5: Rubber (Around the English Language in 80 Words)

For years, whenever I taught the phrasal verb to rub out, a doubt about word-origin used to start chasing itself around in circles inside my head. Let me explain:

To rub (something) out is a separable transitive phrasal verb. That means that it needs a direct object, and that direct object can go in the middle of the phrasal verb, between the verb and the preposition. Other separable phrasal verbs are to put (a hat, gloves) on, to throw (a broken toy) away, to bring (a child) up. Other transitive phrasal verbs are transitive but inseparable - to look after (someone), to get off (a bus).

When I teach rub out as a phrasal verb I explain that it means erase, or delete, using a rubber or eraser. I'm careful to note that the word rubber for a pencil-eraser is NOT used in American English, and that if you ask an American classmate for a rubber, they will look at you with surprise or alarm, as the countable noun (a) rubber in the USA means condom. Americans erase a mistake made in pencil with an eraser.

(Strangely though, the phrasal verb persists in American English in its metaphorical/figurative meaning: you will hear gangsters in American movies talking of the necessity of rubbing someone out - "removing" them permanently.)

At this point I talk about the verb rub, the action of moving one thing (the rubber/eraser) backwards and forwards against another (the page): rubbing is what you do to clothes while washing them, what Aladdin did to the magic lamp, and what you might do to your eyes with your hands when you're tired. It is logical, I then explain, that just as a thing to clean your contact lenses is a contact lens cleaner, and a thing that holds cups is a cup-holder, so a thing that we use to rub mistakes out is a rubber. Rubber, in other words, like cleaner and holder, looks like a typical agent noun.

But we know, of course, that rubber is actually the material that the eraser is made of. This can't be a coincidence, as also in French (gomme), and Italian (gomma), the word for the eraser is the same as the word for that flexible material that we also use to make car-tyres. So can it possibly be just by chance that a rubber happens to be a thing that rubs?

The answer to this conundrum is, as ever, provided by the good old Shorter Oxford Dictionary. It turns out that the material extracted from trees that our European neighbours call "gomme" or "gomma" was called caoutchouc or gum elastic when first discovered in the early 18th Century. For centuries before this the word rubber had been in use in English to describe other objects used for rubbing: brushes, cloths, sharpening stones (whetstones) - in the early 17th Century even a masseur was called a rubber!

Only after gum elastic had become identified with the process of rubbing pencil marks off paper did it become known as India-rubber, and gradually the word rubber lost its other associations, leaving us with an uncountable noun for the material, and a countable noun that the British and Americans have each decided to use for one particular object typically made of that material. The American use of eraser is gradually spreading in British English too, as a result of constant contact and influence. There's a phrasal verb for that too: American usage tends to rub off on the British...

[ A reader, Richard, asks:

What about the exclamation '... and there's the rub!' ? How does that fit into your recreational linguistic observations?

RLM replies:

Thanks for that, Richard! This usage was immortalized by Shakespeare (1602) in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, when, contemplating death as an appealing option - just like a nice, long sleep, Hamlet is struck by another thought: "To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub," that in that sleep one might be tortured by bad dreams - why else would people tolerate the trials and tribulations of life? It must be the fear that those dreams will be even worse. (It's a very secular humanist type of reasoning, isn't it? He doesn't contemplate the After-life as Heaven or Hell, but a sort of mysterious, unexplored territory.) "There's the rub" means "that's the catch", according to the 17th Century meaning of the noun "rub" as "obstacle" or "bit of uneven ground" - something, presumably, that would "rub" against the wheels or underside of a carriage or cart. In the same way that a "rub" in the road would make a vehicle stop or slow down, this thought of Hamlet's "must give us pause" - must make us stop and reconsider.]