A dreaded scourge in Britain over the past few months has raised concern about protecting healthy but vulnerable livestock from infection. It's also raised questions about a couple of synonyms.

During coverage of the initial outbreak and subsequent slaughter of animals, we received e-mail about two terms used to describe the same disease: foot-and-mouth and hoof-and-mouth.

I seem to remember as a boy growing up on the farm in Southern Ontario it was called "hoof-and-mouth disease." If I am correct, when did the name change occur, and why, as this disease seems to affect only cloven-hoofed animals?

Would someone please enlighten me? Thank you.

Ron MacDonald
Yorkton, Sask.

Just curious as to when "hoof-and-mouth" disease was officially renamed "foot-and-mouth disease"?

Wayne Dryburgh
California

Many dictionaries, including the 1998 Canadian Oxford, consider foot-and-mouth and hoof-and-mouth interchangeable. They're both defined as an acceptable label for the same highly communicable viral disease that strikes cloven-hoofed animals, such as cattle, bison, pigs, and deer.

But some of North America's biggest news organizations have taken a firm stand against hoof. For instance, the Canadian Press, Globe and Mail, New York Times, and Associated Press insist journalists write foot-and-mouth disease.

Their style guides don't offer explanations. While we can infer consistency is a consideration, that still doesn't explain why foot won over hoof in the eyes of some influential editors.

FIRST STEP

Before looking at the merits of picking one expression over the other, it would be helpful to review the paths that foot and hoof have travelled over the centuries.

Foot used to be spelled with one o, and sometimes had an e on the end, but otherwise hasn't changed much since speakers of Old English first adopted it from German as far back as a millennium ago.

We still use the Latin term ped and Greek pod in many of our sentences ("pedalling bicycles," for instance, and setting up "tripods"), but foot remains extremely popular.

In fact, the word has got such a foothold in our language it appears in places that aren't always recognized. The word fetter, for instance, originally referred to shackles used to restrain the feet of animals or people. The Latin version is impediment.

Hoof and foot have a similar pedigree, with Anglo Saxons embracing the German word huof at some point before 1150 AD. At the risk of getting sidetracked, it's worth noting that pedigree is a French term for "pie de grue" (crane's foot), which was originally used to describe the marks /|\ commonly found in genealogical trees.

Hoof appears to have much more appeal than its Latin counterpart ungulate, which has been relegated to scientific circles.

As with most Old English, hoof and foot are anything but "sesquipedalian" (a highfalutin gift from the Roman poet Horace to classify words that are sesqui pedalis – Latin for "a foot and a half long.") Shorter terms aren't necessarily pedestrian, however. They can offer a simple and powerful way to make one's point.

DOING THE TWO-STEP

Given their origins, it's not surprising that the two words eventually crossed paths.

We have referred to people's feet as hoofs (or hooves) for hundreds of years, especially when trying to be funny. By the early 1600s, in fact, hoof had become a verb for walking or running away, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Other slang eventually caught on. In the 1800s, for example, hoofer meant a tramp, and by the turn of the next century it also described a tap-dancer on vaudeville.

It's clear, then, that hoof has been linked to humans for a long time. But what about the word foot? Has it always been the property of people? The answer is found in both animate and inanimate objects.

Since we can wander at the foot of a mountain, or write footnotes at the bottom of a page, it's not surprising that the term has been applied to plants and animals as well.

Zoologists have used foot to describe the limbs of some creatures since at least 1835, according to Oxford. Botanists, too, have come up with labels that have taken root in a corner of our lexicon, including the bird's-foot violet.

FOOT/HOOF AND MOUTH

All of this brings us to aftosa or aphthous fever, two technical terms that describe the same acute febrile disease attacking cloven-hoofed animals. Although veterinarians use this jargon, most of us know it as either "foot-and-mouth" or "hoof-and-mouth."

Aftosa is Spanish for aphthous, which in turn is a combination of Latin and Greek, and refers to ulcers that "set on fire" (haptein) in the mouth.

The French, who have a justified reputation for being careful custodians of a precise and elegant language, still call the disease la fièvre aphteuse. In English, however, the compulsion to trod back to our Anglo Saxon roots has proven irresistible.

