white shoe

Senator James Hamilton Lewis and Joseph P. Tumulty, secretary to President Wilson, 1917

29 August 2025

The adjective white shoe is used in the United States to denote the establishment, the privileged, moneyed, and usually conservative, elites who traditionally run American businesses. And in current use it is often specifically used to denote top-flight law firms. But why white shoes? The term dates to the 1930s when it was fashionable among students at Ivy League schools to wear shoes made of white leather, so-called white bucks. The term moved out of collegiate slang into mainstream discourse in the 1950s.

A so-called guide to fraternities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill that was published in the April 1932 issue of the humor magazine The Carolina Buccaneer establishes white shoes as a fashion trend among the collegiate set, although the article implies that the fraternity in question is a bunch of wannabes rather than the elite social set:

Delta Psi. Tony’s Place—the white shoe boys that wear flannels and brown coats the year round. They spend most of their week-ends in Philadelphia and points north. A very quiet house during Christmas and Spring vacations. The lodge has made progress in the past few years and will probably go in debt enough in the next few years to change it from the small time crowd that it now has into a good bunch of heavy taxpayers.

The following, which appeared in the Columbia Daily Spectator on 21 November 1933, places the white-shoe fashion trend in the Ivy League:

Bootblack Decries White Shoe Style

Lincoln, the bootblack who spends his days on 116th Street opposite the Hamilton Hall entrance to the Van Am Quad, is on the verge of writing a letter to General Johnson to see what NRA can do about white shoes on the Campus.

“White shoes,” he declared yesterday, “are all right in the summertime when I can make an honest living keeping them white. But the government should prevent young fellows from making fools of themselves by wearing them dirty all winter and ruining a man's honest business. If the College won't do anything about it, I'll write to Washington.”

The earliest use of the figurative sense of white shoe that I’ve found is from the Chicago Daily Tribune of 28 December 1933:

“I can see,” he said, “that Pearson and Davenport colleges at Yale are going to become the fashionable colleges of the United States as Christchurch [sic] is the fashionable college at Oxford. The ‘white shoe boys of Park avenue’ already have taken up these two colleges and managed to impart an air of social distinction to their walls.[”]

And again from the Columbia Daily Spectator, this time from 25 April 1934, we get a humorous take on the white-shoe fad among Ivy League students:

ITS HERE! THE MONSTER CAMPAIGN CALCULATED TO RID. THE CAMPUS OF THE GREATEST NUISANCE SINCE CLASSES WERE INVENTED. THE WHITE SHOE HAS COME TO GO!

Once an innocent jest, the white shoe has come to stain. Originally the footwear of hospital internes and street cleaners, its sanctity has been invaded by the college student, who jumps into anything feet first. Wherever primitive savagery has flourished in all its pristine simplicity the white foot has always come to trample. Furthermore, from the earliest days of Rome unto the present time, the white shoe has been a symbol of disintegrating masculinity. Are we disintegrating, boys? NO!

[…]

The following is the procedure to be followed in stamping out the white shoe aristocracy.

The article goes on to advocate stepping on and scuffing up fellow students’ white shoes.

Not to be outdone by Columbia in the humor department, the Daily Princetonian of 25 November 1941 had this literal-but-with-class-implications use of white shoe:

According to their sociologist-representative Dr. O. K. (Vienna) Hackenablemish, N. Y. N. H. & H., Princeton lends itself unusually well to a simultaneous cultural and institutional analysis. (Yes!) Six aspects of Tiger culture become apparent from the first.

First is the material culture, or Artifacts, as it is so familiarly known. Of course, you've heard of that. You know, the old “Show me a white shoe (five-button-coat, station-wagon, crewcut, beer-jacket, etc., etc.) and I'll show you a Princeton man” kind of stuff.

The OED Online’s earliest citation is from the Princeton Alumni Weekly of 21 November 1947. This passage uses white-shoe boys as a synonym for Princeton undergrads and also shows that the employment of precariat faculty is nothing new:

The white-shoe boys will get their course selections in on time from now on or else, according to a recent ruling by the Board of Trustees. Or else they will part with $20 vacillation fee. The old charge for changing courses in midstream was a modest $5, and it was not considered that this amount covered the hiring-and-firing expenses occasioned by post-deadline switches. These amounted to 840 at the beginning of the term, a number large enough to wreak havoc with long-range precept plans.

