‘Anxious’ or ‘Eager’? - Quick and Dirty Tips - Dictionary

Anxious

“Anxious” means “worried or uneasy,” but it has often been used somewhat interchangeably with the word “eager,” to mean “full of keen desire” — but that flexibility seems to be changing.

We got the word “anxious” directly from Latin where it meant essentially the same thing: worried, disturbed, uneasy, and so on.

Eager

“Eager,” on the other hand, comes directly from French, and an interesting usage quirk is that although French did have the “full of keen desire” meaning, it had many more negative meanings for the word. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions “severe,” “fierce,” “savage,” “pungent,” “strenuous,” and more. Another meaning was “sour,” and that’s one of the roots of the Latin word for “vinegar,” which was essentially “wine eager” or “wine sour.”

English also had many negative meanings for “eager” in the beginning, but they’ve mostly become obsolete, rare, or regional. Today in English, when you hear the word “eager,” you think of positive emotions. 

‘Anxious’ or ‘eager’?

In the recent past, let’s say the early 1900s, usage writers started making a big deal about not using “anxious” to mean “eager.” You were eager to take your apples to the market to sell if it was just for some extra money, but you would have been anxious about taking your apples to market if you absolutely had to get a certain amount of money for them to be able to survive the winter. You’re eager for good things, but you’re anxious for bad things or things that make you worried.

“Anxious” had been evolving, though. By 10 or 15 years ago, many people were using the words interchangeably. Three major dictionaries imply that it’s OK to use “anxious” to mean “eager,” from dictionary.com saying it’s fully standard to the American Heritage Dictionary saying in 2014 that resistance was waning. Fifty-seven percent of their usage panel said it was fine to use “anxious” to mean “eager,” and the most recent edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage says using “anxious” to mean “eager” is ubiquitous.

However, I have seen indications that resistance to using “anxious” to mean “eager” is actually growing again, which is very uncommon! When a word starts becoming accepted, it usually continues to become more accepted. But in this case, cultural factors are becoming stronger than linguistic factors. I recently did a poll on Facebook, and only 43% of the people who responded said it was OK to use “anxious” to describe an event someone was looking forward to — 14% fewer than the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel in 2014. That was surprising to me.

Mental health an ‘anxious’

But after reading the comments — sometimes yes, it does pay to read the comments! — it became more clear: We’ve become much more open about mental illness in the last 10 or so years, and the word “anxious” is used more frequently in a medical context. Which means that although anxiety isn’t stigmatized like it used to be, people do view it as something they’d rather not have. If you’re going to the doctor and getting a prescription for being anxious, you’re not going to associate that word with happy feelings or being full of keen desire.

The bottom line

So although usage guides no longer say it’s wrong to use “anxious” to mean “eager,” it’s probably still a good idea to keep the words separate. You’re eager to see the dessert tray at a fancy restaurant, but anxious about seeing the final bill. You’re eager to get your new puppy, but anxious about how it might get along with your cat.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Adblock test (Why?)

Dictionary - Merion West - Dictionary

“Sometimes—in the middle of fair night—/when disobedient moon turns vandal/and violently rips off the bolts/of my window-shutters, my eyelids…”

variation on a theme of John Barth’s

recommendation for “prescriptive grammar”

as a healer of sorts (The End of the Road)

disobey—

disoblige—

Disorder—

Sometimes—in the middle of fair night—

when disobedient moon turns vandal

and violently rips off the bolts

of my window-shutters, my eyelids,

forcing them open to cells of unreclaimed

remembrance—memory funeral, tenebrous—

or when the microscopic pea underneath

my forty princely mattresses turns loose,

having to disoblige what little rest

my ailing thoughts laboriously secured

from tight-fisted sleep,

I fear that disorder might creep in

the spacious crevasse of Big Ben’s entrails

to overturn good old punctilious time.

In these foreboding nights of chaos pending

I reach for a dictionary, of any kind,

disobey—disoblige—disorder—

and greedily feed on its law,

its system, structure, rhythm.

