(Of course, he can do neither of these because of that tragically malfunctioning bucket!)Īlas, whet seems not long for this world, but one case where those who stand for historical accuracy in linguistic expression (H.A.L.E. The old children's song "There's a Hole in the Bucket" can actually help differentiate between the two members of the homophonic pair: Henry, the man who notices the titular hole in the bucket, has to wet the stone before he can whet the knife with the stone. The whetstone, used for sharpening metal things such as knives, is a tool that will quickly light things on fire if they are not constantly made wet. To make whet even more confusing is that the other place one may have encountered whet is also connected to water. Whet is an Old English word which means "to sharpen" and, figuratively, "to encourage or incite," and this is the sense of whet in "whet your appetite." Linguists would call the whet/wet confusion an eggcorn. Add to that the fact that whet is all but obsolete, and it's enough to convince many of the accuracy of the "wet your appetite" interpretation.īut it is not accurate. Wet's referring to saliva production is plausible. Imagine being hungry, smells wafting in from a kitchen, and suddenly you're salivating at the thought of digging in. Again, semantically, it is easy to put together a rationale for why some people think the phrase uses the homonym wet. Like intents, whet in "whet your appetite" is often taken as another, more familiar word, wet.
Sounds good synonym full#
One who is "focused, full of purpose" is likely to be intense as well. Whether " intensive purposes" is merely a matter of the running together of sounds or the fact that the word intent is rarely used in the plural form in everyday speech, the collocation is supported by the easy logic of the adapted phrase's meaning. The phrase is old it's a shortened form of an English legal formulation that dates all the way back to the mid-16th century's "to all intents, constructions and purposes." The "constructions" has long been dropped, and now you might be just as likely to hear "for all intensive purposes" instead of "intents and." What we can do, as linguistic glaciologists, is strap on our crampons, drill for an ice core, and get down to marveling at what is changing and why.Īnd what better place to begin than with a phrase I just had the pleasure of using, "for all intents and purposes," which, according to Google searches and grammar columns, seems poised to morph into "intensive purposes" any decade now. (And a third man's source of humor - read this review of Robert Alden Rudin's new collection of language errors, Going to Hell in a Hen Basket for more.)īut for all intents and purposes, and no matter that you might think language change represents the collective dumbing down of our culture (I don't), we can't stop it.
One man's malapropism is another's innovation. Language moves much in the way of a glacier: slowly, constantly, and with a force impossible for any human intervention to halt. Now, as I contemplate a new collection of frozen phrases, caught earlier in the process of change, I see that their analysis might better be described as linguistic glaciology. Call what I was doing linguistic paleontology. A few months ago, I wrote about phrases that had piqued (or is that peaked?) my interest, in a column on malapropisms that show us fossilized words found in phrases frozen in time.
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