This 7 August 1951 advertisement for Nieman-Marcus in the Dallas Morning News, offering fashion advice, gives some explanation for the term and opines that the social distinction does not carry over into life after graduation:

Social lines are faint and easily broken. During our school days, we used to hear the terms, “white shoe” and “black shoe.”  The white shoe boy was the one from the right kind of family, with the right kind of money, wearing the right kind of clothes and joining the right kind of clubs or fraternities. The black shoe boy was the hick, the yokel. In later years, however, we found that the terms were pretty meaningless. A lot white shoe boys we used to know work for black shoe boys, these days, and are very happy when the boss take them to his club for dinner.

A pair of articles in the September 1953 issue of Esquire use the term. One by Russell Lynes, “How Shoe Can You Get,” details the collegiate slang at Yale:

At Yale there is a system for pigeonholing the members of the college community which is based on the word “shoe.” Shoe bears some relation to the word chic, and when you say that a fellow is “terribly shoe” you mean that he is a crumb in the upper social crust of the college, though a more kindly metaphor might occur to you. You talk of a “shoe” fraternity or a “shoe” crowd, for example, but you can also describe a man’s manner of dress as “shoe.” The term derives, as you probably know, from the dirty white bucks which are the standard collegiate footwear (you can buy new ones already dirty in downtown New York to save you the embarrassment of looking as though you hadn’t had them all your life), but the system of pigeonholing by footwear does not stop there. It encompasses the entire community under the terms White Shoe, Brown Shoe, and Black Shoe.

White Shoe applies primarily to the socially ambitious and the socially smug types who affect a good deal of worldly sophistication, run, ride and drink in rather small cliques, and look in on the second halves of football games when the weather is good. They try so hard not to be collegiate in the rah-rah (or, as they would say, “Midwestern”) sense of the term that they are probably the most “collegiate” types now in college.

And this one by Martin Mayer on Harvard makes the elitist claim that Harvard, by admitting large number of scholarship students, can no longer be considered white shoe:

The ten thousand students who with varying degrees of assistance educate themselves at Harvard come from every part of the United States and literally dozens of foreign countries, in all shapes, sizes, colors and religions. Harvard is not today a society school; it isn’t even white-shoe.

Today, white shoe is probably most often used in reference to high-powered law firms, whose associates and partners come out of elite law schools. There is this description of then-newly appointed Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II in the 25 September 1955 Trenton Sunday Times that uses the term in the specific legal context:

Indeed he is a new breed of cat on the Court. Though born in Chicago, he is a Princeton-to-Oxford-to-Wall Street product—the Court’s first Ivy League “white-shoe” boy, its first Rhodes scholar, its first full-fledged eastern Dewey Republican.

And for an example of more recent vintage, there is this from the New Yorker of 5 May 2025:

Executive orders such as the ones titled “Addressing Risks from Paul Weiss” and “Addressing Risks from Jenner & Block” are self-evidently cudgels for Trump to wield against his enemies—in this case white-shoe lawyers who have worked for his political opposition.

White bucks may have gone out of fashion, but the term they spawned lives on.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Thanks to Fred Shapiro for pointing out some of the early uses to me.

A Bared Manual of Carolina Fraternities.” Carolina Buccaneer, April 1932, 8/2. Archive.org.

“Bootblack Decries White Shoe Style.” Columbia Daily Spectator (New York City), 21 November 1933, 1/5. Columbia Spectator Archive.

Gibbs, C. McCague. “Yale ‘News’ Sends Dr. Hackenablemish to Analyze Johnny-Come-Lately Culture.” Daily Princetonian (New Jersey), 25 November 1941, 1/2. Papers of Princeton.

Heimann, Robert K. “On the Campus.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 12 November 1947, 8/3.