                        

Of course, I learn nothing of the art

of holding reservations for tempest

in a harmonious, apollonian lodging.

Youlika Masry, a dual citizen of Greece and the United States, completed her legal education in Greece and France and also studied political theory in the United States. In addition to publishing poetry, she writes and translates books and essays in literature; the social sciences; religion and theology.

Related Articles

Adblock test (Why?)

‘Anxious’ or ‘Eager’? - Quick and Dirty Tips - Dictionary

Anxious

“Anxious” means “worried or uneasy,” but it has often been used somewhat interchangeably with the word “eager,” to mean “full of keen desire” — but that flexibility seems to be changing.

We got the word “anxious” directly from Latin where it meant essentially the same thing: worried, disturbed, uneasy, and so on.

Eager

“Eager,” on the other hand, comes directly from French, and an interesting usage quirk is that although French did have the “full of keen desire” meaning, it had many more negative meanings for the word. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions “severe,” “fierce,” “savage,” “pungent,” “strenuous,” and more. Another meaning was “sour,” and that’s one of the roots of the Latin word for “vinegar,” which was essentially “wine eager” or “wine sour.”

English also had many negative meanings for “eager” in the beginning, but they’ve mostly become obsolete, rare, or regional. Today in English, when you hear the word “eager,” you think of positive emotions. 

‘Anxious’ or ‘eager’?

In the recent past, let’s say the early 1900s, usage writers started making a big deal about not using “anxious” to mean “eager.” You were eager to take your apples to the market to sell if it was just for some extra money, but you would have been anxious about taking your apples to market if you absolutely had to get a certain amount of money for them to be able to survive the winter. You’re eager for good things, but you’re anxious for bad things or things that make you worried.

“Anxious” had been evolving, though. By 10 or 15 years ago, many people were using the words interchangeably. Three major dictionaries imply that it’s OK to use “anxious” to mean “eager,” from dictionary.com saying it’s fully standard to the American Heritage Dictionary saying in 2014 that resistance was waning. Fifty-seven percent of their usage panel said it was fine to use “anxious” to mean “eager,” and the most recent edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage says using “anxious” to mean “eager” is ubiquitous.

However, I have seen indications that resistance to using “anxious” to mean “eager” is actually growing again, which is very uncommon! When a word starts becoming accepted, it usually continues to become more accepted. But in this case, cultural factors are becoming stronger than linguistic factors. I recently did a poll on Facebook, and only 43% of the people who responded said it was OK to use “anxious” to describe an event someone was looking forward to — 14% fewer than the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel in 2014. That was surprising to me.

Mental health an ‘anxious’

But after reading the comments — sometimes yes, it does pay to read the comments! — it became more clear: We’ve become much more open about mental illness in the last 10 or so years, and the word “anxious” is used more frequently in a medical context. Which means that although anxiety isn’t stigmatized like it used to be, people do view it as something they’d rather not have. If you’re going to the doctor and getting a prescription for being anxious, you’re not going to associate that word with happy feelings or being full of keen desire.

The bottom line

So although usage guides no longer say it’s wrong to use “anxious” to mean “eager,” it’s probably still a good idea to keep the words separate. You’re eager to see the dessert tray at a fancy restaurant, but anxious about seeing the final bill. You’re eager to get your new puppy, but anxious about how it might get along with your cat.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Adblock test (Why?)

Genius English Translations – Stray Kids - Social Path ft. LiSA (English Translation) - Genius - Translation

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Genius English Translations – Stray Kids - Social Path ft. LiSA (English Translation)  Genius

Translation troubles: send fruit and any vegetable - Buenos Aires Herald - Translation

Argentine slang takes inspiration from almost anywhere, often using mundane nouns and spicing them up to give them new meaning, so how could fruits and vegetables escape that fate? We’ve had perejil as a previous “translation trouble” — a garnish that becomes much stronger with a dose of lunfardo — so I thought I’d take readers to our linguistic verdulería for a different sort of five-a-day.

