The Many Uses of “Best”

Besides its use as a simple adjective meaning, “of the highest excellence, excelling all others in quality,” the word bestserves as other parts of speech and occurs in many English idioms.

As a verb, to best means to get the better of, get an advantage over, outdo; to outreach, outwit, circumvent. “Jack’s wife always bests him at bridge.”

Best can be a noun. “Marilyn wanted nothing but the best for herself and her family.”

As an adverb best modifies a verb. “All the boys are good at drawing faces, but James does it best.”

Here are several common idioms that make use of the word best. The list is by no means exhaustive.

best man: the chief male attendant who stands up for the groom at a wedding. With the advent of same-sex marriage, the term is beginning to lose its gendered meaning.

the best people: people considered better than most, either because they come from old, established families, or because they possess superior moral qualities. “The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice.” –Ernest Hemingway

best boy: the principal assistant to the chief electrician in a film crew

best seller: what every writer wants to have or to be. The term usually applies to a book or other product, but sometimes it stands for a best-selling author. (Yes, best-selling takes a hyphen.)

second best: next in quality to the first. No one wants to be “second best,” but whether or not it’s a bad thing depends upon who or what is “first best.” For example, in the Forbes list of the richest people in the U.S., Warren Buffett is “second best.” His net worth of a mere $58 billion puts him in second place after Bill Gates. Gates has $72 billion.

to do one’s best and to give it one’s best shot: both expressions mean “to do something to the best of one’s ability,” but they have differing connotations:

“I always try to do my best.” (applicable to any situation)
“I may not have time to pick up the laundry, but I’ll do my best.” (implies that the effort may be futile)
“Everyone else in the contest has more experience, but I’ll give it my best shot.” (the odds of failure are greater than those of success.)

to make the best of it: adjust to a bad situation. “The tornado destroyed our house, but we’ll make the best of it.”

for the best: better than it seems or seemed at the moment. “His bride left him at the altar, but it was for the best because he met and married someone better.”

the best of both worlds: a situation in which you can enjoy two very different things at the same time. “Nina Dobev, who portrays both human Elena and her doppelganger, former vampire Katherine in [ The Vampire Diaries] – said she gets the best of both worlds.”

Some “best” expressions are hyphenated:
best-built
best-aimed
best-bred
best-dressed
best-kept
best-laid
best-managed
best-meaning
best-meant
best-preserved
best-intentioned
best-natured
best-tempered

Six Shades of True

Our word true is one of the oldest in the language. It may derive from a Proto-Indo-European word for tree. A well-rooted tree is strong, steadfast and firm. By the time the word entered Old English as triewe, it had acquired the meaning “faithful” or “trustworthy.”

New connotations continued to attach to true. The sense “consistent with fact” dates from about 1200. The meaning “real, genuine, not counterfeit” is from late 14th century. About 1550 it took on the sense of “agreeing with a certain standard,” and by late 1500s it could mean “accurately fitted or shaped.”

In modern usage, true has at least six shades of meaning.

Here are some examples from the web, together with a few synonyms that might convey the intended meaning more precisely.

1. Is it true what they say about the ‘Moto G’?
Meaning: correct, accurate, right, verifiable, well-documented, factual

2. This is why, with true musicianship in mind, I rarely touch the piano in my classroom.
Meaning: genuine, authentic, real, actual

3. An Australian forklift driver who some historians argued was the true heir to the British throne has died in the small New South Wales town he called home.
Meaning: rightful, legitimate, legal, lawful, authorized

4. A true friend…has your very best interests at heart.
Meaning: loyal, faithful, constant, devoted, staunch trustworthy, reliable, dependable

5. The costume historian views the history of clothing as a true reflection of culture…
Meaning: accurate, true to life, faithful, factual, realistic

6. True repentance is always characterized by at least three things…
Meaning: sincere, genuine, real, unfeigned, heartfelt

Then again, true might be exactly the word you want.

