. Book reviews, like books themselves, come in all shapes and sizes. There are the sometimes inflated rah-rahs on Amazon or Goodreads, or short reviews in Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Choice. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
I don’t recall the first time I noticed the pronunciation of houses as HOWsiz with a voiceless s sound rather than HOWziz with a voiced z. But I remember thinking: “That’s weird. I wonder if houses is becoming regularized. Historically, the word is one of those nouns whose singular and plural stems alternate between voiceless and voiceled sounds. The most prominent examples of such alternations involve f and v, as in singular/plural pairs like wife and wives, life and lives, leaf and leaves, etc.
With the f/v alternation, the sound change is reflected as a spelling change, but not so with house and houses. The pair house/houses is the only example of an s/z alteration between the singular and the plural, though there are other s/z alternations in English, like louse and lousy, lost and lose, useful and use, et. cetera.
I checked to see what dictionaries had to say about house and houses. The online Merriam Webster Dictionary gives the pronunciation ˈhau̇-zəz also -səz, where the “also” indicates a less common pronunciation. The online American Heritage Dictionary (based on the 2011 5th edition) gives both houʹ zĭz and houʹ sĭz for the plural, also recognizing the new pronunciation.
The Oxford English Dictionary, however, gives British English /ˈhaʊzᵻz/ and U.S. English /ˈhaʊzəz/, both with the z sound, and just differing in the height of the final vowel. Webster’s Third (from 1963) gives hau̇z͘ ə̇z and flags hau̇s ə̇z as “chiefly substandard.” Going back a few decades, the 1934 Webster’s Second only gives the z pronunciations.
The difference in transcriptions systems notwithstanding, what all of this suggests is that in the mid-twentieth century the HOWsiz variant was common enough to be noticed but had not yet been sanctioned by elite pronouncers. Webster’s Second ignored it, Webster Third shakes a finger at it, and today’s Merriam.com is fine with either variant.
So what happened? Most other nouns ending in –se don’t change their pronunciation in the plural (horse, case, blouse, course, excuse, lease, base, purse, vise, etc.), so perhaps houses is undergoing some analogical leveling (as we linguists call this regularization). Even though house is a fairly common word, and such words tend to preserve their irregularity, houses has finally come around. Reinforcing the contrast with the verb house, which ends in a z-sound, could also be a factor. And what about the possessive forms, like that house’s color? For me, the first s of house’s is voiceless and most dictionaries don’t address the issue. (Webster’s Third, curiously enough, lists both options for the possessive.)
It’s worth noting too that house is not the only voiceless/voiced alternation that is not reflected in spelling. It’s just the only one with an s. A smallish number of words ending in th also show alternation between singular voiceless th (as in thin) and plural voiced th (as in then): mouth and mouths,baths and baths,wreathe and wreathes often show alternation of the two variants ofth.
In a 2018 article in the journal Language Variation and Change, titled “Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð∼θ]s of change,” linguist
Laurel MacKenzie of New York University reported on the frequencies of devoicing in more than 2,000 tokens of words in spoken corpora. MacKenzie looked at a number of factors, such as the age and gender of the speaker, the surrounding sounds and morphemes, and more. She found that houses was pronounced with a stem-final s about 50% of the time, with younger speakers leading the way: the voiced z pronunciation was present for about 65% of speakers born in the 1940s but dropped to a rate of 38% among speakers born in the 1980s. The voiceless/voiced alternation of th is also being lost. And as one might expect, the words where spelling reinforces the alternation (like knife and knives) are have better retention of the voiceless/voiced alternation.
When I first noticed the HOWsiz pronunciation, it was already pretty robust. I may not switch my pronunciation of houses, but I’m going to be listening more carefully to these plurals.
The blog is back on track, and I’ll begin where I left off in August. I am now reading two books on the history and etymology of limerick by Mr. Bob Turvey. He spent fortyyears researching the subject, and I’ll devote a special post to his work, but at the moment, I can offer only “point counter point”: this short essay is about how worthwhile conclusions come as a reward for an unpredictable encounter or chance knowledge. All the examples are from my own experience, and I have written about them in the past, but they will perhaps make a stronger impression when collected in one place.
An especially enigmatic English word (enigmatic with regard to its origin) is yeoman, which surfaced in written texts in roughly the middle of the thirteenth century (obviously, it existed in speech some time before it was recorded). The riddle is yeo-. The etymology, half-heartedly (?) supported by the revised OED (the entry was touched up last in 2025), traces yeo– to young. I assume that my hypothesis is more realistic, because, for phonetic reasons, yeo- cannot be traced to young.
