Out Damn-ed Spot

ID: 050420.0901

Lady Macbeth's line from Act V, Scene I of William Shakespear's Macbeth is well-known: "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" Unless one hears the play performed professionally however, it may not be apparent "damned" is pronounced as two syllables: damn-ed. When and how did that change — abbreviating the past tense suffix — take place?

In the Introduction to his 2003 book, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, John McWhorter notes the author Jonathan Swift thought it rude not to fully pronounce the suffix: "By leaving out a vowel to save a syllable, we form so jarring a sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred [sic] how it could ever obtain." Swift took to marking the damage with an abbreviation apostrophe. He was, as McWhorter notes, "peev'd."

What would Swift say of the removal of not only the vowel, but the consonant as well? "Damned" is no longer distinguished from "damn." Like Swift however, an American author, Jack Finney, decided to mark the damage with an abbreviation apostrophe.

In the period between 1950 and 1955, Finney used the word damn' eleven times in nine different issues of Collier's magazine; for example, in I Like It This Way (June 24, 1950) — "I just won't let the damn' thing be that important to me!" — and in Tattletale Tape (March 4, 1955): "… there's not a damn' thing I can do."

This convention does not seem to have been an editorial policy of Collier's. In the August 4, 1951 issue, Finney's story, Quit Zoomin' Those Hands Through the Air, uses the word in its full form: "That damned sentry of mine was stealing ..." Interestingly, the story takes place during the Civil War, so Finney may have used the "older" form intentionally. Arguing against this however, is his use of the full form in his April 1960 story in McCalls, I Love Galesburg in the Springtime: "… none of your business but damned interesting all the same?"

Like "bye," an abbreviated remnant of "God be with ye," I imagine "damned" passing through Swift's damn'd, then Finney's damn' until it arrived to damn. Today, Lady Macbeth might say "Out, damn spot!"

I can't resist another example of Finney marking the transmogrification of written English:

In the Preface to his 1992 book, Swift Justice: Murder and Vengence in a California Town, retired newspaper reporter Harry Farrell notes "kidnaped" (one "p") was in journalistic usage in 1933, later supplanted by "kidnapped." Finney provides an example of this, but in an odd way. In The Body Snatchers, Part One (Collier's, November 26, 1954) Finney uses the modern form: "Miles, are you kidnapping me?" Two weeks later, in Part Two, he uses the older form: "If he'd had a kidnaping or murder to report, …" Rather than a simple typographical error, I suggest both spellings, for both verb and adjective, were in common use, the double-consonant form surviving the 1950's.

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