Big List Entries - Wordorigins.org (2024)

14 June 2024

Polonium is a chemical element with atomic number 84 and the symbol Po. It is a highly radioactive metal. Once used widely in various commercial applications, such uses have largely been abandoned out of safety concerns. Its use today is primarily as a source for alpha radiation in laboratories and as a heat source for thermoelectric generators, such as those used for satellites and deep-space probes. The name comes from polon[ia] (Poland) + -ium.

The element was discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898 and named for Marie’s native land. From the published announcement of their discovery:

Nous croyons donc que la substance que nous avons retirée de la pechblende contient un métal non encore signalé, voisin du bismuth par ses propriétés analytiques. Si l'existence de ce nouveau métal se confirme, nous proposons de l'appeler polonium, du nom du pays d'origine de l'un de nous.

(We therefore believe that the substance that we removed from the pitchblende contains a metal not yet reported, close to bismuth in its analytical properties. If the existence of this new metal is confirmed, we propose to call it polonium, after the country of origin of one of us.)

At the time, Poland did not exist as an independent state, partitioned into three parts ruled by Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. Curie hoped that naming the element for her native land would raise awareness of Poland’s political situation.

Polonia is a post-classical Latin name for the land, appearing in the eleventh century and widely used in Latin texts since.

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Sources:

Curie, Pierre and Marie Curie. “Sur une substance nouvelle radio-active, contenue dans la pechblende.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences, 127, July–December 1898, 175–178 at 177. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. polonium, n., polony, adj. & n.2.

Image credit: Unknown photographer, c. 1904. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

12 June 2024

Literallyis often the target of grammar scolds and pedants. What the scolds are carping on is the figurative use of the word, as in, I was literally glued to my seat. The wordliterallycomes to us, via French, from the Latinliteralis, meaning pertaining to letters. It literally means word for word, actually, exactly. But when someone says they were literally glued to their seat, it is a pretty good bet that they are not actually attached to a chair with some sort of mucilage, and it is this non-literal use of literally that the pedants and scolds object to.

What the pedants and scolds fail to realize is that words can have multiple meanings. Furthermore, it’s hardly unknown to have words that have two contradictory meanings, such as the noun sanction (meaning both permit and punish) and the verb to cleave (to separate and to join together). Usually which meaning is intended is obvious from the context, as in someone being literally glued to their seat. Such multiple meanings are rarely the source of confusion.

The pedants and scolds also fail to realize that this figurative sense ofliterallyhas been around for a lot longer than they think—over two centuries. And it has been employed by writers who are a lot better at using the English language than they are.

Literallydates back to Middle English, appearing around 1429 in a work titledThe Mirour of Mans Saluacion:

Litteraly haf ȝe herde this dreme and what it ment,
Now lyes moreovre to knawe þerof the mistik intent.

(Literally have you heard this dream and what it meant,
Now lies moreover to know thereof the mystic intent.)

This early use is, of course, is not figurative. But by the late seventeenth century, writers were beginning to useliterallyas an intensifier, but only for true statements. In 1670, Edward Hyde, the First Earl of Clarendon wrote of the interpretation of vow of poverty taken by Capuchin monks compared to that of the Benedictines and Jesuits:

The other poor men literally affect Poverty in the highest Degree that Life can be preserved, with what uneasiness soever, insomuch as it is not lawful for them to provide or retain what may be necessary for to Morrow, nor to have two Habits nor two Pair of Shoes.

Within a hundred years, however,literallywas being put to use to intensify things that weren’t true. In 1769 Frances Brooke wrote in her novelThe History of Emily Montague:

He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literallyto feed among the lilies.

Brooke is quoting theSong of Solomon4:5:

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

Brooke may be using the word to mean “I quote word for word” or “I am making a literary reference,” but she is also employing metaphor, so her use occupies something of a middle ground between the actual and the figurative. And by 1801 the figurative use was being employed without reservation. Joseph Dennie’s satiric The Spirit of the Farmer’s Museum and Lay Preacher’s Gazettehad this to say aboutbeaus, what we might call “metrosexuals” today:

BEAU.

A being, who would puzzle Linnæus to ascertain the class to which he belonged. Beaus have generally been arranged among the monkey tribe. This was extremely hard upon the monkeys; for they are tolerably agreeable and sprightly animals, but a beau is as stupid in conversation, as he is frivolous in dress. His is like Miss Fanny Williams’s preserver of beauty, “a curious compound.” He is, literally, made up of marechal powder, cravat and bootees. The tailor and the shoemaker, the perfumer, and the laundress, must all fit in council, before a beau can take any public steps.

And by 1838–39, actress Fanny Kemble could, upon visiting her husband’s Georgia plantations for the first time, muse about the effects of her giving up a successful career on the stage to marry a Southern slave owner:

And then the great power and privilege I had foregone of earning money by my own labor occurred to me, and I think, for the first time in my life, my past profession assumed an aspect that arrested my thoughts most seriously. For the last four years of my life that preceded my marriage I literally coined money, and never until this moment, I think, did I reflect on the great means of good, to myself and others, that I so gladly agreed to give up forever for a maintenance by the unpaid labor of slaves—people toiling not only unpaid, but under the bitter conditions the bare contemplation of which was then wringing my heart.

Nor has the figurative use of literally been employed only by hacks, humorists, and actresses. For example:

“Lift him out,” said Squeers, after he had literally feasted his eyes in silence upon the culprit.
—Charles Dickens,Nicholas Nickleby, 1839

Tom was literally rolling in wealth.
—Mark Twain,The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.
—James Joyce, “The Dead,”Dubliners, 1914

And with his eyes he literally scoured the corners of the cell.
—Vladimir Nabokov,Invitation to a Beheading, 1960

Of course, just because the usage isn’t wrong doesn’t mean that all the uses of it are good ones. Like any form of hyperbole, the figurativeliterallycan be overused. And care should be taken that it doesn’t cause confusion. Its use is not appropriate for all genres. For instance, it is probably a bad idea to employ it in expository prose, such as an academic paper. But in fiction, in informal prose, and in speech there is nothing wrong its judicious use. So, unless you’re a better writer than Dickens, Twain, Joyce, and Nabokov, don’t go around saying that the figurative and intensifying use ofliterallyis wrong altogether.

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Sources:

Baron, Dennis. “Literally Has Always Been Figurative.” The Web of Language (blog), 23 August 2013.

Brooke, Frances. The History of Emily Montague, vol. 4 of 4. London: J. Dodsley, 1769, 175. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Dennie, Joseph. The Spirit of the Farmer’s Museum and Lay Preacher’s Gazette. Walpole, New Hampshire: D. & T. Carlisle for Thomas & Thomas, 1801, 261–62. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

Henry, Avril, ed. The Mirour of Mans Saluacion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987, 51, lines 553–54. Archive.org.

Hyde, Edward, First Earl of Clarendon. “On an Active and on a Contemplative Life” (1670). In A Collection of Several Tracts. London: T. Woodward and J. Peele, 1727, 170. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Kemble, Frances Anne. Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–39. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1863, 104–05. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 1994, s.v. literally.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. literalli, adv.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. literally, adv.

Image credit: Lee Lorenz, 1977. Fair use of a low-resolution version of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

10 June 2024

No, not the famous nineteenth-century writer. This is the slang term, as in the exclamationwhat the dickens?Dickensis a euphemism for devil. The earliest citation in theOxford English Dictionaryis from the 1599 playKing Edward IV, Part 1, commonly attributed to Thomas Heywood. The passage is from a comic scene in which the duch*ess is talking about hunting a deer, and the character Hobs is talking about snogging one who is dear to him:

Du[chesse]. Well met good fellow; sawst thou not the hart?

Ho[bs]. My heart? God blesse me from seeing my heart.

Du. Thy heart? the deere, man, we demaund the deere?

Hobs. Do you demaund whats deere? marie corne & cowhides, Masse a good smug Lass, well like my daughter Nell; I had rather then a bend of leather shee and I might smutch togither.

Dutchesse. Cam'st thou not downe the wood?

Hobs. Yes mistris that I did.

Dutch. And sawst thou not the Deer imbost.

Hobs. By my hood ye make mee laugh, what the dickens is it loue that makes ye prate to mee so fondly? by my fathers soule I would I had iobd faces with you.

(masse = uncertain, perhaps mercy; smug = trim, neat, smart; smutch = smooch; imbost = to drive prey on a hunt; iobd faces/jobbed faces = kissed)

While that play is the first published use of the word, Shakespeare may have beaten Heywood to the punch. He uses the word in hisThe Merry Wives of Windsor, where Margaret Page is trying to recall Falstaff’s name:

M.Pa. I cannot tell what (the dickens) his name is my husband had him of, what do you cal your Knights name sirrah?

Rob. Sir Iohn Falstaffe.

Ford. Sir Iohn Falstaffe.

M. Pa. He, he, I can neuer hit on’s name; there is such a league betweene my goodman, and he.

We don’t know exactly when Shakespeare wrote this play. It may have been performed as early as April 1597, but it wasn’t entered into the Stationer’s Register until 1602. But this line does not appear in either the 1602 or 1619 quarto editions. It isn’t until the 1623 First Folio that we see the dickens in the play. As usual, the quarto editions of this play are unreliable—in this case the first quarto appears to have been reconstructed from memory by an actor or someone who had seen the play—so maybe the line was used in its early performances, or maybe not. There is no way to tell for sure.

But the expression is probably not original to either Heywood or Shakespeare. It seems to have been a slang term circulating at the time.

As a diabolical euphemism, dickens shares the initialdwithdevil, as does the similar euphemism deuce. The nameDickinorDickon, a diminutive ofDick, are well attested and older, so the euphemism probably assigns that name to Satan, and so it is akin toOld Nick, which dates to before 1643. Some have suggested that it is an alteration ofdevilkin, but there is no evidence for this.

Thedickens, along withdeuce, which appears by 1651, are also of note because they mark a shift in what was considered profanity, probably a result of the Protestant Reformation and nascent Puritanism. In the Elizabethan era and earlier, references to the devil are common. Shakespeare, for example, was not shy about calling the devil by his name. But by the end of the sixteenth century such euphemisms were beginning to appear, and by the mid seventeenth century such euphemisms were the norm. Shakespeare’s use ofwhat the dickensis another example of his being attuned to the latest slang and linguistic trends, but Heywood’s use shows that Shakespeare was not unique in this regard. Other playwrights of the era were just as likely to use trendy slang and neologisms.

This shift in what is considered impolite speech also demonstrates that what we consider to be profanity is really a question of fashion. What is considered highly offensive in one era may not be so in another. Think of today’s speech where sexual terms are becoming increasingly acceptable, while the taboos are racial and misogynistic epithets; a century ago the opposite would have been the case. What the dickens is up with that?

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. dickens, the, phr., what the dickens...? phr.

Heywood, Thomas. The First Part of King Edward the Fourth. In The First and Second Partes of King Edward the Fourth. London: I.W. for John Oxenbridge, 1599, sig. E3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Hughes, Geoffrey, “Devil, The,”The Encyclopedia of Swearing, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006, 118–20.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. dickens, n.; June 2017, devil, n., devilkin, n.; March 2004, s.v. Old Nick, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v., deuce, n.2.

Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.2. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio). London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 49. Folger Shakespeare Library.

7 June 2024

Meitnerium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 109 and the symbol Mt. It is extremely radioactive, with a half-life measured in seconds. It was first created in 1982 at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. It is named for physicist Lise Meitner, the physicist who in 1938, along with her nephew and fellow physicist Otto Robert Frisch, and chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, discovered nuclear fission. Hahn, alone, received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery. Placing Meitner in the long line of women who have been denied a Nobel Prize because of their sex.