Now back to coincidence and luck. In my research, I look through numerous books, on the off-chance that they may contain some information I need. In an obscure book on Dutch linguistics, I came across a detailed discussion of the English dialectal noun yeomath “a second-year crop of grass,” which, predictably, the OED also records, and the entry contains a sagacious guess about yeo– that provides a good but not final clue to this enigmatic sound group. Young grass? No, the prefix means “additional.” With regard to the details, see the post forJune 17, 2009. A yeoman was, quite probably, understood as an “added man.” In nearly seven years since 2009, neither Wikipedia nor etymonline (both are sensitive to new hypotheses) has commented on my suggestion, and I decided to repeat it here. I also contributed an essay on yeoman to an excellent Festschrift, but alas, the scholarly climate has changed dramatically since the nineteenth century. Such volumes, honoring retired and still active philologists, are now so numerous that even specialists have a hard time following them.
Watch one more attack on grassroots. English fog means “thick mist,” but in dialects, fog also refers to “second-year crop.” This time, it was a different kind of luck that provided a clue to the riddle. How can “fog” and “grass” be connected? By an accident of birth, my native language is Russian, and I know the Russian words par “steam, vapor” and par “field left under steam/vapor.” Both have the root meaning “to become damp, moist.” Fog, with its final g, is almost certainly a word of Scandinavian origin (English words, like sedge. ridge, bridge, and so forth, end an affricate). Related to this fog is, quite probably, German feucht “damp.” The same semantic thread connects Russian par1 and par2 as the two English nouns. If I did not know Russian, this analogy would never have occurred to me.
London and etymology are famous for the fog that envelops them. London, February 2013 by Martin Robson. CC-by-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
Another reward for knowing Russian may not impress too many of our readers, because that key word is Icelandic, rather than English. Yet the case is curious. Icelandic glenna refers to all kinds of open spaces, from “a ray of sunshine” and “a deceptive move in wrestling” to “a clearing in the forest” and “perineum” (hear, hear!). It also means “joke” and all kinds of trickery. Given enough ingenuity, semantic bridges can be built between any two concepts, but still, “joke” and “perineum”?
Open space galore. Photo by Christiyana Krüger via Pexels.
I decided to look up Russian shutka “joke” in etymological dictionaries and discovered that its Bulgarian cognate means “vagina.” This sense left Bulgarian researchers nonplused. But Icelandic glenna explains everything. We remember “perineum,” don’t we? In the past, shutka referred to a quick motion, leap (with the legs spread wide!), and the like. Henceanytype of opening. The sought for connection becomes clear when we look at all the old senses of shutka and the word’s related forms. But who knows Icelandic, Russian, and Bulgarian?
Until roughly the 1870s, most specialists in comparative philology were Germans. As we have seen, to connect glenna and shutka, an inquisitive linguist should be aware of the relevant Russian and Icelandic words and “accidentally” note the otherwise hidden connection. Too bad, I have never studied Welsh, Ewe, and Japanese. What precious associations must be left fallow in them, as far as I am concerned! A few historical linguists of old, JacobGrimm and AntoineMeilletamong them, knew many languages. Today, their peers are rare. To exacerbate the situation, famous polyglots, those who can talk glibly in thirty or more languages, are seldom endowed with great analytic abilities. As St.Exupéry’s Fox remarked sadly, nothing in the world is perfect.
This is a faggot. It is also a pimp. Woman Carrying Faggot by Munkácsy Mihály 1873. Exposé à la galerie nationale hongroise, Budapest. Photo by Ylkrokoyade, CC-By-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
My most amusing discovery, which I have celebrated more than once in my publications, concerns the origin of the noun pimp. See also the post forJune 7, 2007. The word did not interest me, but while reading an old dialectal dictionary, I ran into the entry “pimp ‘faggot’.” I was surprised by the proximity of two infamous nouns with sexual connotations and discovered that the origin of pimp is “contested.” It is “contested,” because older English etymologists did not know the German word Pimpf, while German scholars had no idea of English pimps. Pimpf refers to a youth and specifically, to a member of the youth organization under Hitler. Like Engl. pimp and pimple, it has a root meaning “to swell” (faggots, that is, bundles of sticks, are, it follows, big pimps!).
