Learning | Tride and True? I thought it was Tried and True.

I always heard an expression that I thought was tried and true. I would hear the phrase to describe something (usually a product, but sometimes a method) that was reliable. It sounded like it meant tested and therefore proven. 

I suppose I never saw it in writing, because it surprised me when I saw it written as "tride and true." This was on Facebook, and I suspected it was a typographical error. But I looked it up, and tride is a real word.

I work at Cesar Chavez Central Library now, so I was able to consult a printed volume of the Oxford English Dictionary for the definitions of tride and tried! I expect few people will find that as exciting as I do, but I must remind you: I am a word nerd.

So the OED says that tride was an old adjective used by horsemen related to gait and pace, meaning short and swift, or short and nimble. Either way, it sounds like a reliable horse to me.

The Gingerbread Horse Runs Through the Pasture, 
from Pete Markham's photostream on Flickr.com. Some rights reserved.

But a second definition, also obsolete, is the past tense and participle of try. So it is another way of spelling tried. So we are back to my original understanding of the phrase as tried and true, more or less meaning that a thing or method has proven reliable.

Tried and True" handpainted sign, 
from Damon Styer's photostream on Flickr.com.  
Some Rights reserved.

I won't call the Facebook post I saw a typo, since technically tride is an older spelling of tried, but I think the phrase usually is written as tried and true. When I looked up the entire phrase in the OED, it appeared under tried, but not tride.  That settles the question for me.

Learning | Grateful for Word Nerds

I mentioned in a previous post that I love reading dictionaries.  It should come as no surprise that I consider myself a word nerd.  My best  friend, Roberta, recently reminded me of the time she gave me some lotion from the Dead Sea.   "The packaging was written in a galoompty different languages, and you mentioned that that was as much fun as the lotion."   

Ladyfingers & Nun's Tummies

Of course, my best friend is also a word nerd. She made up the word "galoompty" while she was dreaming.  In her dream, she needed a term for an impossibly big number -- and her subconscious rewarded her with "tri-galoompty oompty." 

There's a customer named Marian, who knows I like big words -- we talk about interesting words in book titles.  Recently, she kindly brought me a printout of an email about a cool word: paraprosdokian. Paraprosdokians are figures of speech which have a surprise at the end.  For example, "I used to be indecisive; now I'm not so sure."  I understand the term comes from Greek terms for "against" and "expectation."

The Meaning of Everything

This holiday season, I'm thankful for books about words, like Ladyfingers & Nun's Tummies: a Lighthearted Look at How Foods Got Their Names (I love the examples of foods named by mistake) and The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. 

True word nerds know that the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, is the definitive source on words in the English language.  There's a copy of the OED in the reference section of Cesar Chavez Central Library. (Sorry, word nerds, but we need to use it in the library. Since it is 20 volumes long, that may be a good thing--can you imagine trying to schlep that thing home, or fit it in the book drop?)