Losing our illusions
''HAVE YOU NOTICED that all the young people now say they've been 'accepted to' college?" a friend asked recently. I told her I had-we're both old enough to remember when one was accepted by the institution, back in the day when nobody ''graduated college" without a decent from between those two words.
But like so many apparently novel expressions, accepted to (or into) college is older than we thought-and so are the people who use it. My friend and I were the victims of two psychological traps, unconscious biases that linguist Arnold Zwicky calls the Recency Illusion and the Adolescent Illusion. The first, Zwicky explains at the website Language Log (languagelog.org), is ''the belief things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent." The second is that ''kids today" are always the carriers of these usage viruses.
And accepted to college, while hardly geriatric, is no spring chicken. I only looked back as far as the mid-'70s - the sparse far reaches of the Nexis news database-but the phrase showed up before 1980 in several Washington Post stories, including one by Judith Martin, now the impeccable Miss Manners.
By the early '80s, accepted to college—perhaps modeled on admitted to college—was in all the best papers, and by 1990 it was running well ahead of accepted by. Today, accepted to and by (and at) are used pretty much interchangeably in college publications and web pages, by old and young alike.
The queries I get from readers, not surprisingly, often reflect the power of the Recency Illusion. Americans are still startled by go missing (first cited 1943, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and widespread outside the US by the 1970s). They don't like grow a business (common since at least the '70s, and prefigured in 1481 by Caxton's ''he grew and amended much this city"). I've had e-mails questioning speak to (as in ''speak to these four points," 1610), to-ing and fro-ing (1847), and to disrespect (1614).
So you'd think I would have developed some resistance to the notion that ''new to me" means ''new to the world." But the Recency Illusion is hard to escape, as I found out shortly after my encounter with accepted to college. The bait was a quotation, in a New York Times book review, from Greg Critser's ''Generation Rx," saying that pharmaceuticals now promise ''everything from guarding us against our excesses of drink, food and tobacco...to extending our very time on this mortal coil."
''On this mortal coil?" But when Hamlet speculates about having ''shuffled off this mortal coil," in what must be Shakespeare's most-quoted speech, we all know he's not talking about a Savion Glover move-don't we? ''Shuffle off" means ''get rid of, dispose of," says the OED, and ''mortal coil" means ''the bustle or turmoil of this mortal life."
So was Critser's misunderstanding a new one? Of course not. To judge by Google hits, hundreds of people think ''shuffling off this mortal coil" involves going somewhere on foot. Even in edited sources, people have been getting it wrong for nearly 20 years.
The shuffle-off-to-Buffalo sense shows up first in an Australian newspaper (''many of us shuffle humbly off this mortal coil") in 1986, but soon lands with a splash in Southern California. At the Orange County Register, one writer managed to use ''on this mortal coil" to mean ''on earth"-"Is there anyone on this mortal coil not having a St. Pat's party?"-six times in 1987 alone.
After that comes not a deluge, exactly, but a steady trickle of misunderstood mortal coils. You can't always tell whether ''shuffle off" means ''get rid of" or ''amble off from," but the ''shuffle on" versions are unambiguous: ''if we're not still on this mortal coil" (Sunday Times of London); ''life on this mortal coil" (Los Angeles Times); ''the rest stops on this mortal coil" (Anchorage Daily News).
The new sense of shuffle off (and mortal coil), unlike the revised accepted to, doesn't seem likely to displace the original. (Having a famous source will no doubt help it survive.) But in both cases, the message is the same: When you spot what looks like an upstart usage, it's probably later than you think.
E-mail freeman@globe.com