While it was first synthesized in 1982, it took a decade for the element to be named and another five years for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) to officially bless the name meitnerium. The naming was delayed not for anything having to do with meitnerium itself, but because of a dispute over who had first synthesized other transuranic elements. The name was first revealed in an article in the 18 September 1992 issue of Science that detailed the naming controversy:

Call it a late christening ceremony. Researchers from the German Heavy Ion Research Society's laboratory in Darmstadt last week announced names for three chemical elements (107, 108, and 109 in the periodic table)—the heaviest elements yet discovered—that were found at Darmstadt way back in the early 1980s

[…]

Why did the German researchers wait so long to name their elements? The answer lies in an unseemly row that has been raging since the 1960s. Both the Dubna researchers and their main competitors—a team from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory led by Glenn Seaborg—claim to have discovered elements 104 and 105. The Americans wanted to name them rutherfordium and hahnium; the Russians, kurchatovium and nielsbohrium. Until this squabble was sorted out, the naming of the heavier elements was also held up.

[…]

Elements 104 and 105 are therefore still embroiled in controversy. But 107 to 109 are finally cleared for christening by the Darmstadt researchers. Assuming the names are approved, as expected, by IUPAC's Commission on the Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry, element 107 will be called nielsbohrium (as a gesture to the Dubna group); 108 will be named hassium, after the Latin name for Hesse, where the Darmstadt lab is based; and 109 is to be meitnerium, after the German nuclear physicist Lise Meitner.

IUPAC approved the name in September 1997.

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Sources:

Holden, Constance. “Random Samples.” Science, 257.5077, 18 September 1992, 1626–27 at 1626. JSTOR.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2001, s.v. meitnerium, n.

Stone, Richard. “Transuranic Element Names Finally Final.” Science, 277.5332, 12 September 1997, 1601. JSTOR.

5 June 2024

It is often said that the US Constitution erected a wall of separation between church and state. But these words do not appear in the text of the Constitution. Instead, the phrase comes from an 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. The association had written the newly elected president expressing concern that their state constitution did not prohibit the government from establishing a state religion, and Baptists being a religious minority in the state at that time, feared for their religious liberty. Jefferson replied:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Jefferson’s draft of the letter still exists, and, among other changes, he originally had written “a wall of eternal separation” but opted to leave out the word eternal in the final version.

The phrase entered into constitutional jurisprudence some seventy-six years later when it was used by Chief Justice Morrison Waite in the 1878 case of Reynolds v. United States, the first US Supreme Court case to address the scope of the First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty. George Reynolds, a Mormon, had been convicted of the crime of bigamy. The conviction was upheld by the Utah Territorial Supreme Court, and Reynolds appealed to the US Supreme Court on multiple grounds, including that the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment protected plural marriage. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, declaring that marriage “while from its very nature a sacred obligation, is nevertheless, in most civilized nations, a civil contract, and usually regulated by law,” and therefore could be regulated by the state. Under the First Amendment, “Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.”

While the phrase is Jefferson’s coinage, the idea of a separation between ecclesiastical and temporal power is not original to him. The political philosopher John Locke, upon whose ideas much of the US Constitution is based, wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration, published in 1689:

It is not my Business to inquire here into the Original of the Power or Dignity of the Clergy. This only I say, That Whence-soever their Authority be sprung, since it is Ecclesiastical, it ought to be confined within the Bounds of the Church, nor can it in any manner be extended to Civil Affairs; because the Church it self is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the Commonwealth. The Boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles Heaven and Earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two Societies; which are in their Original, End, Business, and in every thing, perfectly distinct, and infinitely different from each other. No man therefore, with whatsoever Ecclesiastical Office he be dignified, can deprive another man that is not of his Church and Faith, either of Liberty, or of any part of his Worldly Goods, upon the account of that difference between them in Religion. For whatsoever is not lawful to the whole Church, cannot, by any Ecclesiastical Right, become lawful to any of its Members.

And Jefferson’s contemporary, philosopher Denis Diderot, wrote in his Observations sur le Nakaz, commentary on a statement of legal principles issued by Catherine the Great of Russia, who was Diderot’s patron:

One question for discussion is whether the political institutions should be put under the sanction of religion. In the acts of sovereignty I do not like to include people who preach of the existence of a being superior to the sovereign, and who attribute to that being whatever pleases them. I do not like to make a matter of reason into one of fanaticism. I do not like to make a matter of conviction into one of faith. I do not like to give weight and consideration to those who speak in the name of the Almighty. Religion is a buttress which always ends up bringing the house down.

The distance between the throne and the altar can never be too great. In all times and places experience has shown the danger of the altar being next to the throne.

Diderot wisely opted not to send his observations to Catherine, in which he accused her of being a despot and tyrant, for when she finally read them after his death in 1784, she was furious and declared the observations to be nonsensical and incoherent.

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Sources:

Diderot, Denis. “Observations sur le Nakaz.” In Diderot: Political Writings. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler, eds. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1992, 77–164 at 82–83.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, 1 January 1802. Library of Congress. Text (as sent). Text (draft).

Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration (c.1780). London: Awnsham Churchill, 1689, 18–19. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878). Thomson Reuters Westlaw.

Image credit: Rembrandt Peale, 1800. White House Collection. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

3 June 2024

Bootylicious is an adjective meaning sexually attractive. It is formed from booty + -alicious, which is derived from delicious. The word is an Americanism that got its start in Black slang. Use of the combining form -alicious to form new words dates to the late nineteenth century and marks the quality of the first element of the compound as being appetizing or attractive.

The earliest known use of bootylicious is by the Los Angeles rap group W.C. and the Maad Circle on their September 1991 song Back to the Underground. It’s being used in the sense of weak or contemptible lyrics:

I'm bucking up these MCs, Rappers are coming in stacks and packs
But on the real; most of y'all ain't saying jack (YEP!)
But the same old, same old, so what you got a little fame!
(Dig a dam) What's up with this Rap Game?
Seems like you gotta be whack or even super Bootylicious to get paid
I gotta wear Fade
I guess I'll be a broke motherf*cker with the dollar to my name
Cause I ain't crossing over the fame (Hell No!)

In April 1992, rapper Dr. Dre recorded the word bootylicous in the lyrics to the song f*ck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’). The song was written by Snoop Doggy Dog, as he then styled himself, who also performed in the recording along with Dre. The song was released that December on Dre’s album The Chronic. The single was released in May 1993.

The song is diss on fellow rapper Easy-E, who had led the rap group N.W.A., to which both Dre and Snoop had belonged. Dre and Snoop accused Easy-E, along with N.W.A.’s manager Jerry Heller, of cheating the other members of the group. Dre and Snoop use bootylicious to refer to Easy-E’s weak or poor lyrics:

Your bark was loud but your bite wasn't vicious
And them rhymes you were kickin' were quite bootylicious

This sense of bootylicious seems to come from a sexist metaphor of women being poor songwriters. Dre and Snoop are accusing Easy-E of writing like a woman. This sense is evidence that bootylicious was already established in oral use in the sexually attractive sense.

They were not the only ones to use bootylicious in this sense. We see this in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a Black newspaper, on 19 May 1994:

The “Bootylicious” Award” goes to Kool-Aid who also gets the “Worse [sic] Use of a Sample Award.” I don’t know if you’ve peeped this one out, but it has some rooty-poot kid sampling Naughty By Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray.” First off [sic] all, ole boy sounds stupid as I don’t know what. Then if you check the audience that he’s supposed to be performing in front of, you’ll see that there’s not a black face in the crowd. You know why, ’cause only white folks would sample Naughty’s top hit for a Kool-Aid commercial.

But this sense of bootylicious referring to bad rap lyrics did not have legs, eventually fading from use.

We see the sexually attractive sense by December 1993, with the release of Domino’s (Shawn Antoine Ivy’s) Do You Qualify? on his eponymous album:

She's only sixteen, but looks twenty-two,
And age isn't a factor cuz she's fine to the dude,
And plus she's built like a truck there must be somethin' in her food,
Or her water,
Because she's somebody's daughter
Who's attractive to a son, as well their father's,
And they know this, that ass sticks with us,
And like my homie told me once she's quite bootylicious,
Watch your mouth drop with them dubs that she threw on,
Dandy like candy, so you can get your chew on,
What'cha wanna do? What'cha gonna do?
When you find out that she's far from twenty-two?

And this sense appears in print two months later in an article about youth slang in Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune on 17 January 1994. Given that it’s Idaho, the article is most likely describing the speech of white youth, which shows how much influence Black rap artists had on teen slang, both white and Black, of the era, and is further evidence that bootylicious was quite active in oral use before seeing print:

Winning the prize for originality: “flippen flappin’,” an expression of anger; “booty-licious,”' as good-looking; “wheaties,” describing any farmers; “womyn,” a slang for a female; and “yum,” an expression for when a girl sees a good-looking guy.

We see a parallel development in white slang at about the same time with the word babelicious. That word is also recorded in 1992, in the film Wayne’s World, starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, in which the following exchange takes place:

WAYNE: But before we go, we’d like to take a moment here for a Wayne's World salute to the Guess jeans girl, Claudia Schiffer. Schwing!

GARTH: Schwing!

WAYNE: Tent pole! She's a babe.

GARTH: She's magically babelicious.

WAYNE: She tested very high on the strokability scale.

(Reader Adam Ford notes, quite correctly, that magically babelicious is a riff on the tagline for Lucky Charms cereal, “They’re magically delicious.”)

The two words showcase how white and Black slang interacted in the era. The two are recorded at about the same time, but there is evidence that bootylicious had earlier currency in oral use, so it seems likely that Myers’s use of babelicious was influenced by bootylicious. But it is possible that babelicious had an earlier currency as well. If so, the two would seem to have developed in parallel. But with rap’s growing popularity among white youth in the mid-1990s, bootylicious crossed over and became far more popular than its white counterpart.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Domino (Shawn Antoine Ivy). “Do You Qualify?” Ohhla.com (The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive), n.d.

Dr. Dre (Andre Romell Young) and Snoop Dogg (Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr.). “f*ck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’).”. The Chronic (album), 1992. Azlyrics.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. booty, n.2, bootylicious, adj., babe, n.

Mitchell, Marsha. “Peace from the Editor!” Los Angeles Sentinel, 19 May 1994, C-6/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Myers, Mike, Bonnie Turner, and Terry Turner, writers. Wayne’s World (film), Penelope Sheeris, director. Paramount Pictures, 1992. TikTok.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. booty, n.3; September 2004, s.v., bootylicious, adj., babelicious, adj.

The Right Rhymes, n.d., s.v. bootylicious, adj. (Shout out to Jesse Sheidlower for pointing this site out to me.)

Vogt, Andrea. “Youth and Language the Dynamics of ‘Dissin’ ‘Wassup? Yo, Homies Are Down with the Code[‘] (Translation: Like Their Predecessors in American Pop Culture, Teen-Agers of the ’90s Have Created Their Own Novel Language.” Lewiston Tribune (Idaho), 17 January 1994. NewsBank: Access World News—Historical and Current.

W.C. and the Maad Circle. “Back to the Underground.” Ohhla.com (The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive), n.d.

Image credit: Death Row Records, 1993. Wikipedia. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of the image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

31 May 2024

Platinum is a chemical element with atomic number 78 and the symbol Pt. It is a silvery-white, unreactive, dense, malleable, and ductile semimetal. It is a precious metal, at times being more expensive than gold, and is often used in jewelry. Its most common application, however, is in catalytic converters for automobiles, and it has various other applications.

