'Baited' Breath

 

A recent Google search for the term “baited breath” turned up 431,000 hits, including this headline at CNBC. Fascinating. This means one of two things: Either the people who wrote this term didn’t know how to spell it or a whole bunch of people have been eating night crawlers.

OK, that may be a wee bit unfair. Perhaps we shouldn’t be harsh on people for not knowing a word that, outside of one rare expression, hardly even exists: “bated” (unless you live in the world depicted in the movie “Idiocracy,” in which case we’ve moved on to a whole different subject).

But if you note the similarity to the word “abate,” meaning to put an end to something, you’re off on the right foot.

To say that you waited with bated breath means that the anticipation was so intense that you stopped breathing. Stopped, like in abated. That’s the root of the term.

The fact that this expression is so often paired with the verb “wait” -- he waited with bated -- makes it even easier to get it wrong by just repeating the vowel pattern to get "baited." Do a Google search for “sneak peak” and you’ll see what I mean.

So just remember, bated breath is stopped breath because you’ve abated it. That’s why, with “baited breath,” something always smells fishy.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2015 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “'Baited' Breath”

  1. June 29, 2015 at 3:21 pm

    But if everyone uses baited, doesn't at some point that become correct (like that/which being used interchangeably)?

  2. July 24, 2015 at 9:38 pm

    Carina: Yes, if everyone uses "baited" for "bated," eventually that usage becomes correct. The question is: when? And the answer, in standard practice, is: when dictionaries say so. This is the standard process through which words evolve. You and I vote with our speech and writing (even if our votes are really just errors) and, if enough people use the same words the same way for long enough, that usage becomes standard. Dictionaries serve as referees -- not because they're sanctioned to but because they're the best refs we've got. Anyone who would question a dictionary's -- or all dictionaries' authority -- would have a valid argument. But in standard practice, they tally our "votes" and report the results.