centaur / reverse centaur

Parthenon frieze of a Lapith man fighting a centaur, 5th century BCE

11 September 2026

[A version of this entry originally appeared on 6 August as a Words in the News segment.]

The word centaur, of course, refers to the mythological, hybrid creature that has the head, torso, and arms of a human and the body and legs of a horse. The word was borrowed into Old English from the Latin centaurus, which in turn comes from the Greek kένταυρος (kentauros). But in the early twentieth century the word acquired another sense as a jargon term from the world of automation referring to a pairing of human and machine, where human intelligence, the head, directs the machine that provides the figurative horsepower and speed.

This technological sense of centaur is almost a century old. We see the metaphor in Booth Tarkington’s 1929 The World Does Move:

A racing car on the way to some track contest swept perilously by us at seventy miles an hour; we saw a monoplane “stunt flying” at a faster speed than that, and thus were made aware of the presence of the new athlete, the Twentieth Century's realization of the centaur fantasy, half-man, half-machine, and at his topmost far greater hero to the people than any Marathon runner, discus thrower, charioteer or home-run batter has ever been.

And by 1944 we see the metaphor distilled down to the noun. From Wilhelm Keilau’s 1944 Norway in World History:

Through the centre of the painting a long row of tanks roll towards the foreground; in each open turret a steel-clad warrior laughs triumphantly, proud of his power; he is the modern centaur: half man, half machine.

Twenty-five years later the mechanical had become electronic and centaurs encompassed human-computer hybrids. From a 1969 conference paper by W. Grey Walter:

Even in the utilitarian field of prosthetic design the replacement of a hand or a leg with a “new! improved!” version may require direct coupling to the nervous system and this again may suggest “improvements” at a higher level. We have already played with a system to control a computer directly from the electric waves that precede a voluntary decision, and know that our control would be better if our surgical friends would implant electrodes in suitable parts of our brains. We can imagine quite easily the evolution of a hybrid robot, a cybernetic Centaur or even Minotaur—a man half machine, machine half man.

At the turn of the twentieth-first century, the world of chess took up the term with the advent of Advanced Chess, a.k.a. Centaur Chess, a form of the game in which humans are permitted to use computers to enhance their play. The following exchange took place on the Usenet group rec.games.chess.computer on 2 December. The nature of the exchange indicates the centaur was already being used in this community by that date:

Knob Nose: Has anybody played with this new Analysis Board? It would be interesting to compare notes on what could be done with it.

Gian-Carlo Pascutto: I find it most useful in Centaur/Advanced chess, where it can be used to check the variants the engine produces for deep hidden threats.

Knob Nose: What is “Centaur/Advanced chess”?

Jeroen ;-} A centaur is a mythical creature with the head and torso of a man joined to the body of a horse. So it is a combination of two. It has been translated to the combination of man and machine, operating as one.

Centaur chess or more common, advanced chess, is a player playing chess with (legal) computer assistance.

Newspapers soon began to pick up on the chess jargon. We see an oblique use of this chess sense, in the term centaur room, in the New York Times of 6 February 2003:

Mr. Kasparov champions the idea of “advanced chess,” in which humans compete by using sanctioned computer software during the game, and he has participated in one such game. The future of chess, Mr. Kasparov and others suggest, lies not in the competition between man and machine, but in their fusion.

On the Internet site of ChessBase, a leading publisher of chess programs, a Centaur Room is set aside for people who want to play as a team with their computers.

And we see it being used directly in an article in the February 2015 issue of KM World, the KM standing for knowledge management:

In 2005, an advanced chess tournament took place that allowed any combination of humans and computers. Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, who only held amateur status in Elo (named after physics professor Arpad Elo) chess rankings, took their regular desktop computers and squeezed them for their purposes. They won that tournament against chess masters with superior chess ratings and even superior hardware and software. Both players had leveraged their expertise to align computing power to win chess games. They created a superior team comprising humans and machines. In essence, a new form of chess intelligence had emerged. Kasparov concluded, “Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.”

Kasparov coined the term “centaur” to describe that human-machine combination. The Greek mythological creature consists of a human torso with head and arms and the body and legs of a horse.

Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who has competed in many “human vs. machine” events, did not coin the term, and I am not aware of an instance of him using centaur in this context. He seems to have preferred the term advanced chess.

A reverse centaur, in contrast, is where the machine directs the human to do tasks that are too difficult to automate. This term is in place by September 2021 when it appears in an article in the journal PLOS One:

Current trends point to “reverse centaurs” when it comes to automation. Given that it is easier to manage humans using algorithms (e.g. organise taxi drivers) vs performing the actual task (e.g. autonomous cars), there is a certain market tendency to extract profits from over-exploitation. Instead of machines aiding humans (i.e. what is called a “centaur” in chess), we run the risk of economies of very low wages where humans help machines (i.e. more akin to a very boring and intensive production line, hence “reverse centaur”).

And writer Cory Doctorow has popularized the term reverse centaur. He first used the term in a blog post from 17 April 2022:

In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.

[…]

But even though an Amazon driver represents the tight coupling of a human and a machine to do more than either could do on their own, that’s not the kind of centaur that we talk about when it’s a chess master paired with a chess program. That chess master is being augmented by the machine, and the machine is the junior partner in the relationship. The human is the head, and the AI is the body.

By contrast, an Amazon driver is a reverse-centaur. The AI is in charge, and the human is the junior partner. The AI is the head, telling the body what to do. The driver is the body — the slow-witted, ambulatory meat that is puppeteered by the AI master.

Doctorow would go on to publish a book titled The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI in 2026.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

I am indebted to Garson O’Toole for much of the research on this term. He was the discoverer of the early citations of use.

Doctorow, Cory. “Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs.” Pluralistic, 17 April 2022.

“Fritz 7 Analysis Board.” Usenet: rec.games.chess.computer, 2 December 2001.

Harmon, Amy. “Queen, Captured by Mouse: More Chess Players Use Computers for Edge.” New York Times, 6 February 2003, B6/6. ProQuest Newspapers.

Holtel, Stefan. “From Computer to Centaur: Cognitive Tools Turn the Rules Upside Down.” KM World, February 2015, 18/1–2. ProQuest Magazines.

Keilau, Wilhelm. Norway in World History. London: MacDonald, 1944, 195. Archive.org.

O’Toole, Garson. “centaur / reverse centaur.” ADS-L, 3 August 2026 and again on 4 August 2026.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2016, s.v. centaur, n.

Samothrakis, Spyridon. “Artificial Intelligence Inspired Methods for the Allocation of Common Goods and Services.” PLOS One, 16.9, September 2021. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257399.

Tarkington, Booth. The World Does Move. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929, 283. Archive.org.

Walter, W. Grey. “The Past and Future of Cybernetics in Human Development” (1969). In J. Rose, ed. Progress of Cybernetics: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Cybernetics, London, 1969, vol. 1 of 2. London: Gordon and Breach, 1970, 45–56 st 54. Archive.org.

Image credit: Adam Carr, 2005[?]. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

gonzo

Ralph Steadman’s illustration that accompanied the 1971 serialization of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in Rolling Stone magazine

9 September 2026

The word gonzo is inextricably linked to writer Hunter S. Thompson, famed for his style dubbed gonzo journalism. In Thompson’s usage, gonzo is a highly subjective, first-person style, characterized by distorted and exaggerated facts. Thompson first used the word in print on 11 November 1971 in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which first appeared serialized in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine:

“Right,” I said. “But first we need the car. And after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco shirts.” The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like human peacocks and get crazy, then screech off across the desert and cover the story. Never lose sight of the primary responsibility.

But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.

But Thompson did not coin the word. He was using an existing slang term meaning bizarre or crazy in a more specialized sense. Over the years when asked where the word came from, Thompson told various stories, all crediting editor Bill Cardoso for introducing the term to him.