Platinum was unknown to Europeans prior to the conquest of the Americas, where the Indigenous people of South America had been mining it for centuries. The Spanish called the metal platina (little silver), and the name platinum is a Latinization of the Spanish name, platin[a] + -um (after the classical Latin aurum (gold) and argentum (silver)).

The Spanish, however, initially considered it an impurity that tainted gold, and consequently paid it little interest. The first appearance of the name platina in print is in Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan y Santacilia’s 1748 Relacion Historica del Viage a la America Meridional, which described the authors’ travels through South America in the 1730s. The passage in question relates to the Chocò region in what is now Colombia and describes the difficulty in extracting gold from ore that also contains platinum:

En el Partido del Chocò, haviendo muchas Minas de Lavadero, como las que se acaban de explicar, se encuentran tambien algunas, donde por estàr disfrazado, y envuelto el Oro con orros Cuerpos Metalicos, Jugos, y Piedras, necessita para su beneficio del auxilio del Azogue; y tal vez se hallan Minerales, donde la Platina (Piedra de tanta resistencia, que no es facil romperla, ni desmenuzarla con la fuerza del golpe sobre el Yunque de Acero) es causa de que se abandonen; porque ni la calcinacion la vence, ni hay arbitrio para extraer el Metal, que encierra, sino à expensas de mucho trabajo, y costo.

(In the District of Chocò, there are many Laundry Mines, such as those just explained, there are also some, where because the Gold is disguised and wrapped with other Metallic Bodies, Fluids, and Stones, it needs the help of Mercury to extract it; and perhaps there are Minerals where the Platina (Stone of such resistance that it is not easy to break it, nor crumble it with the force of the blow on the Steel Anvil) is the cause of their abandonment; because neither calcination defeats it, nor is there any way to extract the Metal it contains, except at the expense of a lot of work and cost.)

In early use, English borrowed the Spanish name platina. We see this in the first mention of the metal in the 1750 volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:

This Semi-metal was first presented to me about nine Years ago, by Mr. Charles Wood, as skilful and inquisitive Metallurgist, who met with it in Jamaica, whither it had been brought from Carthagena in New Spain. And the same Gentleman hath since gratified my Curiosity, by making further inquiries concerning this Body. It is found in considerable Quantities in the Spanish West Indies (in what Part I could not learn) and is there known by the name of Platina di Pinto[,] The Spaniards probably call it Platina, from the Resemblance in Colour that it bears to Silver. It is bright and shining, and of a uniform Texture; it takes a fine Polish, and is not subject to tarnish or rust; it is extremely hard and compact; but, like Bath-metal, or cast Iron, brittle, and cannot be extended under the Hammer.

And the Latin platinum appears by 1783, when it is found in Torbern Bergman’s Sciagraphia regni mineralis (Sketch of the Mineral Kingdom):

Aurum nempe omnibus aliis precipitatur metallis, excepto forte Platino, quod ita explicandum existimo. Calx auri vi majoris attractionis phlogisticon singulis eripit et hoc ipso solubilitatem amittit, reducta decidens. Itaque auro in serie metallorum saltim secundus competit locus. Platinum dejicitur omnibus, auro tamen minus distincte.

(Namely, gold is precipitated by all other metals, except perhaps platinum, which I think should be explained in this way. The calx of gold, having the greatest attraction for phlogiston, frees it from other metals, and thus loses its solubility, falling off as a reduction. Therefore gold deserves at least the second place in the series of metals. Platinum is precipitated by all, but less distinctly than gold.)

The English translation of this work, published the same year, however, continues to use platina. The only mention of the Latin platinum is in the index, which cross-references it to instances of platina.

But within a few years, English had also borrowed the Latin name, and platinum came to be the more common name in that language. We see platinum being used in a 1786 translation of an essay by Carl Wilhelm Scheele:

This matter [i.e., coloring agent or dye] has a more sensible action upon the calces and metallic precipitates: All the calces, however, are not attacked; for it produces no effect upon the calces of platinum, tin, lead, bismuth, iron, manganese, and antimony.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Bergman, Torbern. Outlines of Mineralogy. William Withering, trans. Birmingham: Piercy and Jones for T. Cadell and G. Robinson, 1783, 131. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Bergman, Torbern. Sciagraphia regni mineralis. London: John Murray, 1783, 136–37. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2006, s.v. platinum, n. and adj., platinic, adj., platina, n. and adj.

Scheele, Carl Wilhelm. “Dissertation on Prussian Blue, Part 2” (1783). The Chemical Essays of Charles-William Scheele. London: J. Murray, 1786, 391–406 at 394. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

de Ulloa, Antonio and Jorge Juan y Santacilia. Relacion Historica del Viage a la America Meridional, vol. 2, part 1. Madrid: Antonio Marin, 1748, 6.10, 606. Google Books.

Watson, William and William Brownrigg. “Several Papers Concerning a New Semi-Metal, Called Platina” (5 December 1750). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 46, December 1750, 584–96 at 586. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1749.0110.

Photo credit: Focal Foto, 2023. Flickr.com. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 license.

29 May 2024

Booty is actually two different words, one meaning plunder or loot and the other referring to sex.

Booty, referring to plunder or loot, of is uncertain origin. It was borrowed from some European language, but there are any number of potential candidates. It’s cognate with the modern German Beute, the Dutch buit, and the French butin. The original Germanic root probably meant to exchange, barter, distribute, ala the Old Norse noun býti and verb býta.

We see the word in William Caxton’s 1474 The Game and Playe of the Chesse:

And for so moche hit behoueth to see well to that whan the tyme of the bataylle cometh that he borowe not ne make no tayllage For noman may be ryche that leuyth his owne hopying to gete and take of other Than all waye her gayn and wynnynge ought to be comyn amonge them exept theyr Armes. For in lyke wyse as the victorie is comune so should the dispoyll and botye be comune vnto them And therfore Dauid that gentyll knyght in the fyrst book of kynges in the last chapitre made a lawe that he that abode behynde by maladye or sekenes in the tentes should haue as moche part of the butyn as he that had be in the bataylle.

(And for so much it behooves to see well that when the time of battle comes that he does not borrow nor make tallage. For no one may be rich that leaves his own hoping to get and take from others. Then in all ways their gain and winnings ought to be common among them, except their arms. For likewise, as the victory is common so should the despoil and booty be common unto them. And therefore David, that gentle knight, in the first book of Kings in the last chapter made a law that he who remained behind in the tents because of malady or sickness should have as much part of the booty as he that had been in the battle.)

Note that Caxton’s version has both the Germanic botye and the French butyn.

Booty can also mean the buttocks or genitals or sexual intercourse, but this sense has a different etymology. It arose in American Black slang, and like the plunder sense of booty, this origin of this sense is uncertain The Oxford English Dictionary says that it may have developed from botty, a nineteenth-century hypocoristic word for the buttocks, originally mostly associated with an infant’s or child’s bottom. We see botty being used in an 1842 letter from Charles Darwin to his wife, Emma. The Annie referenced in the letter is their one-year-old daughter:

What a nice account you give of Charlottes tranquil maternity—I wish the Baby was livlier,—for liveliness is an extreme charm in bab-chicks—good bye.— I long to kiss Annie’s botty-wotty

C.D.—

But to me, this connection to botty is a stretch. More likely, booty is simply a variation on body, or even more likely, butt. And it also seems likely that the plunder sense of booty was an influence on the development of the sexual one, related through the idea of acquisition and conquest.

We’re not quite sure when the sexual sense of booty appeared. Slang is notoriously difficult to pin down, and Black slang even more so, since it is even less likely to appear in publications than white slang. Toward the end of his life in the 1950s, jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson recalled a song from his youth (1902–08) with the title Don’t Hit That Lady, She Got Good Booty. The interview was published posthumously in the June 1959 issue of Jazz Review:

Q: Did you play anyplace when you were a boy in Jersey City?

A: No, I was too young. Like other kids, I used to work around saloons, doing a little buck dance, playing the guitar and singing songs like Don’t Hit That Lady, She Got Good Booty … Left Her on the Railroad Track … Baby, Let Your Drawers Hang Low. I used to sing through the saloon doorways or at the family entrance since I was in short pants and wasn’t allowed to go inside. Sometimes I used to rush the growler for beer parties so I could learn songs at them.

One usually has to be skeptical about reminiscences about language usage since memories are malleable and anachronistic elements are often inserted into memories. But in this case, it seems likely that Johnson, of all people, would be able to recall with accuracy the songs that influenced him.

The earliest use of booty, or more precisely boody, in print is in Carl Van Vechten’s 1926 novel N[——]r Heaven:

The Creeper had swirled into a dance with a handsome mulatto. His palms were flat across her shoulders, his slender fingers spread apart. There was an ancient impiety about the sensual grace of their united movement.

Take your eyes off the golden-brown, Dick warned, laughing.

You know my type!

It wouldn't take long to learn that.

Byron turned to his companion and looked at him earnestly. Dick, I want to ask you something, he said. Now ... now … that you've gone white, do you really want … pinks for boody?

Dick averted his eyes. That’s the worst of it he groaned. I just don’t. Give me blues every time.

And Zora Neale Hurston uses the phrase in her 1935 novella Mules and Men:

Over at the Florida-flip game somebody began to sing that jook tribute to Ella Wall which has been sung in every jook and on every “job” in South Florida:

Go to Ella Wall
Oh, go to Ella Wall
If you want good boody
Oh, go to Ella Wall

Oh, she’s long and tall
Oh, she’s long and tall
And she rocks her rider
From uh wall to wall

Oh, go to Ella Wall
Take yo’ trunk and all—

“Tell ’em ’bout me!” Ella Wall snapped her fingers and revolved her hips with her hands.

“I’m raggedy, but right; patchey but tight; stringy, but will hang on.”

So booty was clearly established in Black slang in the first half of the twentieth century.

A booty call, not to be confused with a butt dial, is a late-night phone call asking if the person is available for sex. This phrase appears in the 1990s. The rap duo Duice had a 1993 song titled Booty Call; the lyrics, however, have nothing to do with booty calls but are rather about playing music in a club. And the phrase is attested to in the Black teen magazine YSB in April 1994:

YSB: Here at Virginia Union University, do people date anymore or is it just a get together and then “hi” and “bye” type of thing?

Frank Reese, 21, Landover Hills, MD: I don't think people date anymore, we just basically get together to have sex.

YSB: Why is that?

Frank: Dating is an outdated thing. I don't think people really court nowadays. Females just want to have sex, just like males just want to have sex. That's what's going on.

Dominique Alfonse, 21, Brooklyn, NY: That's really a terrible statement to make,' cause I think the girls who do that now are in trouble because there are so many men out here who just want sex. They just figure the only way to keep up is to just join the gang. But I don't feel that the ladies who I interact with on campus are [joining the gang]!! It's all just a state of mind, but I don't feel as though it's something that ladies or men are doing as a fad. I think that it just happens like that.

Frank: Nowadays girls are kinda fast. I've had girls come up to me making the “booty” calls. Guys don't have to make the “booty” calls nowadays.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Caxton, William. The Game and Playe of the Chesse (1474). London: Elliot Stock, 1883, 50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Darwin, Charles. Letter to Emma Darwin, 9 May 1842. University of Cambridge: Darwin Correspondence Project.

Davin, Tom. “Conversations with James P. Johnson.” Jazz Review, 2.5, June 1959, 15–17 at 16. Jazz Studies Online (PDF). (Green’s Dictionary of Slang has this quotation but erroneous states the issue date and page.)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. booty, n.2.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Mules and Men” (1935). Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, Cheryl A. Wall, ed. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1995. 146. Archive.org.