“High Court.” Trenton Sunday Times-Advertiser (New Jersey), 25 September 1955, Part 4, 14/6–7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“It’s Here! The Monster Campaign.” Columbia Daily Spectator (New York City), 25 April 1934, 2/2. Columbia Spectator Archive.

Lynes, Russell. “How Shoe Can You Get.” Esquire, September 1953, 59 and 128. Esquire Magazine Archive.

Marantz, Andrew. “Is It Happening Here?” New Yorker, 5 May 2025, 30/1. New Yorker Archive.

Mayer, Martin. “Tubs and Bottoms. Harvard: What Makes It Great? What Keeps It Free?” Esquire, September 1953, 118. Esquire Magazine Archive.

Nieman-Marcus “Point of View: On Teenagers” (advertisement). Dallas Morning News (Texas), 7 August 1951, part 3, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2015, s.v. white-shoe, adj.

“Professor and Student Praise New Yale Plan.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 December 1933, 5/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Harris and Ewing, 1917. Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

run it up the flagpole

Buzz Aldrin saluting the flag, Apollo 11, 20 July 1969

27 August 2025

The phrase run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes is credited to Madison Avenue admen of the 1950s. The phrase, and many others like it, is used in the context of brainstorming or “spitballing ideas” and refers to making a suggestion to see if people like it.

Examples of similar ad-speak from the era abound. For instance, this appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on 2 April 1954. It doesn’t contain the flagpole phrase, but it does have several others:

Out in Chicago they have an expression: “Keep your pores open on this one,” which means don’t do anything hasty. (And that, of course, is the general direction of almost all ad agency talk. The idea is for heaven’s sake, be careful. Don’t go rushing into anything.) And when you have finally decided the idea is definitely lousy, you “pull the chain on that one.”

There is generally, in some of the later Madison Ave. patter, a note of pessimism, if not downright cynicism in their gropings with the spoken word. Take this one, for example, which is a very real example of Madison Ave.: “Let’s roll some rocks and see what crawls out.” Obviously the boys are not expecting much. In the old days, they used to “mother hen” an idea, or they’d say “let’s incubate this and see what hatches,” and this, with its intimations of maternity, was kind of sweet and touching. Now, they’re rolling rocks and you know what crawls out from under those.

The earliest use of the flagpole phrase itself, or rather a variant wording of it, that I’m aware of appears in a column on Madison Avenue ad-speak in the Washington Post and Times Herald of 24 December 1954:

Of course, there are the usual endless variations on “let’s kick it around,” which means “Let’s for heavens [sic] sake, somebody come with an idea.” “Let’s blow feathers around the room.” “Let’s run it up the rack and look underneath.” “Let’s run the flag up the pole and see who starts saluting.”

The following year, we get the phrase in what would become its canonical word order in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg News of 11 November 1955:

MADISONIANA—From time to time John Crosby, vigorous chronicler of the radio and television world, has reported on the unique ionospheric imaginery [sic] that has become a familiar Madison Avenue by-product of creative minds in conference. Quite independently, Guyon Madison picked up on this one: “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see how many people salute it.”

And there is this found in a pair of columns on the advertising industry in the New York Herald Tribune in November 1956. On 12 November, Joseph Kaselow’s column read:

The [newspaper feature] writer said he would get back to the p. r. man and in a short while he did. And here, so help me, is what he said: “I took it in to one of the editors and ran it up the flagpole, but nobody saluted; so I guess it’s dead.”

As we said, this thing is serious. It must be nipped in the bud. Or next thing you know somebody will be writing a book about “The Man in the Green Flannel Eyeshade.”

Three days later, Kaselow wrote:

The other day we had an item about a newspaper feature writer who turned down a story by saying he’s taken to the editors and run it up the flagpole, but nobody saluted. We played it up as a case of the creeping influence of Madison Ave. on the native—and what’s worse, the editorial tongu[e].

