Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Of and Oh

Of

Of—Belonging to, associated with, containing, comprised, or made from.

The fourth most common word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Corpus, after ‘the’, ‘be’, and ‘to’. But maybe not for long. There’s a pattern among English speakers to use noun adjucts in place of the word ‘of’. According to Wiktionary, In the 18th century you were more likely to say ‘affairs of the world’. Now the expression ‘world affairs’ is more appropriate. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation was established in 1908, while the Central Intelligence Agency was established in 1947. When entering a town in the Wild West, you might make a ‘show of arms’. But when the USSR and US stockpiled nuclear missiles, they weren’t performing a race of arms; they were engaged in an arms race. Tell someone you’re concerned about ‘the warming of the globe’, and see what kind of tripped up response you get.

I’m chalking this one up to general increase in literacy. Because it’s natural to add filler words when talking to give a greater sense to what we mean when we say what we say. But when editing for copy, the maxim is the fewer words to express the same thought, the better. Noun adjuncts make copy read smoother, dumping the word ‘of’ along with the rest of the crumpled first draft in the writer’s waste bin. But that’s no reason to entirely eliminate the word; it’s very useful as long as the concept of possession exists. And possession is nine-tenths of the law, after all.

Which… you know what? Where does that expression come from? Because I’m pretty sure if someone stole my bicycle that that would infer the bicycle practically belongs to the thief. Maybe I can prove away another tenth, but they won nine-tenths of the case. Doesn’t that mean I already lost? What if I possess the wheels and the thief owns the rest of the bicycle. How many tenths do each of us start off with?

Obviously, the expression isn’t meant to be taken literally. It doesn’t appear to line up with a specific court case either, instead originating from an oversimplification of the old Scottish proverb, “possession is eleven points in the law, and they say there are but twelve.” The first half of this expression appears in writing in Colley Cibber’s 1697 play, Woman’s Wit or, The lady in fashion a comedy acted at the Theatre Royal by His Majesties servants. (It’s specifically brought up when ‘an old rake-hell’ of a major offers to pay his son’s debtor with his son’s money, but the son rebukes his father with “I barr that old Gentleman, no! no! Possession is eleven Points in the Law!”) Considering how we’re tracing the expression back to a play, that makes the expression a literary device, and not a legal expression.

But while there may not be any actual legal code involved, the idea is sound. Courts don’t often reward claimants with circumstantial evidence. Saying a pet kielbasa is mine, and having my roommate agree with me, isn’t a solid argument if the kielbasa is sitting on a heated rock terrarium inside my ex-girlfriend’s house. Or, as Skip Rutledge puts it in Government’s Defense of the Status Quo, “The shirt or blouse you are currently wearing is presumed to be yours, unless someone can prove that it is not.”

The expression itself isn’t usually cited for legal precedence, but sometimes it is. Most famously it was invoked in the trial Hatfield v. McCoy, when a drove of pigs wandered from Hatfield’s farm into McCoy’s farm. McCoy argued that you couldn’t separate the pigs out from each other, and the judge agreed, citing the nine-tenths rule. It was a harsh ruling, but maybe one could make an argument that it was one of the only fair ways to resolve the issue… but the presiding judge was Preacher Anderson Hatfield, and a cousin to the defendant. The feud between the Hatfields and McCoys lasted twenty-three years and resulted in the death of twelve people, and sentencing of nine others, including one execution. So maybe next time you would tout that something on your property is de facto yours, that you give a little thought to hearing the other side out first. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be preventing the next great family feud.

Oh

Oh—a versatile interjection that might be expressing surprise, amazement, awe, understanding, realization, annoyance, disgust, or pain. Oh can precede an afterthought, an invocation, a dramatism, an emphasis, or simply be used as filler or as a sound that people make in place of lyrics. And yes, I’m delighted to inform you that Wiktionary decided to use Hit Me Baby One More Time (1998) as a citation for its quotation: “Oh, baby, baby, how was I supposed to know?”

Let’s dig deeper into this phenomenon. Why do lyracists and singers do this? Granted, it’s an innocent choice in Hit Me Baby One More Time. Here we could argue Brittney says ‘oh’ to call out to her lover. But when River Cuomo from Weezer sings “Ooh wee ooh, I look just like Buddy Holly”, how come listeners don’t complain about lazy writing? You’d think we’d prefer songs with more to say. But The Right Stuff from New Kids on the Block shows you can make song where the chorus is primo filler, and still peak at number three on the Billboard top 100. Why do we, as consumers, not demand more? All things being equal, wouldn’t pertinent and interesting lyrics be a more interesting choice than a few oohs and aahs?

I’m outside my area of expertise, so I jumped over to r/songwriters and asked them. I think JohnnyEaster hit the answer succinctly:

The point is, I think artists use words like that because it can communicate so much with so little. I guess some people may call that cheap – but music isn’t about being concise. The goal in most music I think is to communicate a feeling.

Maybe the best example (or at least my favorite) I can think of is The Flaming Lips “The Spark That Bled” with the line “I stood up and I said ‘Yeah'” It’s so simple but always gets me so hyped.

Sometimes I overthink, and miss the obvious. JohnnyEaster is right. With rare exception, the goal of almost every song is to make you feel something. When Marvin Gaye sings “Wooah, oooh mercy, mercy me. Oooh, things ain’t what they used to be, no, no…” I feel that. If you read the lyrics, Mercy Mercy Me is a song about the troubling environmental impact of industrialization, and how disjointing it is to realize the world you lived in and once seemed safe is now suffering. But the primal moans Gaye infuses in his song shows us how he’s suffering, and we suffer right along with him. There’s more content in a few well-placed ‘ohs’ than two or three stanzas worth of lyrics.