“Posse Talk: Campus Creepin’” YSB, 30 April 1994, 54. ProQuest Magazines.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. booty, n.3, booty call, n.; June 2016, s.v. botty, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. booty, n.1.

Van Vechten, Carl. N[——]r Heaven. New York: Knopf, 1926, 215. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Sony Spain (2018). Wikipedia. Fair use of low-resolution copy of the work to illustrate the topic under discussion.

Today, to be or to go berserk means to be frenzied or crazed, and the term carries a connotation of violence. The word comes from the Icelandic berserkr, meaning a powerful Norse warrior who displayed a wild and uncontrolled fury on the battlefield. In other words, a stereotypical Viking, or at least how Vikings appear in modern, popular imagination. The etymology of the Icelandic word is disputed, but it probably comes from bear + sark, a type of shirt or tunic. So a berserk or berserker was literally a bearskin-clad warrior.

Berserk enters into English usage around the turn of the nineteenth century, a period when there was great literary interest in things medieval and, in particular, stories related to medieval Scandinavia. The earliest use of berserker that I have found in English is in a summary of the Kristni Saga, an account of the Christianization of Iceland that appeared in the January 1800 issue of Edinburgh Magazine:

After this triumph Thorwald traversed Iceland with the bishop; at Vatnsdal they were encountered by two Manics or BERSERKER, who raved, stormed, and, through the power of their familiar spirits, walked unhurt amid burning fire; but when Frederic had consecrated the fire, they were miserably scorched and slain.

In 1803, William Herbert published a translation of a portion of Hervarar Saga that contained this line:

Then went the sons of Angrym to Sams-ey; and when they arrived there, they found the champions fury come upon them.

Herbert commented on his use of “champion’s fury” to translate the Icelandic berserksgangr:

“Champions fury.” Berserksgangr. I have ventured to translate Berserker by the English word champions; but there is no term in any language, that can exactly answer to it. These extraordinary people have been called by Latin writers berserki. See Kristnisaga, p. 142. They fought without armour, and were subject to a sort of fury, which was called Berserksgangr. Their name is derived from ber, bare, and serkr, a garment or coat of mail. The following account of them is given by Snorre Sturleson. “Enn hanns menn foro bryniolauser, &c.[”] i.e. “And his (Odin's) men went without coat of mail, and were furious like dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were strong as bears or bulls; they slaughtered mankind, and neither fire nor steel had power ever them. That is called Berserks gangur.” Yngl. Sag. c. 6.

In 1806, Walter Scott would publish a version of the traditional ballad Kempion (or Kemp Owyne, Child's Ballad #34) and commented on his use of warwolf in the poem:

Warwolf, or Lycanthropus, signifies a magician, possessing the power of transforming himself into a wolf, for the purpose of ravage and devastation. It is probable the word was first used symbolically, to distinguish those, who, by means of intoxicating herbs, could work their passions into a frantic state, and throw themselves upon their enemies with the fury and temerity of ravenous wolves. Such were the noted Berserkar of the Scandinavians, who, in their fits of voluntary frenzy, were wont to perform the most astonishing exploits of strength, and to perpetrate the most horrible excesses, although, in their natural state, they neither were capable of greater crimes nor exertions than ordinary men. This quality they ascribed to Odin.

The following year, Sharon Turner would provide this description of berserkers in his History of the Anglo-Saxons:

One branch of the vikingr is said to have cultivated paroxysms of brutal insanity, and they who experienced them were revered. These were the Berserkir, whom many authors describe. These men, when a conflict impended, or a great undertaking was to be commenced, abandoned all rationality upon system; they studied to resemble wolves or maddening dogs; they bit their shields; they howled like tremendous beasts; they threw off covering; they excited themselves to a strength which has been compared to that of bears, and then rushed to every crime and horror which the most frantic enthusiasm could perpetrate. This fury was an artifice of battle like the Indian warwhoop. Its object was to intimidate the enemy. It is attested that the unnatural excitation was, as might be expected, always followed by a complete debility. It was originally practised by Odin. They who used it, often joined in companies. The furor Berserkicus, as mind and morals improved, was at length felt to be horrible. It changed from a distinction to a reproach, " and was prohibited by penal laws. The name at last became execrable.

The phrase to go berserk appears about a century later, indicating that the concept had become thoroughly anglicized and the word was no longer being used exclusively to refer to medieval Norse warriors. The earliest use of the phrase that I’m aware of is in a humorous short story by Rudyard Kipling titled The Child of Calamity (also known as My Sunday at Home). The story was published in numerous newspapers at the time, starting on 30 March 1895. In the story, a doctor encounters a sleeping navvy (i.e., laborer) at a train station, and mistakenly thinking the navvy has been poisoned, administers him an emetic. The navvy subsequently goes into a rage:

Till that moment the navvy, whose only desire was justice, had kept his temper nobly. Then he went Berserk before our amazed eyes. The door of the lamp-room generously constructed would not give an inch, but the window he tore from its fastenings and hurled outwards. The one porter counted the damage in a loud voice, and the others, arming themselves with agricultural implements from the station garden, kept up a ceaseless winnowing before the window, themselves backed close to the wall, and bade the prisoner think of the gaol. He answered little to the point, so far as they could understand, but, seeing that his exit was impeded, he took a lamp and hurled it through the wrecked sash. It fell on the metals and went out. With inconceivable velocity the others, fifteen in all, followed, looking like rockets in the gloom; and with the last (he could have had no plan) the Berserk rage left him as the doctor’s deadly brewage waked up under the stimulus of violent exercise and a very full meal to one last cataclysmal exhibition, and we heard the whistle of the 7:45.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“The Gleaner, No. XV.” Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, January 1800, 3/2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Herbert, William. “The Combat of Hialmar and Oddur” (1803). Select Icelandic Poetry, vol. 1. London: T. Reynolds, 1804, 71, 82–83. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kipling, Rudyard. “The Child of Calamity.” Argus (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), 30 March 1895, 4/5. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. berserk | berserker, n.

Scott, Walter. “Notes on Kempion.” Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. 3 of 3. Edinburgh, James Ballantyne, 1806, 32. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Turner, Sharon. The History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. 1. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1807, 210. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Zoëga. Geir T. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910, s.v. berserkr, n., 50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Sören Hallgren, 1996. Statens Historiska Museer, Stockholm. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

24 May 2024

Phosphorus comes into English from classical Latin, wherePhosphorusis a name for the planet Venus. The name comes ultimately from the Greek; the roots areφως-(phos-, light) +-φόρος(-phoros, bringer). Sophosphorusis the light-bringer, and the element is named for its luminescent properties. (Lucifer also literally means light-bringer in Latin, and it is also a name for the planet Venus. But unlike Lucifer, phosphorus is not a name for the angel that rebelled against God in the Christian mythos.) One also sometimes sees the clipped form phosphor.

It appears in a Latin-English dictionary of 1538, although this is a use of the Latin, not the English word:

Phosphorus, the daye sterre.

And again, we see the Latin name in an English text in a 1587 book on botony:

This tyrant (Nabuchadnezzar) is compared for the great magnificence and glorious pompe of his huge empire, vnto the goodlie Planet and glittering morning star, Lucifer: which being seene after the Sunne is gone downe, is called Vesperugo and Hesperus, and heereof speaketh Virgil where he saith,

Trudge, trudge apace home, full fed Goates,
The Euening Starre appeeres.

But in the morning, preceeding and going afore the Sunne, it is called Lucifer, and Phosphorus: and (of the glittering brightnes and amiable beautie, and shining colour which it hath) named also Venus.

The translation from Virgil’s Eclogue 6 is a rather loose one. The poem, which uses the name Vesper, reads:

Omnia quae Phoebo quondam meditante beatus
audiit Eurotas iussitque ediscere lauros,
ille canit (pulsae referunt ad sidera valles),
cogere donec ovis stabulis numerumque referre
iussit et invito processit Vesper Olympo.

(All the songs that of old Phoebus rehearsed, while happy Eurotas listened and bade his laurels learn by heart—these Silenus sings. The re-echoing valleys fling them again to the stars, till Vesper gave the word to fold the flocks and tell their tale, as he set forth over an unwilling sky.)

Finally, we get an anglicized use of the word in John Harvey’s 1588 A Discovrsive Probleme Concerning Prophesies in a passage about the 1572 supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia. Here phosphorus is being used to simply mean a star, not specifically the planet Venus:

Sithence his decease it is lately supposed by diuers Mathematicians, that the new strange star in Cassiopeia, which appéered, Anno 1572. was this Tyburtine sydous; but how vnequall is that paraphrase to the phrase of this prophesie? Or how vnlike is this description, to the manner, and effect of that new Phosphorus?

And we see Venus referred to as Phosphorus in Robert Parry’s 1595 Moderatus, the Most Delectable and Famous Historie of the Blacke Knight:

When Phosphorus declining West her tracke,
Commaunding Nox her charge to take in hand
And for to spread abroad her curtaine blacke,
By Natures course to couer both sea and land

The chemical element, with atomic number 15 and the symbol P, was discovered in 1669 by alchemist Hennig Brand, who distilled it from urine, which contains a significant amount of phosphates. Phosphorus is the first element not known the ancients to be discovered. It was recognized as an element by chemist Antoine Lavoisier in 1777.

The name of the element appears in Latin by 1675 and in English by 1680. It is so called because it can emit a glow and some forms will spontaneously combust in the presence of oxygen.

Discuss this post

Sources:

The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538, sig. R.v.r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Harvey, John. A Discovrsive Probleme Concerning Prophesies. London: John Jackson for Richard Watkins, 1588, 42–43. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

An Herbal for the Bible. London: Edmund Bollifant, 1587, 255. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. phosphorus, n., phosphor, n. and adj.

Parry, Robert. Moderatus, the Most Delectable and Famous Historie of the Blacke Knight. London: Richard Jones, 1595, sig. D.2.v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Virgil. “Eclogue 6.” In Eclogues. Georgics, Aeneid: Books 1–6. Jeffrey Henderson, ed. H. Rushton Fairclough, trans. Revisions by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999, lines, 82–86, 66–67.

Photo credit: Peter Krimbacher, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

22 May 2024

It is not uncommon for a grisly or shocking term to lose its impact over the years, to meliorate. Such is the situation with basket case. As the term is commonly used today, a basket case is someone who is under physical or, more usually, mental distress to the point where they can no longer function. It is also used to refer refers to a dysfunctional organization or situation. But the origins of the term are much more grim and rooted in the horrors of the First World War, or as we shall see, rooted in something of an urban legend that arose during that war.

As originally used, basket case denoted a quadruple amputee. With no arms or legs, the soldier was reduced to being carried around in and living life in a basket. The idea of basket cases arose despite the fact that apparently few, if any, soldiers in such a condition actually existed. The term starts appearing in print in 1919 in denials that such basket cases existed. Here is the earliest that I’ve found, a story in Ohio’s Cleveland Plain Dealer with a dateline of 17 January 1919 and published the following day:

For many weeks there have been rumors that wards of “basket cases”—soldier patients minus both arms as well as both legs—were in existence at this hospital.

[…]

There is not a single “basket case” in “debarkation No. 3” at the present time. And what is more, there has never been a basket case in any of its wards since they were first opened.