The Herald Tribune was not the only outlet reporting on ad-speak. William Morris wrote this for the Milwaukee Journal on 13 September 1956:

The advertising fraternity, incidentally and not surprisingy [sic] is noted for the inventive and colorful metaphor used in its own shop talk. Each year Holiday magazine collects the cream of the crop. Here are three from the current batch:

Of a new campaign: “Let’s anchor it in deep water overnight and see if it develops any leaks.[“] (Translation: “I want to catch the 5:02.”) “Let’s get together and cross-pollinate.” (Translation: “I give up—you got any ideas?”) Then there’s my favorite, used about a new and untested idea for a campaign, “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”

Perhaps the most well-known use of the phrase is in the April 1957 film 12 Angry Men, directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Reginald Rose, where it is uttered by Juror #12, a feckless advertising executive played by Robert Webber:

#12: Y’know in advertising . . . I told you I worked at an ad agency, didn’t I? (#11 nods) Well there are some pretty strange people . . . not strange really . . . they just have peculiar ways of expressing themselves, y’know what I mean? (#11 nods again) Well, it’s probably the same in your business, right? What do you do?

#11: I’m a watchmaker.

#12: Really? The finest watchmakers come from Europe I imagine. (#11 bows slightly) Anyway, I was telling you, in the agency, when they reach a point like this in a meeting, there’s always some character ready with an idea. And it kills me, I mean it’s the weirdest thing in the whole world sometimes precede the idea with some kind of phrase. Like . . . some account exec’ll say, “Here’s an idea. Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.” (#12 laughs) I mean, it’s idiotic, but it’s funny. . .”

The OED Online has this as the earliest example of the phrase, erroneously dating it to 1955. 12 Angry Men, written by Rose, had been originally produced in 1954 as an episode of CBS-TV’s Studio One. It was then adapted into a stage play by Sherman L. Sergel the following year. The flagpole phrase does not appear in either of these earlier versions. Evidently the OED conflated the 1955 stage play with the script for the 1957 movie.

Of all these ad-speak phrases, the one that survives is run it up the flagpole. It would appear that all of them did indeed arise among Madison Avenue admen, but the use of run it up the flagpole in the movie catapulted that particular one to stardom and immortality.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Thanks to Garson O’Toole, Fred Shapiro, and Stephen Goranson for pointing out some of the early citations.

Crosby, John. “Radio and Television: The Ad Agency Language.” New York Herald Tribune, 2 April 1954, 21/1–2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “A Refresher Course in that Madison Avenue Language.” Washington Post and Times Herald, 24 December 1954, 31/1. ProQuest Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 1 August 2025, s.v. run. v.

Kaselow, Joseph. “Advertising Field: Guards Up, Men.” New York Herald Tribune, 12 November 1956, A5/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Advertising Field: Sound and Fury.” New York Herald Tribune, 15 November 1956, A7/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Madison, Guyon. “Manhattan Days and Nights.” Williamsburg News (Brooklyn), 11 November 1955, 6/3. Newspapers.com.

Morris, William. “Words, Wit and Wisdom.” Milwaukee Journal (Wisconsin), 13 September 1956, Green Sheet 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2011, s.v. run, v.

Rose, Reginald. “Twelve Angry Men.” Studio One, CBS-TV, 1954. YouTube.

———. Twelve Angry Men (film script), 1957, 220–221. ScriptSlug.

Rose, Reginald and Sherman L. Sergel. Twelve Angry Men. A Play in Three Acts. Woodstock, Illinois: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1955.

Photo credit: Neil A. Armstrong/NASA, 1969. Wikimedia Commons. NASA, AS11-40-5874. Public domain photo.

Middle Ages / medieval

Fifteenth-century depiction of a medieval market from a copy Nicole Oresme’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics, and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics

25 August 2025

[Edit 26 August 2025: corrected error about the fate of Romulus Augustulus}

The Middle Ages, or medieval period, runs from roughly 500–1500 C. E., that is more or less from the so-called fall of Rome to the so-called Renaissance and the start of the modern era. While Middle Ages is a pretty obvious term for a period between two others, there are a lot of problems with dividing history into this era.

First, the Middle Ages is a Western Eurocentric periodization. The history of any other region cannot be neatly divided by these events.

