Substitute For, Substitute With, and the Variable Understanding of What is Replacing What

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant and Martha. This is Lee from Huntsville.

More than once, anyway, in the past few years, I’ve had a specific miscommunication at the fast food drive-thru. Either my wife or I will order something and say, can I substitute coleslaw for the fry? And then the answer we’ve gotten sometimes is it doesn’t come with coleslaw. And we say, yes, we know it doesn’t come with coleslaw. We want to know if we can have coleslaw instead of the fries. Are we using substitute in a weird way? I blame the drive-thru speakers, but it wasn’t always at the drive-thru. Sometimes it was face-to-face.

All right. Yeah, the problem here is this word substitute, because the word means one thing, and it’s sort of changing in certain circumstances. The traditional formulation is substitute X for Y. Like you can substitute maple syrup for sugar in this recipe. That means put maple syrup in the recipe instead of sugar. Or you can substitute oil for butter, which means use oil instead of butter.

However, this word substitute is so tricky depending on the prepositional company it keeps. Because if you use the preposition with instead of for, then substitute increasingly can mean to replace someone or something with something else. For example, when I make this banana bread, I substitute the sugar with maple syrup. That means I use maple syrup instead of sugar. Or how about this one? We substituted the nice silverware with plastic utensils. That means we were going to use the nice silverware, but then we decided, what the heck, let’s just use plastic.

So, you know, more and more people are starting to use this second version of substitute. So I blame the word substitute. I think in cases like this, especially if you’re in a fast food joint and people are trying to do things very quickly, you know, in a restaurant context, it’s best to just use different words. You know, does this come with coleslaw or can I have coleslaw instead of? Because just imagine if you’re ordering a latte and you say, can I substitute regular milk for lactose free milk? You know, that means I want regular milk, not lactose free. But if you said, can I substitute regular milk with lactose-free milk, then you want the lactose-free milk. And you really don’t want the barista to make a mistake.

Right. There’s a bathroom problem later if that mistake is made. Yeah. Yeah. So I have started avoiding the word substitute when I’m making orders.

So Martha’s on a real good path here, Lee. And I’m going to back everything she says. And somebody else is going to back it, too. There’s a linguist by the name of David Dennison who has studied the history of English in its really complicated forms. And he has a fantastic chapter in the book called One Language, Two Grammars, Differences Between British and American English. And this chapter literally talks about this, this thing, specifically the verb substitute and substitute X for Y. And he talks about this change in what he calls argument structure. And he points out that this is a generational change happening in both the U.S. and the U.K. And it has happened before, but with this verb in French as far back as the 1500s.

So this verb to substitute is the problem, but not only in English. And it’s been going on for 500 years. Well, I’m glad I’m in good company. Yeah. And in French, it swapped completely. It went from X for Y to Y for X. It’s walked completely around. So we may see that happening in 500 years in English.

All right. That’s a long time to wait. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll get back to you in 500 years and let you know.

Okay. Lee, thank you so much for your question about this. Take care of yourself and be well.

All right. All right. Thank you both. All right. Bye-bye. All right. Bye-bye. Bye.