[…]

“Every day we have people come here and ask to see the ‘basket cases’,” said Capt. W. E. Lang. “They are well intentioned people who want to do something for these poor unfortunates, as they call them. I have the hardest time convincing them that we have no such cases. If they seem unwilling to believe me I give them the freedom of the hospital and let them search for themselves. We have not had a single basket case since the hospital has been in existence and a good many thousand cases have passed through its ward.

But gradually, as memories of the war faded, basket case lost its tinge of horror, and the figurative sense arose. Here is one, a comment on the division of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis that appeared in New Orleans’s Times-Picayune on 18 October 1938. While the subject is international politics, the allusion explicitly calls out the original meaning:

When the amputations are completed, it appears that Czechoslovakia will be, in hospital parlance, a “basket case”—with the Nazis furnishing the basket.

And by the next war, there is this column that appeared in the Oregonian on 26 October 1942 about comedian Jack Benny making a plea for people to donate their old cars for scrap metal to help the war effort:

Mr. Benny of Waukegan croaked his lines on the March of Time program while propped up in his hospital bed with a rag tied around his neck, and before somebody cut the mike cord throwing him off the air, Jack had given his faithful old friend, his Maxwell, to help out the scrap drive.

The line cut (probably caused by a new interne letting slip with his scalpel while treating an outpatient case) came just as Jack was warming up with a plea to other people to donate their favorite rolling stock too, too, no matter how much it hurts. Mr. Benny’s appeal was so eloquent, despite his bum larynx, that millions of listeners must have decided to turn in their heaps. In giving my own car, an old basket case, I make only one selfish stipulation, and that is that the sacrifice must be no greater than that suffered by Mr. Benny.

The point of the column is that despite Benny’s owning an old, broken-down Maxwell being a running gag in his radio show, he did not actually own a Maxwell car.

The original, amputee sense of basket case received new life during WWII, again despite such cases being vanishingly rare. But following the war, the figurative sense continued unabated. Here is an example from Life magazine of 16 February 1948:

The U.N. has decided that all Palestine should be divided into three parts—a Jewish state, an Arab state and an internationalized Jerusalem. But now we have to think about the problem harder than ever. For the “solution is shaky.”

The decision was the most important one in U.N. history. It was adopted by a two-thirds vote after long study and debate, and it had the backing of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Will this unequivocal decision work? If not, the U.N. may become a more pathetic basket case than the old League of Nations after the Japanese nullified the decision on Manchuria. The setback to world peace might be equally profound.

Today, few who use the term are aware of its rather grim, albeit near-mythical, origin.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., basket, n.1.

Kitchen, Karl K. “Absurd Stories Without Basis: No ‘Basket Cases’ in Big New York Hospital, Correspondent Says” (17 January). Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio), 18 January 1919, 8/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Moyes, William. “Behind the Mike.” Oregonian (Portland), 26 October 1942, 9/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. basket case, n.

“The Palestine Problem.” Life, 16 February 1948, 34/1. Google Books.

Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 18 October 1938, 10/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo Credit: US Army Signal Corps, c.1918. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

20 May 2024

To be hard-nosed is to be stubborn, unsentimental, uncompromising. The phrase is an Americanism, dating to the early twentieth century, but why hard-nosed? The answer comes from rifle ammunition.

In the late nineteenth century, the introduction of cordite and nitrocellulose gunpowder, in addition to be being “smokeless,” created higher muzzle velocities. To limit recoil, lighter bullets were used, but to prevent the smaller, lead projectiles from fouling the barrels of the rifle, the lead core of the bullet was surrounded by a “full-metal jacket” of harder material. But militaries found that full-metal-jacket ammunition was less effective at wounding and killing the enemy, so they began experimenting with ways to make soft-lead ammunition usable. The first of these were produced at the British Arsenal in Dum Dum, India in the 1890s, earning them the sobriquet of dum-dum ammunition.

The development of dum-dum ammo led to the coining of soft-nosed and hard-nosed in the context of rifle bullets. The earliest example of these terms that I can find is in the New York Sun of 24 January 1897:

Hunters have given the 30-calibre smokeless powder rifles a pretty thorough trial during the last year, and most of them are satisfied with its work on game in cases where a soft-nose bullet was used. A hard-nose bullet from the 30-calibre rifle, it appears, when it hits a deer passes through, leaving a “pinhole,” and causes the deer to run all the faster. With a soft nose bullet, that curls over on hitting the flesh, the effect is usually deadly.

The more figurative use is in place by 1913, when it appears in Kansas’s Emporia Gazette of 10 December of that year:

But while Emporia is as she is, the town always will be neighborly and hospitable, and never will get hard-nosed and haughty when a convention comes to town to eat Emporia groceries and make business for the Emporia laundries. We always are willing to spend the unearned increment of these occasions for rubber and gasoline to make the occasion festive and gladsome.

I would have guessed that the figurative sense of obstinacy and determination came out of the world of boxing, a metaphor relying on the ability of a good boxer to take a hit on the nose. But there simply aren’t examples of “hard-nosed boxers” or similar constructions to be found. Instead, searches turn up many examples of hard-nosed and soft-nosed used in terms of bullets.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. hard-nosed, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2015, s.v. hard-nosed, adj.

“Small Calibre Rifle Wounds.” Sun (New York City), 24 January 1897, Section 2, 6/6. NewspaperArchive.com.

“The Town ‘Done Noble.’” Emporia Gazette (Kansas), 10 December 1913, 2/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

17 May 2024

Palladium is actually two words, with distinct, albeit related, etymological paths and meanings. The older use of the word comes from Greek myth, the newer one is the name of element 46.

The original sense of palladium (often capitalized) was the name of a statue of the goddess Athena in the city of Troy. Supposedly, as long as the statue was within its walls, the city could never by conquered. But the Greek warriors Odysseus and Diomedes slipped into the city during the siege and stole the statue. Use of the name in English appears by the late fourteenth century, borrowed from the French and Latin palladium. The Latin comes from the Greek Παλλάδιον (Palladion), formed from Παλλαδ- (Pallad- from the epithet Παλλάς (Pallas) of the goddess Athena) + ‑ιον (-ion, diminutive suffix).

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385) has this:

But though the Grekes hem of Troie suetten,
And hir cite biseged al aboute,
Hire olde usage nolde they nat letten,
As for to honoure hir goddes ful devoute;
But aldirmost in honour, out of doubte,
They hadde a relik, heet Palladion,
That was hire trist aboven everichon.

(But though the Greeks shut in those of Troy,
And besieged their city all about,
They did not wish to leave off their old customs
As to very devoutly honoring their gods;
But in utmost honor, out of reverence,
They had a relic, called Palladium,
That was their trusted object above everything.)

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, palladium had been generalized to refer to some venerated object that served as a safeguard or protector. We see this general sense in Philemon Holland’s introduction to his 1600 translation of Livy’s history:

Now in these 35 bookes, so few as they be, preserved as another Palladium out of a generall skarefire, we may conceive the rare and wonderfull eloquence of our writer in the whole.

The name of the element is much more recent, dating to 1803. Palladium is a silvery metal with atomic number 46 and the symbol Pd. The metal has many uses, with over half the world’s supply used in automobile catalytic converters. But it is also used in electronics, medicine and dentistry, hydrogen fuel cells, and in jewelry.

The element’s name was formed in English from Pallad- (Παλλαδ-) + -ium. But in this case the name is not taken directly from the epithet for Athena, but rather from the newly discovered asteroid Pallas, which in turn is named for the goddess (cf. cerium and asteroid / Ceres / Pallas / Juno / Vesta).

The metal was discovered and named by William Hyde Wollaston in 1802, but the chemist, wishing to make a profit from his discovery and to keep the process for refining it secret, did not publish in the usual journals. Instead he anonymously offered samples of the metal for sale. The name palladium first appears in a leaflet advertising the sale. The text of the leaflet is reproduced in a paper on the metal by Richard Chenevix appearing in the 1803 volume of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London:

Palladium, or new silver, has those properties amongst others that shew it to be a new noble metal.

1. It dissolves in pure spirit of nitre, and makes a dark-red solution. 2. Green vitriol throws it down in the state of a regulus from this solution, as it always does gold from aqua regia. […] 8. But, if you touch it, while hot, with a small bit of sulphur, it runs as easily as zinc.

It is sold only by MR. FORSTER, at No. 26, Gerrard-street, Soho, London; in samples of five shillings, half a guinea, and one guinea each.

In 1805, Wollaston finally wrote about his discovery in Philosophical Transactions, revealing himself as the discoverer and the reason for the name:

I shall on the present occasion confine myself principally to those processes by which I originally detected, and subsequently obtained another metal, to which I gave the name of Palladium, from the planet that had been discovered nearly at the same time by Dr. Olbers.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. Stephen A. Barney, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006, lines 1.148–54, 17.

Chenevix, Richard. “Enquiries Concerning the Nature of a Metallic Substance Lately Sold in London, as a New Metal, Under the Title of Palladium” (12 May 1803). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 93 (1803), 290–320 at 290. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1803.0012.

Holland, Philemon. “To the Reader.” In Livy. The Romane Historie. Philemon Holland, trans. London: Adam Islip, 1600, n. p. Early English Books Online.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. Palladioun, n.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, s.v. palladium, n.1, palladium, n.2.

Wollaston, William Hyde. “On the Discovery of Palladium; with Observations on Other Substances Found with Plantina,” (4 July 1805). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 95 (1805), 316–330 at 316. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1805.0024.

Photo credit: Bibi Saint-Pol, 2007. Louvre Museum, Paris. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

15 May 2024

The phrase (I’ll bet) dollars to doughnuts is an Americanism dating to the late nineteenth century, referring to the stakes of an imagined wager on a sure thing. While due to inflation, today one would be hard pressed to find a doughnut for less than a dollar, when the phrase was coined one could buy a number of the pastries for that price.

The earliest appearance of the phrase, in the singular a dollar to a doughnut, that I’m aware of is in Kansas’s Leavenworth Daily Commercial of 11 March 1871:

The tresses of a young lady of Illinois are said to be “of that peculiar hue that a field of ripe wheat throws toward a setting sun." It dis-tresses us to think that these newspaper men will write so hifalutin, when they might use “plain language,” like “Truthful James.” The girl has “yaller” hair, that’s what’s the matter with her. All this talk about peculiar wheat throwing out a ripe sun toward a setting field, is bosh and nonsense. It is a dollar to a doughnut that her carroty hair stands out, like quills on a fretful porcupine, except when she soaps it.

I was quite taken with this item. Not only is clever commentary on language that substitutes one metaphor for another in a different dialectal register, but it’s an example of a short item used to fill out the bottom of a column of unrelated text. In this case, it appears at the bottom of a column of business notices. It is also an example of a newspaper editor sniping at the practices of other papers, a common occurrence in nineteenth-century papers. The editor is commenting on a piece that first appeared in Scranton, Pennsylvania’s Morning Republican of 11 February 1871 and was reprinted in a number of other papers:

The most beautiful girl in the United States lives near Lincoln, Ill. Her hair is of that peculiar hue that field of ripe wheat throws toward the setting sun. Her eyes send forth a light so effulgent and magnetic that strangers become spellbound under its influence and stand rudely gazing. Her cheeks bear a bloom like the sunny side of an early peach. A pearl would seem almost black beside her teeth. Her form is so graceful that men worship her before seeing her face. Her hand suggest [sic] the idea of waxen fingers tipped with vermilion. Her smile seems actually to illuminate her presence, and when see [sic] laughs the listener fancies he hears sweet music in the distance.

The editor of the Leavenworth paper was quite right to object to this overly flowery, purple prose. (And fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will get a kick out of the use of effulgent.)

