| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 81
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| Cord itself means “a string or rope.” It has many extensions, as in an electrical cord and a cord of wood. When referring to anatomical structures, it can be spelled in general usage either as cord or chord (again by influence of Greek and Latin). Strict medical usage requires cord, however. Your doctor examines your spinal cord and vocal cords, never your chords. | 1 |
| When something strikes a chord with you, it is actually a metaphorical string that is being struck and not a triad of musical notes. But many of us feel harmonic overtones anyway. | 2 |
claustrophobic
| | You may feel claustrophobic in that cubicle, but is the cubicle therefore claustropbic as well? Clinically speaking, claustrophobic refers to an abnormal tendency to feel terror in closed spaces. But, like other terms used to describe psychological conditions (schizophrenic and narcissism, for example), claustrophobic has been applied more loosely in the general usage of our language over time. At first it referred to any kind of temporary feeling of being closed in or unable to escape (Riding on trains makes me feel claustrophobic). Then it became common to use it to refer to any kind of space that might make a person feel such a sensation (The staff members are jammed into a nest of claustrophobic offices). Seventy-four percent of the Usage Panel finds this latter usage unacceptable, implying that claustrophobic should be used only to describe a psychological state. Nevertheless, this usage is well established, and it follows a general tendency to combine adjectives with nouns according to a progressively looser interpretation of the relationship between the two. For example, the phrase topless swimsuit came to be followed by topless dancers, which led in turn to topless bars, topless districts, and topless ordinances. By the same token, a room that makes you feel a certain way may be described as sad or cheerful without objection, and there seems to be no reason for drawing the line at calling it claustrophobic. | 3 |
cohort
| | Education is not what you have learned but what you can still remember, and there are some today who remember from their second-year Latin that a “cohort” in Caesar’s Gallic Wars was a unit of soldiers. There were six “centuries” (100 men) to a cohort, ten cohorts to a “legion” (therefore 6000 men). A century, then, would correspond to a company, a cohort to a battalion, and a legion to a regiment. The bodyguard of a Roman general was also called a cohors. Because of the word’s history, some people insist that cohort should only be used to refer to a group of people and never to an individual person. In recent years, however, the use of cohort to refer to an individual rather than a group has become very common and is now in fact the dominant usage. Seventy-one percent of the Usage Panel accepts the sentence The cashiered dictator and his cohorts have all written their memoirs, while only 43 percent accept The gangster walked into the room surrounded by his cohort. Also, perhaps because of its original military and paramilitary associations, cohort usually has a somewhat negative connotation, and therefore critics of the President rather than his supporters might use a phrase like the President and his cohorts. | 4 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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