| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 133
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| sense “to repair or maintain”: service the electric dishwasher. In the sense “to supply goods or services to,” serve is the most frequent or only choice: One radio network serves three states. | 1 |
set / sit
| | These verbs have been confused since the Middle Ages, so it is not surprising that they sometimes get mixed up today. Throughout its history set has been a transitive verb. It originally meant “to cause (someone) to sit” and also “to cause (something) to be in a certain position.” This second sense survives as a basic meaning of the verb today: She set the book on the table. But since about 1300, set has been used without an object to mean “to be in a seated position, sit.” Set is still common as a nonstandard or regional word meaning “sit,” especially in rural speech: Stop on by and set a spell. The most familiar of set’s intransitive uses describes the motion of the sun at the end of the day. The sun only sets; it never sits. | 2 |
| This would seem a bit anomalous, since sit is mainly an intransitive verb. Its basic meaning is “to rest supported on the hindquarters,” as in He sits at the table. It has a variety of other uses that entail occupying a location (The house sits on a small lot) or existing in a resting or unused state (The skis sat gathering dust). Nevertheless, sit has its transitive uses, some of which date back to the 14th century. It has taken over the meaning that originally belonged to set, “to cause (someone) to sit,” so that we can now say They sat the winning ticket holder back in his chair. A more recent transitive use of sit is “to provide seats for,” as in The theater sits 5,000. | 3 |
| But no matter how this sits with you, at least you don’t have to worry about the chickens. A hen can sit or set on her eggs, so in this usage you can’t possibly go wrong. | 4 |
shambles
| | A boy might sometimes transform his room into a battlefield, while his parents might only see a shambles. In fact, they could all be right. Shambles goes back to the sedate Latin word scamnum, “a stool or bench.” Speakers of Old English borrowed the diminutive of this word, scamillum, as sceamol, which meant “a stool” and also “a table for selling goods.” Old English sceamol became Middle English shamel, which developed the specific sense of “a table in a meat market.” Soon it was used in the singular and plural to mean “a place where meat is butchered and sold, a meat market.” From here it was a small step to the slaughterhouse, and in fact the Middle English compound shamelhouse meant “slaughterhouse.” In the 16th century the plural form shambles also developed this sense, along with the figurative sense “a place or scene of bloodshed.” So shambles just got bloodier and bloodier. | 5 |
| But no more. Our current, more generalized meaning “a scene or condition of disorder” is first recorded in 1926, and the blood has been draining from shambles ever since. Some people have resisted this modern sense of the word, insisting that a shambles must entail bloodshed, but theirs is a losing battle. Back in 1969, 85 percent of the Usage Panel found shambles acceptable when used in the “scene of disorder” sense. In fact, it is difficult to imagine most users of American English giving the word any other meaning. | 6 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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