But how is the British participle spelled? Both “queuing” and “queueing” are correct, according to Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. The Americans, of course, are “lining” up. Oxford says this use of “queue” is “chiefly British,” and the Dictionary of Word Origins says it “has never caught on in American English.” That explains why Chicagoans stand in a “line” while Liverpudlians form a “queue.” “That talent … of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes … the French People.” The OED’s earliest written example in English is from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837): This usage leaped across the Channel in the following century. In the 1790s, the OED says, French speakers began using queue to mean a “line or sequence of people waiting their turn to proceed or to be attended to.” Meanwhile, the French too were using their word queue in imaginative ways. Imaginative metaphorical uses appeared in the 1700s, etymologists say, when the word came to mean a braid (or “pigtail”), and a billiard stick (spelled “cue”). It was used in the 1400s to mean a band of parchment or vellum attached to a letter, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.Īnd in the 1500s, as John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “queue” appeared in descriptions of heraldic shields and meant the tail of a beast. In English, “queue” didn’t originally mean a line of people. This sense of the word persists in American English, but the British replaced it in the 19th century with “queue,” a French word that originally meant “tail” and has roots in the Latin cauda (tail). Shakespeare used “line” this way in Macbeth (circa 1606) in reference to a procession of ghostly kings: “What will the Line stretch out to’ th’ cracke of Doome?” The written use of “line” to mean a row of people dates to the late 16th century, the OED notes. Later senses of the word in English preserved this notion of a “line” as something stringlike-a narrow mark resembling a long string a row of letters set into type a string of objects or people, and so on. Even in Latin, the word linea (line), a derivative of linum, originally meant a linen thread, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. So etymologically, a “line” is a linen thread. This word, like the equally ancient “linen,” has its source in the Latin linum (flax), and the earliest sense of “line” was flax-either spun into thread or woven into cloth. “Line” is an extremely old word, dating back as far as the 600s in Old English. The British used “line” for “queue” in the distant past, and some Americans have begun to use “queue,” probably influenced by British usage rather than by computer terminology.īut how did that broad general rule come to pass? Here’s the story. However, the division between “line” and “queue” isn’t as clear as all that. In Britain, violators who don’t take their turn are “jumping (or barging) the queue.” In North America, those who cheat are “cutting in line.” How did all this come about?Ī: Broadly speaking, you’re right-people ranked in an orderly sequence and waiting for something will be called a “line” in the US and a “queue” in the UK. Q: I am given to understand that what is referred to as a “line” of people in the US is called a “queue” in the UK, though both Americans and British use “queue” the same way in its computer sense.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |