I was watching The Rachel Maddow Show the night, a couple of weeks ago, when Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, was about to force a brief government shutdown through a filibuster and other delaying tactics. Maddow showed video of him speaking on the Senate floor about one of his favorite themes, government waste, and I briefly glimpsed one of his visual aids that, if I read it correctly, was deeply strange. I searched the Internet for the poster, and it turned out I had read it correctly.

The deeply strange thing, needless to say, is that the word a is not a preposition but an article. Talk about waste; Paul spent I don’t know how much government money on a slick poster and couldn’t even be bothered to get his parts of speech right.

That made me wonder if there was anything else Paul got wrong in his attack on this study, which he initially broached in a 2016 press release. Spoiler alert: The answer is “yes.”

Backing up a bit, when Neil Armstrong arrived on the moon in July 1969, the first words he said seemed to be, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” This doesn’t really make sense, since “man” and “mankind” are pretty much the same thing. Armstrong subsequently contended that he had actually said, ” … step for a man … ” (emphasis added), which does make sense, and makes it a good quote.

You can judge for yourself by listening to this recording.

Over the years, there have been various attempts to determine whether he said “a” or not. In 2006, an Australian computer programmer ran the recording through audio software and concluded that Armstrong had voiced the article but static blotted it out. Three years later, two other researchers, using supposedly higher-quality recordings, came to the opposite conclusion. Armstrong, who died in 2011, himself would adopt the position that while he intended to say a, he wasn’t completely sure whether he had done so and preferred that the word be rendered in parentheses. That seems reasonable.

The study ridiculed by Rand Paul was published in September 2016; you can read it here. The lead author was Melissa Baese-Berk, a linguist at the University of Oregon. Paul’s poster (and his press release) misrepresented the purpose of the study, which it described as an attempt “to figure out whether Neil Armstrong used the preposition ‘a.'” Rather, the authors examine, through an experimental study, how the confusion over Armstrong’s quote may relate to broader issues regarding how we hear what others say. As Dr. Baese-Berk wrote to me in an e-mail,  “We were less interested in whether Armstrong used the article and more interested in whether this instance could illustrate the very issues of timing and speech reduction that we were interested.”

Furthermore, the poster is deeply disingenuous regarding funding. Take a look at it. How much do you think the National Science Foundation spent on Dr. Baese-Berk’s Neil Armstrong study–$700,000, right? Wrong. In fact, the grant was spread out over more than forty complementary studies. Paul’s press release is equally deceptive and misleading on this point.

Having read the Armstrong  study, I acknowledge that its findings do not amount to a cure for cancer. However, to state what should be obvious, that isn’t the way science works. It advances our understanding through fits and starts. The starts could not occur without the fits.

Nor am I saying that all academic research, government-funded or not, is worthwhile. Some of it amounts to self-perpetuating boondoggling, with little hope of eventually yielding real enlightenment or utility, and deserves to be critiqued.

But not through Rand Paul’s two-bit demagoguing.

Woo-woo tips mingle with practical pointers. “Eat from heart-shaped bowls, and put heart stickers on your refrigerator,” Minich recommends. (Why? “To keep the spirit of love alive,” duh.)

–The New York Times, March 27, 2016, review of Whole Detox, by Deanna Minich

… “Valley of Love,” a logy, woo-woo drama about a former couple who, at the request of their son, who killed himself earlier that same year, have come to find answers in the California desert.

–The New York Times, March 24, 2016

“I fluctuate between being very practical and very impulsive, and this was a very impulsive decision,” continued Mr. [Tim] Daly. … “Not to get too woo-woo, but there was a good vibe and I just kind of leapt.”

–The New York Times, February 5, 2016

Clearly, woo woo has hit center stage, or at least that portion of it occupied by The New York Times. And what exactly is woo woo? Deepak Chopra offered a rather defensive definition in a 2011 Huntington Post piece: “It used to annoy me to be called the king of woo woo. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, ‘woo woo’ is a derogatory reference to almost any form of unconventional thinking, aimed by professional skeptics who are self-appointed vigilantes dedicated to the suppression of curiosity.”