Second, the “fall of Rome” is something of a myth. It is true that Rome was sacked numerous times in the fifth century and the last person formally claiming the title of emperor of the Western Roman Empire was deposed in 476, but the people of the empire did not suddenly stop thinking of themselves as Roman, and Roman emperors continued to rule from Constantinople well into the fifteenth century. The people we commonly label as Byzantine today thought of themselves as Roman.

Third, while there was indeed a great flowering of art and learning in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, this was by no means unprecedented or unique. There were lots of “renaissances,” so many that such flowerings and “rediscoveries” of ancient works really need to be viewed as a fact of any age, not a singular event belonging to one time and place. To cite just one example, the “pre-Renaissance” image above is taken from a copy of Nicole Oresme’s fourteenth-century translation of Aristotle, done in Paris.

Finally, Middle Ages and medieval are terms imposed upon the era by later peoples. The people of the era didn’t call themselves medieval or say they were living in the Middle Ages. Towards the end of the period, they would have called themselves modern, a word that is in use by 1456 in English and a century earlier in French. So when did Middle Ages and medieval come into use?

The term Middle Ages first appears in John Foxe’s 1570 edition of his Protestant martyrology, Actes and Monumentes:

Thus thou seest (gentle reader) sufficiently declared, what the Moonkes were in the primitiue tyme of the church, and what were the Moonkes of the middle age, and of these our latter dayes of the church.

It appears again in 1605 in William Camden’s “Certaine Poems,” a section of his Remaines of a Greater Worke, in which he gives samples of medieval poetry:

I will onely giue you a taste of some of midle age, which was so ouercast with darke clouds, or rather thicke fogges of ignorance, that euery little sparke of liberall learning seemed wonderfull.

Camden is already describing the period as dark and ignorant, an intellectual and social abyss between the lights of Rome and the Renaissance, an inaccurate description that present-day scholars of the period take great pains to try to eradicate (Cf. dark ages).

Medieval is a much later term, with its first known appearance in the preface to Thomas Fosbroke’s 1817 edition of his British Monachism: Or, Manners and Customs of the Monks and Nuns of England:

He professes to illustrate mediæval customs upon mediæval principles, from a persuasion, that contemporary ideas are requisite to the accurate elucidation of history.

Medieval is an alteration of the modern Latin phrase medium ævum (middle ages), which dates to 1604. The word may be modeled after the earlier primeval.

Finally, the phrase to get medieval, meaning to torture someone or otherwise become violent or aggressive, dates to Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 movie Pulp Fiction, in which the character Marsellus Wallace, played by Ving Rhames, says:

What now? Well let me tell you what now. I’m gonna call a couple pipe-hittin' n[——]rs, who'll go to work on homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. Hear me talkin' hillbilly boy?! I ain’t through with you by a damn sight. I’m gonna git medieval on your ass.

Which brings us to another myth about the medieval era, that it was an era characterized by brutality and torture. Like any age, it had its violence, but it was not especially violent in comparison with other periods. For instance, the twentieth century, with its world wars, was far more violent than any century of the medieval era. And most of the artifacts and stories one encounters in “medieval torture” museum exhibits actually date to the Early Modern era and the Protestant Reformation, not the Middle Ages.

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Sources:

Camden, William. “Certaine Poems.” In Remaines of a Greater Worke. London: George Eld for Simon Waterson, 1605, 2. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Fosbrooke, Thomas Dudley. British Monachism. London: John Nicols, Son, and Bentley, 1817, 14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Foxe, John. The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contayning the Actes and Monumentes of Thynges Passed. London: John Daye, 1570, 204/1. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2002, s.v. middle age, n. & adj.; June 2001, s.v. medieval, adj. & n.

Tarantino, Quentin and Roger Avary (writers). Pulp Fiction (film). Miramax, 1994. Dailyscript.com.

Image credit: Anonymous, fifteenth century. Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 927, fol. 145. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

cotton-picking / cotton-picker

Enslaved people picking cotton, c. 1850

22 August 2025

The etymology of cotton-picking/picker is straightforward; it’s a compound of cotton + picking/picker. But the etiology is more complex and somewhat sinister, arising out of a metaphor for slavery in the American South. While in today’s usage the racist intent has often been bleached away, the terms can still carry a racist connotation even if the speaker does not intend that sentiment.

