A rumor has been circulating about our new president’s level of literacy. First suggested (I think) in a blog post for The Times of Israel, the notion that the president not only doesn’t like to read but cannot read above the fifth-grade level of his campaign rhetoric has made the rounds of Samantha Bee, the Daily Kos and other left-wing opinion makers. I am not here to spread that rumor, but to ask what it might mean for our understanding of both this unusual president’s character and the future of any such administration for the chief executive to be functionally illiterate.

According to the Literacy Council of Union County, in North Carolina, 14 percent of Americans — 1 in 7 — are functionally illiterate, defined as people who “get by” with reading skills in the second- to fifth-grade range. This is not a question of being stupid; as Emily Kirkpatrick of the National Center for Family Literacy has observed of low-literate adults, “They’re very intelligent people because they’ve figured out how to work around disclosing the fact they they can’t read or can’t read well.” While most functionally illiterate adults are also poorly educated, some have completed college and even graduate school, as attested by John Corcoran, the “teacher who couldn’t read” and who taught in public schools for 17 years without, in his words, “getting caught.” In the film Primary Colors, John Travolta’s impression of Bill Clinton captivates his audience with the story of fictional Uncle Charlie who let his life slide away even as he “passed.”

How do you pass? Well, consider some of the characteristics of a functionally illiterate adult who masks his or her disability:

• Has extremely poor spelling skills.
• Uses excuses like “I forgot my glasses” when asked to read.
• Tends to go to the same few restaurants and order the same thing.
• Carries a book, newspaper, or magazine, but doesn’t read it.
• Resists writing lists or notes; instead relies on memory

As the literacy site Learn to Read puts it, “Today there are many who pass as literate, although they aren’t. … Many illiterates are knowledgeable and eloquent speakers. They just didn’t gain their knowledge or eloquence through reading. … [Of the millions of functionally illiterate Americans], only about six million admitted to needing help with any tasks requiring literacy. In short, they felt good about what is actually very poor performance.”

Although the only photos I could unearth of the president holding a book or magazine were either photoshopped or taken of him holding one of his ghostwritten books, the other characteristics, like the lists that have been circulating of narcissistic-personality-disorder traits, seem eerily familiar. And reports like Monday’s in The New York Times – “[National Security] Council staff members are now being told to keep papers to a single page, with lots of graphics and maps. ‘The president likes maps,’ one official said” – might inspire us to substitute maps for newspaper or magazine.

But let’s just say that this president — or some hypothetical president in the future — is functionally illiterate. What difference would it make, really? We live in a world where the chief executive can dictate his tweets; where he can get news and analysis from television rather than from books or magazines; where audiobooks and podcasts can replace text; where we respect the extemporaneous speaker far above the one reading off the teleprompter. And plenty of highly literate people promulgate views that most of us find abhorrent. (Steve Bannon, for what it’s worth, is supposedly a voracious reader.)

Yes, lack of literacy still carries a stigma, one that experts on dyslexia, for instance, work hard to combat. And as social psychologists have shown, the presence of stigma not only discourages the afflicted person from seeking help; it also correlates with personality traits that might get in the way of honest, effective leadership. As Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major argue in “Social Stigma and Self-Esteem: the Self-Protective Properties of Stigma,” members of stigmatized groups, contrary to received opinion, often have surprisingly high self-esteem. Why? Because they attribute negative feedback to prejudice against people like them and devalue those dimensions in which their group fares poorly (while overvaluing dimensions where they excel). It is not hard to imagine cases where criticism of the sitting president is perceived as prejudice against “people like him” and where the criteria where the president fares poorly — for instance, a basic knowledge of history or of the balance of powers in our government — are devalued in favor of criteria like toughness or the ability to draw large crowds. And such protective measures would, in and of themselves, inure the president to important course corrections or knowledge acquisition.

(We are, I remind myself as well as my readers, not spreading a baseless rumor, but only speaking in hypotheticals.)

But the more salient danger of having a functionally illiterate President, surely, would be the chief executive’s inability to deploy the critical thinking skills that are essential to tackling the multidimensional issues central to his mandate. As Michael Scriven of the University of Western Australia puts it, “Many of the skills we think of as part of the critical-thinking repertoire are refinements or extensions of literacy skills. Argument analysis, for example, builds on the ability to understand the meaning of paragraphs.” Certainly, plenty of pre-literate societies had wise, competent, effective leaders. Socrates famously argued against literacy because readers could fool themselves into believing they had accessed the heart of knowledge simply by absorbing text. But we no longer stand in the square of Athens to argue philosophy, and literacy advocates argue effectively that no level of competence in listening, speaking, remembering, and absorbing images can compensate for a deep gap in literacy. A functionally illiterate president would not only skip the briefing papers he was handed every day in order to hide his inability to read them; his not reading them — and thereby never thinking critically about them — could itself lead to inadvertent war or a huge tear in the fabric of our national security.

It’s an alarming proposition. Let’s hope any president about whom such rumors of illiteracy swirl can put them quickly to rest — perhaps, as Samantha Bee suggests, by reading aloud a certain long-form birth certificate.

I’m hooked. Merriam-Webster is the coolest thing on social media. In these dark times, where clickbait generally leads down a long tunnel into dystopia, the Twitter resurgence of a venerable dictionary is something to, well, tweet about.

First, there’s M-W’s political savvy. As NPR and other media organizations have observed, the nerdy group in Springfield, Mass., has been having a field day with the malapropisms of the current administration. Just last week, after the president spent part of his news conference vigorously denying reports of improper contact between his staff and the Russians, M-W saw fit to remind us all that a ruse is “a stratagem or trick usually intended to deceive.” When Kellyanne Conway introduced the term alternative facts into the discussion, M-W immediately tweeted the definition of a fact: “a piece of information presented as having objective reality” (though, to twist the knife, it later presented an alternative definition of the word). When news surfaced of the president’s having brought paid staff to applaud him during his speech at the CIA, M-W helpfully tweeted the correct term: “If you’re part of a group that’s paid to applaud, you’re a ‘claqueur.’” M-W has proposed a Word of the Day for awhile now, but saw fit to note, on December 16, “Good morning! The #WordOfTheDay is … not ‘unpresidented.’ We don’t enter that word. That’s a new one.” Recently, M-W saw fit to supply us all with 10 words from Russian — just in case, you know, we may all have to learn that language anytime soon. Plus, they reintroduced the once-archaic term snollygoster, meaning “a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician.” Now I know what to call the robo-recipient of all those calls I’ve been making to members of Congress.

And simply following M-W’s “Trend Watch” — which noted, for instance, the spike in lookups of the term anti-Semitism following last week’s presser question about the rise in hate crimes since the election — pokes advertent or inadvertent fun at what’s happening in Trumpland. Words selected for their trending qualities recently included immigrant, tergiversation, and dossier. When someone tweeted, in response to a news article on the president’s spelling issues, that “@MerriamWebster is the real winner here,” M-W soberly declared, “We take no joy in this.” Ultimately, like most who have resorted to satire or mockery of the gaffes that keep on giving, I’m sure they would prefer to applaud their president than to snicker at him, but I can’t deny that the chuckles they provide are good for my mental health these days.

But that’s not the only reason to fall newly in love with the fellows inside the red circle. There’s also their feverish hunger for words. Recently, in a single week, they added 1,000 new words to their online dictionary, which thankfully we no longer have to lug around with us. Words like photobomb, face-palm, and the newest, hippest meaning of the word shade. There’s the Word of the Day podcast, where you may think you know the meaning of, say, cachet, but the delightful person reading its origins and meaning to you will enlighten you nonetheless. And you get words like sward and transpontine that you’re certain you knew in some former lifetime and are happy to meet again.

I live in the town that was Noah Webster’s birthplace, so perhaps we’re already a little dictionary-happy here. A huge statue of him fronts the downtown Noah Webster branch of the library, and the latest, hippest development in town is called Blue Back Square, in honor of the little blue-back spellers that Webster first published in 1783. Less is known about Charles and George Merriam, whose publishing firm bought the rights to Webster’s dictionary after Webster’s death in 1843, but recent visitors to the company’s Twitter feed have agreed that Merriam makes a delightful baby name.

Finally, I’m loving Merriam-Webster because of the humbling effect of its weekly New Words quiz. People who write and read Lingua Franca go into such tests fairly sure we’ll ace the thing. Not so! I was lucky to get six out of 12 this week, and that was due to a couple of very lucky guesses. There are other games as well, little three-minute diversions that can make us forget the Orwellian state of language at this moment. It’s surely true, as the Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski has said, that “people are seeking kind of objective truths and maybe researched and trustworthy sources and to that extent, it’s gratifying that people are turning to the dictionary because that’s essentially what we’ve always done.” But they’re doing it in surprising, innovative ways that remind me how playful — how joyful, really — words can be.

Many of us were startled by the president’s recent labeling of the free press as “the enemy of the American people.” Many felt a line had been crossed. But which line, and what it had to do with this particular choice of words, hasn’t been crystal clear. I want to pick it apart here to understand which alarm bells may be ringing and why.

The phrase itself is most recently associated with Stalinist Russia, where, as Nikita Khrushchev put it in his 1956 speech denouncing the term, it “was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals” as demurred from Stalin’s cult of personality. Certainly Stalin was relying on language cues that distinguish the two important words in the phrase, enemy and people. An enemy differs markedly from the more common political labels adversary or opponent. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in 2013, “An adversary is someone you want to defeat. An enemy is someone you have to destroy.” The difference goes back to the roots: Opponent and adversary both derive from words meaning to turn or stand again; enemy comes from terms meaning “not friend.” You can have friendly opponents or adversaries; it is a contradiction in terms (despite the coinage frenemy) for an enemy to be a friend.

