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"Jive" for "Jibe"

caniswalensis said:
I am pretty sure that a gibe or a gybe is a taunt.

Different word from Jibe, which is to match or agree.
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Wikipedia.org
On the entry about the nautical usage:

While jibe and gybe are both acceptable spellings of the term, gybe is more common in British English and jibe in American.

Bottom line
All the sources provided different definitions for each spelling.

jibe
witionary - insult, nautical, agreement (tends to be US)
dictionary.com - nautical, agreement
merriam-webster.com - nautical

gibe
witionary - insult, agreement
dictionary.com - insult
merriam-webster.com - insult

gybe
witionary - nautical, insult
dictionary.com - nautical
merriam-webster.com - variant of jibe

So pick your spelling and takes your chances. There is some support for any spelling in any usage. But it looks like in the US normal usage might be:

jibe - nautical, agreement
gibe - insult
gybe - not used

This seems to be consistent with caniswalensis' view.
 
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davefoc said:
Wikipedia.org
On the entry about the nautical usage:

While jibe and gybe are both acceptable spellings of the term, gybe is more common in British English and jibe in American.

Bottom line
All the sources provided different definitions for each spelling.

jibe
witionary - insult, nautical, agreement (tends to be US)
dictionary.com - nautical, agreement
merriam-webster.com - nautical

gibe
witionary - insult, agreement
dictionary.com - insult
merriam-webster.com - insult

gybe
witionary - nautical, insult
dictionary.com - nautical
merriam-webster.com - variant of jibe

So pick your spelling and takes your chances. There is some support for any spelling in any usage. But it looks like in the US normal usage might be:

jibe - nautical, agreement
gibe - insult
gybe - not used

This seems to be consistent with caniswalensis' view.
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Great breakdown! thanks for taking time to post it. :)

I am an American, so that explains some things. :rolleyes: lol
 
caniswalensis said:
The last ten years or so, I have been hearing people I know use the word "Jive" in place of "Jibe" with increasing frequency.

Has anyone else seen this, or is it just us hicks here in the mid-west U.S.A.?

....

Canis
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Surely you jape.
 
SpitfireIX said:
I've heard this one several times on ESPNWP recently. Extremely grating as one would expect broadcasters to know better. :(
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Yes, but sportscasters are notoriously boneheaded. Every one of them to man will describe a hockey player jumping in the air as "leaving his feet." Drives me crazy. "That's definitely charging, there--he left his feet." Aaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuggggggghhhh!
 
caniswalensis said:
The last ten years or so, I have been hearing people I know use the word "Jive" in place of "Jibe" with increasing frequency.

Has anyone else seen this, or is it just us hicks here in the mid-west U.S.A.?

I usually address it like this:

Person: "A doesn't jive with B."

Me: "So you are saying A is true?"

Person: "NO! Are you listening? A doesn't match up with B."

Me: "OH! You mean they don't JIBE. J-I-B-E When you said they don't JIVE J-I-V-E, I thought you were saying they don't lie. You see, to JIVE is to speak in an untrue manner, and to JIBE is to match."

Person: "OK, anyway...."

This method is either so obnoxious that people are not responding to it, or they do not beleive me or simply do not care. I will regularly hear the same people repeat the mistake.

Am I alone in this, or do some of you have experiences that jibe with my own? Don't give me any jive, tell me straight. :cool:

Canis
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I have heard and seen it.

My guess is "don't care." Most people just don't give a damn and think, "If you understood what I meant, why should I care if I said [wrote] it correctly?"

The one that drove me crazy was all the idiot talking heads on the news channels talking about "weapons cashays." Nope, "cache" is pronounced like "cash." "Cachet" is pronounced "cashay," and means something different entirely. I think maybe someone finally corrected it because I haven't heard it so much lately.


davefoc said:
In spoken English, I suspect that jive for jibe is very common as in fact A jives with fact B, however the use of the expression seems to be on the wane so there aren't a lot of samples to base an opinion on.

I had to look it up but apparently gibe and jibe are just different spellings for the same word and any spelling is OK for any use of the word. However gybe might be restricted to the nautical meaning. I notice that my spellchecker doesn't like gybe. Maybe a British English spellchecker would have a different opinion on the matter.

And just what is the origin of the expression, gibes with, anyway?

As an aside I think I used to say "jives with" and then I got to wondering if the proper form of the expression was "gibes with'. I wasn't that curious so I didn't look it up but I think I switched to "gibes with" in my own speech. On the other hand, I'm not sure I've used the expression in the last five years.
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davefoc said:
Wikipedia.org
On the entry about the nautical usage:

While jibe and gybe are both acceptable spellings of the term, gybe is more common in British English and jibe in American.

Bottom line
All the sources provided different definitions for each spelling.

jibe
witionary - insult, nautical, agreement (tends to be US)
dictionary.com - nautical, agreement
merriam-webster.com - nautical

gibe
witionary - insult, agreement
dictionary.com - insult
merriam-webster.com - insult

gybe
witionary - nautical, insult
dictionary.com - nautical
merriam-webster.com - variant of jibe

So pick your spelling and takes your chances. There is some support for any spelling in any usage. But it looks like in the US normal usage might be:

jibe - nautical, agreement
gibe - insult
gybe - not used

This seems to be consistent with caniswalensis' view.
Click to expand...

I have never seen "gibe" used instead of "jibe" - I have only seen it used with the meaning of "to taunt." (just commenting...)
 
