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タワーを移動させたら。When I change the location of the cat tower,
Jul. 13th, 2025 11:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
maru_feedタワーを一時的にここに移動させたら、みんな1回は必ず乗ってみる。 When I temporarily moved the cat tower here, every cat made sure to climb on […]
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the fine/small print
Jul. 13th, 2025 07:47 pmacommonlanguage_feedLast month, Dave Mandl tagged me on this message on Bluesky:
I hadn't really reali{s/z}ed it either, till Dave pointed it out. But sure enough, it is the case. Here are a couple of screenshots from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, showing the fine print and the small print with a bit more grammatical context:
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Before we get into the how, when, and where of this, let's start with the what. There are three uses of the fine/small print to sort out, which arose in this order:
- the original, literal meaning: printed characters that small in dimension and (relatedly/therefore) light in line thickness, and therefore difficult to read
e.g. I can't read such small/fine print without my glasses. - the extended meaning the fine/small print: supplementary text to a contract or other document that expresses terms and conditions, typically printed in a small/light font
e.g. They hid the extra penalty fees in the small/fine print. - more figurative uses (again with the): important, technical/non-obvious information that one might not have paid attention to, but that might have serious repercussions.
e.g. "The fine print of what Obama is doing is far less dramatic than many of his defenders and critics claim." (Cedar Rapids, IA Gazette, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary)
In the literal sense 1, the OED has examples of small print all the way back to the 1500s; fine print only appears in 1761. All the first citations are from England, but all their examples of fine print from the 1850s onward are American.
In the extended sense 2 (from what evidence we have), the fine print shows up first—in an American case-law reporter in 1891. The small print is first found in a yachting manual published in London in 1900.
It's hard to say when these expressions got more figurative. The OED only gives a separate figurative sense 3 for fine print (first example, 1948) with just "also figurative" at sense 2 for small print. It's a bit annoying that the two are treated differently, but it appears to be because the figurative examples of fine print in AmE are just more figurative. In the 'figurative' fine print examples, like the Obama one above, we're looking at deeds rather than words. But the not-really-about-print examples of sense 2 for small print involve language (if not print), as in this example from the Telegraph:
- 1971Some interest attaches therefore to the ‘small print’ of the Queen's speech and how far it avoids firm undertakings on some of the more controversial measures.
So, to sum up, it looks like, for some reason, AmE liked the phrase fine print more than small print for the literal stuff, and then it added an extended meaning relating to contractual language. You can see the frequency of the phrase rising as it gets more uses—and the neglect of small print in the Corpus of Historical American English:
Then after the meaning was extended, it looks like it was calqued into BrE—which is to say BrE took the idea and put it into the more familiar phrasing small print.
I wondered whether there were broader differences in the use of fine in its 'slim, delicate' linear senses in AmE and BrE. I found a few things, but they don't add up to much of a picture:
- fine line: consistently more AmE than BrE hits in singular
- fine lines and wrinkles: This phrase had 3x more hits in BrE than AmE in GloWbE (2012–13), but only about 1/3 more in the more recent News on the Web (NoW) corpus. It's strongest in Hong Kong/Singapore/Malaysia, though, so maybe it originated in advertising in Asia?
- draw a fine line between (two similar things): The OED's first example of that is BrE in 1848; the GloWbE corpus now has more US examples than UK, but the numbers are very small.
- fine-tip, fine-point (of a pen, etc.): much more AmE in GloWbE and NoW. (The number of hits for fine nib were tiny, but more in BrE. Fine-nibbed pen had more in AmE.)
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My cartoon for this week’s @guardian books
Jul. 13th, 2025 11:42 ammyjetpack_feed
ALTMy cartoon for this week’s @guardian books
Brad Pitt reveals ex-driver who inspired Sonny Hayes' backstory
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In a Word
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n. an aversion to work
isolato
n. a person who is physically or spiritually isolated from their times or society
hebetate
v. to make dull or obtuse
suspiration
n. a long, deep sigh
Drawn from the last line of a 1951 poem by Pierre Béarn, the French phrase métro, boulot, dodo describes the monotony of workday life: Métro refers to a subway commute, boulot is an informal word for work, and dodo is baby talk for sleep.
Anna Kaloustian wrote in the Yale Herald, “No English expression manages to quite grasp its prosaic implication, its banality.”
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Bus Bunching
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When two or more buses are scheduled at regular intervals on the same route, planners may expect that each will make the same progress, pausing at each stop for the same interval (1). But if Bus B is delayed by traffic congestion (2), it incurs a penalty: Because it arrives late to the next stop, it will pick up some passengers who’d planned to take Bus C (3). Accommodating these passengers delays Bus B even longer, putting it even further behind schedule. Meanwhile, Bus C begins to make unusually good progress (4), as it now arrives at each stop to find a smaller crowd than expected.
As the workload piles up on the foremost bus and the one behind it catches up, eventually the result (5) is that the two buses run in a platoon, arriving together at each stop. Sometimes Bus C even overtakes Bus B.
What to do? Planners can set minimum and maximum amounts of time to be spent at each stop, and buses might even be told to skip certain stops during crowded runs. Passengers might be encouraged to wait for a following bus, with the inducement that it’s less crowded. Northern Arizona University improved its service by abandoning the idea of a schedule altogether and delaying buses at certain stops in order to maintain even spacing. One thing that doesn’t work: adding vehicles to the route — which might, at first blush, have seemed the obvious solution.
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Getting to know the real Gabriel Bortoleto
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