When Sen. Mitch McConnell, on learning of the Russian hacking of our presidential election this past fall, said, “The Russians are not our friends,” he was voicing the standard message that America and Russia, while currently at peace and occasionally cooperating in international efforts, are not simply opponents in a race for power, but fundamentally antipathetic toward each other. When the current President tweeted, “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do,” he seemed to be substituting the word enemies for adversaries — people who had fought against him, not people who felt hatred for him (and vice versa).

Of course, the phrase goes back further than Stalin, to Robespierre in 1789, who called the aristocrats of France “l’ennemi du peuple.” Peuple is a cognate of people, but with a more restrictive meaning. In English, we use people as the general plural of person; only rarely and with specific intent do we say or write persons. By contrast, le peuple (which is almost always singular, except, as in English, when referring to the various nationalities or ethnicities of the world) doesn’t mean the same thing as les personnes, les gens, or le monde (as in Le parc est plein du monde, the park is full of people). It refers to a group bound by tribal, ethnic, or national identity or class struggle. As one French scholar I met put it, “A riot is caused by les gens, but a revolution is caused by le peuple.” To be an enemy of the people, in this original (and doubtlessly also the Stalinist) sense is to be deemed worthy of destruction by that self-identified group. Insofar as an enemy of the people is found amongst the people, he is likewise a traitor and doomed as such. And when a leader decides, like Louis XIV, that “l’état, c’est moi,” that autocrat’s notion of the people resides exclusively within his own breast.

Such are the resonances that greet the president’s new phrase of choice concerning the free press. The words at the beginning and the end of the phrase are both fraught with meaning. (I haven’t even started on the choice of the enemy rather than an enemy.) They suggest fairly strongly not only that the free press is an inimical force that must be destroyed, but also that the American people are a cohesive, like-minded unit, identical in its feeling to the president himself, that is under threat from that press. When the French revolutionaries codified ennemi du peuple in a 1794 law that condemned to death those “spreading false news to divide or trouble the people,” they were seeking to mute such press by any means, including the most extreme.

Of course, such a recognizable slur risks ironic turnabout, as in Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, where the supposed “enemy” is the whistle-blowing hero of the story. But we are not in a play, and irony has taken its leave from our politics. The clearest formulation of the dangers in this phrase, for me, can be summed up this way: Any homogeneous group of people, and any politician, not only has opponents; he or she needs opponents, whether the “loyal opposition” or an outside adversary, in order to thrive. No one needs enemies — and those labeled as enemies are thereby unwanted, disposable, and deeply at risk.

In a former lifetime I served as director of publications for a small liberal-arts college whose ambitious president wanted to put it on the map. The word he asked me and others to promote in articles, in capital-campaign materials, in announcements of scholarship opportunities, and the like was excellence. I wondered at the time what was so special about claiming to be excellent. Were there liberal-arts colleges that claimed to be mediocre, or merely good? Perhaps, I thought, I was influenced by my generation’s rather coy use of the term, like the term brilliant, to denote an idea or a choice that we merely approved. E.g., “How about we smoke a couple of joints and drive down to the beach?”

“Excellent!”

Well, apparently the “ubiquity of excellence rhetoric,” as several British scholars call it in their recent article “Excellence R Us: University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence,” has in fact seriously eroded the term. They ask, “Does ‘excellence’ live up to the expectations that academic communities place upon it? Is ‘excellence’ excellent?” And the answer, generally speaking, is no.

We accustom ourselves to the notion of excellence, I suspect, beginning early in our school years. Grading criteria often assign the description excellent to the top grade in a sequence; if you see Excellent! at the bottom of your sixth-grade essay, it’s probably followed by A. At the same time, excellence continually represents something toward which we are meant to strive. I once took a job in publishing that required very little of me beyond shuffling sets of proofs from one department to the next. (This was before computers.) I was asked to perform a self-evaluation after six months. It seemed to me I’d done everything as I was supposed to, on time, cooperatively, etc., and so given the choice of evaluating my own work as poor, fair, good, or excellent, I chose excellent. My boss corrected me when we met. “You can’t be excellent,” she said.

“Oh dear,” I said. “Have I fallen short somewhere?”

“No,” she said. “But you’ve been here only six months. You’re not allowed to be excellent before a year passes.”

For the authors of “Excellence R Us,” the problem with the term is that it “carries little or no information content, either within communities or across them.” Rhetorically, though, they consider whether it might be useful nonetheless, much as Wittgenstein’s “beetle in a box” was useful. That is, if each of us has a box with an invisible object inside that we each label beetle, we cannot know if we are housing the same thing. Nonetheless, so long as we “negotiate and use the term socially to engender intersubjective understanding or action” — that is, so long as knowing the boxes all contain something that we’re all calling beetles serves to promote understanding of some kind — then the term has a purpose. Likewise, even if your idea of excellent differs broadly from mine, perhaps it means something that we are all using this term for our assessments; that it amounts in some unknowable way to an A.

No, say the authors, and I think they’re right. A beetle is a beetle unto itself. Excellence is continually relative, as its place in any given rubric suggests; it exists as an aspirational quality, as the achievement that beats out good, fair, and poor. This matters to scholarly disciplines and to institutions mostly because, like the gold star on the spelling test, the designation of excellence brings rewards — and if we cannot know the intrinsic quality of the assessment criterion that rewards us, what purpose does it serve? Excellence, as the authors write, “is little more than an assertion that that project, institution, or practitioner can be said to succeed better on its own terms than some other project, institution, or practitioner can be said to succeed on some other, usually largely incomparable, set of terms.” Even within disciplines, and even at the highest levels (think Nobel Prize), the vagueness and ubiquity of attributions of excellence produce homophily, or a tendency to find excellence mostly or entirely in works that hew to the same conventions as works that have already been rewarded or canonized. Few of us would admit that excellence is a “more of the same” quality, but so long as we hold to the term as the apex of our aspirations, it may well continue to function this way.

The authors of the study, which looks at a wide variety of disciplines and examples, cautiously introduce other terms we might consider, like soundness and capacity, in place of excellence. I don’t know that these do the trick. I did realize, on reading the article, that I know of no instance where I have written the word excellent on a student paper or in a recommendation letter. I have had to check those boxes on recommendations, of course (Excellent: top 1%-2%). But something in me resists the label even for work I have found to be head and shoulders above what other students produce. I’ll write almost anything else instead — Fabulous! Fascinating! Well argued! Detailed and engrossing! Why? Perhaps because it seems to me to put pressure on the very students I aim to praise; to label their introductory paragraph, or even their work as a whole, excellent seems to give them no further room to maneuver if they revise that piece or when they write the next paper. Or perhaps because, given the commonness of claims to excellence in an academic world where nothing less than the best will do, I fear that my students will discount the label, will see it as a professor’s lazy response to a bright shiny bit of rhetoric rather than a celebration of their achievement.

Perhaps I am simply persnickety, or too parsimonious in my praise. I wonder how others have negotiated this term that, dependent in its very meaning on remaining highly concentrated, has nonetheless fallen prey to immense dilution.

I am writing this in Mérida, Mexico, where my husband and I lucked out in avoiding the snowstorm that hit the Northeast this week. We are baking in the Yucatán sunshine and visiting nearby Mayan sites. Our second day here, in a city park, we bumped into a professor of Mayan studies at a nearby college who wanted to practice his English. Many of the edifices in Mérida were built from the five pyramids of the Mayan city that once occupied this site, and he pointed out to us a series of hieroglyphs that were tucked into the façade of a church, unattended and unnoticed by passersby.

I asked him about the Latin-alphabet version of Mayan, in which the translations ubiquitous at tourist sites here are written. That alphabet version of spoken Mayan, he said, was created in the 20th century, but it has little to do with the codices that have been discovered at such impressive sites as Uxmal and Chichen Itza. Those codices, he explained, did not bear any kind of one-on-one relationship with the spoken Mayan languages of the time. The script that experts have decoded from the remains at those sites and others expresses not words but concepts. To read ancient Mayan script is to enter a sort of conceptual space where you apprehend the glyphs as ways toward relationships and ideas, not as written versions of what someone might conceivably say.

At least that was the explanation we got from this one professor. I have no expertise in ancient languages or in the arduous work of decoding texts carved into stone. The information I’ve gleaned online during the evenings here indicates that Mayan glyphs are logosyllabic: combinations that represent words or phrases. So the notion that the writings the professor was referring to were based on concepts, as opposed to the sounds a person makes while speaking, might be oversimplifying the distinctions that matter here.

Still, as we visited the archaeological sites themselves, I found myself thinking about this notion of a language that exists in two separate spheres. In one sphere, that of oral communication, people make sounds that are readily understood by the others in their community and understood to some degree by those nearby whose languages are related. In the other sphere, those educated in the script grapple with the ideas that it represents. They may articulate their understanding of those ideas in words, but no two individuals’ “readings” of a particular codex will match up exactly, because no two individuals express an idea exactly the same way, even if they see eye to eye on it. For instance, the Golden Rule that I learned as a child, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” might be equally well expressed as “Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself” (the Confucian version). But I read those statements as literally (though perhaps not figuratively) different, while the sort of writings our new professor friend was describing would presumably “write” them exactly the same way.

The idea, I concluded, bore its best relationship to the way I might “read” a painting, an act that we almost always see as involving some degree of interpretation. Between this sort of reading and the sort I do if I read a book aloud to preschoolers, it seems to me, is a difference of kind, not of degree. But that may be because, in addition to not being an archaeolinguist, I am not a semiotician. If I were, I might be able to produce an argument about how our own language, with its multiple roots and connotations, serves as its own complex system of signs and symbols; about how our own reading is never as straightforward as we think.