Psi Baba said:
Yes, but sportscasters are notoriously boneheaded. Every one of them to man will describe a hockey player jumping in the air as "leaving his feet." Drives me crazy. "That's definitely charging, there--he left his feet." Aaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuggggggghhhh!
Click to expand...

Sportscasters tend to be idiots.(My fellow Canadians will be painfully familiar with one Mr. Don Cherry.)

I've heard more than a few misuse the term "literally", as in "the last minute winning goal caused the crowd to literally go wild, and literally blow the roof off the arena", or some such thing.
 
Use of "whenever" for "when" is truly annoying.

More recent (and equally annoying) is the use of "over" to mean "about." I see things like this in students' papers: "The speaker's presentation over invasive species . . . "

Another one that comes to mind is the errant use of apostrophes to make a word plural.
 
The Shrike said:
Use of "whenever" for "when" is truly annoying.

More recent (and equally annoying) is the use of "over" to mean "about." I see things like this in students' papers: "The speaker's presentation over invasive species . . . "

Another one that comes to mind is the errant use of apostrophes to make a word plural.
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OK, if we're going down this whole pedantic path, misuse of infer and imply is the most annoying for me. And added to my little annoyance is that I like to pretend to not be a pedantic jerk so I am forced to just listen to people misuse the words and not correct them.
 
davefoc said:
OK, if we're going down this whole pedantic path, misuse of infer and imply is the most annoying for me. And added to my little annoyance is that I like to pretend to not be a pedantic jerk so I am forced to just listen to people misuse the words and not correct them.
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Take it a step further, why would you want to correct them? Give if a few decade and they'll be right, and in the case of infer being used to mean imply it will be yet another case of a word regaining one of its original meanings. Enjoy the ride.
 
Elizabeth I said:
I have never seen "gibe" used instead of "jibe" - I have only seen it used with the meaning of "to taunt." (just commenting...)
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I think that's my observation also, but the way the various definitions list alternative spellings it is not clear (at least to me) that any spelling for any usage is incorrect. I don't think I've ever seen the gybe spelling used.

I did a little more research and found this site:
http://www.grammarist.com/usage/gibe-jibe-jive/

I wish I'd found that first. I think it is consistent with what appears to be the general consensus of the definitions I looked at and the usage I saw on the internet. I found quite a few examples of gybe being used in the nautical sense and I have no memory of ever seeing that spelling before this discussion.
 
brodski said:
Take it a step further, why would you want to correct them? Give if [it]* a few decade and they'll be right, and in the case of infer being used to mean imply it will be yet another case of a word regaining one of its original meanings. Enjoy the ride.
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I don't think one understands exactly why one is a pedantic jerk. Maybe a desire to promote truth above tact, maybe a sense of insecurity that manifests itself with pedantic jerkness., maybe just the simple desire to help somebody with a misunderstanding of language. It's all kind of fuzzy for me. At any rate the source of the cognitive dissonance for me is being one and trying to pretend that I'm not.

*I know you put that in there as a test for me. Alas, I failed the test and noted the correction, thus confirming my basic pedantic jerkness.
 
I like threads like this. It makes me feel young to hear all you old folk gripe about misuse of your be-bop jargon. Unless some of you are also young but pedantic, in which case unclench, man, these are the intertubes.

Checkmite said:
One of many cliche's that are misheard and misrepeated so often that the actual phrase has been forgotten. "For all intensive purposes" (rather than for all intents and purposes) is on the way; almost beyond recovery is the common "butt naked" (which should be "buck naked").
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If you want to be the guy to tell General Butt Naked he's been using the wrong name this whole time, be my guest.
 
davefoc said:
. Maybe a desire to promote truth above tact,
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the problem with language, and especially English, is that Truth is hard to come by, is arrived at by broad consensus and shifts regularly. Saying that infer does not mean imply is only a truthful statement in some contexts and even where it is truthful, it is only truthful for the time being.
 
brodski said:
the problem with language, and especially English, is that Truth is hard to come by, is arrived at by broad consensus and shifts regularly. Saying that infer does not mean imply is only a truthful statement in some contexts and even where it is truthful, it is only truthful for the time being.
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I agree with this, but infer and imply are two useful words right now that mean different things. I think a movement of the language that eliminates the distinction is not desirable.

Often times the movement of the English language is toward changes that eliminate unnecessary distinctions and my inner pedantic jerk is less antagonized by those.
 
davefoc said:
I agree with this, but infer and imply are two useful words right now that mean different things. I think a movement of the language that eliminates the distinction is not desirable.

Often times the movement of the English language is toward changes that eliminate unnecessary distinctions and my inner pedantic jerk is less antagonized by those.
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Perhaps not desirable but inevitable. Words don't always retain their original meaning and it was only the typewriter and 19th Century grammarians that caused conformity in use and representation. Now we have the centrifugal forces of cable news and "Internet English" that are conspiring to ruin everything we thought we knew about proper spelling and expression.

Language is a tool and is not exempt from adaptation and development.
 
davefoc said:
I mentioned this thread to my wife. She says the expression is "jive with" and anybody that doesn't know that is just stupid.

Sorry, I'm just the messenger.
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in that case Mr Messenger, we may be stupid, but she is still wrong... :p
 
Yes, I've heard it enough that I thought it was the correct usage myself. I also hear "mine as well" instead of "might as well" and "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less."
 
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