Q: I’m an outdated film buff who likes to analysis among the forgotten usages in pre-1950 motion pictures. One utilization I’ve seen is “stopping” at a lodge (or a good friend’s residence or no matter) the place at the moment we might say “staying.” When did this alteration?

A: The usage of “stopping” for “staying” isn’t fairly so useless as you assume. It nonetheless reveals up every so often, as on this submit by a British vacationer on Tripadvisor (Aug. 14, 2022):

“Hey all, we’re stopping on the Hilton Capitol Hill & I’m a eager runner. Are there any operating routes (park primarily based perhaps) close to there?”

You’re proper, although, that the utilization isn’t all that frequent today. We in contrast two expressions, “stopping on the Waldorf” and “staying on the Waldorf” utilizing Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks phrases and phrases in digitized books.

The outcomes point out that the 2 expressions have been just about equally in style from the Nineties to the Nineteen Forties, when the “staying” model turned the overwhelming favourite.

Within the mid-Sixteenth century the verb “keep” got here to imply “to reside or sojourn in a spot for an extended or shorter interval; to sojourn or put up with an individual as his visitor,” based on the Oxford English Dictionary.

The primary OED instance, which we’ve expanded, is from a letter written June 5, 1554, by the Earl of Bedford and Lord Fitzwaters concerning the voyage of Prince Philip, son of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, to England for his marriage to Queen Mary I:

“And from Villa Franca unto St. James’, being distant forty leagues, with all of the velocity he can conveniently make, the place he stayeth about two days” (from England Underneath the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, 1839, by Patrick Fraser Tytler).

Within the early nineteenth century, the OED says, the verb “cease” got here to imply “to stay, delay one’s keep in a spot; to remain (to dinner, at residence, with an individual).”

The dictionary’s first quotation is from The Mysterious Husband (1801), a novel by Gabrielli, pseudonym of Elizabeth Meeke: “In case your Honour and also you, Madam, will cease to dinner with us.” Meeke was the stepsister of the novelist Fanny Burney.

In wanting into your query, we got here throughout an article within the Dec. 24, 1978, problem of The New York Instances about Claudio Carlo Buttafava, normal supervisor of the Savoy Resort in London.

The headline, “Stopping on the Savoy,” was a pun on “Stompin’ on the Savoy,” the 1933 jazz commonplace composed by Edgar Sampson.

And since we’re nonetheless in a vacation spirit, we’ll finish with this model by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

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