But I am on vacation for two more days, and not inclined to take things too seriously. After all, many come here wondering what the Mayan meaning is of the word Yucatán. Turns out it most likely came from a misunderstanding. The Spaniards asked the non-Spanish-speaking locals the name of this place, and they replied, quite sensibly, “Uh yu ka t’an,” meaning “Hear how they talk.”

The case of the dairy drivers has captured the world’s attention. From The New York Times to The New Yorker and Language Log, the $10-million award granted (some say) because of a missing comma makes news in which we all — well, maybe not Oakhurst Dairy, in Maine — can delight.

Readers of Lingua Franca may well know the facts already. The workers’ guideline at issue noted that overtime pay would not cover “the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.” Without a comma following the word shipment, the phrase packing for shipment or distribution can be read as a single item — in which case, since truck drivers do no packing, they are entitled to overtime pay. “For want of a comma,” the judge’s decision on appeal wittily begins, “we have this case.”

The lower court’s decision was both kinder to Oakhurst Dairy and, at first glance, more coherent. Why? Because taking the phrase packing for shipment or distribution as a single activity creates asyndeton — that is, a series without a final conjunction. Poets love asyndeton — take Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which Antony proclaims, “Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Shrunk to this little measure?”

We see it inadvertently used most often, I think, in sentences where the final item in a supposed series should actually be styled as a coordinate phrase or clause. For instance, a student might write, “We were tired, wet, cold, and rushed inside the hotel.” In this case, rushed, like were, is a verb following We; the student really wants to write “We were tired, wet, and cold, and we rushed inside the hotel” or perhaps “Tired, wet, and cold, we rushed inside the hotel.” He doesn’t mean to be using rushed as the final adjective in the series; neither is he aiming at asyndeton. He just doesn’t understand syntax very well.

The lower court considered, evidently, that Maine legislators did understand syntax and used distribution as the ninth in a series of nouns while omitting the serial comma (as, by the way, they had been instructed in the drafting guidelines). But on appeal, Judge David J. Barron pointed out more ambiguities than a serial comma can account for.

First there is Oakhurst’s contention that if the phrase were packing for shipment or distribution, the word distribution would be redundant; the items are packed, period, and it makes no difference whether they are packed for shipment or for distribution, since one activity essentially equals the other. Since legal parlance disdains redundancy, surely such phrasing cannot have been the Legislature’s intent.

Nay, said the drivers. For after all, if shipment and distribution were the same thing, why not write packing for shipment or shipment of?

Then there’s the ticklish subject of nouns. All the other items in the series are gerunds: nouns formed out of verbs. Distribution is a regular noun, argued the drivers — so what’s it doing in the series, if it’s part of the series? Makes much more sense for it to be, like shipment, the object of the preposition for.

The judge considered those arguments but still came up against the mysterious asyndeton that the drivers’ reading of the stature entailed. In their reading, Judge Barron pointed out, “the list is strangely stingy when it comes to conjunctions.” And so, given competing and compelling arguments from both sides, “The text has, to be candid, not gotten us very far.” Given that the state’s default position in ambiguous cases is that laws should “further the beneficent purposes for which they are constructed,” he reversed the lower court’s ruling and found in favor of the drivers.

The judge’s ruling is 29 pages long — so much depends on an absent comma! — but I recommend it for true fanatics of syntax. The question that lingers, of course, is not whether, but in what way, the Maine legislators screwed this one up. Did they really, like my student, neglect to place a conjunction before the word packing? Or did they neglect that little note in the legislative drafting manual’s advice against the serial comma? “Be careful if an item in the series is modified,” it says. Either way, they can’t just tell Oakhurst Dairy not to cry over spilt milk. They have some explaining — and revising — to do.

I have totally been thinking about this word.

No, that’s not true. I have been thinking about many other things: midterm grades, spring allergies, whether to freeze half the massive pot of chili I cooked last night, how proud I am of my March-blooming orchid. But in informal parlance, totally simply supplies emphasis. It’s not normal for a person to spend much time mulling over a single adverb; the space it’s taking up in my brain is surprisingly large. Hence, totally; or, were I under 35, like, totally. Its use as an intensifier, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, appeared first in writing in the early 1970s, as in the advertisement for Screw magazine that promised “a totally dominant English massage by a lovely female, in your home or office.” I associate it with the kind of stoner language popularized by Cheech & Chong, though I suspect the one-word answer, “Totally!” denoting agreement, didn’t appear until later.

I’m thinking about the word, though, not as a persistent artifact from my youth, but as what Maggie Haberman of The New York Times calls a “tell.” Specifically, she points to a White House statement accompanying the partial release of the President’s 2005 federal tax return, in anticipation of its being aired publicly on The Rachel Maddow Show just last week. The statement reads, in part, “Despite this substantial income figure and tax paid, it is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns.” (Of course, there’s more to complain about, in this sentence, than the word totally; for instance, how the illegality of leaking a tax form is “despite” the grand sums listed thereon remains opaque. But that’s a subject for another day.) According to Haberman, Trump himself probably added the intensifier totally, which is hardly necessary to the claim:

Trump wrote part of this statement. “Totally” is the tell https://t.co/sb6kCvV8KA

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) March 15, 2017

That is, stealing and publishing tax returns is either legal or illegal (I vote for the latter). I suspect Haberman assigns totally to Trump’s lexicon because he can hardly utter a sentence without intensifiers. Things are rarely beautiful without being very, very beautiful, rarely great without being truly great. Intensifiers have been, well, intensifying for some time, but Trump stands apart in his effervescent use of them.

But there’s more, I think, to totally. Most people who came of age when the word was on the rise in informal language use it with a twist of irony, perhaps not quite as mockingly as they would use the word groovy, but with a nod to the juvenilia it represents. Or it might be self-effacing, as in Antonio Ruiz-Camacho’s response to receiving a Best Work of Fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters: “So I guess it’s not totally horrible what I’m doing.” There are also subtle differences in the placement of totally. “I totally understand the argument” comes across as slang; “I understand the total argument” or “I understand the argument totally,” not such much. In “I totally don’t want to do it,” the word functions as a synonym for really or truly.

So what of Haberman’s claim? In the context of a formal White House press release, as The Washington Post points out, the word is unusual. It fits with Trump’s widespread use of intensifiers, uttered as though nothing merits discussion unless it admits of grandiosity, superfluity, the extraordinary. And it fits with the phrase in the sentence that follows, dishonest media, that Trump himself is fond of uttering.

But I’ll venture one more idea, for which I have only a hunch. There was a lot of usage, during the era when totally came into informal parlance as an intensifier, that few took seriously and many indulged more whimsically. Beautiful, another of Trump’s favorite modifiers, is an example. So is zero used as an adjective, as in zero tolerance, which first appeared in 1972. Even, in many contexts, the establishment. Seventy is old for a newly elected president, but in some ways, Trump seems a bit older, like someone who picks up on terms like these without quite understanding their context and then proceeds to lard his language with them. That is, totally is probably a “tell,” but of the president’s relationship to informal language generally, not just as an example of his love of intensifiers.

The risk, in many cases, is that the intensifier works as a backfiring mechanism. Claim “totally illegal,” and you’re almost inviting someone to show where something might be legal. “Completely bogus” begins to sounds authentic. And “truly dishonest” might be the last remaining marker of that elusive trait, honesty.

n.b. The president, of course, is not the only media personality fond of totally as an intensifier. Maddow herself, confronted by skeptics of her scoop, allowed that the 2005 return she obtained “totally could’ve come from Trump.”

I am writing this blog post on the last day of National Reading Month, a featured period of time that may become quaint in the years ahead. For now, though, it has comprised several weeks of recommendations, read-ins, read-aloud marathons, and general hoopla around the joys and benefits of reading. And for several years now, the researchers David Kidd and Emanuele Castano have been tying reading to a specific outcome that many feel is woefully lacking in our political life: empathy. In particular, they have linked the growth of empathy to the reading of literary fiction, which, more than reading genre fiction, nonfiction, or nothing at all, appears in their test scores to promote more empathy in readers of all persuasions than the other choices.

There are all sorts of problematic things about a study of this kind, not the least of which are the definitions of empathy and literary. Tempting as it is for a writer of so-called literary fiction to proclaim that her work will demonstrably improve your character, I do well to question the validity of studies that reinforce my own prejudices. Fortunately, the researchers are fairly precise about their definition of empathy. They place it in the context of “Theory of Mind,” (ToM) “the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one’s own beliefs and desires.” They further distinguish between “affective ToM (the ability to detect and understand others’ emotions) and cognitive ToM (the inference and representation of others’ beliefs and intentions),” linking the affective component with empathy. In other words, you may differentiate others from yourself, deduce something about how they think or feel by various signals, and be able to draw a picture, as it were, of what you figure to be their point of view. But you only empathize with them when you actually penetrate their emotional state and are able to internalize it, regardless of their difference from you.