But back to the phrase at hand. The plural form, dollars to doughnuts, appears a few months later in Portland, Maine’s Portland Daily Press of 18 October 1871:

We will bet Dollars to Doughnuts that we are offering goods at lower prices than any house in Portland.

But doughnuts were not the only things of little value being wagered. There is the slightly earlier phrase dollars to buttons. Here is one in a letter dated 19 October 1870 printed in New York’s Pomeroy’s Democrat newspaper:

Some years ago, when we began life, dating back to the days of our infancy, the family physician said it would be dollars to buttons that we never lived to articulate the first letter of the alphabet. But we did.

The America’s Historical Newspapers database has five instances of dollars to buttons in 1870–71, all from Pomeroy’s Democrat. This version did not have the legs that dollars to doughnuts had, probably because it lacks the alliteration.

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Sources:

“Alas Poor Yorick!” (letter, 19 October 1870). Pomeroy’s Democrat (New York City), 9 November 1870, 5/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. dollar, n.1. (Green’s includes an 1803 citation for dollars to doughnuts, but this is an error. The “1803” is the page number, not the date, in a three-volume collection of Jack London’s works. London used the phrase three times in his 1911 short story The Meat.)

“Items.” Morning Republican (Scranton, Pennsylvania), 11 February 1871, 4/8. Newspapers.com.

Leavenworth Daily Commercial (Kansas), 11 March 1871, 4/2. Newspapers.com.

“Miscellaneous Notices” (advertisem*nt). Portland Daily Press (Maine), 18 October 1871, 3/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dollar, n.

Image credit: David Wilton, 2024 using the DALL-E image generator in the ChatGPT-4 AI. Public domain image.

13 May 2024

A meme stock is a publicly traded stock that experiences a sudden rise in value due to a concerted effort by a number of retail investors who organize over social media. The price of a meme stock usually has no relation to actual value of the company in question; they tend to be highly volatile and are often a bubble. The classic example of a meme stock is the brick-and-mortar video game retailer GameStop, whose stock rose some 600 percent in January 2021 due to the efforts of a group of investors organizing on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets.

The term is, of course, a compound of meme + stock.

The earliest examples I have found are on Twitter. This one, in the form of a hashtag, is from 2 May 2017:

$AMD inching towards that $10 mark as the #memestock is down another 2.4% AH after already -24% during the day.

And this one from 13 September 2018:

Every time i look at $AMD i cry a little bit because i was in at $8. And also because it was a memestock that actually blew up after i got out.

Meme stocks are not necessarily shares in companies with little or no value. AMD is an example of a meme stock whose underlying company had sound financial fundamentals, but its value was driven to excessive heights by small investors.

Mainstream journalism began using the term in early 2021 in response to the GameStop phenomenon. The earliest professional use of meme stock that I know of is by Techcrunch.com on 16 January 2021, about a week before the GameStock surge began:

Band 3 is the retail cohort, the /r/WallStreetBets, meme-stock, fintech Twitter rabble that are both incredibly fun to watch and also the sort of person you wouldn’t loan $500 to while in Las Vegas. They are willing to pay nearly infinite money for certain stocks—like Tesla—and often far more than the more conservative public money. Demand from the retail squad can greatly amplify the value of a newly listed company by making the supply/demand curve utterly wonky.

And there is this use in the National Review on 31 January 2021 in the midst of the GameStop bubble:

Robinhood and other brokerages halted trading not due to some shady desire to help Wall Street, but because they could not afford to shoulder the risks their customers were taking. A sizable portion of retail traders’ speculative investments in “meme stocks” were made with money borrowed from brokerages on margin. In response to increased volatility, Robinhood twice issued “margin calls,” decreasing the amount of borrowed money customers were allowed to invest in GameStop—first to 20 percent, then to zero.

There are a couple of older senses of meme stock. The first is one’s collection of internet memes that are ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. The second is a jocular usage that operates on the premise that internet memes can be traded like stocks.

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Sources:

Alex @mintauntaun, Twitter.com, 13 September 2018.

“The GameStop Bubble.” National Review, 31 January 2021.

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, 16 April 2024, s.v. memestock, n.

North Bluff Capital @bluff_capital, Twitter.com, 2 May 2017.

Wilhelm, Alex. “No One Knows What Anything Is Worth.” Techcrunch.com, 16 January 2021.

Photo credit: Mike Mozart, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

10 May 2024

Oxygen is a chemical element with atomic number eight and the symbol O. It is a highly reactive nonmetal that is a gas at room temperature. It’s the most abundant element in the earth’s crust and the third most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium. It constitutes about 21% of earth’s atmosphere. Oxygen is necessary for most life as we know it.

The name oxygen is borrowed from French, which formed the word from the Greek ὀξυ- (oxy-, referring to acid) + ‑γενής (-genis, meaning to create) in the eighteenth century.

The element was discovered independently by Carl-Wilhelm Scheele in 1771 and Joseph Priestley in 1774. Priestley called his discovery dephlogisticated air because oxygen is necessary for combustion. Phlogiston was a hypothetical substance that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, was believed to present in all combustible material and was released when burned. According to this theory, oxygen deprived materials of phlogiston, hence Priestley’s name for it. Antoine Lavoisier, in 1778, was the first to use the name oxigine, and that name stuck in both French and English:

D’après ces vérités, que je regarde déjà comme très-solidement établies, je désignerai dorénavant l'air déphlogistiqué ou air éminemment respirable dans l’état de combinaison & de fixité, par le nom de principe acidisiant, ou, si l’on aime mieux la même signification sous un mot grec par celui de principe oxygine: cette dénomination sauvera les périphrases, mettra plus de rigueur dans ma manière de m’exprimer, & évitera les équivoques dans lesquelles on seroit exposé à tomber sans cesse, si je me servois du mot d’air: ce nom en effet, d’après les découvertes modernes, est devenu un mot générique, & qui s’applique d’ailleurs à des subftances dans état d'éslasticité, tandis qu’il est ici question de les considérer dans l’état de combinaison, & sous la forme liquide ou concrète.

(According to these truths, which I already consider to be very solidly established, I will henceforth designate dephlogisticated air or eminently breathable air in the state of combination & fixity, by the name of acidizing principle, or, if we prefer the same meaning under a Greek word by that of the oxygen principle: this name will save the paraphrases, will put more rigor in my way of expressing myself, and will avoid the equivocations into which we would be exposed to constantly falling, if I used the word air: this name in fact, according to modern discoveries, has become a generic word, and which moreover applies to substances in a state of elasticity, while here we are talking about considering them in the state of combination, & in liquid or concrete form.)

(Lavoisier used the term principe or principle rather than élément.)

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Sources:

Lavoisier, Antoine. “Considérations génerales sur la nature des acides.” Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences avec les mémoires de mathématique et de physique. Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1778, 535–47 at 536. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, s.v. oxygen, n.

Photo credit: Nika Glover, 2010, US Air Force photo. Public domain image.

8 May 2024

Most people associate the bee’s knees, meaning something that is excellent or otherwise superlative, with the Roaring ’20s and the Jazz Age. But while the phrase did come into its present-day meaning shortly before and experienced a rise in popularity during that era, it has precursor meanings that predate it by a considerable number of years. And while it is popularly considered to be an Americanism, early uses can be found in Australia, Ireland, and Britain, making the region of origin difficult to pin down. The phrase is often attributed to cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan, but while he may have used the phrase, he did not coin it.

The phrase is first attested to the late eighteenth century in the sense of something very small. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, it came to refer to some nonsense thing, and a decade or so later the present-day sense of something excellent appeared. There is some evidence that this sense of bee’s knees was popular among American doughboys during the First World War, and that sense ballooned among the general public in the post-war years, as the soldiers returned from service.

The bee’s knees is only the one of the more popular and long-lasting in a series of animal phrases constructed with the definite article the, such as the cat’s pajamas. Others include the antelope’s tonsils, bullfrog’s beard, canary’s tusks, caterpillar’s camisole / kimono / spats, cat’s cuffs / kneeknuckles / lingerie / nightgown / tonsilitis / vest, clam’s cuticle / garters, crocodile’s adenoids, duck’s quack, elephant’s tonsils, frog’s eyebrows, kipper’s knickers, kitten’s vest, lion’s bathrobe, oyster’s eyetooth, pig’s scream / whiskers, sandfly garters, snake’s eyebrows, and sparrow’s chirp. It's easy to see how the idea of such rare or impossible things could give rise to a phrase denoting something that is exceptional or especially noteworthy.

The earliest use of bee’s knees, actually a reference to it being used, that I’m aware of is in an 1896 issue of the British journal Notes and Queries. The writer is citing a letter written to his grandmother, dated 27 June 1797:

A ”Bee’s Knee” (8th S. x. 92, 199).—I find the phrase “As big as a bee’s knee” in a letter from Mrs. Townley Ward to her sister, my grandmother, dated 27 June, 1797: “It cannot be as big as a bee’s knee.”

Notes and Queries is a long-running (since 1849) scholarly journal that publishes informal notes and questions about language, literature, and history to which other readers respond. It is, essentially, the print precursor of an internet message board or social media site. It’s still being published, although the internet has short-circuited its utility as a research tool.

This use of bee’s knee (it is usually in the singular in this sense) as a comparison to something very small would continue through to the twentieth century. I have an American usage from Philadelphia’s Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post of 12 November 1831:

Waiter; walk a kidney three times before the fire, and bring it me with a shallot as hot as the first broadside; and, d’ye hear, put a bite of butter not bigger than a bee’s knee on the bilge of it; mind that!

And there is this from The Great Metropolis, published in New York City in 1837, but the account is about London, and this is probably an American reprint of an originally British book:

“Ned, my jolly old fellow,” said one cartman to another, as they both sat quaffing a pot of porter in the tap-room—“Ned, von’t [sic] you have a slice of this here loaf?

“I’m not a bit hungry,” said Ned.

“Take a slice; there’s a good fellow.”

“Well, if I do,” said Ned, “let it be only the bigness of a bee’s knee.”

But at the turn of twentieth century the plural bee’s knees began to be used to refer to some fantastic or fanciful object, often a jocular stand-in for some exotic and foreign foodstuff. This new sense would seem to be a generalization of something absurdly small to something just absurd, often some exotic foodstuff. The earliest use of this sense that I’m aware of is from the Daily Globe of Fall River, Massachusetts of 5 September 1901:

A large plate glass window in Holden & Hindle’s store was broken about 11.15 o’clock last night. George Borden, of Westport, vender of watercress, bee’s knees, clam’s ankles, etc., did the trick, but he claims it was purely accidental.

And the next year there is this in the 27 October 1902 issue of the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle:

In another of the dozen or so artictles [sic] about the Eagle in Saturday morning’s paper, Mr. Hinkley states that he will pave between the tracks IF Mr. Butts is elected. If we thought for a single minute that this would be done, hand if we wouldn’t vote for Allison. Such a proposition is about as safe as the man who went into a restaurant and offered $100 for some fried bee’s knees.

And writer Zane Grey used the phrase in his 1909 short story The Short Stop. Grey was chiefly known for his novels about the American West, but he had played baseball for the University of Pennsylvania and for several years in the minor leagues, and this story is about the sport, although the passage in question has nothing to do with baseball:

“Wall, how's things? Ploughin’ all done? You don’t say. An’ corn all planted? Do tell! An’ the ham-trees growing all right?

“Whet?” questioned the farmer, plainly mystified, leaning forward.

“How’s yer ham-trees?”

“Never heard of sich.”

“Wall, don-gone me! Why over in Indianer our ham-trees is sproutin’ powerful. An’ how about bee’s knees? Got any bee’s knees this spring?”

