Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 March 27

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 27

Origin of 'clean up baseball cap'

Is a clean up baseball cap inspired by the cleanup hitter? How come the name arise? Would cleanup hitters wear a different cap? --Bumptump (talk) 00:25, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Where have you seen this? --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:35, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Example of the cap: [1]in Amazon. Bumptump (talk) 07:38, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

It appears to be one of that company's brand names, so it almost certainly would refer to "cleanup hitter". Another of their brands is "MVP", which of course means "Most Valuable Player". In short, just catchy names. The cleanup hitter would wear the same uniform cap as anyone else on the team. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:52, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

To someone with no knowledge of the baseball term, it would be refer to the cap's heavily contoured peak, like a dustpan. Doug butler (talk) 13:35, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, no. If someone didn't know baseball, and made up their own meaning, it would be a false etymology. The real meaning is plainly by allusion to the cleanup hitter (linked above by the OP). --Jayron32 14:44, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Number names of English origin

All cardinal numbers 1-9999 have names of native English origin. But what about ordinal numbers?? "Second" is of Latin origin. According to Wiktionary, this word replaced the native English word "other" as the ordinal of 2. Why?? Georgia guy (talk) 23:37, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

I think that Proto-Indo-European *h₂énteros, the ancestor of other, did not simple mean "second", but "the other one of a pair", as in "on one hand ...; on the other hand", or "the other side of the coin". Not just in the branch that became English, but for the descendants of the PIE term in many languages, this was the original sense. In some languages the term was generalized from "the second one of a pair" to "the second one of an ordered collection" (of possibly more than two items). In other languages it was generalized to "any item from a collection apart from those just referred to". In most languages the original sense then became ambiguous and was dropped (although sometimes retained in idiomatic combinations: Dutch andermaal means "for the second time"). Swedish managed to introduce both generalizations and learned to live with the ambiguity. In any case, I think English "other" was historically not used as an ordinal number like "third" was. In Old English æftera, originally an adjective meaning "that which is after", could also serve as an ordinal.^[2] Note that Latin secundus was originally also not an ordinal number, but just an adjective meaning "following".  --Lambiam 02:24, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

And first means ‘leading’. —Tamfang (talk) 06:08, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

And German erst means earliest, if we are to go into etymological semantics. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:48, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- I'm not sure why the matter is deserving of doubled question marks. In Old English, "other" was a dual word, like "either" and "neither" in modern English, or like its semi-cognate "uter" in Latin. It basically meant "one of two items", and in specific contexts could mean either "the first of two" or "the second of two". As the word shifted away from having a dual meaning, it became less suited to play the role of the second ordinal, and was then replaced in that function... AnonMoos (talk) 02:35, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

See also Latin influence in English. Alansplodge (talk) 10:41, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

And Latin alter was the other second word, or the second other word. Meaning second or other. Temerarius (talk) 18:42, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

In French contrariwise, second(e) means ‘…of two’, in contrast to the analogic deuxième. —Tamfang (talk) 06:07, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Isn't that distinction a bit artificial? Take a phrase such as la seconde année la plus élevée après 2018.^[3] While la deuxième année la plus élevée is more common, insisting it is better seems schoolmarmish to me.  --Lambiam 07:13, 29 March 2022 (UTC)