Thus far, this seems straightforward. Things get a little dicier when the researchers approach this issue of literary versus popular or genre fiction. Both imagine a world with characters in it whose motives and emotional frameworks differ from the reader’s. The battle over who gets to claim the mantle of “literary” has waged within the world of fiction (and, to a lesser extent, nonfiction) for years. As The Guardian reported recently, “Literary authors are the luxury brands of the writing world [but] the people who actually buy books, in thumpingly large numbers, are genre readers.” Novelists who manage both to gain respect from award judges and reviewers but also sell in big numbers, like David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel, Michael Chabon, and Donna Tartt, have generally claimed they pay no attention whatever to this supposed divide. To Mitchell, “The novel’s the boss”; Chabon claims, “I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain.” Kidd and Castano draw on various literary theorists to set a dividing line that actual readers may place at different points on the spectrum. (Exhibit A: Stephen King.) According to their earlier essay, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” theorists like Barthes, Bakhtin, and Bruner have established criteria that allow us to claim that literary work “uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences.” Genre fiction, by contrast, “tends to portray the world and characters as internally consistent and predictable [and thus] may reaffirm readers’ expectations and so not promote ToM.” Their more recent essay, “Different Stories: How Level of Experience with Literary and Genre Fiction Relate to Mentalizing,” narrows the focus to characterization, where literary fiction “tends to flout polarized agonistic structures or discrete personalities, developing instead complex characters” whereas genre fiction “places[s] stock characters in central roles.”

I don’t know the work of all the theorists the studies cite; nor do I have the statistical training to engage with the graphs and charts they proffer to support their conclusions. I do know that literary essays, like psychological studies, need to be read carefully and with expertise. For instance, Kidd and Castano happily cite E.M. Forster’s famous distinction between round and flat characters to support their distinction between high- and lowbrow fiction. But Forster actually recommends flat characterization, to a degree; “a novel that is at all complex often requires flat people as well as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life.”

I also know that fiction-reading is a habit, and like any habit, its effects begin with inclination and accrue over time. For their experiment, the psychologists assembled short texts — sometimes excerpts from longer works, sometimes short fiction — using criteria that seem, at least to this author, questionable. For instance, one experiment drew its materials on the one hand from an anthology of “popular fiction” published in 1998 and including stories from the previous two centuries, and on the other hand from the 2012 Pen/O. Henry award series. They also used the ART, or Author Recognition Test, to establish participants’ familiarity with certain types of literature.

There may be some demonstrable effect from reading short snippets of two different types of writing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the same kind of effect that comes from an extended reading habit. Even if it were the same sort of effect, one’s engagement with a story written in the last 10 years would perforce be different, and quite likely in terms of empathy, from one’s engagement with a story from 1880. Finally, though most authors, and many self-styled “serious readers,” follow an author’s work and career, most readers I know have much the same relationship to author recognition that I have to film-director recognition, which is to say slight. They read the book, not the author, and as far as I can tell this tendency holds true regardless of the work’s place on the popular-literary spectrum.

Look, we need empathy in this Machiavellian world. I love reading fabulously written, emotionally complex books, and I hope you do, too. But I’m not ready to call literature an empathy factory. It may not always be good for you, for all I know. It’s just great, all on its own.

I’ve heard it so many times my head hurts: the nuclear option. The Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, as we all know, invoked it last week in order to get a vote on Judge Neil Gorsuch, who has now been confirmed and sworn in as a new associate justice of the Supreme Court. And like many phrases you hear every 30 seconds or so if you’re listening to the news, it quickly becomes a word that you don’t think much about. Nuclear option: We know it can mean overriding, by a simple majority, the rule prescribing a 60-seat threshold for cloture, or the decision to cut off debate, on a Supreme Court justice; it means changing a rule of the Senate that goes back however many years, and breaking with tradition is terrible, etc.

But hold on. I grew up in the days of Duck ′n′ Cover. Nuclear would conceivably refer to nuclear power a couple of decades later, but in my childhood it meant nuclear war, a war in which the power to split the nucleus of the atom would bring about Armageddon, and so the whole point was that it was not an option. Hence the famous doctrine of MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, that kept the United States and the Soviet Union in a stalemate during the Cold War.

How we went from the nucleus of the atom, to shorthand for splitting the atom and going kaboom, to the option of changing a rule deserves a few moments’ explication. We begin with nuclear physics, of course, a branch of science that heated up in the 1930s and found its first expression in the deadly weapons of the Second World War, which were known not as nuclear but as atomic bombs, though the term nuclear power did make its way into the lexicon with suggestions that it might one day be used, for instance, to power automobiles. Since then, the countries developing bigger and more deadly atomic and hydrogen bombs have become known as nuclear powers, an ironic term when seen through the lens of the original meaning of nucleus — “kernel,” or “core” — since possessing such capability pretty much means you’ll be at the center of any discussion about international relations.

But during the Cold War, MAD meant that the choice to use nuclear power to devastate the enemy was not really a choice, or at least not a sane choice. It was part of what William Safire called “the Option 3 trick.” You presented a decision maker with five options — “the top one amounts to Abject Surrender and the bottom one to Nuclear Strike” — with the goal being to engineer the centrist choice, Option 3. If you were left, as Nixon claimed the United States would be if George McGovern’s policy on armed forces were followed, “with only a nuclear option,” you needed to rethink your approach — or your candidate.

By 2005, Safire wrote, the term had come to mean “an action that invites a really bitter battle.” In fact, though, U.S. senators who first used the term in regard to changing the Senate rules regarding cloture did so accusatorily: It was only the other side that claimed this horrific, unthinkable “choice” was actually under consideration, not the side that might exercise the option. “I prefer calling it the constitutional option,” Sen. Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican, said when Safire asked him about using this method to end the traditional 40-vote filibuster. “That other side is acting like we’re going to blow the place up.”

“Thus,” Safire wrote, “we have a clear lexical signal to show voters which side the speaker is on.” Not necessarily so any more. Take Urban Dictionary’s top definition for the phrase go nuclear, “taking things to the absolute extreme in order to avoid a series of small escalations.” Here, the agent behind the nuclear option openly admits to, say, responding to a friend’s public shaming of him by telling her that her husband is cheating on her: “There was nothing I could do. I had to go nuclear.”

That, as far as I can tell from this week’s news, is the stance of Sen. Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, on the so-called nuclear option, just taken, of removing the filibuster even for decisions on Supreme Court nominees. “If we continue on the path we’re on right now, the very next time there’s a legislative proposal that one side of the aisle feels is so important they cannot let their base down, the pressure builds, then we’re going to vote the nuclear option on the legislative piece,” he said last week. In other words, the nuclear option is no longer something normal that the other side is trying to scare folks about. Nor is it the unthinkable action that leads you back to a more reasonable position. It is the extreme step that someone or something else — your ill-mannered friend, your base, “pressure”—forces you to take. It is the freely elected but extreme choice of which, after you’ve made it, you say, “I had no choice.”

N.B. The title of this post also comes from Safire’s piece, where he recommends thinking of the word nuclear as two one-syllable words, to avoid the unfortunate pronunciation nukular. It is worth noting, however, that the Latin etymon, nucleus, could also be nuculeus. So George W. Bush wasn’t the first to insert that pesky u.

Last week, the United States dropped its MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast, on a network of tunnels in Afghanistan, killing approximately 94 people who have been reported thus far as ISIS militants. Of course, Massive Ordnance Air Blast is not how the press has been referring to this largest nonnuclear device; it (or she) is referred to as the Mother of All Bombs — which may, in fact, have been the original moniker, with the more official-sounding term a back-formation from this Mom Bomb idea.

But why, many have been asking, is it the mother of bombs? Mothers give life. Mothers don’t fight wars. So go the feminist outcries against what feels like yet another gesture of casual misogyny from the present administration. At the same time, as Dennis Baron has observed on his Web of Language blog, misogyny may be the least offensive thing about the use of a weapon whose 94 victims may well be replaced within the hour by more angry jihadists.

The phrase mother of all acquired its status as the biggest and baddest only recently, with Saddam Hussein’s 1991 reference to the coming battle with U.S. forces as the “mother of all battles.” The explosion (so to speak) of mother of all phrases that followed led the American Dialect Society to pronounce it the 1991 Word of the Year. Since then, it’s been used both to brag and to condemn: the mother of all car crashes, the mother of all burgers. But mother of has a deeper history, going back to references to Eve or to Nyx, the daughter of Chaos. In its generative sense, the phrase has continued through the centuries with mother as the original of whatever was being observed or touted: the human voice was the mother of all instruments, the Church of Rome was the mother of all churches, ecclesiastical Slavonic was the mother of all Slavic languages. Until the late 19^th century, though, the progenitive father of all eclipsed mother of all, being used about four times as often in books during the 1830s, according to Google’s Ngram viewer. Only in the 1980s did mother of all gain in ascendancy, used in references to dance as the mother of all language, the earth as the mother of all creation, and history as the mother of all the humanities, while father of all basically remained a reference to the patriarchal Christian god. (That may soon change, as the Russians start preparing the “father of all bombs,” but I’ll believe it when I see it, which I hope not to.)

Along with the age-old idea of an original giving birth to all the (less pure) versions that followed, and a late-20^th-century tendency to personify that original as female, we have a darker history of mothers and big bad things. There’s Lilith, whose myth runs alongside Eve’s but figures the original female as demonic; there’s Grendel’s mother in Beowulf; there’s Sycorax, the mother of Caliban in The Tempest. The destruction caused by the spawn of these women is generally laid at their feet; as the ones responsible for incubating and nurturing these awful progeny, they are held more responsible, often, than the monsters who do the actual destroying. In Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” the “rough beast” set to take advantage of our confused chaos invokes a monster-mother, as he “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.” In the HBO series Game of Thrones, the horrifying thing about the determined Daenarys Targaryen is not that she finds a trio of dragon eggs but that she refers to what hatches from them as her children.

