@JSBangs Well, there was that little math mistake I made back in the 1990s, but that only cost about $500 million dollars. I'm not sure how many man-hours.
That's for sure. And I've been on the multicollider too but tbh I'd much rather have one Robusto or Kosmonaut answer than ten one-liners copied out of etymonline.
@Kit — It's very likely I cannot answer your question. However, if it's about howdy, then the earliest occurrence found in the COHA is dated 1845, and hello is 1834. It doesn't constitute any evidence, because the corpus cannot possibly capture the usage of that period in full. Particularly, representative samples of spoken English of that time are impossible to get.
@Vitaly I'm really irritated by this question. I've got people posting etymologies, but I have no idea if these words were used commonly, or just existed. Seriously, did pilgrims say "Hail" to each other?
Ime glad youve jined that uther Bobb who is zactly thar with a kwil, and you ma sai " howdy " tu him fur me. Well I thot az that I might az well kill the roomeytiz by tellin you how I kill turkis, az to grunt fur nuthin.
@Kit Well, “representative samples of spoken English of that time are impossible to get.” There will only be weak evidence through fiction and whatever texts decided to record spoken usage. Try resetting the search options and searching for [=hello]in the COHA.
That will give you a few synonyms.
All occurrences of hi in the 1810 are just typos / misspellings / OCR errors.
Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia; The Adventures of Three Southerns. By a Virginian; Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, &c., in the First Half Century of the Republic. By a Native Georgian; Charcoal Sketches; or, Scenes in a Metropolis (by Joseph Clay - a Georgian)
@Vitaly Thanks, that's helpful. Trouble is, I still don't know how common the usages are. I find "howdy" hard to swallow, to be honest. "Greetings" seems more plausible.
Well, I guess I am not really going to have satisfaction on this question. I am particularly annoyed that Martin Beckett's little joke is being so highly upvoted. It's funny, but not a real answer.
what is a good French equivalent for 'sticks out like a sore thumb'? :-)
- "Se voir comme une mouche dans une verre de lait" (conspicuous like a fly in a glass of milk) - "Se voir comme le nez au milieu du visage" (stick out like the nose in the middle of the face).
Well, I guess I am not really going to have satisfaction on this question. I am particularly annoyed that Martin Beckett's little joke is being so highly upvoted. It's funny, but not a real answer.
@Kit Yes, don't worry. This happens all the time. He had 40 yesterday and after the drug had had its effect, he was hopping and bopping all around. At 3 o'clock in the morning. So Cerberus and I were chatting till the birds were celebrating dawn.
@Kosmonaut — Yeah. Unfortunately, there really isn't any way to force people not to vote for the flip answers over the serious, informative, germane ones. That certainly militates against the ultimate effectiveness and purpose of SE sites in general, I think.
I saw one of @nohat's answers where he f***ing nailed it, had charts and everything and a well-written, well-reasoned answer, and it got like two votes.
I don't see what's wrong with Bruno's answer… Well, except that it's incomplete (there are a lot more greeting formulæ as illustrated by the HTOED links I posted here earlier).
if someone can recommend a free and easily accessible corpus of early American English correspondence that works with wordlists, you could combine all the HTOED entries into a wordlist and do a search
@Kit Exactly. And we are living alongside sovereign Native American reservations today. You could give that answer to any question about American words in the present day too.
@Kit Yes, it is off-topic for sure. I am saying that this comment doesn't even make an insightful point — so there were speakers of languages other than English in America at the time, so what? The same is true today.
@Robusto Normally I would actually delete it or convert it to a comment. Because it has so many upvotes and is the highest voted, I am trying to decide what to do. Usually a comment like this would be at -2 once I get to it anyway.
Great, it's gotten 2 more upvotes in the past few minutes.
"The term originally referred to the large cabinets that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers.[2][3] Later the term was used to distinguish high-end commercial machines from less powerful units." — Wikipedia
Etymonline gives "from main + frame"
I agree that etymologies can be fascinating. Only this one isn't. "What is the origin of the term 'shoe box'?" Kinda on that level.
Thing is, I never met an actual mainframe in my life, but I still find it trivial to deduce the origin of the term. Don't even need to consult The Big Black Book of Forbidden Knowledge [ahem, sorry] Wikipedia.
The OED gives this:
"central processor of a computer
system," 1964, from main (adj.) +
frame.
In the days when large installations were becoming more common, a computer system would require a specially built room (as far as I know, they still do). Tape drives, disk drives, printers, car...
About SQL (Computing/Databases):
When we have two or more fields in a table that, together, identify its records uniquely, what's the proper way of calling them? Composite or compound keys?
I've seen on the web both uses so I'm not really sure.
all the answerers, the asker herself (@Kit), and I committed a fundamental mistake of extrapolating Present-day English usage onto earlier periods of time, to some degree
there is no reason to assume that howdy was informal back then
That non-English answer makes me so annoyed. I should have deleted it right away — I just feel like something is wrong if I delete an answer with more than 10 upvotes.
@Kit — And that's another thing I am not sure of. There is some evidence that excessive religiosity of the founders is a recent myth laboriously being created by the folks. I haven't assessed the evidence, but I know there is a whole book about it.
@Kit — Besides, the Cambridge History of the English Language claims that the story about the early settlers (especially in the Appalachian region) was being created in the early 20th century or so.
@Kit — He will do all the leg work, but he balks at posting the answers. I practically begged him to post his answer to my last question, but he just blew me off.
I gave all the links I could. Those two screenshots of the HTOED Online, coupled with Etymonline and common sense, is enough to post a reasonable answer.
I was taught that 'an' should precede words beginning with vowels.
What is the proper article ('a' or 'an') to precede an acronym begining with a vowel?
For Example: In the sentence "A UFO is scary.", Was the word 'a' used properly or should it be replaced with 'an'?
@Martha — I thought it failed to load something at first, but reloading the webpage, clearing the cache, and, finally, restarting the browser didn't help. It's back to normal now somehow.
To quantify it in RGB terms, I see three different colours in the background in the screenshot (which is supposed to be uniform): #f6f8f4, #f6f9f1, and #f6f9eb
Okay . . . How quickly will this question be closed as "Off Topic" or something else?
Would any of you want to use a "logical parentheses" extension to English to clarify grouping? Say that our opening parenthesis is the particle "ka" [kah] and our closing parenthesis is the particle "na" [nah]...
You can try it in Chat Sandbox if you are not sure about formatting.
Yá'át'ééh (Apache/Navajo)
Tânisi (Cree)
niksokowa (Blackfoot)
And lots more
What might be the origin of the word "mainframe" for describing a type of computer?
The OED gives this:
"central processor of a computer
system," 1964, from main (adj.) +
frame.
In the days when large installations were becoming more common, a computer system would require a specially built room (as far as I know, they still do). Tape drives, disk drives, printers, car...
About SQL (Computing/Databases):
When we have two or more fields in a table that, together, identify its records uniquely, what's the proper way of calling them? Composite or compound keys?
I've seen on the web both uses so I'm not really sure.
I was taught that 'an' should precede words beginning with vowels.
What is the proper article ('a' or 'an') to precede an acronym begining with a vowel?
For Example: In the sentence "A UFO is scary.", Was the word 'a' used properly or should it be replaced with 'an'?
Okay . . . How quickly will this question be closed as "Off Topic" or something else?
Would any of you want to use a "logical parentheses" extension to English to clarify grouping? Say that our opening parenthesis is the particle "ka" [kah] and our closing parenthesis is the particle "na" [nah]...
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…