The metaphor underlying the adjective is that of enslaved persons in the American South harvesting cotton. The Oxford English Dictionary records this literal sense of the noun cotton-picking as early as 1795 and cotton picker referring to machine that performs this task from 1833. Literal use of the terms in contexts clearly about harvesting cotton is rarely problematic. The problem comes in with the extended, figurative uses of the terms.

Figuratively, cotton-picking is used either as a general term of abuse for a person or as a euphemism for damned. One of the earliest uses, and it’s a transitional one that both literally refers to a enslaved person who picks cotton and is also used derogatorily, is from Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography Twelve Years a Slave, referring to a young black girl whose owner refuses to sell her along with her mother, thus separating them. He does this because the girl would be worth more in a few years:

“What is her price? Buy her?” was the responsive interrogatory of Theophilus Freeman. And instantly answering his own inquiry, he added, “I won’t sell her. She’s not for sale.[”]

The man remarked he was not in need of one so young—that would be of no profit to him, but since the mother was so fond of her, rather than see them separated, he would pay a reasonable price. But to this humane proposal Freeman was entirely deaf. He would not sell her then on any account whatever. There were heaps and piles of money to be made of her, he said, when she was a few years older. There were men enough in New Orleans who would give five thousand dollars for such an extra, handsome, fancy piece as Emily would be, rather than not get her. No, no, he would not sell her then. She was a beauty—a picture—a doll—one of the regular bloods—none of your thick-lipped, bullet-headed, cotton-picking n[——]rs—if she was might he be d—d.

Cotton-picking starts appearing regularly in print in the 1930s, often in non-racial contexts. Yet, these early extended uses are almost all from the American South, so the subtext is distinctly racist, even if the context is not. For instance there is this from Audie Murphy’s WWII memoir To Hell and Back, published in 1949. Murphy was a native of Texas:

Okay, gourd-head. Get that cotton-picking butt off the ground.

Here there is no overt racial context, it is one white soldier talking to another, but the underlying racist metaphor remains obvious.

The noun cotton-picker follows a similar pattern, although it has remained in use as a clear racial epithet. Extended use as a derogatory term for a Black person dates to at least 1880 in Elizabeth Avery Meriwether’s novel The Master of Red Leaf. The reference in that novel is to an enslaved woman who works as a nurse and thus is unlikely to be tasked with field work and is uttered by fellow enslaved women:

Her dress was less fashionable, was more rural, than the garments worn by the steamboat negresses. These latter quite looked down on Gilly, and one I heard call her a “Country Jake.”

“Yes, a regular cotton picker!” chimed in another.

“You may jes know,” said a third, “dis is de bery fust time in all her borned days she ever got outen sight o’ de cotton fiel’.”

Guy Williams’s 1930 Logger-Talk, a lexicon of lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest defines cotton-picker as “a negro” in a list of ethnic epithets.

But in parallel with cotton-picking, the noun cotton-picker was also used, again starting in the American South, as a derogatory epithet for white people. But even though it is used for white people, the epithet is fundamentally racist, equating the person being insulted with blacks. From Jerome Harris’s 1919 Dizzed to a Million, a memoir about his WWI service in the field artillery:

What are these boys from the South? Are they cotton-pickers, corn-crackers, stump jumpers, ridge-runners or bog-leapers?

Some of the bleaching away of the racial connotations of these terms, so that present-day speakers use the term casually without racial intent, may stem from a 1953 Looney Tunes cartoon, Bully for Bugs, in which Bugs Bunny says:

Well, here I am. Hey, just a cotton-picking minute. This don't look like the Coachella Valley to me. [Looks at map] Hmm, I knew I should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

(The Historical Dictionary of American Slang gives a 1952 date for a Looney Tunes cartoon that uses “cotton-picking hooks,” referring to someone’s hands, but doesn’t identify the title. I’ve been unable to find it.)

