Has the whole world started using baited breath instead of bated breath? This is about the tenth time I've seen it in the past couple of days.
I know. I'm anal.
Baited breath became popular about the same time sushi did...
The whole thing smells fishy to me.....
houeto: Harry Potter uses “baited’. Shakespeare goes with ‘bated’. You’re in with the more classical and literate people of freerepublic... Me? Not so much...
************************************************
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bated-breath.html
Which is it - bated or baited? We have baited hooks and baited traps, but bated - what’s that? Bated doesn’t even seem to be a real word, where else do you hear it? Having said that, ‘baited breath’ makes little sense either. How can breath be baited? With worms?
There seems little guidance in contemporary texts. Search in Google and you’ll find about the same number of hits for ‘baited breath’ as ‘bated breath’. In one of the best selling books of all time - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, (whose publisher could surely have afforded the services of a proof-reader), we have:
“The whole common room listened with baited breath.”
As so often, help is found in the writings of the Bard. The earliest known citation of the phrase is from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, 1596:
What should I say to you? Should I not say
‘Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ Or
Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this;
‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?
Bated is just a shortened form of abated (meaning - to bring down, lower or depress). ‘Abated breath’ makes perfect sense and that’s where the phrase comes from.
Geoffrey Taylor, in his little poem Cruel, Clever Cat, 1933, used the confusion over the word to good comic effect:
Sally, having swallowed cheese
Directs down holes the scented breeze
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.
“I know. I’m anal.”
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Theirs know truth too that, your just overeducated, we should be proud of are knowledge of proper usage of are language. Two many people our careless about such thinks. You want loose you’re mine over this will you?
It’s hopeless, we have college graduates who couldn’t pass a sixth grade English test from 1955 and they respond with anger when anyone points out their ignorance.
I’m certain that I make plenty of mistakes in writing myself but every one of the errors that I intentionally included in my reply are repeats of what I have seen on FR, some of them were in posts written by people who mention there...uh, they’re...uh, their advanced degrees. Read almost anything written prior to 1900 or so and compare it to almost anything written now and if you have any love for good writing you will want to scream. Privates in the American revolution were better writers than four star generals are today.