On the other end of the literary spectrum we find this in the 1 September 1910 issue of the Mirror, the newspaper of the prison in Stillwater, Minnesota:

Oliver Twist of the Steward’s department informed us that he will tender a banquet to The Mirror Sporting Writers’ Association and forwards a copy of the menu which we publish below:

Mock Duck Soup.
Young Onion Tops (decapitated)
Spinach a la Si Haskell
Seedless Orange Seeds Stewed
Broiled Bees’ Knees
Fried Ice Cream
New Potato Peelings a la Olive
Rimless Doughnuts
Distilled Water

And there is this that appeared in Nevada’s Tonopah Daily Bonanza of 14 August 1912. The article is an opinion piece supporting Clarance Darrow’s defense of the McNamara brothers, labor unionists who detonated a bomb at the Los Angeles Times newspaper in 1910, killing twenty-one people. Darrow managed to get them a plea deal that spared them from the death penalty:

I do not favor violence. I have fought labor unions all my life. I drew up the famous anti-picketing ordinance, yet I had walked the streets all day trying to sell my labor to feed my hungry and crying babies, and couldn’t get work, while others were living on bees’ knees, humming bird’s tongues and giving monkey dinners. I would commit violence. I would tear the front off the first national bank with my finger nails.

A few years earlier, starting in 1905, we get a series of Australian uses of the phrase. The first, and most interesting, is in a 3 March 1905 letter by folk-singer Harold Percival “Duke” Tritton. The letter, which is filled with slang, was found among his papers following his death in 1965 and mined by lexicographers for the verbal treasures it contains:

And I am popular with the family, and the neighbours. So everything is Jakalorum. I’m teaching Mary and all the tin lids in the district to dark an’ dim, and they reckon I’m the bees knees, ants pants and nits tit* all rolled into one.

Tritton seems to be using bee’s knees in the superlative sense, which would make it, by several years, the earliest such use. But it also refers to the earlier sense of size with its association with ants pants and nits tit*. That would make it something of a transitional use between the two senses, but its appearance in Australia is puzzling. Did the later sense develop there first? Or was the superlative sense in use on several continents before it started appearing in print?

A few months later we get another Australian sense, but this one seems to be a nonce use, a confusion with another term. The music column of Adelaide’s Evening Journal of 19 August 1905 has this:

However, among the characteristic features of a Stradivarius violin are the bees knees of the pfurling [sic], which are kept closer to the inner corners than in most instruments, and hence display a greater margin of wood on the outer edges of the corners.

Purfling are the thin, inlaid strips of wood running on the edges and backs of stringed instruments. The purfling is not merely decorative, but also protects the wood from cracks as it ages and may have an effect on the tone of the instrument. The pointed edges of the instruments where the two ends of the purfling connect, usually known as the mitre, is also commonly called the bee sting. The use of bees knees in this article would appear to be an error for bee sting. I know of no other uses of bees knees in this musical sense.

After that false alarm, we get another anomalous use in Perth’s Truth of 20 January 1906. A reader replies to another reader’s request for information with this:

“Inquirer” (Kalgoorlie): 1. Yes; bee’s knees are the latest. 2. Mr. G. Thyne, of Messrs. D. and W. Murray, Kalgoorlie, should be able to advise you on the subject.

This newspaper column is analogous to Notes and Queries, with readers asking questions and getting responses from others. Unfortunately, I cannot locate the original question from the Inquirer in Kalgoorlie, so what is meant by bee’s knees here is, for the moment at least, unknown.

Another anomalous use is in a series of classified ads in Victoria’s Bendigo Advertiser starting on 27 September 1910 that ran for several months. The ad is for a clothing store, but what exactly is meant by the phrase isn’t clear from the available context:

BEES Knees to You I’m off to Wilkins and Jones’s for my Summer Suit Busy B. Charing X.

Duke Tritton’s 1905 use of the phrase might be the earliest in the superlative sense, but the first unambiguous use in that sense actually comes from England. It appears in a short piece about a local bakery in the Woolwich Gazette and Plumstead News of 5 July 1910:

Genuine Scotch shortbread is difficult to obtain in this district. Lots of substitutes are passed off on the too readily believing public, but poor stuff they are at the best. However, there is one place, at any rate, where this delicious edible can be had in its proper crispness and flavour. Mr. George Paterson’s 13, Eton Road, Plumstead. The real “bee’s knee” it is. Besides shortbread Mr. Paterson—who, by the by, was manager of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative bakery for we don’t know how many years—makes specialities of wedding, birthday, and christening cakes, breakfast scones and rolls, and Scotch hot pies.

Since it’s a reference to food, it may be a transitional use from the sense of an exotic foodstuff, although how exotic Scottish shortbread would be to 1910 Londoners is open to question. But in any case, this use in a local London paper, along with Tritton’s use five years earlier in Australia, throws a monkey wrench into the idea of the phrase being an Americanism.

The first American use of bee’s knees in the superlative sense that I’ve found is in a cartoon in Pennsylvania’s Scranton Republican of 15 August 1917. The cartoon depicts several members of a newly formed US Army unit from Scranton and describes one man as the “bee’s knees of the new unit.” It is also the first one associated with World War I.

Another First World War usage is found in the January 1918 issue of Treat ’Em Rough, the unit magazine of the US Army Tank Corps training facility in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A unit that, incidentally, was commanded by Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Lieut. McNamara is the bee’s knees when it comes to drilling. 1-2-3-4, hep, hep, tell the sergeant to get in step. What he don’t know about drilling isn’t worth knowing.

The use of the phrase would explode over the coming decade as the soldiers came home from the war. Damon Runyan penned this fictional conversation between two delegates to a political convention in his 5 July 1920 syndicated column:

Second Delegate—"There’s plenty doing in Springfield for me. I’m sick and tired of staying around here. You must be nutty to want to stay.”

First Delegate—"Well, now, ain’t that the bee’s knees! Of course, I don’t get to the convention much, but everybody knows I’m for Jimmy Cox and they vote me that way whether I'm there or not. Why I’m having a swell time here.”

Runyan wasn’t the first to use phrase, nor was he the only major writer of the era to use the new superlative sense of bee’s knees, but his column was printed in papers across the United States and marked the sense’s entry into print discourse and eventually an indelible association with the Jazz Age.

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Sources:

“304 Battalion. Co. B.” 37/1. Treat ’Em Rough (US Army Tank Corps, Camp Colt, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania), January 1918, 37/1. ProQuest Magazines.

“Among the Politicians.” Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle (New York), 27 October 1902, 5/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Bobbles.” Mirror (Stillwater, Minnesota), 1 September 1910, 4/3. Newspaper Archive.com.

“Chapter VII: Metropolitan Society—The Lower Class.” The Great Metropolis. New York: Theodore Foster, 1837 161. In Foster’s Cabinet Miscellany, vol. 5. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society. (The dates are a bit confused here. The book has a title page with the 1837 date, but volume of Foster’s Cabinet Miscellany in which it is enclosed bears a date of 1836.)

Classified advertisem*nt. Bendigo Advertiser (Victoria), 27 September 1910, 6/3. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Declares Darrow Did Remarkable Thing in Saving Lives of the M’Namara Brothers.” Tonopah Daily Bonanza (Nevada), 14 August 1912, 1/2. NewspaperArchive.com.

“East End Echoes.” Daily Globe (Fall River, Massachusetts), 5 September 1901, 7/1. Newspapers.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. bee’s knees, n.

Grey, Zane. “The Short Stop.” Pittsburg Press (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), 11 October 1909, 6/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Motor Truck Unit Enjoys Jolly Time.” Scranton Republican (Pennsylvania), 15 August 1917, 4/6. Newspapers.com.

“Musical Notes.” Evening Journal (Adelaide, South Australia), 19 August 1905, 6/4. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Our Letter-box. Answers to Correspondents.” Truth (Perth, Western Australia), 20 January 1906, 3/4. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bee, n.1.

“Replies.” Notes and Queries, 8.248. 26 September 1896, 260. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Runyan, Damon. “Two Delegates Talk” (4 July 1920). Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 5 July 1920, 4/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Seen and Heard.” Prahran Telegraph (Melbourne, Victoria), 24 April 1909, 5/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Tol Lol Penny.” Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 12 November 1831, 4/2. ProQuest Magazines.

“Trade Touches.” Woolwich Gazette and Plumstead News (England), 5 July 1910, 4/7. British Newspaper Archive.

Tritton, Harold Percival “Duke.” Letter, 3 March 1905. In John Meredith, Dinkum Aussie Slang: A Handbook of Australian Rhyming Slang (1984), Kenthurst, New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1993, 12–15 at 15. Archive.org.

Image credits: Honey bee: Charles J. Sharp, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en; Violin: Rocket12793, 2019, Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; Eisenhower: Treat ’Em Rough, 1 January 1918, 3. Public domain image; Scranton Republican (Pennsylvania), 15 August 1917. Public domain image.

6 May 2024

I had no idea that British usage ofcreekwas different from the use of the word in the rest of the English-speaking world until I was translating an Old Norse work (appropriately enough regarding the discovery and exploration of Vinland) and found that my Old Norse dictionary, produced in the UK, translated the wordvágras “bay, creek.” Unsure what was intended, a bay or a creek, I did some digging and discovered in British dialect the two words were synonyms. (Just to be clear, there is no etymological connection with the Old Norsevágr;creekis simply a translation.)

British and American pronunciation also differs. In British English, the vowel in creek is longer. (In linguistics, vowel length is not what you were taught when learning to read. A long vowel is just that—it takes longer to utter; there is no change in the vowel sound.) British pronunciation is generally /kriːk/, while American pronunciation is usually /krik/. (These are both “short” vowels in the sense you were probably taught in school.) In some American dialects the word is pronounced with a different vowel, /krɪk/ or “crick.”

The early history of the word is somewhat hazy, but it is probably from a Germanic root, probably the Old Norse kriki, meaning nook or bend, which would make it related to crook. English acquired the word from the French crique in the thirteenth century, and in Middle English the word was generally spelled with an <i>. At the same time the Anglo-Latin creca appears. In the sixteenth century, the word was borrowed again, this time from the Dutch kreke (modern Dutch kreek), and the spelling began to shift from <i> to <e>.

All these early uses, including those in French, Anglo-Latin, and Dutch are in the sense of an inlet, bay, or cove. One of its earliest appearances in English is in the c.1300 poem Havelok the Dane:

Hise ship he greythede wel inow;
He dede it tere an ful wel pike
That it ne doutede sond ne krike;
Therinne dide a ful god mast,
Stronge kables and ful fast,
Ores gode an ful god seyl—
Therinne wantede nouth a nayl,
That evere he sholde therinne do.

(His ship was supplied well enough;
He sealed it very well with tar and pitch
So it should fear neither sound nor creek;
Therein he installed a very good mast,
And strong cables, very fast,
Good oars and a very good sail—
It wanted nary a nail,
If he should ever need one.)

The sense of creek meaning a small river or stream appears first in North America, but it also is found in Australian and New Zealand speech. The sense is an extension of the sense of inlet or bay; European explorers would use the word to designate a cove, only to find it being fed by a river, and the name creek was transferred to it.

The stream sense appears by 1622 in Captain Nathaniel Butler’s “Unmasked Face of Our Colony in Virginia as It Was in the Winter of the Year 1622.” Butler was governor of Bermuda and had a brief visit to the Jamestown colony that year. This is taken from an April 1623 transcription of Butler’s work in the The Records of the Virginia Company of London (I cannot find a version of the original that does not have modernized spelling and other editorial interventions):

Ther Howses are generally the worst yt euer I sawe ye meanest Cottages in England beinge euery way equall (if not superior) with ye moste of the best, And besides soe improuidently and scattringly are they seated one from an other as partly by their distance but especially by the interpositc[i]on of Creeks and Swamps as they call them they offer all aduantages to their sauadge enimys & are vtterly depriued of all suddaine recollection of themselues vppon any tearmes whatsoeuer.