Mandar fruta/cualquier verdura

“Send fruit” and “any vegetable” mean the same thing so we can group them together: it basically means doing something on the fly without taking it seriously. The phrases apparently come from long-distance comforts in the 19th century, with people asking their family to “send them fruit” from home when they moved to other parts of the country. The stories differ in how mandar fruta went from earnest plea to admonishment but it seems to stem from the disappointment of receiving packages without fruit: saying in contrast that “any old vegetable” or cualquier verdura was sent instead. 

Now, mandar fruta means to say things without understanding and cualquier verdura can also become hacer cualquiera or cualquier cosa — doing something poorly, usually in a rush and completely missing the mark.

Banana

This came up in conversation with the innocent and potentially philosophical question: “What does it mean to be a banana?”

A banana is basically a showy person who thinks they’re all that — and in trying to be cool they look ridiculous in their inflated sense of self. It can be a noun modified for the person’s gender, e.g. sos un banana, or a descriptor: es re banana (they’re so banana).

Here’s a bonus: the warning phrase “A papá mono/mamá mona con bananas verdes.” This basically means “Don’t try to fool me” — you wouldn’t trick a parent monkey, a seasoned and mature fruit expert, with unripe bananas. Growing up abroad in a bilingual household with a wisecracker for a father, I genuinely learned this one as “To father monkey with green bananas” — only to realize on returning to Argentina that I didn’t know its original Spanish form. Translation troubles, indeed.

Nabo

With the same sentence structure as sos un banana, the unassuming turnip can also become a bit of a put-down. But better to be a turnip than a banana in Argentina (what a sentence) because nabo usually just means that someone’s a bit of a chump. If you forgot your keys, you might call yourself a turnip. If someone tells a particularly bad joke, they could be called a turnip without fear of genuinely offending them. In fact, if you wanted your gentle blow to someone’s intelligence to be even softer and kind of dorky, you can use naboleti.

¡Chupate esta mandarina!

When you have an ace up your sleeve, particularly if you’ve accomplished something and want to throw it in someone’s face, you can tell them to “suck on this tangerine.” This is usually negative or to the other person’s detriment — presumably because tangerines can be bitter — but can also be used to express surprise. I’ve heard it a lot in the card game truco, when a winning hand is thrown down with an exultant ¡chupate esta mandarina!

The closest English equivalent, an approximation which I find delightful — “How’d you like them apples?”

¡Apa la papa!

This is basically the opposite of chupate esta mandarina, although I don’t hear it often. Apa la papa is so satisfying and fun, though, that I really think we should say it more. Apa and epa are simple and versatile exclamations but as with anything in life, you add a potato and the result is necessarily positive — congratulatory amazement, even. Someone graduated? ¡Apa la papa! You did the thing? ¡Aapaa la papaa! 

Really draw out those A’s for full effect. Go on, have some fun with cries of tubular triumph today.

Share your thoughts and translation hang-ups with us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram!

Adblock test (Why?)

20,000 words included in new dictionary of Shakespeare's English - Medievalists.net - Dictionary

The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language, published this week, aims to be the ‘first fully corpus-based dictionary of Shakespeare’s language and most comprehensive since Alexander Schmidt’s in the early 1870s.’

William Shakespeare used the word dotage to capture reduced mental ability (as in being blindly in love) rather than as a quaint term for old age, successes were really outcomes – one could talk of a ‘bad success’ – and, it turns out, the word bastard back then most often referred to a flower that was genetically hybrid.

Advertisement

While dinner was preferred by Shakespeare for what we might think of as lunch (although his contemporaries used it to refer to an evening meal), beef, as today, was strongly associated with the English, but particularly the lower ranks (it was thought to reduce intelligence). And while fish was not only considered inferior to red meat, it was also considered to be ‘decidedly dodgy’, being associated with Catholicism or sex.

