Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today we're going to talk about why we use the phrase baker's dozen and how to make words that end in O plural.
I recently encountered the phrase baker's dozen and wondered where it came from.
Well first, a dozen is twelve, and the word goes back to the Latin duodecima, which was formed from the words for two and ten.
So it also meant twelve.
But a baker's dozen is 13.
So what is going on?
Were old-time bakers so generous that they threw in an extra roll so often that if you bought 12 rolls, you'd always get 13.
Well, not exactly.
You might get an extra loaf, but not because of generosity.
In medieval England, bread was a staple food and bakers were subject to strict laws about price and weight.
For example, a law called the Assize of Bread and Ale Act set standards for the weight and quality of both bread and ale.
It was actually the very first British statute that regulated the sale of food.
And bakers who sold underweight loaves faced harsh penalties, including fines, flogging and even time in a pillory.
Different kinds of bread, like whole wheat bread versus a finer bread called wastel, had different standard weights.
And the price of a loaf also fluctuated with the price of wheat.
But since the weight of bread can also vary due to things like moisture loss during baking and cooling, bakers may have sometimes added an extra loaf when they sold them by the dozen, so they wouldn't accidentally shortchange customers and risk punishment.
The practice was especially common when bakers sold to middlemen who would resell the bread.
In this case, the 13th loaf also gave these intermediaries a profit margin.
The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for baker's dozen is from 1596 and the more literal 13 to a dozen shows up in print around the same time, but the practice itself is believed to be older.
The phrase devil's dozen for 13 also exists, and Anatoly Lieberman, writing for the Oxford University Press blog, says it could be because bakers had bad reputations and people referred to them as devils.
But interestingly Lieberman says that quote some Germanic and Romance languages have no special name for 13, while others have.
When such a name exists, the reference is always to things gone wrong or some devilry, unquote.
So he seems to favor the general idea of the number 13 being tied to the devil and leading to 13, of something being referred to as a devil's dozen.
The two ideas could even be connected through popular Elizabethan puppet shows that featured a tug-of-war between the devil and a baker.
Thirteen can also be called a long dozen, a term that arose in the early 1800s, and a printer's dozen, which comes from printers giving 13 copies for every 12 ordered, perhaps to provide an allowance for mistakes, damage or quality checks.
Moving beyond thirteen, another interesting dozen phrase is nineteen to the dozen.
According to the Worldwide Words blog, this one emerged in the 1700s and is used to describe something fast, like fast talking or a dog wagging its tail quickly.
As in, this person or dog is cramming more than a normal amount of something into a dozen.
A Google Ngram search shows that it's more common in British English, and here's a fun example from a 2015 article by Lucy Davis describing the Irish photographer Gareth McConnell.
Quote He's much like this in conversation, frequently self-deprecating easygoing, often cheeky.
He also talks 19 to the dozen weaving punk bands AK-47s Tommy Hilfiger, Susan Sontag and Carl Cox into his conversations as easily as his publishing venture Sorica, his daughter in his longtime battle with drug addiction.
At the end of it all, I find myself wondering what on earth just happened, unquote.
19 seems to be the traditional amount used in the saying, but Worldwide Words reports seeing other numbers too.
Next, you may have heard of 11, referred to as a banker's dozen.
This is a more modern, casual or joking phrase that arose in the late 1800s.
That plays on the stereotype of stingy bankers, shortchanging customers, prioritizing their own interests or just taking out a lot of fees.
So you end up with less money than you expected.
It fits in with the saying that people work banker's hours when they don't work as long as other office workers.
Finally, we have the daily dozen.
This started out as a workout routine with 12 calisthenic exercises, invented in 1919 by a Yale University football coach named Walter Camp, while he was an advisor to the US military during World War I.
Then, during the 1920s, he promoted his exercises on the radio.
And eventually daily dozen, could be used to refer to anyone's exercise regimen, whether it used Camp's 12 exercises or not.
And the meaning broadened even further over time.
So now, it doesn't even have to refer to exercise.
It can refer to any set routine, duties, or tasks.
The term was also used by Dr Michael Greger in his book How Not to Die as the title for a list of 12 foods, such as beans berries, whole grains and so on, that he recommends eating for optimum health.
So that might be the way you've heard Daily Dozen used today, but it got its start as a specific circuit of exercises long ago.
English spelling can be a challenge, to put it mildly.
There are a lot of rules, like I before E except after C, but they all have exceptions.