In one account, Thompson would credit editor Bill Cardoso with coining the word in 1970 in a conversation with him about his article “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” which appeared in Scanlon’s Monthly that year. A 1977 interview on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has this exchange between Thompson and the interviewer:

And in another 1977 interview, this time with High Times magazine, Thompson said:

One of the letters came from Bill Cardozo [sic], who was the editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine at the time. I’d heard him use the word Gonzo when I covered the New Hampshire primary in ’68 with him. It meant sort of “crazy,” “off-the-wall”—a phrase that I always associate with Oakland. But Cardozo said something like, “Forget all the shit you’ve been writing, this is it; this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.” Gonzo. Yeah, of course. That’s what I was doing all the time. Of course, I might be crazy.

And in yet another account, Thompson and Cardoso claimed that Cardoso had written to Thompson in regard to his 1970 Kentucky Derby article calling that piece either, in Thompson’s recollection, “pure gonzo,” or in Cardoso’s “totally gonzo.”

The earliest known use of gonzo in print is in an article in the 14 June 1970 issue of the Boston Globe Sunday magazine, which, as it happens, was edited by Bill Cardoso:

For five years Alpert attempted to sustain the level of enlightenment he had encountered that snowy night in Newton. He tried every chemical he was handed. He took over 300 LSD trips. He smoked pot and went Gonzo on STP, the most powerful hallucinogen ever concocted.

This was rapidly followed by another use of gonzo in a Boston paper by Charles Giuliano in the 3 July 1970 issue of the Boston Herald Traveler:

Some 25,000 gonzo fans jammed the bowl end of Harvard Stadium, Wednesday, July 1 to hear their sex-rock idols, Ten Years After.

In subsequent months, Giuliano would go on to use gonzo in a number of music reviews in the Herald Traveler.

Cardoso, or at least Boston, seems to be the nexus for early uses of gonzo, but where Cardoso got the word is very much up in the air. Cardoso said it was a South Boston slang term for “guts and stamina of the last man standing at the end of a marathon drinking bout.” But it does not appear to be a Boston slang term, or at least there is no record of any such word. On another occasion, Cardoso claimed that it came from the French Canadian gonzeaux, meaning “shining path.” That too is a fiction, as if Cardoso was creating a gonzo etymology for gonzo.

Corey Seymour and Jann Wenner’s 2007 Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson gives a different story about the origins of the term from Doug Brinkley, the literary executor of Thompson’s estate:

The Internet is full of bogus falsehoods propagated by uninformed English professors and pot-smoking fans about the etymological origins of “gonzo.” Here’s how it happened: The legendary New Orleans piano player James Booker recorded an instrumental song called “Gonzo” in 1960. The term “gonzo” was Cajun slang that had floated around the French Quarter jazz scene for decades and meant, roughly, “to play unhinged.” The actual studio recording of “Gonzo” took place in Houston, and when Hunter first heard the song he went bonkers—especially for this wild flute part. From 1960 to 1969—until Herbie Mann recorded another flute triumph, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—Booker’s “Gonzo” was Hunter’s favorite song.

When Nixon ran for president in 1968, Hunter had an assignment to cover him for Pageant and found himself holed up in a New Hampshire motel with a columnist from the Boston Globe Magazine named Bill Cardoso. Hunter had brought a cassette of Booker’s music and played “Gonzo” over, and over—it drove Cardoso crazy, and that night, Cardoso jokingly derided Hunter as “the ‘Gonzo’ man.” Later, when Hunter sent Cardoso his Kentucky Derby piece, he got a note back saying something like, “Hunter, that was pure Gonzo journalism!” Cardoso claimed that the term was also used in Boston bars to mean “the last man standing,” but Hunter told me that he never really believed Cardoso on this. Just another example of “Cardoso bullshit” he said.

The bit of it being Cajun slang or Louisiana jazz jargon is unsubstantiated. I have found no uses of the word in relation to Louisiana until the appearance of Booker’s tune in 1960. But the rest of Brinkley’s tale seems plausible and match, in the essential elements, the accounts of the word’s origin that Thompson gave. But Thompson is not exactly a reliable source, and it seems that Brinkley’s main source was Thompson, so take it with a grain of salt.