It is true, as Dennis Baron and others have observed, that weapons of mass destruction have had male monikers: “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima, “Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki. But those were ironic, even whimsical terms used with a smile by the military who deployed the weapons. It was the Allies who referred to the German howitzer pummeling Paris as “Big Bertha.” Now, by dubbing this massive display of destructive power the Mother of All Bombs, we shed any pretense of cuteness. Reports thus far have been of “no civilian casualties,” and at the same time we learn that “an elderly man who lives close to the bombing site in Achin’s Momand Dara area said the blast was so piercingly loud that his infant granddaughter was experiencing hearing loss.” Thus have the men in charge unleashed her, this primal destructive force, Shakespeare’s “foul witch” of “sorceries terrible,” filled with “unmitigable rage,” whose “litter” can only be “a freckled whelp, hag-born.”

What bothers me about this joining of ancient misogynies and modern mass destruction, though, is not that we are, once again, blaming the mother. It’s that we shout it from the rooftops: We are proud of her.

“Je veux être le président des patriotes face à la menace des nationalistes”: “I want to be the president of all patriots against the nationalist threat.”

That’s what Emmanuel Macron, the front-runner in the recent French election, said during his first-round-victory speech. Those two words, patriot and nationalist, are deep points of argument among political scientists, but for most of us, the distinctions get a bit murky and sometimes self-contradictory. When I was growing up, in 1960s America, few people referred to nationalists, and the word patriot itself had a negative connotation for those on the left who were opposing the Vietnam War and pushing for women’s rights. I remember seeing a sign hoisted aloft at one rally: DOWN WITH PATRIOTS! DOWN WITH THE PATRIARCHY!

Now, by contrast, those resisting the current administration proudly wear the title of patriot and decry those they consider nationalists. As Jonathan Haidt pointed out in September, the exemplar of this patriotism was Khizr Khan’s emotional address at the Democratic National Convention, where he rightfully celebrated his heroic son and pulled out a copy of the Constitution. But Haidt essentially conflates patriotism and nationalism, calling both a form of parochialism, “caring more about those close to you than those far away.” The contrast, for him, is with globalism, though he suggests that Khan’s speech, which “celebrates ‘us’ without denigrating ‘them,’” can “unite most nationalists and most globalists.”

Among conservatives, there seems to be an active debate about how and whether to distinguish nationalist and patriot from each other. In National Review, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru set forth a concept of nationalism, sometimes called “open nationalism,” that they consider “a healthy and constructive force.” They reject “discussions of nationalism” that “frequently pose the alternatives of an obsession with blood and soil (nationalism!) and an exclusive focus on political ideals (patriotism!).” Writing in the same publication, Jonah Goldberg responds by distinguishing sharply between the two ideas. While “without some pre-rational passion for one’s own country, it would be impossible to make patriots,” he points out that “our shrines are to patriots who upheld very specific American ideals.” Patriotism, in other words, remains an allegiance to concepts or principles represented by civic principles and legacy, distinct from the tribalism that any form of nationalism, open or closed, connotes.

Or, as one respondent on a political chat board put it, “Nationalism: I should do what is best for my country even at the cost of other countries. Nationalists sacrifice others. Nationalists also tend to believe in a zero-sum world. In order for their situation to improve, that of someone else must worsen. Patriotism: I should do what is best for my country even at the cost of myself. Patriots sacrifice what is theirs.”

It is certainly true that, as Jonah Goldberg alleges, the avowed cosmopolitanism of many progressives has traditionally led them to part company with both nationalism and patriotism, seeing in a phrase like “what is best for my country” an artificial standard. We replace it with phrases like “what is best for humanity”; “what is best for the world”; “what is best for the planet.” In fact, perhaps the most remarkable development in the broad resistance to Trumpism has been a renewed allegiance among such “patriot skeptics” to specifically American ideals.

In short, the traditional distinction between nationalism and patriotism has depended on the difference between the “nation,” often an ethnic or cultural community, and the “state,” a political entity with a high degree of sovereignty. Perhaps much of our confusion today results from the melding of these two theoretically distinct ideas, partly as a result of increasingly diverse populations and partly from the painful, often violent process by which artificially constructed postcolonial states have begun to acquire distinct identities. Ten years ago, if you had asked me about the difference between the two words, as a wordsmith but not a political philosopher, I would have used a sports metaphor. The person who says “I love baseball” might be a loyal Yankees fan or might love getting out there and swinging a bat. The approaches to the sport are different; even the ideas about the sport might be different; but they’re not opposed to each other.

When we return to Macron’s statement, though, we see the results of a shift in ideas of country that make for two opposing camps. French nationalists want “France for the French,” a culturally, religiously, and perhaps ethnically homogeneous homeland. French patriots want the ideals of the French state — liberté, egalité, fraternité, and the open secularism that has resulted from centuries of anticlerical policies — to guide them into the future. In Macron’s view, the bigotry and crippling nostalgia of French nationalism directly threaten the maintenance of ideals for which patriots can give their lives. It’s as if the baseball fans, in their raucous insistence on witnessing the game they decided to root for, were posing a threat to the game’s essential future, perhaps its existence.

Oh, wait. Wrong game. That would be football.

For a time in my 20s, I worked as “assistant to the publisher” at Schocken Books, now part of Random House. Like anyone with that sort of glorified-secretary position, I took on a lot of tasks that weren’t part of the job description. At one point, my boss realized that a charming “book of days” desk calendar, with clever quotes and illustrations — for which he had purchased publishing rights and print-ready films from a British publisher — lacked the permissions to reproduce most of the clever quotes. My project became finding quotations that existed in the public domain, fit the illustration or the time of year, and, most important, fit neatly into the space that had been occupied by the quote for which we couldn’t afford the permission fee. I reached for ditties like the one my mother used to recite:

Nobody loves me, everybody hates me
I’m goin’ out and eat worms.
Big long skinny ones, little short slimy ones,
and fat ones that stick in your throat.

(Various versions of this charming song exist; I can’t swear that’s the wording I used, but I was confident that no one owned the rights to it.)

Another quotation I wanted, for reasons that now escape me, came, I was certain, from W.C. Fields and had something to do with hating children and dogs. I asked around the office. Everyone had heard of it, but no one was sure of the wording. That afternoon, walking home, I ducked out of a sudden rainstorm into a bookstore. In the back was a collection of Hollywood books: gossip and history. As I thumbed through them, the store owner asked if I needed help finding something, and I told her about the quote. “I think it’s ‘A man who hates dogs can’t be a bad guy,’” she said.

“No,” said a handsome young man who was browsing postcards. “It’s about children, about hating children. And dogs.”

The young man, it turned out, also worked in book publishing, at Little Brown. The next day, I took my lunch break at the New York Public Library and managed — I thought — to track down the W.C. Fields quote. The version I found, “Any man who hates children can’t be all bad,” said nothing about dogs. I jotted it down on a postcard and sent it to the young man at Little Brown, just for fun. Two years later, we were married.

Had I known about Quote Investigator — or, more properly, had the internet existed to give Quote Investigator a home — that romance might never have started. Not that Garson O’Toole, who operates the website, has looked into the Fields quote, at least not yet. But he relates so much else about who said what that I wouldn’t have bothered with the bookstore or the library.

For instance, there’s the clever line, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” People have attributed it to sources as varied as Coco Chanel and Albert Einstein. But Quote Investigator proves convincingly that it came into circulation by way of an English broadcaster, C.E.M. Joad, in 1926.

Then there’s Mark Twain, to whom all kinds of witticisms are attributed, including, “Life is one damn thing after another,” an anonymous expression that stuck to Twain only because H.L. Mencken said so.

Vladimir Nabokov really did write, “Literature is of no practical value whatsoever.” But most quotations seem not to have been uttered — or, at least, not coined — by the person whose name we generally attach to them, including several famous Yogi Berra sayings, like “When people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them” (spoken first, apparently, by the impresario Sol Hurok).

Far be it from me to ask where Garson O’Toole, who, according to the site, “has a doctorate from Yale University, and exploring quotations is one of his avocations,” gets the energy to track down all these bons mots. But I’m sure that if I’d known I could use the quote “Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children,” apparently correctly attributed to the humorist Sam Levenson, I might have stopped chasing W.C. Fields’s hatred of the little tykes. Had the internet existed, I might have learned that dogs were indeed relevant to the quote, which was said about Fields by a scriptwriter, Leo Rosten. But then, as Yogi Berra apparently did say, when you come to a fork in the road, take it. And I did.

My colleague Ben Yagoda predicted it a year and a half ago: Oftentimes is on the rise. I just returned from South Carolina, where I was struck by its ubiquity. A server at a restaurant told me that oftentimes people preferred their salad dressing on the side. In a nature preserve, a fellow walker told us he had oftentimes seen alligators sunning themselves on that patch of weeds. Most surprising, my son, who’s moved to South Carolina for work, peppered his speech with oftentimes, an expression I had never heard from him before. He pronounced it, as did the others, with two t’s.

The word is certainly showing up more frequently. Google’s Ngram viewer shows its being used in books more than twice as often in 2008 as in 1995, though even with that sharp rise it occurs half as much as in 1905, when books like Sylvanus Stall’s What a Young Man Ought to Know cautioned against (among other things) “unnatural stimulation” of the salivary glands, “as is oftentimes done by those who chew gum for several hours and day after day.” In other words, the word has sounded archaic until fairly recently.

Whether oftentimes is in part a regional expression I cannot determine. I may have noticed it in the South because it’s more frequent there or because I tend to notice language more when I’m in a different area of the country. The Corpus of Contemporary American English notes instances of the expression in spoken interviews and reports on all the major networks and in written form in magazines, newspapers, novels, and academic publications. There do seem to be more frequent appearances in interviews in African-American magazines like Essence, confirming one friend’s judgment that it’s a common colloquialism in the black community. But it also appears in the National Review and in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy — most often embedded in quoted speech, but sometimes as part of a report or analysis, as in the point made in the Quarterly Review of Distance Education: “Oftentimes with mobile learning, an individual may choose to learn something based upon a personal interest or a sudden need.”