And creek appears in this passage describing the English colony in New England appears in Philip Vincent’s 1637 account of the Pequot War:

In a word, they have built faire Townes of the lands owne materials, and faire Ships to, some where of are here to be seene on the Thames. They have overcome cold and hunger, are dispearsed securely in the Plantations sixty miles along the coast, and within the Lan also along some small Creekes and Rivers, and are assured of their peace by killing the Barbarians, better than our English Virginians were by being killed by them.

The phrase up sh*t’s creek is a nineteenth-century Americanism meaning in trouble, facing a predicament. The phrase is often bowdlerized by omitting the sh*t’s or, in early print appearances, replacing it with salt. The earliest known use of up sh*t’s creek that I know of is from 1868. It appears in the testimony of Augustus Lorins, a freedman, who was testifying about the 4 June 1868 murders of Solomon Dill, a US congressman from South Carolina, and a Nestor Ellison, a freedman. The men were probably murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Lorins’s testimony appears in the Secretary of War’s report to Congress for 1868:

On or about the 15th of May I went to Mr. Dill’s house. On my return to the plantation of Mr. E. Parker, he said to me: “Well, Augustus, what did Mr. Dill have to say?” I told him. “What else,” said Parker. I replied, I saw some pictures of Mr. Lincoln. He, Parker, then said, “well, our men put old Lincoln up sh*t creek, and we’ll put old Dill up.”

One can be up sh*t’s creek without a paddle. Mentions of paddles in the phrase date to at least 1930.

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Sources:

“At a Court Held for Virginia on Wedensday in the Afternoone the Last of Aprill 1623” (30 April 1623). The Records of the Virginia Company of London, vol. 2. Sarah Myra Kingsbury, ed. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906, 379–89 at 383. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018, s.v. creca, n. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. creek, n., sh*t creek, n.

“Havelok the Dane.” In Four Romances of England. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds. University of Rochester: TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997, lines 707–14.

Message of the President of the United States and Accompanying Documents to the Two Houses of Congress. Third Session, Fortieth Congress. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1868, 480. Google Books.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. crike, n.(1).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. creek, n.1.

Vincent, Philip. A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England, Between the English and the Salvages. London: Marmaduke Parsons for Nathanael Butter and John Bellamie, 1637, 20. Archive.org.

Photo credit: US Army photo, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

3 May 2024

Zirconium is a chemical element with atomic number 40 and the symbol Zr. It is a lustrous, gray-white metal. The mineral zirconium silicate, also known as zircon, is common in the earth’s crust and has been known since antiquity. Zirconium has a variety of commercial uses, and zircon crystals are considered gemstones.

The etymology follows a rather tortuous route. Zircon is a modern borrowing from the German, which is itself a borrowing from the Italian giargone (fourteenth century), which in turn comes from the Old French jacunce. (In the thirteenth century, Middle English borrowed the French word, forming jacincte and jagounce, but these words didn’t survive into modern English.) The French root comes from the Latin hyacinthus, which in turn is from the Greek ὑάκινθος (hyakinthos). The European words are related to the Arabic الزركون (al zarqūn), although the nature of that connection is uncertain.

In Greek myth, Hyacinthus was a Spartan prince and lover of Apollo. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the two were competing in throwing the discus, but Apollo’s throw accidently struck the prince, killing him. The flower grew on his grave. The hyacinth gemstone is so called because it has the color of the flower.

The modern German Zircon appears by 1780 in Axel von Cronstedts Versuch einer Mineralogie:

Dieser Stein ist gewönlich ponceau oder hiazinthenroth, welches sich zuweilen etwas ins gelbe, zuweilen mehr ins rothe, und oft auch ein wenig ins braune zieht. Selten fömt er von weisser Farbe (Zircon) vor.

(This stone is usually ponceau or hyacinth-red, which sometimes turns a little yellow, sometimes more red, and often also a little brown. Rarely it appears white in color (zircon).)

But it was Martin Klaproth, in 1789, who first identified zirconium as an element, which he dubbed Zirconerde:

Welche eine angemessenere Benennung veranlassen mögten, an ihr fennen lernen wird, den Namen Zirconerde, (Terra circonia) ben.

(Those who would like to use a more appropriate name will learn from it to use the name zircon-earth (Terra circonia).)

Zircon made its way into English in 1794 in Richard Kirwan’s Elements of Mineralogy in the form circon:

Jargonic Earth, or Jargonia.

This earth hath been discovered by Mr. Klaproth; it has as yet been found only in the stone called Jargon, or Circon, of Ceylon, of which more hereafter.

This earth resembles argill more than any other earth, though it differs essentially from it in some respects. Its colour is white, and its specific gravity probably exceeds 4,000.

(Jargon here is another variant of the mineral name and unrelated to the linguistic term.)

But it was Humphry Davy who, in 1808, dubbed the element zirconium:

From the general tenor of these results, and the comparison between the different series of experiments, there seems very great reason to conclude that alumine, zircone, glucine, and silex are, like the alkaline earths, metallic oxides, for on no other supposition is it easy to explain the phenomena that have been detailed.

The evidences of decomposition and composition, are not, however of the same strict nature as those that belong to the fixed alkalies and alkaline earths; for it is possible, that in the experiments in which the silex, alumine, and zircone appeared to separate during the oxidation of potassium and sodium, their bases might not actually have been in combination with them, but the earths themselves, in union with the metals of the alkalies, or in mere mechanical mixture. And out of an immense number of experiments which I made of the kind last detailed, a very few only gave distinct indications of the production of any earthy matter; and in cases when earthy matter did appear, the quantity was such as rendered it impos­sible to decide on the species.

Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium.

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Sources:

Cronstedt, Axel Fredrik. Axel von Cronstedts Versuch einer Mineralogie, 1.1. Leipzig: 1780, 162. Google Books.

Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia” (30 June 1808). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98, 1808, 333–70 at 352–53. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1808.0023.

Kirwan, Richard. Elements of Mineralogy, second edition, vol. 1. London: J. Nichols for P. Elmsly, 1794, 14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Klaproth, Martin H. “Chemische Untersuchung Des Zircons.” Der Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde Zu Berlin, 9. 1789, 147–176 at 171. Universität Bielefeld Universitätsbibliothek.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. jacinct(e, n., jagounce, n.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Ovid. Metamorphoses, book 10. David Raeburn, trans. London: Penguin, 2004, 390–92.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. zirconium, n., zircon, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. jargon | jargoon, n.2, jacounce | jagounce, n., jacinth, n., hyacinth, n.

Image credits: zircon, Don Guennie, 2011, Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; hyacinth, Alexander Kiselyov, late nineteenth century, National Museum in Warsaw, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work

1 May 2024

Astronomers are often rather creative with the names they come up with for the objects and processes they discover. An example is the verb to spaghettify and the noun spaghettification. The words describe what would happen to a person (or thing) who fell into a black hole. The gravity (tidal force) at the feet of the person would be orders of magnitude stronger than at the head, causing the person to be stretched like a piece of spaghetti.

The earliest use of the words, in this case the noun spaghettification, that I have found is in Nigel Calder’s 1977 book The Key to the Universe, which was published in association with a BBC television program of the same name. In the book, however, Calder implies that the term is already in use by astronomers studying black holes:

The fate of the imagined space-traveller who stumbled upon a black hole became a commonplace way of describing the extra-ordinary work of gravity, in and around a black hole. Before being trapped and crushed, the unwary astronaut would first be stretched into spaghetti.

The first hint of trouble might be his hair standing on end, his feet and hands feeling heavy, his head light. The astronaut’s blood would drain into his limbs, bringing merciful unconsciousness before gravity rendered his body into meat, into molecules, into atoms, and eventually into a long beam of particles hurtling toward the black hole.

Spaghettification was due to the gravity intensifying, metre by metre, in the approach to a black hole. It was a tidal effect, an extreme version of the process by which the Moon would pull more strongly on sea-water immediately beneath it than on the oceans to the far side of the Earth. In the more severe conditions around a black hole, the force of gravity increased so rapidly towards the centre that it could easily be a million times stronger at the spaceman’s feet than at his head. So he would be torn apart by the tide.

And the verb sees print by 1981, when it appears in Nigel Henbest’s The Mysterious Universe:

A simple nonspinning black hole would be no good for interuniverse travel. We have already seen the fate of the unfortunate explorer of such a hole, crushed inexorably by the one-way flow of space within, into the unseen central singularity. The entrance to the interuniverse tunnel must be rotating, or an electrically charged, black hole, large enough for the intrepid explorer not to be spaghettified.

Often scientific jargon (or is it slang in this case?) remains within the discourse of the scientists, but the public’s fascination with black holes and the rather gruesome imagery of the spaghettification process has caused the term to enter into mainstream discourse. Here is an example from, of all places, in a 2000 book review in the magazine Good Housekeeping:

It's a good bet that few guidebooks reveal where you can experience “spaghettifying.” But Around Chicago with Kids (Fodor’s, $10) does. (FYI: You can become long and skinny near a black hole in space…or in front of the wall of mirrors at the city’s Adler Planetarium.)

So that’s spaghettification, a rather grim and graphic description of an astronomical process.

There is, however, an older, non-astronomical use of the term. It appears in a 1965 English translation of Alfred Jarry’s 1897 play Ubu Cocu. Jarry’s (1873–1907) works were precursors to the twentieth-century genres of Dada, Surrealism and the Theater of the Absurd. The passage from Ubu Cocu refers to what will happen to man who cuckolds another:

There’s nothing to be done with him. We’ll have to make do with twisting the nose and nears [sic], with removal of the tongue and extraction of the teeth, laceration of the posterior, hacking to pieces of the spinal marrow and the partial or total spaghettification of the brain through the heels. He shall first be impaled, then beheaded, then finally drawn and quartered. After which the gentleman will be free, through our great clemency, to go and get himself hanged anywhere he chooses. No more harm will come to him, for I wish to treat him well.

The metaphor of spaghetti is original to the English translation. Jarry’s original French reads:

arrachement partiel ou total de la cervelle par les talons

(partial or total removal of the brain through the heels)

But this earlier appearance of spaghettification is probably unrelated to the astronomical usage. While it is possible that some astronomers had read Cyril Connolly’s translation of Jarry’s play or that Connolly was conversant with astronomers and astronomical jargon, both of these seem far less likely than the idea that the two uses are separate coinages.

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Sources:

Calder, Nigel. The Key to the Universe. New York: Viking, 1977, 143. Archive.org.

“Have Tots Will Travel.” Good Housekeeping, March 2000, 69/2. ProQuest Magazine.

Henbest, Nigel. The Mysterious Universe. London: Ebury, 1981, 145. Archive.org.

Jarry, Alfred. Ubu Cocu, 5.2 (1897). In Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, eds. Cyril Connolly, trans. New York: Grove, 1965, 50. Archive.org.

———. Ubu Cocu (1897) in Tout Ubu. Maurice Saillet, ed. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1962, 244. Archive.org.

Image credit: Moore, Steven Dean (director) and Matt Groening (creator). “Treehouse of Horror XXIII” (TV episode). The Simpsons, 24.2, 7 October 2012. Fair use of a single frame from the animation to illustrate the topic under discussion.