And we like teased him for it there and stuff, but we kind of like brushed it off, whatever.
And then Like I said, we all became like a very tight knit group after that.
So we started doing a lot more together, going to a lot more concerts and traveling together, so on and so forth.
And everywhere we went, no matter where we were, who we were, with what we were doing, whether we were intoxicated or not, he would continue to do this.
He was just like the master of disappearing and reappearing like super abruptly and And it was just so funny.
And so now like within our group of friends, we have developed this phrase that we all use.
And basically it's like whenever somebody anybody in our group or anybody in general just kind of wanders off without warning us or telling anybody that they're going off and kind of does their own thing for a while and then returns out of the blue.
We call it pulling a Trevor and it does happen.
And we do use the phrase, kind of often, honestly.
And it's extended even farther out than just our friend group because, you know, like a game of telephone, we tell the story and it just gets used.
And yeah, so we call it pulling a Trevor.
Thank you, Grammar Girl.
Thanks, Gabby.
That's so funny.
And it definitely falls into this category of familects or friendelects that I hear, where there's essentially a person who is famous to just your family or just your friends or something weird or funny or annoying that they do.
And then their name gets repurposed in a broader sense to describe that thing.
It's so fun.
Anyway, thanks for the call.
We'll see you next time.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Morgan Christensen in advertising, Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, Rebecca Sebastian and Nat Hoops in marketing and Dan Feierabend in audio, who just finished deep cleaning his work.
Computer keyboard and mouse.
So much dust, he says.
And as I'm looking down, I'm thinking, I should probably do that too.
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.
Thank you.