Are we simply talking about an affectation here, along the lines of the recent rise in amongst rather than among? Most sources view often and oftentimes as synonymous. The Oxford English Dictionary makes virtually no distinction in its definitions, noting only that oftentimes is now “chiefly N. Amer.” Both mean “many times” and “frequently.” In actual use, though, even those who have boarded the oftentimes train will find only the humble often will do. Take, for instance, this pair of statements:

Often, I don’t bother with it.

I don’t bother with it often.

Replace the first with oftentimes, and its meaning of many times sharpens: “Oftentimes, I don’t bother with it.”  But try replacing the word in the second statement: “I don’t bother with it oftentimes.” It sounds out of place, probably because the meaning here is frequently; or, in another way of phrasing the point, “I don’t bother with it most of the time.” Notably, oftentimes is practically never written or spoken as oftentime, because the reference is to theoretically countable occasions and not to a sort of habit.

Take, as a final example, my own sentence above: “Google’s Ngram viewer shows its being used in books more than twice as often in 2008 as in 1995.” True, some bot out there is actually capable of counting the number of times you can see the word oftentimes in certain books published in 1995. But my claim refers to a trend, and to replace often with oftentimes would seem — at least to me — inappropriate.

Still, oftentimes is happening oftener, maybe oftener enough that the OED will eventually have to update its references to oftener times and oftenest times, last noted as early 17^th century. My phrase, above — “most often embedded in quoted speech”— would become “oftenest times embedded in quoted speech.” Not my choice of phrasing, but who knows? Everything old is new again.

I imagine most of us have a story about a time we used a word or an expression that we thought we’d invented, only to discover that it had been around for hundreds of years. In my case, my vivid memory is of feeling nauseated on a long car ride when I was about 8 years old. I had heard of people being seasick. But we weren’t at sea. So I thought I would coin a new term for how I felt. “Mommy,” I said from the back seat. “I think I’m carsick.”

My mother was a relatively patient woman. She had listened without condescension as I catalogued the many new words with which I was in love: sinewy, grotesque, faint, bolster. But a car with three fussy children in the back is no fun even on a good day. She twisted around from the passenger seat and said, “You’re just saying that because you heard that word somewhere. You shouldn’t use words just to hear the sound of them.”

“I’m not,” I said. And then I threw up.

As we grow older, we gather bits of knowledge like lint, such that finding fresh metaphors is a rarity and failing to know something that’s been around a while feels like an embarrassment. When I was in my 30s, I spoke with a friend who had just been to a folk-music concert and heard a new song that he found particularly moving. “It had a lovely lilt to it,” he said. “It was about a red river valley.”

“Uhhh,” I said, and then I struggled to enlighten him without making him feel like an idiot.

Fortunately for our new president, he is immune to feeling like an idiot. Among the many claims that have had journalists scratching their heads recently was his remark — to an interviewer from The Economist, no less — that the metaphor priming the pump, to mean injecting stimulus money into the financial system, originated with him. Here’s the relevant part of the interview:

But beyond that it’s OK if the tax plan increases the deficit?
It is OK, because it won’t increase it for long. You may have two years where you’ll … you understand the expression “prime the pump”?

Yes.
We have to prime the pump.

It’s very Keynesian.
We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world. Have you heard that expression before, for this particular type of an event?

Priming the pump?
Yeah, have you heard it?

Yes.
Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it. I mean, I just … I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It’s what you have to do.

As Merriam-Webster was quick to point out, prime the pump as an expression for a fiscal stimulus goes back to 1933. The origin of the phrase itself dates to the early 19^th century. At Language Log, Ben Zimmer has assembled an impressive set of cartoons referring to the expression and dating as early as 1921. As one commenter to The Washington Post observed,

I have actually primed the pump, using a pitcher of water left in the old iron sink for exactly that purpose. Pour the water down the pipe, and then start pumping the handle to bring the water up from the shallow-water well. When I primed that pump, the pump, well, and sink may have already been much older than 84. I was a child then.

Priming has a slightly wobbly origin in the Latin primus, the idea being that before you can do anything else (fire a gun, cover a wall with paint), you have to prepare it. In its application to fiscal stimulus, though, the Keynesian idea was, as Jonathan Chait observed  this week, “a program of temporary fiscal stimulus to inject demand into an economy stuck with high unemployment.” By contrast, the plan our president was discussing with The Economist would “permanently increase the deficit in an economy with low unemployment.” As Chait points out, “Telling The Economist you invented the phrase ‘priming the pump,’ to describe a plan that does not prime the pump, is a bit like sitting down with Car and Driver, pointing to the steering wheel on your car and asking if they have ever heard of a little word you just came up with called ‘hubcap.’”

But here’s the mystery for you, Lingua Franca readers. Was this “coinage” of priming the pump both ignorant and inventive, like my 8-year-old’s use of carsick? Was it ignorant but derivative, as if my friend had himself taken credit for naming this “new” folk song “Red River Valley”? Was it a weird self-deprecating irony, sort of “I like to claim stuff for myself, and now I’m claiming prime the pump, even though you and I both know it’s been around for decades because we’re both so smart”? Was it a sign of dementia, the phrase itself still rattling around in the head but its origin erased, so the ego rushed in to fill the vacuum and take credit? Or … ? Please don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. This is a language column. Prime the pump is language. It matters.

I actually enjoy commencement exercises — the pomp, the circumstance, the grandmothers, the decorated caps, even the speeches. Only one niggling irritation blemishes the day, assuming the day is dry and not too hot. At about a third of the more than two dozen commencement exercises I have attended, the stalwart soul reading the names of graduates before they march across the stage into their futures has noted those who earned their degrees but could not be present by tacking onto their names the Latin in abstentia.

Now, Latin peppers the proceedings on these occasions. We give degrees to luminaries honoris causa, that second word pronounced in ways ranging from caw-za to cow-sa. Students merit various ranges of laude. So I suppose it is appropriate to note the missing students’ absence in Latin. But the word, as far as I can tell, is absentia.

I came home from the proceedings on Sunday determined to get to the bottom of that extra t. I was not mistaken in my understanding of Latin. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of absence uses the phrase in absence and traces its origin to the Latin in absentia, which breaks down more or less into “being elsewhere.” Google is so determined on the correct usage that my attempts to find in abstentia were met constantly with a gentle correction: Was I not looking for in absentia?

And yet the extra t is not unique to those I’ve heard pronouncing all the student names. Once you insist, Google coughs up its results: Almost 28,000 instances of abstentia. Some of these citations reflect (again) Google’s gentle forgiveness of me for my typo, in that the reference actually has the correct word; but hundreds are published uses of this nonword in books and articles. For instance:

Congress holds the key. It can permit courts to hold trials of defendants “in abstentia,” with the defendants not present. (Dan Robinson, Nuevo Laredo: A Prelude to War, 2009)

The court pronounced life sentences on 33 convicted defendants: Alehubel Amare (charged in abstentia) … (U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 1978)

The Advocate General used two arguments to deny that the scope of the right of a fair trial and the right of the defence in the case of judgement rendered in abstentia was an element of Spain’s national identity. (Colson & Fields, eds., EU Criminal Justice and the Challenges of Diversity, 2016)

The dukes of Carinthia in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries were frequently lords in abstentia. (John Eldevik, Episcopal Power and Ecclesiastical Reform in the German Empire, 2012)

The one, very brief investigation I’ve found, at the Eggcorn Forum, supports my own hunch that the insertion of that irritating extra t is a result of the speaker’s or writer’s momentary confusion of the root sources of absence and abstain. It’s a funny eggcorn, if that’s what it is. Absent means “Not present in a place or at an occasion; away.” To abstain is “to keep or withhold oneself”; abstinence is “the practice or discipline of resisting self-indulgence.” In both cases, something is lacking; with absence, the thing or person referred to isn’t there; with abstinence, one desires something but refrains from having or taking it.

Ironically, if you plan to abstain from voting in a committee, you usually need to be present to do so. Still, I can see — sort of — how in absentia can be conflated with abstaining, as if the missing candidate from graduation has chosen to withhold himself from the grandiose ceremony at hand. After all, commencement exercises aren’t for everyone. Maybe they’re self-indulgent, and should be resisted.

At least, that’s what I tell myself, as I listen on a sunny May Sunday to the recitation of names of those present and elsewhere. Perhaps, I tell myself, if there’s a good reason for it, in abstentia will stop grating on my ear.

The changes in language, under the current administration, come thick and fast. Even before George Orwell pointed out that “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” people paying attention noticed the distinct and often disturbing intertwining of political purposes and language manipulation. Prior administrations had their self-contradicting legislation, like George W. Bush’s ill-fated Clear Skies Act. But Chris Mooney and Lisa Rein, in The Washington Post, recently pointed out a curious twist in the changes underway online and in print from various federal agencies in the last four months.

We already know that the central page on climate change has disappeared from the website of the Environmental Protection Agency (though, interestingly, you can still find some relevant subpages hidden away here); that a tax windfall for the rich has been labeled the American Health Care Act; that the administration has not been able to evade the term Muslim ban by calling its repeatedly barred executive order Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry.