The words weird and ate have E before I and words like science and species have I before E, even though it comes after C.
Another case where the exceptions seem to outweigh the rule has to do with how you spell the plural forms of nouns ending in O.
For some of them, like radio, you add S.
For others, like tomato, you add ES.
According to Merriam-Webster, the official rule is that you add s when the root word ends in a vowel plus o, as in radio ratio and rodeo, and you add es if the word ends in a consonant plus o, like tomato or potato.
Well, that sounds great, but you can quickly come up with exceptions.
For example, photos ends in a consonant, T, plus O, like tomato, but it takes an S plural, not ES.
Some people have suggested that the exception to the add ES rule, like photos, are all shortened forms of longer words.
This works to an extent.
Photos is short for photographs, combos is short for combinations, and the word rhinos refers to more than one rhinoceros.
But there are also words ending in a consonant plus O that take S rather than ES, plurals that aren't short for anything.
For example, solo or piano, although piano actually did used to be an abbreviated form of the now obsolete word pianoforte.
Others have said that.
Well, maybe when the word ending in O is related to music, it takes an S rather than ES plural.
That covers solo and piano, unless we're talking about solo flights across the Atlantic.
But what about banjo?
Which, unfortunately for those of us trying to figure out spelling rules, can take either an S or ES plural?
And it's not the only word ending in O that can go either way.
There's also zeros cargos halos, tornadoes and torpedoes, all of which can be written with either an S or ES ending.
Still others, weighing in on the S vs ES plural rule, have suggested that maybe the words ending in consonants plus O take S rather than ES plurals.
All come from non-English sources.
That explains piano, which comes from Italian, and rodeo, which comes from Spanish, and also the S plural on espressos, tacos and kimonos.
But languages are always borrowing from each other and it's hard to draw a line between what counts as an English word and what counts as a borrowing.
Technically speaking, tomato and potato were borrowed into English from Spanish, which in turn borrowed the words from languages of indigenous peoples who first introduced the words and the foods themselves to Europeans.
If there ever were a rule governing which words ending in O take which type of plural, that rule has been broken so many times and so many exceptions have been carved out that it looks like we're just going to have to rely on our memories to figure out which words take S and which take ES, and which can take either, depending on your preference.
I'm not sure if it's helpful or hurtful that, in addition to the complexities of English spelling rules, there are cases where it seems like anything goes.
Who cares if you spell banjos with S or ES?
Or for that matter, ketchup is K-E-T-C-H-U-P or C-A-T-S-U-P.
They're all just alternate spellings.
And this isn't a new problem.
Spelling has been difficult and inconsistent in English for a long time.
Even proper names like Shakespeare, used to be able to be spelled any way people wanted to, including one way on one occasion and another way on a different document.
Samuel Johnson attempted to standardize things with his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, but of course not everyone read or obeyed the dictionary's dictates.
And then Noah Webster went and complicated things even further with his American Dictionary of the English Language, where he introduced a series of simplified spellings to differentiate American English from British standards.
But again, not everyone followed the rules and there wasn't always a prescribed standard for every situation.
There are still a surprising number of words with two correct spellings, not even counting the many spelling differences between American English and British English, like tire spelled T-I-R-E versus T-Y-R-E, or theater with an E-R versus R-E ending.
Sometimes the confusion makes me want to just take an axe to the whole system.
But is that an A-X or A-X-E, or either one?
When it comes to the plurals of words that end in O, all we can say is there are some general guidelines like add ES if there's a consonant before the O, But when in doubt, check a dictionary.
That segment was written by Natalie Schilling, a professor emerita of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington DC and who runs a forensic linguistics consulting firm.
You can find her on LinkedIn.
Finally, I have a familect story from Kent.
So one that we have in my family is, George, we're in the wrong pew.
That's because one time we were on an Amtrak cross-country trip and this couple was trying to find their seats and they got in and they looked at their tickets and the woman said George, we're in the wrong pew.
My family overheard that.
Someone did.
And that became a phrase for whenever something just wasn't in the right place.
George, we're in the wrong pew.
Anyway, this is Kent, and this is my familect.
Thanks, Kent.
It's funny how just a short thing you overhear can strike people as so funny or interesting that they use it for the rest of their lives.
I'm sure that couple has no idea they inspired your familect.
Thanks for the call.
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Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Rebecca, Sebastian Nat Hoops, Morgan Christensen, Dan Feyerabend and Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, who wants to take a ceramics class?
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