Some sources attribute the term — presumably an onomatopoetic rendition of the eerie soundtrack that plays when mystical folk unleash their mysticism — to James Randi, the longtime magician/skeptic whose career of debunking was recently chronicled in the documentary film An Honest Liar. The earliest reference I’ve been able to find is from a 1983 edition of New Age Journal, cited in a 1984 Philadelphia Inquirer article by Steven X. Rea:

George Winston, who practices yoga and who currently has three albums on the jazz charts … has jokingly called this crowd the “woo-woos.” In a 1983 interview in New Age Journal, Winston, asked if he knew who comprised his audience, answered that there were some classical fans, some jazz, some pop and “all the woo-woos.”

“You know,” he added, “there’s real New Age stuff that has substance, and then there’s the woo-woo. A friend of mine once said, ‘George, you really love these woo-woos, don’t you?’ and I said ‘Yes, I do love them,’ and I do. I mean, I’m half woo-woo myself.”

Woo woo soon developed from a noun to an adjective, as in this 1988 quote from a journal called Training: “Subsidiary gurus, licensed to deliver high woo-woo programs developed by others, often will remind you of TV weathermen.” (Interjection-noun-adjective is a rather unusual course of anthimeria.) The Times’ first use came two years after that, in an article about the Earth First movement: “In small towns among the redwoods, new-age settlers have appeared in tie-dyed wardrobes and dreadlocks. They work as carpenters, holistic healers, mandolin players, giving themselves names like ‘Sequoia’ and ‘The Man Who Walks in the Woods.’ Within Earth First, these neo-hippies are known as the ‘woo-woo element.’”

Hugh Herbert

While looking into the origin of the mystic-mocking term, I was struck by how many other different ways it has been used, including as the catch phrase of Hugh Herbert, a rubber-faced comedy actor of the 1930s and ’40s. Wikipedia tells us:

His screen character was usually absent-minded and flustered. He would flutter his fingers together and talk to himself, repeating the same phrases: ‘hoo-hoo-hoo, wonderful, wonderful, hoo hoo hoo!’ So many imitators (including Curly Howard of The Three Stooges and Etta Candy in the Wonder Woman comic book series) copied the catchphrase as ‘woo woo’ that Herbert himself began to use ‘woo woo’ rather than ‘hoo hoo’ in the 1940s.

Interestingly, a 1938 article by Lucius Beebe in the New York Herald-Tribune associates the phrase with other comedians: “Originated by the Ritz Brothers and long accepted in the West as a cry of dismay, festivity, or general acclamation, the screaming of ‘woo woo’ has penetrated the New York bars.”

People nicknamed “Woo Woo” include:

• Arnie (Woo Woo) Ginsberg, a retired Boston disk jockey, one of whose trademark sound effects was a train whistle. Jonathan Richman referenced him in the 1989 song “Fender Stratocaster”: “Like Woo Woo Ginsberg at the juke box joint/You hear the sound and you get the point.”
• Legendary Chicago Cub fan Ronnie (Woo Woo) Wickers. (Not to be confused with Philadelphia Phillie fan Brad Golden, who shouts, “Everybody hits! Wha Hoo!”)
• In the 1940s, 15-year-old Ellsworth (Sonny) Wisecarver Jr. developed a habit of running off with older women, garnering him national publicity and the moniker the Woo Woo Kid. Fun fact: A 1987 film based on Wisecarver’s exploits, In the Mood, was the first starring role of Patrick (McDreamy) Dempsey.

The Wisecarver woo woo seems to stem from the term’s use to denote a sense of risque hijinks, sort of the intersection of “hubba hubba,” “ooh la la,” and, in another bit of onomatopoeia, a wolf whistle, with an implied association with the idea of pitching woo. In 1960, Time magazine illustrated the glamour of the financial writer Silvia Porter by quoting a letter to her lecture agency, “Our second choice would not have the allure and woo-woo of Miss Porter.”

Then there was the Hamilton Jordan affair. As readers who were past the age of reason in 1978 may recall, Jordan, a top adviser in the Carter administration, made headlines that year when, at a Washington bar, he supposedly spit his drink on a woman’s blouse. The White House thereupon issued a 33-page white paper denying the allegation. The Washington Post reported:

The White House rebuttal issued yesterday rested heavily on the statements of Daniel V. Marshall III, a bartender at Sarsfield’s at 2524 L St. NW, where the incident occurred. …

Marshall’s version of what happened is that Jordan was quickly surrounded by young women who wanted to be near the “celebrity.” He said Jordan “woofed down” a steak and drank a beer and two Amaretto-and-creams.

The women were coming up to Jordan “and ‘woo-woo,’ you know what I mean?” Marshall asked.