The more interesting aspect of what Mooney and Rein turned up is not that Orwellian speech remains rampant, but that changes are often being initiated, not as a top-down directive, but from within the agencies concerned. Take the Energy Department Clean Energy Investment Center, which has morphed into the Energy Investor Center. Now, the explanation given by the department’s spokeswoman, Lindsey Geisler — that the changes “better reflect the broader focus of the project, which includes all traditional and nontraditional energy sources” — sounds typically evasive. But other sources at the agency suggested that the new label is a survival tactic more than a lightly disguised retreat from any commitment to clean energy. If you assign your project an Orwellian label, this thinking goes, you can continue to do your good work without drawing negative attention. Maybe they won’t cut your budget. Maybe they won’t notice you at all.

Similar thinking seems evident at the EPA’s former site for Climate Ready Water Utilities, now renamed Creating Resilient Water Utilities, a change that took place before the inauguration. It’s hard to know what to do with this word resilient, which pops up often in the environmental sector now. To be resilient is to withstand difficult conditions, or recover quickly from them; to spring back. What conditions, one might ask, are forcing these water utilities to develop resilience? When another page, on climate-change adaptation, acquires the title Resilience, doesn’t that imply that the climate is, indeed, under some sort of stress? Perhaps, if these changes are indeed put in place — as Daniel Holt, formerly of the U.S. Agency for International Development, believes — by “civil servants running data-driven initiatives,” resilience is a clever wink toward those of us who hope they’re still doing the research, while avoiding censure from those who want to take all those research findings to the Dumpster. And it’s hard not to admire career officials who can continue their “same work” while sending the right signals to those currently in power, like the international aid agency that now frames its development work as a matter of national security. (Which it always was, but once upon a time there was this talk about human rights.)

At the same time, it would not be far-fetched to draw some inferences from the change of Energy Investment to Energy Investor or from new tabs at the now-obscure “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” web page that feature “Opportunities for Farmers and Ranchers” and “Aggregating, Processing, and Distributing.” This language does seem to privilege those who might find personal or corporate profit opportunities in areas of government work that once purported to help a broader swath of citizens.

What I wonder about is the degree to which a change in labels — or PR-supplied headlines, or web-page titles — affects the character of the work, not now, but as the future unspools. We in academe are not strangers to such changes in nomenclature. Our undergraduates no longer concentrate in fields like anatomy, philology, or ancient languages. Mostly, we like to think that we changed the names of our fields of study when we found that the fields themselves had changed, so that biology (or zoology, or biological sciences) became more precise; philology was more properly subsumed under various branches of linguistics; classics more properly describes a field of study that both comprises cultural concerns and teaches many texts in contemporary vernacular. Social studies became the social sciences, most sociologists would argue, when institutions recognized that these fields of study met the criteria of sciences.

But I suspect that when women’s studies, baptized in the 1970s, morphed into women and gender studies or gender and sexuality studies, there was a wide and deliberate attempt to entice more men into the field. Sure enough, the term masculinist is no longer rare, and courses in queer theory and necropolitics draw students from across the spectrum. The title changed, and the content changed, but whether chicken or egg is hard to say.

Returning to politics proper, then, might we not be wary of such relabeling, not because it reflects clear shifts in policy within such a chaotic administration, but because the temporarily convenient labels might become self-fulfilling prophecies? That by calling victims of domestic violence, for instance, “victims of crime,” we could start losing sight of the particular nature of domestic violence? That as dedicated civil servants try to, as one NOAA scientist put it, “lay low,” new hires might come to see their mandate as being exactly what the agency’s website says it is — “to help people understand and prepare for climate variability and change.” In other words, not to investigate or substantiate its anthropogenic causes.

On a quick trip to Minneapolis over the weekend, I noticed Southwest Airlines’ slogan, “Is ‘rapider’ a word?” Well, no, I thought. It’s not. That is, you do not find suffixes appended to the adjective rapid to form comparative and superlative forms. Fortunately, in English, you have other choices. You could say faster or quicker, for instance. But those words wouldn’t draw the busy traveler’s attention as easily, and of course they would have no resonance with Southwest’s Rapid Rewards frequent-flyer program.

Then, as I sat waiting for permission to lower my tray table so I’d have somewhere to set my coffee down and get back to my book, I wondered: Why isn’t rapider a word?

In elementary school, we learned that shorter adjectives — quick, smart, big, small, sick, smooth, long, etc. — formed comparatives with -er and superlatives with -est, but longer ones — serious, ridiculous, dysfunctional, etc. — were modified by more and most.

But rapid isn’t that long. It’s no longer than silly, narrow, gentle, or quiet. Its -id ending, shared with adjectives like putrid and florid, seems to dictate its exclusion from -er and -est inflections, just as silly’s -y ending dictates its comparative/superlative formation of changing y to i and adding -er and -est. Rapider doesn’t even sound as strange as the comparatives formed from adjectives already ending in -er, like cleverer and soberer.

Native English speakers know all these variations (and more) in adjective formation from growing up with the language, despite my son’s habit, when young and playing for cuteness, of describing my cookies as “gooder” and our sofa as “comfortabler” than our neighbor’s. The more I thought about it, the less that shorter/longer rule applied. What about a one-syllable adjective like tense? I’m more tense whenever there’s turbulence on a plane flight; most tense during takeoff and landing. I never describe myself as tenser or tensest. Some shorter adjectives — unique, square, evil, normal — have been proposed as absolutes, making it supposedly nonsensical to form comparatives or superlatives; perhaps that’s why we fudge things by generally sticking in most or more rather than adding suffixes.

But that rule doesn’t apply to most of the examples I could think of, at least in the time it took to fly from Minnesota to Connecticut. Arriving home, I looked at etymologies in a rather scattershot way, hoping to find a pattern. Our drawings from Germanic languages tend to be shorter (quick and fast as opposed to rapid), but adjectives like gentle have roots in French and Latin, so there’s not much real consistency there.

In the end, like so much in English, the “rule” is ad hoc. One English as a Foreign Language website I found tried to make sense of it all, but in a way that I’m sure I would find dizzying if I were trying to master this crazy tongue. Just think of fast in the sense of rapid, which easily changes to faster and fastest, whereas fast in the sense of firm, unmoving usually becomes more fast and most fast.

And we tend to change our habits when it comes to forming comparatives and superlatives. Just take a glance at the Google Ngram below to see what’s happened with more pleasant and pleasanter over the last decade.

So who knows? Maybe rapider will be a word, eventually. Maybe even the larger theme of the Southwest Airlines ad campaign, “Transfarency,” that produced the sign I saw, will be a word. Meanwhile, folks in the advertising department, you accomplished your objective. You caught my eye. You got me thinking about it.

Those of us — poets, fiction writers, literary essayists — who consider our work with language to amount to art often have a strange relationship with discussions of language. It’s hard to find a parallel in other forms of art. We who are not painters have little to offer on the subjects of paints and canvases; we who are not composers generally have few opinions about the qualities of various key or tempo signatures, much less about the composition of the orchestra. We have the right to our opinions on the finished product, of course, but the materials of creation are not materials we use in our everyday lives.

Language, by contrast, is everyone’s material, and everyone has an opinion about it. The prolific linguist and writer David Crystal tackles a number of those opinions in his new work, Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar, neatly packaged back to back with another recent history, The Story of Be. I confess that before reading the book, I had not given a thought to the dawn of grammar, either as a philosophical notion (starting with ancient Greece) or as integral to a child’s acquisition of language. What struck me in his explication was not so much the insatiable hunger to analyze that prompts Plato to investigate the parts of sentences, but the early application of that study to achieve, as a 16^th-century grammarian named William Bullokar put it, “the perfecter writing thereof.”

In other words, almost as soon as people were able to describe the structure of a language, they began to prescribe ways to go about deploying it. Or, as Crystal puts it, “Grammar should never be divorced from meaning.” He delves into the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate at several points along his historical trajectory. What’s taken for granted, though, is the idea that the point of understanding the way language works is to achieve clearer, more cogent communication.

And yet, as Crystal admits halfway through his argument, his own interest in grammar was hardly inspired by the dull, rules-based grammar teaching he suffered as a student. Rather, “deep down, it was a predilection for analyzing things.” From that predilection, he not only grows passionate (and incredibly well informed) about features of earlier forms of English, regional and cultural differences in global English, English on the internet, and so on; he also links grammar to semantics and to what he dubs a “semantic/pragmatic approach” that resolves the prescriptive/descriptive debate.

It’s a great ride along the way. Crystal’s sense of play points a way back to a love of grammar and a pedagogy of grammar that avoid the twin traps of dullness and zombie rules that marked his own school days.

I’m left, though, with a question that comes mostly from my vocation as a fiction writer. My interest in grammar, if it can be called that, came not from a predilection for analyzing things but from the keen desire to exercise my craft or art. In extremely rare cases, we find painters, choreographers, sculptors, composers, and, yes, writers of such uncanny brilliance that they produce great work without having a deep understanding of the tools of their craft. But for the most part, we figure that Picasso knew his oil paints and Beethoven could analyze the key of G major down to the bone. It’s also fair to surmise that they wanted to paint great pictures and write great music; that the analysis followed, rather than anticipated, the urge to create.

For writers of what we think of as literature, I believe the process is the same. The stronger the ambition to produce great writing, the more likely we are to unpack the grammar of our language, to maximize our material. Mostly, we don’t bother with labels and categories, any more than a painter necessarily masters terms of chemistry; the point is to make the best possible use of the stuff. Various writers have tried to crystallize this distinction. The American poet William Carlos Williams called poems “machines made out of words,” driven only by poetry itself. Archibald MacLeish argued that a poem “should not mean, but be.” The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty made the distinction most eloquently, for me, when he wrote, “The writer is like the weaver. He works on the wrong side of his material. He has to do only with language and finds himself, suddenly, surrounded by meaning.”

