Writing about a dream date in the Valentine’s Day issue, Cassie summed up her boyfriend’s reaction to the prospect of seeing Bride Wars with the phrase “case and point.” I’m sure that lots of readers automatically exclaimed, “That should be case in point,” referring to an example that illustrates the point you are making. But how did we ever wind up with that phrase?
The website World Wide Words says that it comes from the French phrase á point, meaning to the point. This showed up in English as in point in the late 17th century (and which we readily recognize lurking in the expanded phrase in point of fact). About a century later, the Oxford English Dictionary gives us: “Some case or cases, strictly in point, must be produced.” From that sentence, it follows that such a case would be a case in point.
Solving this mystery leaves another question: why did Cassie write case and point? I suspect that the answer lies in the greater likelihood that young people live in a more oral/aural environment than us old fogies, who belong more to a world of print. If your primary exposure to the phrase comes from hearing it, in and and, spoken quickly, can sound the same. In point of fact, we use ’n to mean and, as in rock ’n roll. In a similar way, teachers see would of and could of in the writing of their students because few people distinctly pronounce these as would have and could have. What we hear seems to be something like woooduv and cooduv, and we know those are wrong, so the uv ending gets changed to of.
So there’s a little story about the origin of a phrase, with a case in point about how our ears and our eyes process words differently. And I can’t close without noting that an investigative agency in Manchester calls itself Case in Point and that the official magazine of the Case Management Society of America is Case in Point. But just to create more confusion, there’s also a software program for corporate attorneys called Case & Point. What are the odds that people refer to that as Case ampersand Point?
The Grammarnator