I could discuss South Park’s Woo Woo PC Chant, the Woo Woo cocktail (vodka, peach schnapps, and cranberry juice), and Jeffrey Osborne’s 1986 “You Should Be Mine (the Woo Woo Song),” but you get the idea. Woo woo has an uncanny semantic productivity. Not to get too woo woo on you.

I was listening the other day to “Reply All,” a podcast about the Internet, and P.J. Vogt, the reporter/host, had occasion to say the word “often.” I was pretty confident that I knew how he was going to pronounce it. After all, Vogt is young (I would judge in his early 30s), and speaks with vocal fry, list lilt, uptalk, and, generally, a pronounced Ira Glass-esque lack of slickness.

In other words, I knew he would say “off-ten,” pronouncing the t.

And he did.

A good deal of history is embedded in his choice. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word often became commonly used (supplanting oft) only in the 15th century, and that in the 16th and 17th, it was sometimes said with the t voiced, sometimes not. Queen Elizabeth I said offen (the dictionary doesn’t say how it knows this), and that pronunciation became the accepted one. In the blog Daily Writing Tips, Maeve Maddox quotes John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, published in 1791: “in often and soften the t is silent.”

John Keats seemed to be assuming such a pronunciation in lines he wrote for a draft of “Endymion” (1818):

“… O foolish rhyme! / What mighty power is in thee that so often / Thou strivest rugged syllables to soften … ”

(My colleague Charles Robinson, a Romantics scholar, cautions, “I would agree that he probably pronounced often without the t — but you cannot prove it from the rhyme. Remember, there are partial and sight and near rhymes — so even if he did pronounce it off-ten, it would still ‘rhyme’ with soffen.“)

But the t version would soon revive. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “With the rise of public education and literacy and, consequently, people’s awareness of spelling in the 19th century, sounds that had become silent sometimes were restored, as is the case with the t in often.”

The dictionary is noncommittal about the shift, but in the 20th century, usage commentators often got exercised about off-ten. H.W. Fowler wrote in Modern English Usage (1926) that the t-voiced version was “practised by two oddly consorted classes — the academic speakers who affect a more precise enunciation than their neighbours’ … & the uneasy half-literates who like to prove that they can spell.” Alan S.C. Ross’s “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English,” the 1954 essay that coined the terms “U” (upper-class) and “non-U” (everyone else), put off-ten decidedly in the non-U camp.

Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1957) quotes a contemporary edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary as calling the t-pronunciation “vulgar.” He adds: “It is certainly unnecessary and is usually due to an affectation of refinement.”

There is a regional as well as a class element to this, at least in the United States. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a 1928 issue of American Speech: “The Ozarker nearly always pronounces the t in often.” And DARE also cites the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (1989) as reporting 453 informants who said the t as opposed to 290 who did not.

Data on pronunciation, as opposed to writing, are hard to come by, but I did my best. I listened on YouTube to 12 versions of the opening line of “On the Street Where You Live” — “I have often walked on this street before.” It was offen in both the My Fair Lady original cast album and the movie soundtrack, and in the renditions by Vic Damone, Etta Jones, Bobby Darin, Nat King Cole, Harry Connick Jr., Dean Martin, and Willie Nelson (whose version is my favorite). Only Tom Jones (a Welshman), Nancy Wilson (African-American, born in Ohio), and Smokey Robinson (African-American, born in Detroit) sang off-ten.

“Birches” by Robert Frost, has the lines:”Often you must have seen them/Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning/After a rain.” In this recording, Frost says offen.

As I suggested at the outset, it’s my sense that in recent years, young people have become partial to off-ten. The language blogger Jan Freeman agrees and offers anecdotal support:

I’ve been interested in this one since my daughter, brought up as an OFF-en speaker, went to college at the University of Michigan and came back saying OFF-ten. I don’t think it’s a regional thing — I grew up two hours south of Ann Arbor, and I don’t remember OFF-ten even as a variant. It must have been something she picked up from friends.

To at least pseudo-scientifically test this proposition, I met individually with the undergraduates in the class I’m currently teaching and asked them to read aloud the sentence, “Experience has shown that first impressions are often lasting ones.” Eight said off-ten and five said offen. (Obviously, their pronunciation may have been affected by seeing the t on the piece paper in front of them, or by self-consciousness.)