Not everyone wants to write poems or novels. Nor do many of us share Crystal’s love of analysis. But we all swim in the sea of language. What can fire, for most people, the alchemy that melds grammar and meaning?

Crystal doesn’t quite answer my question, but he does launch his history toward the future with a readable approach that is, in his words, “a replacement of ‘what’ questions by ‘why’ questions”:

[To] make us see that grammar is a dynamic, purposeful, thought-provoking activity which relates to all of us. It is a subject that can be applied to any and every use of language, past and present. … It is the means whereby words, punctuation marks, tones of voice, and other features are integrated into a meaningful and effective whole. Grammar, in short, is the skeleton of style.

And style is … a subject for another post.

When my kids were small, we used to recite a little ditty about going on a bear hunt. The hunt involved a belief that there was a bear out there, “a big one,” only we couldn’t see it; we had to get past the obstacles and find it. (And, I suppose, capture or kill it, only we never found the bear; the rhyme was entirely about the obstacles in our way.)

Bears exist; witches don’t. That is, they don’t exist in the fairy-tale or medieval sense of a person (generally female) with magical powers. There continue to be people who call themselves witches, of whom more below. But one reason we look upon the Salem witch trials with such horror is that the mass hysteria that led to the execution of 20 people in Salem, Mass., in 1692-93 was based on such profoundly mistaken ideas that those executed were innocent by definition.

But did the Puritans hunt witches? They might have been eager to label nonconformists like the non-churchgoing Sarah Osborne witches in order to assign blame or get revenge. And they attempted to entrap witches with various “tests” including witch cake, a yummy concoction of rye meal and urine by which the guilty among them might be found out. But the witches were already among them, just not named as such. In fact, just like the Good Witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz, for many centuries white witches were in great demand for their healing powers. Only when unexplained phenomena like the Black Death devastated the population did church authorities go looking for the malevolent forces causing them — and in that sense, they were hunting witches the way I might set a cat to hunting the mice that I’m sure are getting into the corn.

Yet according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term witch hunt, which Donald Trump used last week to refer to the investigation into whether his campaign had ties to the Russian government, was first used in 1885, in H.R. Haggard’s fabulist novel King Solomon’s Mines. Before then, witches were suspected, tried, prosecuted, and condemned, but not hunted. By 1938, witch hunt had taken on a distinctly political cast. We call the ruthless methods of the Josef Stalin and Joseph McCarthy witch hunts because we understand their victims to have been framed or unjustly persecuted. No one called the subjects of those trials “witches,” but the sins of which they were accused — Trotskyism, Communism — both existed and were considered dangerous by a good swath of the population. By shaping the plot of The Crucible so that the motives of the witch accusers were entirely instrumental and their effects hysterical, Arthur Miller not only drew attention to the cruel absurdity of McCarthyism but also defanged the Communists his “witches” represented.

Later in the 20^th century, the “Satanic ritual abuse” panic led to witch hunts of nursery- school teachers that destroyed many careers. Here, the water is a bit muddier. That pedophilia existed as a criminal tendency in the world at large was never in question by either prosecutors or the defendants seeking exoneration. The existence of Satanic rites is more disputable. There are present-day self-identified witches and Luciferians, but it’s doubtful that any of the accused day-care teachers were involved in such practices.

Only in the latter half of the 20^th century did witch hunt apply to individuals, and always in attempts either to deny that such a thing was taking place or to assert the unfairness of whatever was taking place. This use of the term seems categorically different to me. The role of guilt by association in rounding up so-called witches, Trotskyites, Communists, nursery-school pedophiles, and so on is far less salient here. Perhaps more important, the so-called victim of the witch hunt tends to deny the very existence of the witch and to rely instead on their own innocence and the perfidy of accusers:

“The Watergate witch hunt . . . was run by liberals in the media.” –Paul Johnson, Modern Times

“Nixon Sees ‘Witch-Hunt,’ Insiders Say” –Headline on Bernstein/Woodward Washington Post article, July 22, 1973

“I’m asking what is it about [the Clintons] that attracts these witch hunts or, dare I say, these vast right-wing conspiracies?” – Tavis Smiley, November 20, 2015

“There has been a witch hunt against every prominent person of color that has served alongside the president. And this is part of it.” –MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe, speaking about the Obama administration appointee Susan Rice, November 27, 2012

“This is a witch hunt.” –Jesse Singal, writing about the response to Rebecca Tuvel’s essay on “transracialism” in Hypatia, May 2, 2017

Now, witch hunt has become Donald Trump’s go-to phrase for whatever emerges from James Comey’s testimony, Robert Mueller’s investigation, or any report in the news media of suspicious actions taken by the administration or the Trump campaign. And it’s not any old witch hunt, but the greatest in U.S. history against a politician. (It would have to be the greatest. Bigly.)

But here’s what I’m wondering. The people who hanged those unfortunate individuals in Salem thought they were witches; the people on trial thought witches existed, with powers they themselves did not possess or crave. Many in Hollywood in the 1950s thought Communists existed — many were Communists — but they just didn’t think Communism was a bogeyman. Nixon, by contrast, denied the existence of the conspiratorial president depicted in the media; Hillary Clinton denied the existence of the wrongdoing that the Benghazi investigations seemed determined to uncover.

Now we have an individual who promised great health care for everyone with no costs; who promised to bring back the coal industry with a wave of his wand; who promised to rid the world of ISIS in a matter of months. Such magic! Could it be that the president believes investigators are after him, not for conspiring with Vladimir Putin, but because he really is … a witch?

If so, all I can conjure is Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, who cast a spell and almost drowned when things got just a little out of hand.

Often I pay attention to a shift in language only when I find it coming from my own mouth. That was the case the other day, when my husband and I were hiking in the Berkshire hills. He caught his toe in a tree root and started pitching down the hill, but managed to veer right and swing around a slender birch until he steadied himself. “That was clumsy of me,” he said.

“But you managed to right yourself like a ballet dancer,” I said. “Good—”

Right then I felt the new set of words, ready to come out of my mouth: on you.

“Good job!” I said. We continued downhill, but as I watched my step among the various roots and rocks that are the hallmark of hiking trails in this part of the country, my mind drifted to the phrase Good on you. Once upon a time, I would have said Good for you. What had changed? And why?

Ask a person of a certain age, and they will probably tell you that Good on you is Australian slang, pronounced and emphasized mostly as Good ON ya. In fact, apparently in some parts of Australia the expression can be neatly shortened to Onya! Ask a younger person, though, and you’ll hear a distinction that has nothing to do with nationality or region and everything to do with intent.

If I back up my own timeline to, say, 20 years ago, I would have said to my husband, “Good for you!” I would have used the same expression if he had come home with the news that he had won the raffle at an office party. In other words, I would have said “Good for you!” to mean either “Well done!” or “How lucky!” When I spoke to a couple of millennials this week about Good on you, they confirmed what I suspected: These two meanings have now taken different paths. The appropriate response to my husband’s clever footwork on the downhill path would be Good on you. The response in regard to the raffle, unless I believed he had earned the prize in some way, like by a years-long perseverance in buying raffle tickets, would be Good for you.

And now that the phrase has been uncoupled, as it were, Good for you finds itself increasingly used sarcastically. As one American contributor to an online discussion explained, it can easily mean, not Congratulations! But Eat my shorts! You are certainly full of yourself, you worm turd. Conversely, Good on you can extend a moral approbation, as in this exchange from a recently published story by Laura van den Berg:

We boarded the ship in Miami. We are going to Cozumel because our mother loved that part of Mexico, and we are going the way we are going because she loved cruise ships, too. She took two a year, always to Cozumel, always on the most monstrously large ships available, a thousand feet long and fourteen stories high, with names like DESTINY and SUNSHINE. She would have loved the ship my sister and I have chosen. At first, people think we’re a couple. Good on you! they say.

Or take Alex Bledsoe’s noir novel, He Drank, and Saw the Spider:

“You killed the bear?”
“Yes.”
“Single-handedly?”
“No, I used both hands.”
Isidore shrieked again. She thought it over. “Well, good on you, sir. Bears eat sheep, and sheep feed us, so we’re always glad for fewer bears.”

Good for you has not completely lost its sincere meaning, but we see it increasingly used snidely, as in this exchange between Hoda Kotb and her co-host on the Today show, Kathie Lee Gifford:

HODA KOTB: How often do you guys do your sheets?
KATHIE LEE GIFFORD: Twice a week.
HODA KOTB: Twice?
KATHIE LEE GIFFORD: Yes.
HODA KOTB: Oh, well. OK. Goody — good for you. Goody for you.

Or in this bit of dialogue from Fiona Maazel’s recent story “Dad’s Just a Number,” where context is everything:

After a while, I said, “I’m not a liar. I’ve never lied about anything.” I went on to say I had no secrets. And that I’ d even been up front with her about sperm donation, which I could imagine a lesser guy being cagey about.
“Wow,” she said. “Good for you.”
“Vi. Come on.” I took her hand.

Of course Good for you retains its hortatory sense, as in the reason children should eat their peas. And Good on you retains its fashion sense (“That dress looks good on you”), which creates the double-entendre of the app Good On You, whose mission statement explains: “Our shopping choices have a huge impact on how businesses treat people, the planet and animals. So we created the Good On You app to make it easy for anyone, anywhere, to shop to their values.”

My colleague Ben Yagoda began noticing the drift of Good on you from Australian to American English some six years ago, and all I can say is that if I’m starting to use it, the trend must be increasing. Perhaps, as my other colleague Bill Germano suggested, “Good [  ] you is where on went when it decamped from based on, a usage that now seems practically extinct.” Those prepositions do seem to find their way, don’t they? Good on them.