I have just subscribed to the Oxford English Dictionary (at a special discount rate, thanks to Sparrow). To inaugurate the subscription, I just read the entire definition of “what”. It took me an hour and a quarter.
In the midst of this, I discovered that I was completely wrong about the origins of my wife’s favorite English phrase. “What the x“, for various values of x, traces back to… Geoffrey Chaucer?! It looks like he brought it over from the French “que diable…”. I find this strangely disappointing.
Addressing a crucial question of language
Then it occurred to me that there might be something of interest in the choices we make about he noun we put at the end of the phrase. The pox is gone now, since we don’t have to worry about it any more (for the time being). “Hell” was my father’s preferred locution. Google ngrams don’t reach back very far, but they show hell is still going strong. In fact, it really took off about the time I was born. “Devil” and “deuce” have been fading since the Great Depression; there appears to be a transfer of authority from the central executive to the collective, coincident with the spread of popular democracy in the English-speaking world, but other than that tenuous connection I’ve found nothing.
Google Ngrams for the leader board
Apropos of which, I must salute the OED for the utility and delicacy of their phrase, “in polite colloq. usage…”
sharon blake edgar
I used to have an OED and enjoyed getting lost in it. I haven’t thought about it for 20 years, perhaps I ought to. Thank you for this piece.
tom hillman
I am growing increasingly fond of the idea of “What the pox”