Finally, galoot “an awkward fellow.” Like pimp, it revealed its history to me by chance. An article on Italian seafaring terms made me aware of the Italian noun galeotto “galley slave; scoundrel.” The rest was plain sailing. My etymology, proposed first in the post forJuly 23, 2008, has had some recognition, but alas, Webster and the OED keep saying “origin unknown.” I am patient. Everything comes to him who waits, and I hope that the tie I suggested will one day gain wider recognition.
Luck? To be sure. But to quote Tchaikovsky, inspiration never visits the lazy.
Featured image: Yeomen of the Guard, in procession to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, for the annual service of the Order of the Garter. Philip Allfrey, CC-by-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve been reading S. Jay Keyser’s fascinating book Play It Again Sam, which (despite its waggish title) is a serious and insightful study of the role of repetition in the verbal, musical, and visual arts. The key idea is that repetition is both efficient and pleasurable, setting up patterns that reinforce linguistic structure and create aesthetic impact.
Part of the book deals with the “rule of three” and the role that triples play in capturing and focusing our attention, providing rhythm, and making things memorable and surprising. Take a second and think of some tripled up phrases if you can. My list included these tricolonic phrases, in which the repetition builds the list in significance:
Vini, vidi, vici
Friends, Romans, countrymen
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Government of the people, by the people, for the people
we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground
Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman.
The number three shows its rhetorical impact in a number of places. It’s in jokes (“A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar …”), folklore (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”) and advertising (“Snap, Crackle, Pop). The stereotypical five-paragraph essay, which is still taught in some places, consists of an introductory paragraph, a concluding paragraph and three body paragraphs. And its paragraphs are often made up of topic sentence, a concluding sentence, and at least three supporting sentences.
In prose, tricolons show up in sentences where triples are used to build emphasis. Sometimes a simple bicolon is too little and a tetracolon is too exhausting. Here are a few from recent reading. In Annie Lowrey’s essay about avoiding microplastic, “I Fought Plastic. Plastic Won” in The Atlantic (August 2025), in one sentence we find a compound noun phrase with three parts, where the second echoes the first and the third expands the idea:
Scientists have found plastic in brains, eyeballs, and pretty much every other organ.
In another sentence, the triple goes down the body, from the eyes to the groin:
We cry plastic tears, leak plastic breast milk, and ejaculate plastic semen.
Triples can pack a lot into a small space as the compound subject of a gerund:
Concerns over plastic exposure have exploded in recent years, with podcast bros, MAHA types, and crunchy moms joining environmentalists (and a number of physicians and scientists) in attempting to ditch the substance.
And they can even be used to organize longer lists in to rhythmic triples of pairs of adjectives:
Plastics are amazing. The synthetic polymers are light and inexpensive, moldable and waterproof, stretchy and resilient.
Compare that last one to the same sentence with “light, inexpensive, moldable, waterproof, stretchy, and resilient.” You’d be snoring before you get to the end. If you stop, look, and listen, you find tricolons everywhere. Look for them.
After I’ve finished a book, I’ll often check the reviews to see how my opinion lines up with what others have to say. Sometimes I’m surprised at points I’ve missed and amazed at what others have found (factual flubs, influences, allusions). After reading one recent book where a reviewer flagged a meandering style, I was prompted to reconsider my own reaction: was the meandering an indicator of the narrator’s mental state or the author’s inattention? The review prompted me to think further and reflect on previous books by the same author. Was he slipping?
I often use reviews in advance, to get a feel for a book that I’m thinking of reading before I commit. And sometimes I’ll compare a few reviews. I’m still wondering, for example, whether to commit to the 1,000 plus-page biography of Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. I read the New Yorker review by Lauren Michele Jackson (“Up the River,” in the May 5, 2025, issue) which opens with the idea that
America sees itself in a young boy who learns—but not too much—and whose story ends with his eyes on an open horizon, a stretch of land claimed by the nation but not yet bound to it.
The review implies that Twain’s work and life parallel the story of the United States and describes Twain as a man of contradictions, whose restlessness “was the most American thing about him.”
Graeme Wood’s review in the Atlantic (“The Not-at-All-Funny Life of Mark Twain,” in the May 9, 2025 issue) tells us that the book “dwells more on the wreck of a man than on his sublimely comic work.”
Both reviews mention Twain’s coming of age in an era dominated by the legacy of the Civil War and slavery, his sad family life, his addiction to get-rich-quick schemes, and his concern with leaving biographical footprints. Jackson offers a more straightforward summary of the book’s path, commenting on Chernow’s “misreading of Southern racial dynamics,” his focus on Twain’s writing habits, and his “apologies” for some of Twain’s attitudes and behaviors, such as his Lewis Carroll-like affection for young girls, whom he called his “angelfish.” Wood sees Chernow as presenting a Twain who was “gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams…,” a man “able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others [but who was] … powerless to correct them in himself.”
For good measure, I also read Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times, (“A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn’t Have Much of What Made Him Great,” May 13, 2025). Garner gives away the game in the title and opens with a jab:
Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion.
It gets rougher, but there are some key insights. Garner notes that the book seems out of balance to him, with Twain’s formative early life given short shrift. The review points us to some other Twain bios that might be worth a look, and it notes that Chernow’s is the first biography to appear in the context of the #Black Lives Matters and #Me Too movements.
All three reviews are chockful of detail and wit, so I appreciate them as a writer as well as a reader. I still don’t know if I’ll commit to Mark Twain. But if I do, I know what to watch for.
When I read slowly, I’m a somewhat easily distracted reader. I might ponder an idea, puzzle at a phrasing, or admire elegance and style. Sometimes, though, it is unexpected words that cause me to stop and wonder about their origins.
Here are a handful of expressions that have sent me to the dictionary: “shades of,” “craned her neck,” “sported a new hat,” “madcap kids,” “stool pigeon” and “moniker.” They all put my reading on pause. When I encountered them, I pondered a bit, jotted down the words so I’d remember to research them, and got back to what I was reading.
Here’s what I learned.
Shades of is related to shadows and to shadow-like nuances. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, from about 1818, shades of was used, “in humorous invocation of the spirit of a deceased person,” with the implication that the deceased person would be horrified or amazed at what was going on. The dictionary notes that it is no longer exclusively humorous and can now refer to some person or thing that is reminiscent of a present happening. So to say “shades of Bruce Springsteen” would be to invoke the Boss’s image or music as a point of comparison.
To crane one’s neck is from 1799, according to the OED, and means “To stretch (the neck) like a crane,” and it even has the variant to crane one’s head. The crane in question is the bird, of course, though cranes for lifting have been around for millennia (think Archimedes or the Egyptian pyramids). But the mechanical ones have only been called cranes since 1487, also getting their name from the bird.
The verb to sport is fearsomely complicated and has nothing to do with football. It wends its way back to disport, meaning “to divert, amuse or entertain” often with a reflexive. Over time sport came to refer to the act of amusing oneself or frolicking, often outdoors. Sport also developed the meaning of “to display” something ostentatiously or to say something publicly. Since about 1778, it could mean “to wear”, and the OED gives the example of “Some macaroni Barristers [who] have presumed to sport Bags and Pig-Tails.” “Macaroni barristers” refer to ones wearing fashionable Italian and French styles—eighteenth century hipsters.
Madcap, it turns out, began as a noun, with a first citation from 1589, meaning a madman, and within a few years the word was also used as an adjective. The suggested etymology is mad + cap, where cap has the metaphorical sense of “head.” And the OED points us to such similar uses as goose-cap, huff-cap, and fuddle-cap for a simpleton, a swaggerer, and a drunk. All are now obsolete.
When I hear stool pigeon, I think of a criminal who snitches on cohorts to make a deal. But it turns out to refer back to the practice of using a decoy bird tied to a moving stool to attract its fellows. The OED treats stool pigeon as US usage from about 1804 to indicate first a literal decoy and later an informer. An 1804 citation refers to a turtle “exhibited like a stool pigeon to a parcel of geese, in expectation that it would encrease the flock” and in 1844 we find “Those secret partners, by gamblers, are termed ropers, or stool-pigeons: their business is to delude the inexperienced into their dens of iniquity.” A few years later, we get an 1850 citation that “The senior high constable of Philadelphia … recollected that Harry White … who he had been lately using as a ‘stool pigeon’, or secret informer, had informed him … that ‘a big thing’ was coming off shortly.”
Moniker is still a bit of a stumper to me. The OED gives it as “origin uncertain” with an earliest citation from 1851. One suggestion is that it arose from a slang usage for eke-name (meaning nickname). Other ideas relate it to the words monarch or monogram. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, in The Secret Languages of Ireland (1937), suggests its origin can be found in the mixed language Shelta (sometimes called Tinker’s Cant or simply The Cant). Macalister posits the Shelta word munika meaning name, and this idea is developed further in a 2007 essay by William Sayres called “Moniker: Etymology and Lexicographical History.” That’s the latest word on moniker.
Since I started writing this piece, I’ve come across new words and phrases to puzzle over and research: cheapskate, right as rain, beck and call, chockful, and bespoke. I’m off to the dictionary again.
