Today, the term is most often encountered in legal contexts. Soon after its apothecary sense the word took on a more general meaning of substitution. Such substitutions could be either accidental or fraudulent.
#Translate pro quo pro#
In its initial use, a now-obsolete sense from the beginning of that century, quid pro quo referred to something obtained from an apothecary when one medicine was substituted for another. The current use dates to the late 16th century. We define quid pro quo as “something given or received for something else,” and "a deal arranging a quid pro quo.” The literal translation from New Latin is “something for something.” Major spikes of lookups occurred on September 25th, October 17th and 18th, and November 20th, for a year-over-year increase of 644%. The investigation into President Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky became something of a vocabulary lesson for many Americans, and the term quid pro quo was heard countless times from newscasters, pundits, politicians, and the president himself. It is increasingly common to see they and them as a person’s pronouns in Twitter bios, email signatures, and conference nametags.
#Translate pro quo professional#
And the American Psychological Association’s blog officially recommended that singular they be preferred in professional writing over “he or she” when the reference is to a person whose gender is unknown or to a person who prefers they. Singer Sam Smith announced in September that they now prefer they and them as their third person personal pronouns. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (WA) revealed in April during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Equality Act that her child is gender-nonconforming and uses they. Nonbinary they was also prominent in the news in 2019. There's no doubt that its use is established in the English language, which is why it was added to the dictionary this past September. More recently, though, they has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers. Lookups for they increased by 313% in 2019 over the previous year.Įnglish famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years. Although our lookups are often driven by events in the news, the dictionary is also a primary resource for information about language itself, and the shifting use of they has been the subject of increasing study and commentary in recent years. It reflects a surprising fact: even a basic term-a personal pronoun-can rise to the top of our data.
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