Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

This is a new one to me; up 'til now, I too have heard "fraught" only as "fraught with".   A little research...

The Online Etymology Dictionary says it's related to "freight", which in the early 1200s in Middle English was spelled fraght.   The verb was fraughten and its past participle fraught, so it meant "laden" or "loaded".   The entry finishes by saying "Figurative sense is first attested 1570s".   So "fraught with" would be the usual and correct way of saying it.

But you say your dictionary confirms that simply "fraught" is a valid use of the word.   I suppose that it can be valid to say that a ship is loaded (without specifying what with), but I suspect you heard NPR use the word to mean a situation was not just "loaded" but "loaded with tension, uncertainty or fear".   If so, I'm going to take a leap of faith here and say your dictionary is mistaken.

Or rather, your dictionary doesn't actually say it's valid; it just says that people sometimes use the word that way.   That's the problem with dictionaries these days; I don't think you can find a one anywhere in the English-speaking world that will try to tell you what's right.   A decade or two ago even the Oxford English Dictionary abandoned prescription and went over to the "descriptive" position already adopted by every other dictionary in the language.   Now it's left to old curmudgeons like me and Jack Kilpatrick to issue proclamations on whether "fraught" can correctly be used to mean "fraught with tension"—and he's dead, alas.

Glenn, back me up, here; you're an old curmudgeon too, aren't you?

I haven't heard that one, but it's at least not "fraught" by itself; "worry-fraught" clearly means "fraught with worry" (just using a different word order).   Carol, is that how they did it on NPR?   If so, I take back what I said about it being wrong; I thought you meant they said something like "the situation was fraught", just that and no more.