Q: The expression “as I alluded to earlier” has been rife amongst sports broadcasters and now seems to have spread beyond that sphere. Is the use of “allude” for a direct reference another case where popular misuse leads to acceptance?
A: The verb “allude” meant to suggest or hint when it first appeared in Middle English in the late 15th century. In the early 16th century, it took on the senses of to mention indirectly, fancifully, or figuratively. And a few decades later, it came to mean to use wordplay or to pun.
The fanciful, figurative and punning senses, which are now obsolete, reflect the Latin source of the term, alludere, which meant to make a playful comment. As you can see, the verb “allude” has been a work in progress from its earliest days. And it’s not at all surprising that it still is.
Yes, many people are using “allude” these days to mean refer directly, and some usage guides accept that sense of the word. But most standard dictionaries and style manuals still say “allude” means to refer indirectly or casually.
Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage recognize as standard English the use of “allude” to mean refer either directly or indirectly.
Fowler’s, edited by Jeremy Butterfield, says, “It has been claimed by some critics that to allude to someone or something can only properly mean to mention them ‘indirectly or covertly,’ i.e. without mentioning their name, unlike refer, which means to mention them directly, i.e. by name.”
“But in practice,” Fowler’s goes on to say, allude is often used to mean ‘refer,’ e.g. He had star quality, an element often alluded to in Arlene’s circle of show-biz friends—Gore Vidal, 1978 [from the post-apocalyptic novel Kalki].” The usage guide concludes: “This use is well established and perfectly acceptable.”
Merriam-Webster’s challenges the “false assumption” that “the ignorant and uneducated are responsible for the ‘direct’ sense,” and provides examples of its use by “speakers and writers of high cultivation.”
Here’s an early example: “He never alluded so directly to his story again” (from Edward Everett Hale’s short story “The Man Without a Country,” 1863).
The usage guide says the “direct” use of “allude” is “simply a logical extension from the indirect use, and indeed is an inevitable development” because the verb was often used ambiguously by established writers.
It cites a half-dozen examples in which “allude” is used in “contexts in which it is not possible to know for certain whether the word is to be taken in its ‘indirect’ sense or not.”
Here’s one from Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence (1920): “it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts.”
However, Merriam-Webster says the direct use of “allude” hasn’t “driven the old subtle sense out of the language.” It cites this example, which we’ve expanded here, from “Why I Write,” an essay by Joan Didion in The New York Times Book Review (Dec. 5, 1976):
“You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
As for other views, Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.) says “allude” means “to refer to (something) indirectly or by suggestion only.” It says the verb “is misused for refer when the indirect nature of a comment or suggestion is missing.”
And Pat, in her grammar and usage guide Woe Is I (4th ed.) says: “To allude is to mention indirectly or to hint at—to speak of something in a covert or roundabout way. Cyril suspected that the discussion of bad taste alluded to his loud pants. To refer to something is to mention directly. ‘They’re plaid!’ said Gussie, referring to Cyril’s trousers.”
If there’s a 5th edition of Woe, Pat may recommend avoiding “allude” when there’s any chance of ambiguity. There are many alternatives, including “refer,” “mention,” and “indicate” for the direct sense, and “suggest,” “hint,” and “imply” for the indirect sense.
And if you do use “allude,” make clear whether you mean refer directly or indirectly, as Didion did when she used it indirectly in her essay and Hale did when he used it directly in his short story cited above.
As for the etymology, “allude” is derived from the classical Latin alludere (“to play with, to make a playful or mocking allusion to, to jest”), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. When the verb first appeared in English in the 15th century, it meant “to suggest, hint, hint at.”
The OED’s earliest English citation, which uses “alluding” to mean “suggesting,” is from John Skelton’s late Middle English translation (circa 1487) of the 40-volume Bibliotheca Historica, written by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily) in the first century BC:
“Ne none so covenable a name in theire supposell vnto it can be appropried, as to call it ambrosia … alludyng by that worde enwarde dilectation” (“Nor can any name be more fitting, in their opinion, to call it than ‘ambrosia’ … alluding by that word an inner delight”).
In the early 16th century, the OED says, “allude” took on the sense of “to make an oblique or indirect reference to, to refer indirectly or in passing to.”
The dictionary’s first citation is from a 1531 letter by George Joye, an English Protestant writer living in exile in Antwerp. In the letter, Joye responds to charges of heresy made against him by John Ashwell, the prior of Newnham Abbey in Bedfordshire:
“Christe called his Gospel & holy worde the keye of knowlege or keyes in the plural noumber of the kingdom of heauen alluding vnto the double propertye that one keye hathe both to open and to shutte.”
In that same letter, Oxford says, Joye used “allude” in a sense closer to its Latin source: to “refer (something) fancifully or figuratively to; to compare (something) symbolically.” The dictionary’s first citation expands on Joye’s earlier comment about keys:
“The propertye of a keye is to open that which before was shitte thus doth Luce allude & agre his speach with the propertys of a keye” (“The property of a key is to open that which before was shut, thus doth [the Apostle] Luke allude and agree [symbolize and align] his words with the properties of a key”).
In the mid-16th century, the OED says, “allude” came to mean “to make a play on words; to pun.” The first citation is from The Castle of Knowledge (1556), by the mathematician Robert Recorde:
“There canne be no such allusion of woordes in the englyshe … except a man wold rather allude at the woordes, than expresse the sentence.”
As we’ve noted earlier, the figurative and punning senses of “allude” are now obsolete. However, the OED says the early 16th-century meaning “to make an oblique or indirect reference” evolved “(esp. in later use): to refer in any manner”—that is, to refer directly or indirectly.
We’ll end with a few words from Mrs. Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Charles Dickens’s final completed novel:
“ ‘The mind,’ pursued Mrs Wilfer in an oratorical manner, ‘naturally reverts to Papa and Mamma—I here allude to my parents.’ ”
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