Here are some idioms that contain the word true:

true as steel: loyal and dependable
true colors: personality traits often concealed by one’s day-to-day behavior
true love: love that does not alter when it alteration finds
ring true: to sound likely (like the intended tone of a bell that has been cast properly)
tried and true: worthy of trust because of previous dependability
true up: straighten something
true to form: according to pattern or previous behavior
true-blue: totally dependable at all times

The Many Uses of John

Although male names like Aiden,Jayden, and Santiago lead in popularity among various ethnic and social groups in the U.S., the name John comes only afterJames as the most popular in the total population according to 1990 census figures.

The long-standing popularity of John has spawned numerous expressions in English, not all of them likely to please bearers of the name.

Because the name is so common, it has served as a generic appellation for any man, rather like Mac, Jack, and Joe, as in Hey, Mac! Got a light?, Every man jack of them (meaning every single man), and G.I. Joe (any man serving in the military).

In the days of the great English manors (think, Downton Abbey), “John” or “John Thomas” was used to refer to a man of the servant class such as a footman, butler, or waiter. In time, “John Thomas” became a euphemism forpenis. Another word for the same male body part is “Johnson.”

An anglicized version of French gendarme gave “johndarm” or “john,” a slang word for a policeman.

“John Doe” originated in English law as a fictitious name to describe one of the people in person a certain type of litigation. The name has come to be used to refer to an ordinary or typical citizen. A 1941 Frank Capra movie starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, Meet John Doe, focuses on the suffering of homeless and unemployed U.S. citizens.

Viewers of police dramas know that “John Doe” is often used to refer to a corpse whose identity is unknown. A female victim is called a “Jane Doe.”

The word john to refer to a W.C. or toilet may derive from the name of its inventor, Sir John Harington/Harrington (1561-1612), a member of Queen Elizabeth I’s court.

The use of john to refer to a prostitute’s client may have something to do with one of the meanings of “John Thomas.”

The word john also occurs in a few noun compounds.

A demijohn is a large bottle usually encased in wicker, like a bottle of Chianti, only much bigger. The wicker casing has one or two handles to make the bottle easier to carry.

A John boat is a small, flat-bottomed boat used on inland waterways in the U.S. It is also spelled jon boat.

A johnny cake in the U.S. is a cake made of cornmeal and toasted before a fire. In Australia, a johnny cake is made of wheat meal and baked on the ashes or fried in a pan.

Prepositional Idioms with “of”

The other day I read a letter supposedly written by a literature professor. It contained what struck me as the unidiomatic use of the preposition to attached to the adjective ignorant.

Note: An expression is idiomatic when its meaning is not deducible from the meanings of the individual words. In idiomatic usage, the exact same words can have different meanings, depending upon context. Take, for example, the phrasal verb “put out”:

• put out the light (extinguish)
• put out the cat (place outside)
• put out your hand (extend)

ESL learners spend hours memorizing dependent prepositions and the words they appear with because few dependable rules exist to explain the usage. We’re angry with a person, but angry about an injustice. We’re concernedabout our children, but concerned with the ecological movement. I don’t remember having been taught these patterns. I just know what “sounds right.”

The dependent preposition I’ve always heard used with the adjective ignorantis of:

He was ignorant of the consequences of his actions.

For this reason, I was startled to read what the literature professor wrote:

I specialize in literature, feminism, and cultural criticism (so naturally I would be ignorant to something that got 700,000 views).

Note: the professor was being sarcastic. Of course she knew about whatever it was that “got 700,000 views.”

My impulse was to condemn the unidiomatic usage “ignorant to” without further ado, but then I recalled the way “bored of” has spread in recent years.

To me, “bored of” is horribly unidiomatic, but since writing an unforgiving post about it, I’ve seen on Google N-Gram Viewer that the appearance of “bored of” in printed books has risen precipitately since the 1980s. Further, according to the Oxford Dictionaries online site, “the Oxford English Corpus contains almost twice as many instances of “bored of” than “bored by.”

Clearly my knee-jerk reaction to unidiomatic preposition use bears examination.

I did a web search. Sure enough, “ignorant to” is out there in blog postings and reader comments:

Why are people… so ignorant to the facts?
I think he’s ignorant to the fact that they both wanted it
People just are ignorant to the fact that system files use up that space too.
Torres seems ignorant to the danger he is in.