'To Kate' (v.) #cl2023
Quick peek inside the new @Ardenpublisher Encyclopedia of #Shakespeare Language
Every single word of his plays is included (minus proper nouns and numbers)! pic.twitter.com/cO46TeWzu4

— Katharine Kavanagh (@BustingFree) July 6, 2023

This new research by Lancaster University sheds light on the times with the publication of The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language, published by Bloomsbury earlier this week. Its publication comes after 25 years of preparation, a £1 million Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, a team of up to 25 researchers, and seven years of hard work.

Advertisement

The project, conceived and led by Jonathan Culpeper, a Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, will result in a unique 5 volume reference work, detailing and illuminating Shakespeare’s rich language. A key feature of the project is that is uses corpus linguistics, the computer-aided analysis of massive datasets of language, to provide evidence-based accounts of Shakespeare’s language.

And not just of Shakespeare’s words. The volumes of the Encyclopedia will also reveal the linguistic thumbprints of plays and characters plays, the articulation of themes such as love and death, and the networks of character interaction. Professor Culpeper, who worked together with Dr Andrew Hardie and Dr Jane Demmen, also from Lancaster University, on these volumes, explains “This is the first fully corpus-based dictionary of Shakespeare’s language and most comprehensive since Alexander Schmidt’s in the early 1870s.”

This month sees the publication of the first two volumes, which together constitute a dictionary. Volumes 1 and 2 comprise 20,000 word-entries gleaned from a million-word corpus of Shakespeare’s plays and compared with a matching million-word corpus of contemporary plays, along with huge corpus of 320 million words of various writings of the period.

“So why the comparisons?” asks Professor Culpeper. “Other dictionaries define Shakespeare by looking just at Shakespeare. The result is a bit circular – Shakespeare’s words had lives amongst his contemporaries, and we pay attention to that, along with what they are doing in Shakespeare’s plays.”

Advertisement

It is obvious perhaps that wicked occurs densely in religious texts of the time, but who would have guessed that of the highly frequent word ourselves? Frequent words such as alas or ah are revealed to be heavily used by female characters, doing the emotional work of lamentation in the plays (especially histories).

“Frequent words,” Professor Culpeper comments, “often excluded from previous Shakespearean dictionaries, have a wood for the trees problem.”

The dictionary also surveys the infrequent, flagging words that occur but once in Shakespeare, such as bone-ache (syphilis) or ear-kissing (whispering, though other writers used it for flattering), and words that seem to have their earliest occurrence in Shakespeare (including, the decidedly modern-sounding self-harming).

Advertisement

The Encyclopedia is written for a general audience. The remaining volumes will be published over the next three years. To learn more, please visit the publisher’s website or buy this set on Amazon.com.

Being a small part of the @ShakespeareLang project was one of the highlights of my time at @LAEL_LU. Holding the encyclopedia for the first time earlier this week was really special. Congratulations to @j_culpeper, @HardieResearch and @JJDemmen on these first two volumes!! pic.twitter.com/3aoAtfych7

— Mathew Gillings (@mathewgillings) July 6, 2023

Top Image: Work on a new ‘verbal treasure trove’ captures nuances and uses of Shakespeare’s words. Phot courtesy Lancaster University, UK

Related Posts

Advertisement

Subscribe to Medievalverse

Adblock test (Why?)

Lost in translation: Germany's challenges training Ukrainian soldiers - Financial Times - Translation

What is included in my trial?

During your trial you will have complete digital access to FT.com with everything in both of our Standard Digital and Premium Digital packages.

Standard Digital includes access to a wealth of global news, analysis and expert opinion. Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting. For a full comparison of Standard and Premium Digital, click here.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section.

What happens at the end of my trial?

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel.

When can I cancel?

You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

You can still enjoy your subscription until the end of your current billing period.

What forms of payment can I use?

We support credit card, debit card and PayPal payments.

Adblock test (Why?)