Dates: Saturday, June 15 – Wednesday, June 26, 2024 Instructors: Suzanne Snider; Guest Instructors: To Be AnnouncedLocation: Hudson, New York Come all ye budding oral historians, radio documentarians, writers, filmmakers, media advocates, and photographers who wish to make use of oral history in your practices. This immersive upstate New York workshop is a rigorous introduction […]
Dates: March 14 – 17, OnlineInstructor: Suzanne Snider This workshop is designed for educators who want to bring oral history into their classrooms and learning spaces. We’ll begin with a rigorous introduction to oral history theory, methods and practice before reviewing existing curricula and projects as a jumping off place to design our own curricula/projects. […]
Dates: Friday, March 1 – Sunday, March 3, 2024Location: Online via ZoomInstructors: Suzanne Snider, zavé martohardjono (they/them), Saturday, March 2 For many of us, family is the obvious—and sometimes most complicated—place to start our work as oral historians. In this workshop, participants will learn how to use oral history to document and preserve their family stories. We’ll discuss […]
Application Consideration Opens March 18, 2024 Hagley’s Oral History Office manages a growing collection of interviews covering a range of topics, from daily life along the Brandywine River, to the history of synthetic textile production, to mushroom farming in Chester County, Pennsylvania, to medical imaging and other industries. Many of these interviews have never been […]
Deadline to Submit: March 30th Dear OHA members, The Oral History Association is led by a group of volunteers who serve as officers, council members, and committee members. We are grateful for the time and service of so many talented individuals. Today, we invite you to help us move the organization forward toward its strategic […]
This week’s newsletter from Grammarphobia was all about sweating the small stuff, but the root of this slang expression is another slang expression: don’t sweat it. So here is an older post – would 2016 be considered ancient? – explaining its origin.
Q: As someone who ranks high on the perspiration index, I was wondering when the phrase “don’t sweat it” came about.
A: “Don’t sweat it” first showed up in print about 50 years ago, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but we’ve found a similar expression that appeared in writing 50 years before that.
The OED describes “don’t sweat it” as American slang for “don’t worry.” The dictionary says a positive colloquial version, “to sweat,” means “to experience discomfort through anxiety or unease.”
The earliest example for “don’t sweat it” in Oxford is from a 1963 issue of the journal American Speech: “Don’t sweat it means ‘don’t worry about it.’ ”
However, we’ve found this similar usage in the Dec. 12, 1914, issue of Happy Days, a New York weekly newspaper:
“ ‘What’s the meeting for, anyway?’ said Paul Braddon. ‘Keep your shirt on, and don’t sweat it off,’ said Deacon Small.”
The first positive citation (grammatically speaking) in the OED is from The Hungarian Game, a 1973 espionage thriller by Roy Hayes:
“ ‘Hold off for a moment. I want to watch him sweat.’ ‘The guy’s about to faint from pain.’ ”
As you can imagine, the verb “sweat” in its literal sense is very old, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times. The infinitive was swætan in Old English and meant (as it does today) to emit perspiration through the pores of the skin.
The first example in the OED is from the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (circa 900):
He swa swiðe swætte swa in swole middes sumeres (“He so sweated strongly in the mid-summer heat”).
The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says that “sweat” is ultimately derived from the proto-Germanic root swaita-, and that it has given us such words and phrases as “sweater” (1882, the garment), “sweatshop” (1889), and “sweatshirt” (1929).
