I was on Twitter recently just minding my own business when I ran across one of the many polls that Ellen Jovin (of Grammar Table fame) posts. This one asked whether people were familiar with the word upsum:
As you can see, only about 3% answered yes, whereas 87% of the respondents hadn’t ever heard this word. That included me.
One of the commenters provided a definition and opinion:
A little searching took me to the Macmillan dictionary, which is a British-based publication. They have a definition that echoes the commenter’s writeup and that lists the word as “informal.” The best part is that they have an extensive usage note. From that I learned that upsum “seems to be particularly common in the domains of politics and finance.” They posit that the word goes back to the early 2000s, which makes it surprising to me that so many people (Americans?) hadn’t heard the word even after almost 20 years.
As the commenter’s tweet suggests, some people seem to be bothered by the term. After all, we already have the noun summing-up. But it’s not that strange. For one thing, the word upsum follows a pattern based originally on verb + particle that we see in more familiar nouns like uptake, upload, uplift, upsurge, and updo (as in hairstyle). And more generally, the fact that we already have a word for something has never been an impediment in English to creating new words for the same idea.
For origins today, a term that is happily relevant for our family this weekend: nuptials. As you know, this means a wedding ceremony: “the social event at which the ceremony of marriage is performed,” to quote Vocabulary.com.
It’s not really obvious where the term came from, is it? We got it from French (nupcial) and they of course got it from Latin. The Latins had an adjective nūptialis (“of or related to marriage”), from the noun nūptiae (“wedding”), from the verb nūbō (“to marry, take as husband”).
There is a cognate in English that you might be able to guess from the word nūbō, namely nubile. Today, the word is frequently used to mean “sexually mature and attractive,” pretty much only in reference to a young woman. However, another meaning, and one that is more directly derived from nūbō is “of marriageable age or condition.”[1]
I was pleased to discover that the word nuptials has a cognate in Italian that I didn’t even know I knew: nozze. Not that I know Italian, by any means, but I do know that the Italian name for Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro (whose libretto is in Italian) is Le nozze di Figaro.
I only ever use the noun nuptials with that -s at the end and with a plural verb: “The nuptials are on Saturday.” This makes it feel like a plurale tantum—a noun that is only used in the plural, like pants, scissors, and glasses. But no, a singular noun form nuptial does exist, historically and as late as the 20th century. I suspect this is pretty rare; I find no instances of singular nuptial as a noun in the COCA corpus. It’s fitting in any event that nuptials—a wedding—is a plural event, don’t you think? 🙂
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] There’s a discussion to be had about how the vocabulary of English singles out young women in this way. [^]