Etymology of Fraught

Hello, you have a way with the words.

Hello, this is Sam calling from Burlington, Vermont.

Hello, Sam. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Sam. What can we do for you?

I have a fraught question.

Oh, dear.

My sensitive ears have picked up a changing use in the word fraught, F-R-A-U-G-H-T. All my career, it’s been used in a phrase as an adjective, meaning a lot of, say, fraught with peril or fraught with worry. Lately, I’ve begun to hear it used as a standalone adjective, as in the process is fraught or the parents are fraught. Perhaps I’m hearing some slack usage or I’m mistaken about the proper usage or could be the word is changing.

So when somebody says the situation is fraught, then you’re sitting on the edge of your chair, right, waiting for them to say with something, right?

That’s been my experience.

Yeah, yeah, I can relate. I’ve had the same experience. But apparently since about the 1960s or so, that usage has become more and more common. It used to be exactly what you’re saying, that you would say a situation is fraught with. It’s related to freight. It has to do with literally, in the past, it had to do with loading a ship, loading a vessel. So now we’re talking about a situation that’s loaded with worry or loaded with tenseness or loaded with a lot of potential negative outcomes.

Right, right.

It used to be sort of neutral. You know, you could say fraught with blessings or something like that. But over time, it came to be more negative. And then for some people, it started dropping off. Ben Zimmer, who writes about language for The Wall Street Journal and a bunch of other newspapers, has written about fraught. And he found really concrete evidence that this started to take off in the 2000s. And by 2005, fraught without the prepositional clause was incredibly common in major newspapers and in the speeches of major figures on the national scene. But as Martha notes, it’s got a longer history than that. We can find what looked like proto examples from the 20s and 30s. By the 60s, it’s fully entrenched as like a thing that’s just started to be noted by language experts and grammarians and the people who write style guides. It’s so common by the 2000s that to see it in a New York Times headline is completely ordinary.

Is there any guidance on preferred usage or am I just an old-fashioned language curmudgeon?

Well, I think the nice thing about this case, I don’t know that we’re stuck in an either-or. I think both of these uses can continue to prosper and do their particular jobs without too much worry. I mean, like Martha’s saying, you are kind of waiting for the dun-da-da-da-da, and it never comes. The two beds never come. But I love the use of fraud. It’s fraud. I mean, it’s loaded with negative portents, basically, is what you’re saying when you say something is fraud. I mean, even if we say that it started being really popular in the 2000s, in the language world, that’s considered very new. So you did find something that is happening. You did correctly identify a trend. And, Sam, I’ve seen at least one dictionary that has said that fraud without the with is a little bit more informal. I’ve got to cut up with the times.

Yeah.

And Sam, nobody’s going to make you use it that way, but maybe every time you hear somebody use it, you can think of us.

There we go.

I will always think of you.

All right.

Thanks, Sam, for calling.

All right.

Bye-bye.

My pleasure.

Take care.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Goodbye.

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