So far, “ignorant to” is still rare in modern usage compared to “bored of.”

By the way, although the folks at Oxford acknowledge the popularity of “bored of,” they also acknowledge that it’s still not considered to be standard English: “It’s best to avoid using it in formal writing.”

When it comes to which preposition to use with which adjective, the spirit of the language will decide. Meanwhile, careful writers and speakers may wish to review current prepositional use and use the established patterns.

To get you started, here are a few examples of adjectives that take the preposition of:

accuse of: The homeless man was accused of vandalizing a park bench.
acquitted of: When more evidence came to light, the man was acquitted of the charge.
capable of: Unsocialized children are capable of atrocious behavior.
censorship of: Throughout history, governments and religious institutions have advocated the censorship of books.
consist of: Krapp’s diet consisted of bananas and water.
convince (someone) of: You’ll never convince him of the truth of your argument.
critical of: He is critical of everything I write.
deprive of: Millions of children grow up deprived of ordinary comforts.
disapprove of: Some people make it a policy to disapprove of everything they didn’t think of first.
jealous of: Some men are jealous of the success of their wives.
kind of: What kind of books do you like to read?
regardless of: The soldiers were required to shave, regardless of their wishes.
required of: Familiarity with standard English is required of all applicants.
short of: I can’t go to the movies because I’m short of cash.
take charge of: Adolescents are encouraged to take charge of their learning.
unmindful of: The wounded man staggered aimlessly, unmindful of traffic.
worthy of: This writing is worthy of a professional novelist.

And, let’s not forget,
ignorant of: Many native English speakers seem to be ignorant of established prepositional use that ESL learners struggle to master.

Lo and Behold!

A football fan posted the following:

I decided to watch the Duke vs Miami game and low and behold Duke is successful this year…

Naturally the “low and behold” caught my eye. Was it just a typo? I hopped on my search engine to see what I could find.

Apparently a lot of English speakers write low for the lo of “Lo and behold!”

Some of the misspellings I found were deliberate puns in headlines above stories about something “low,” like low oil prices, low calorie recipes, and low golf scores.

More, however, seemed to be the result of not knowing that the word in the expression is spelled lo and not low.

Here are some examples:

Low and behold! (a blog title)

Low and Behold (a 2007 movie about post-Hurricane Katrina)

…low and behold I have some pretty awesome DOMS in the mid region (exercise site)

But low and behold, some four decades later… (printed rap lyrics)

Low and behold it worked out great I got a laptop in the mail (testimonial on marketing site)

Autumn term will all be about the Old Testament and low and behold, we’ve worked out a complete program (university site in the U.K.)

Low and Behold…How Much Work Are You Willing to do? (headline on an author’s site)

If you don’t count the exotic list of words acceptable for Scrabble tournaments, English has very few two-letter words. The fact that only about twenty are in common use may account for attempts to add a little body to loby adding another letter.

Lo may derive from the imperative form of the verb to look. It has been used as an interjection at least since Beowulf was written, but the tautology “lo and behold” dates only from the 19th century.

Long before that, lo–in the sense of Look! See! Behold!– was used to direct attention to something about to happen or about to be said.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; (Song of Solomon, 2:11, KJV.)

And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught/The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light. (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald translation.)

The earliest OED citation for Lo and behold! is from a letter written in 1808. Bulwer-Lytton– he who gave us the novel opening, “It was a dark and stormy night,” used it in 1841:

The fair bride was skipping down the middle..when, lo and behold! the whiskered gentleman..advanced..and cried—‘La voilà!’ (Night & Morning II. iii. v. 144 )

Nowadays the expression is used both humorously and cuttingly. Tennessee Williams has Stanley use it in a tirade against Blanche:

You come in here and sprinkle the place with powder and spray perfume and cover the light-bulb with a paper lantern, and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile! (Streetcar Named Desire, scene 10).

Modern novelists probably won’t find much use for the expression but“Lo and Behold!” still has plenty of life in it for daily conversational use. People who use the expression in their blogs and online conversations may want to check the spelling. Historical novelists putting exclamations in the mouths of pre-19th century characters may want to stick to plain “Lo!”