But which to choose? Hoof or foot? According to Oxford, the earliest recorded reference found so far is in an 1862 article in the Edinburgh Veterinary Review: "Cows affected with the foot-and-mouth disease."

By the end of the decade, however, the term hoof-and-mouth was also being used in the United States and several other countries.

Both expressions have walked side by side ever since, although it appears foot has often had the upper hand because it's been the popular choice of bureaucrats and journalists.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has generally followed the British government's preference for the term foot-and-mouth. In Ottawa, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency almost invariably uses foot as well.

MISSPEAK AND MISSTEP

"We need a cure for the confusion surrounding the common name for aftosa," complained William Safire last month in a column in the New York Times Magazine.

In addition to the problem of jumping between foot and hoof on a whim, Safire said there's a danger of shortening the conjunction and to 'n'. People sometimes hear foot-IN-mouth even if the speaker is actually saying foot 'n' mouth.

The phrase "foot-in-mouth," of course, refers to a spoken gaffe. The 1997 Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang credits Safire with being one of the first writers to apply the term foot-in-mouth disease to politics. (Back in the 1960s, he defined it as "the tendency to blunder when ad-libbing.")

Safire, himself, has pointed out that the inspiration for the expression goes back to Jonathan Swift more than 250 years ago ("The bishop has put his foot in it"), and that the modern version has been around for at least half a century.

What has this got to do with diseased cattle? Well perhaps everything, if you're U.S. President George W. Bush – a frequent target of ridicule for his habit of bending English into weird shapes with words like "misunderestimated"and "subliminable," as well as expressions like "We ought to make the pie higher" (instead of bigger) and "The question we need to ask: is our children learning?"

The botch-ups have become so common, observed Safire, that the president has started poking fun at his own slips: "You know that foot 'n' mouth disease rampant in Europe?" Bush said at a roast for politicians and journalists earlier this year. "I've got it." (Several Web sites and at least one book deriding his solecisms appeared only months after he moved into the White House.)

CONCLUSION

Although some people have strong views about hoof and foot, kicking up a fuss whenever they hear or read the "wrong" word applied to aftosa, the distinction is really a matter of personal preference.

It's not a case of putting one's foot in it, of bungling language by picking one adjective over the other. Both expressions have been around since at least the 1860s.

Critics of foot have pointed out that cattle don't wear shoes, but this argument has several flaws:

• The terms "cloven-hoofed" and "cloven-footed" have been synonymous for centuries.

• People who object to livestock having "feet" don't seem to oppose countless other colourful and harmless expressions – from politicians putting their "snouts" in the trough to governments "clawing" back pension benefits.

• Language is not logical. (After all, if cows can have "calves" why deny them the rest of the leg?)

• Recent images of visitors wiping their shoes on mats soaked in disinfectant at Canadian airports are a vivid reminder of how the disease can be spread.

There may, however, be a couple of more compelling reasons to support hoof. As Safire noted, foot-IN-mouth disease has already staked out territory that makes serious discussion of a real virus difficult.

Other entrenched idioms raise similar concerns. Since the 1920s, for instance, foot-and-mouth disease has been considered a humorous description of golfers who bore spouses at night with boasts about their day's exploits sauntering over fairways and greens.

Still, as Eric Partridge noted in his 1951 Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, golfers are just as likely to contract hoof-and-mouth disease. Even in colloquial speech, then, the two expressions are considered as close as a gimme putt.

The strongest case for hoof is that it might stop people mixing up two different viruses. As the Canadian Food Inspection Agency points out on its Web site, there's an unrelated "vesicular disease in humans, unfortunately named Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease, which may be confused with FMD (foot-and-mouth disease)."

Although hoof is popular with some people, foot remains the choice of most government officials and large news organizations in North America and Britain. Those who resist using it risk being dismissed as recalcitrant – an old Latin term for "obstinately disobedient" that literally means "to kick out with the heels."

There's clearly no consensus on what to call aftosa. But with more than three million animals slaughtered overseas, and with so many farmers' livelihoods either threatened or destroyed, it's safe to say that most of us would not dispute one description: tragic.