Whence the appeal of this pronunciation? All I know is that it seems of a piece with the popularity of amongst, whomever, saying “a person that” instead of “a person who,” pronouncing either as eye-ther, and the spellings grey and advisor. These are all changes in previously accepted usage that seem more formal, British, and/or fancier, and (in off-ten and the first three examples) are slightly longer. I leave to greater minds than mine the question of why these qualities are desirable.

In any case, in keeping with these trends, the question of how to pronounce “often” may soon cease to matter. Just as it replaced oft back in the day, it is being supplanted — if my students’ work can be trusted — by an amongst-ish antique word. That’s right, I’m talking “oftentimes.”

I read this sentence in The New York Times not long ago: “Most evenings, before watching late-night comedy or reading emails on his phone, Matt Nicoletti puts on a pair of orange-colored glasses that he bought for $8 off the Internet.”

The phrase that caught my inner ear was “off the Internet.” It sounded odd because, given the widespread use of the expressions online and on the Internet, one would expect the preposition to be on. 

A possible explanation for the “bought it off the Internet” formulation stems from the use of off (since the 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary), in the sense of from, “esp. with take, buy, borrow, hire, and the like.” It’s a colloquial but very real idiom, as in “I bought it off my brother.” (Even more colloquial is “I bought it off of my brother.”)

But I don’t buy this etymology for “bought it off the Internet.” For one thing, the off-instead-of-from pattern doesn’t really apply: it sounds weird to say, “I bought it from the Internet.” Looking into the history of the phrase further convinced me that the explanation lies elsewhere. Here are some examples from the early years:

• “The G Box has the responsibility of taking packets off the Internet and handing them over to the LAN or vice versa.”—Computerworld magazine, 1992
• “‘Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant,’ says Kapor.”—The Nation, 1993
• ” … sexual images can be downloaded off the Internet.” —CIO magazine, 1993
• ” … pulling shareware off the Internet.” —InfoWorld magazine, 1994
• “And we’re looking for ways to try to at least help parents deal with what their children can get off the Internet.”—Pres. Bill Clinton, 1994
• “People said they would buy more off the Internet if they knew the privacy policies for the companies whose sites they visit.”—Network World magazine, June 1997

The progression is interesting. The early references are to files, software, text, or images, and the word off suggests a sense of the Internet as a giant clothesline, or tree, on which these things are hanging, ready to be plucked. I believe that notion extended to the Matt Nicoletti idea of purchasing things from Internet vendors, as first seen in the 1997 Network World quote.

Before long, people started talking about buying something off a particular vendor. From Nick Hornby’s 2007 novel Slam: “Mum buys stuff off Amazon sometimes.”

I mentioned all this to my daughter Maria Yagoda, and she said people her age (twenties) and younger have taken things a step farther, saying, “I bought it offline” to indicate something purchased in an Internet transaction. Sure enough, a poster to Urban Dictionary created an entry for this in 2005:

And it’s still very much around a decade later. I did a Google search for the phrase “bought it offline,” limited to things posted in the last year. Of the hits that were not ambiguous, about half referred to purchases that were made in stores (the traditional “offline”) and about half to ones that were made online. Examples of the latter:

• “Rodriguez purchased a bus pass on the Facebook group recently and said her pass ‘worked perfectly’ and she bought it offline because of the cheaper cost.—The State News (Michigan State University student paper)
• “i agree about the naked palette i bought it offline because i couldn’t find it in Australia”—YouTube video “Makeup Products OVERHYPED”
• “Where Do I Find My Product Code If I Bought It Offline And Dont Have The Confirmation Email Anymore?”— message board

How did this usage arise? In 2009, someone posed that question to the Yahoo Answers community: “How come when a lot of people buy something online they tell others they bought it ‘offline’?” Sacha’s response was chosen “best answer,” and I think it’s basically right, including the implicit observation that the old-fashioned and somewhat Al Gore-y term Internet has been supplanted by the all-purpose online. Sacha opined: “its a quick way of saying it. for example instead of saying i bought it off the internet, they say i bought it offline – coz it wouldnt it make sense if they sed i bought it off online. if you get what im saying? lol.”

Lol indeed. The etymology is all well and good, but the phrase remains peculiar at best, nonsensical and confusing at worst. As Neil Roberts points out, offline is in all other contexts understood to mean not connected to the Internet, so where is the possible logic in saying “I bought it offline” when what is clearly meant is “I bought it online”?

But demanding logic from language developments is a mug’s game. So I’m going to withdraw the question and go offline.