Generations of kids have grown up watching this cartoon and hearing the term without realizing its racial connotations. Of course, these Looney Tunes cartoons, being products of their day, often contained racist content, with the more obvious bits edited out in later television broadcasts.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 27 July 2025, s.v. cotton-picking, adj., cotton-picker, n.

Lighter, J. E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House, 1994, 491, 492, s.v. cottonpicker, n., cotton-picking, adj. & adv.

Maltese, Michael (writer) and Chuck Jos (director). Bully for Bugs (animated short film). Warner Brothers, 1953, timestamp 1:11. Dailymotion.com.

Meriwether, Elizabeth Avery. The Master of Red Leaf. New York: E. J. Hale and Son, 1880, 125. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Murphy, Audie. To Hell and Back. New York: Henry Holt, 1949, 41. Internet Archive.

Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853, 85–86. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1972, s.v. cotton-picking, n. & adj.; 1893, cotton-picker, n.

Williams, Guy. Logger-Talk: Some Notes on the Jargon of the Pacific Northwest Woods. University of Washington Chapbooks 41. Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1930, 15. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Image credit: unknown photographer, 1850. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

plead / pleaded / pled

Saint Katherine arguing against pagan philosophers before Emperor Maxentius, Heinrich Füger (1751–1818), oil on canvas

20 August 2025

The verb to plead, meaning to make an appeal or argument, especially in a legal setting, comes to us from the Anglo-Norman French plaider. Since the Normans ruled England starting in 1066 and imported their own laws and legal system into England, many English legal terms come from Norman French. "Law French" was spoken in the courts during much of the Middle English period, and the French legal terms that survive to this day include: assizes, attorney, bailiff, culprit, defendant, escrow, estoppel, grand/petit jury, laches, mortgage, parole, tort, and voir dire.

We see plead, or rather plaide, in the thirteenth-century debate poem, The Owl and the Nightingale, where it is used in a general sense of to contend or debate:

Þeȝ we ne bo at one acorde,
We muȝe bet mid fayre worde,
Witute cheste & bute fiȝte,
Plaide mid foȝe & mid riȝte.

(Though we are not both of one accord, we might better with fair words, without emotion and free from fighting, plead with decency and correctness.)

The sense to argue a case in a legal setting appears in a Middle English life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria written c. 1300:

Nou is þis seide þat on; gret schame ich vunderstonde
An emperour to siche aboute; so wide in eche londe
After maistres to plaide; aȝen a ȝung wenche

(Now I understand this is said that with great shame an emperor searched about widely in each land for masters to plead against a young girl.)

According to the legend, Katherine won the argument against all the pagan philosophers, even converting one of them to Christianity, but Emperor Maxentius sentenced her to torture and death anyway.

Plead would be just another unremarkable borrowing from French following the Norman Conquest, but the verb has two past-tense and past-participial forms, pleaded and pled, and there is often wrangling over which is correct.

Both past-tense forms are equally old, so neither has primacy of age. But the irregular form pled disappeared in standard British usage, being retained only in Scottish and other dialects, but not before it made its way across the Atlantic and becoming firmly planted in American English. So in North America, both pleaded and pled can be found in both spoken and written English. Neither one can be considered “incorrect,” although the regular pleaded is by far the more common form in edited prose.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 4, 2017, s.v. plaider, v.

Cartlidge, Neil, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003, lines 181–84, 6. London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, fols 233r–246r.

D’Evelyn, Charlotte and Anna J. Mill, eds. “Saint Katherine.” In The South English Legendary, vol. 2 of 3. Early English Text Society 236. London: Oxford UP, 1956, lines 75–77, 535–36. London, British Library, MS Harley 2277. Internet Archive.

Garner, Bryan A. Garner’s Modern American Usage, third edition. Oxford University Press, 2009, s. v. pleaded; *pled; *plead.

Google Books Ngram Viewer, “pleaded, pled.” Accessed 25 July 2025.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. 1994, s.v. plead.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. pleten, v., pleien, v.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2006, s.v. plead, v.