But if we take Brinkley’s story as true, where did Booker get the name of his song from? According to a February 2002 article in BluesNotes magazine by Greg Johnson, James Booker took the name of his song from a character in the 1960 film The Pusher. That movie is based on Ed McBain’s (pseud. Evan Hunter) 1956 novel of the same name. In the novel, the character receives his nickname as a mishearing of the slang word gunsel, a gunman:

We know what happened at the card game. We know all about the gunsel routine and the way your goofed and called it “gonzo” and the way it brought down the house, and the way you were called Gonzo the rest of the night. Batman told us all about it, and Batman’ll swear to it. We figure the rest like this, pal. We figure you used the Gonzo tag when you took over the Hernandez’s trade because you didn’t figure it was wise to identify your own name with your identity as a pusher. Okay, so these kids were looking for Gonzo, and they found him, and one them bought a sixteenth from you, and he’ll swear to that too.

But as with the other stories, we have little substantiation that the word comes from the McBain novel.

Dictionaries have attempted to give gonzo an etymology, but like the above stories, they cannot be trusted. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is “perhaps a borrowing from Italian,” giving either the Italian gonzo, meaning foolish, or the Spanish ganso, meaning goose or fool, as the etymon. While Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives a more complex etymology, saying it is either a blend of gone + crazo (an eccentric person) or gone + the Italian suffix -zo, with an allusion to gung-ho. These explanations are plausible but seem to be cases of etymologists using traditional tools of etymology, borrowing and derivation, to reach for an answer that is simply not known.

All we can say for certain about the origin of gonzo, as we know it today, is that Cardoso introduced it to Thompson who popularized it. Beyond that no one can say.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 17 August 2026, s.v. gonzo, adj.1.

Gzowski, Peter. 90 Minutes Live, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 12 April 1977. In Anita Thompson, ed. Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson. Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press, 2009, 70–71. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Hirst, Martin. “What is Gonzo? The Etymology of an Urban Legend.” University of Queensland, Australia, 19 January 2004.

McBain, Ed (pseud. Evan Hunter). The Pusher (1956). New York: Penguin, 1963, 149. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1989, s.v. gonzo, adj. & n.

Rosenbaum, Ron. “Hunter S. Thompson: The Good Doctor Tells All … About Carter, Cocaine, Adrenaline, and the Birth of Gonzo Journalism.” High Times, September 1977. In Anita Thompson, ed. Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson. Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press, 2009, 91–92. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Shapiro, Fred. “Further Antedating of ‘Gonzo.’” ADS-L, 15 July 2026.

Taylor, Robert. “Baba Ram Dass (the Former Richard Alpert, PhD) Shares His Experiences.” Boston Globe, 14 June 1970, Magazine 19/1. Newspapers.com.

Thompson, Hunter S. (Raoul Duke, pseud.). “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Rolling Stone, 11 November 1971, 36–48 at 38/4. ProQuest Magazines.

Wenner, Jann S. and Corey Seymour. Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson. New York: Little, Brown, 2007, 125–26.

Wills, David S. “Uncovering the Origins of ‘Gonzo’ on the 20th Anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s Death.” Beatdom (Substack), 20 February 2025.

Zimmer, Ben. “Further Antedating of ‘Gonzo.’” ADS-L, 15 July 2026.

Image credit: Ralph Steadman, 1971. Fair use to illustrate the topic under discussion.

booty / booty call

Cover for the 2018 song Booty by Spanish rapper C. Tangana (Antón Álvarez Alfaro) and Mexican-American singer Becky G. (Rebbeca Marie Gomez)

7 September 2026

[Updated from 29 May 2024: added antedating of booty call]

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 earliest known use of booty call, unearthed by Fred Shapiro, is by Black comedian Bill Belamy on a 4 September 1992 episode of Def Comedy Jam:

Right, let's analyze the case. Mike Tyson calls the honey from the hotel room—2 o'clock in the morning. Is that or is that not a booty call? Can you help me?

In other early uses, 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

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Sources:

Belamy, Bill. “Bill Belamy on Def Jam” (4 September 1992). YouTube.com. Quotation at 1:12 mark.

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

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, accessed 16 August 2026, 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 Online, March 2002, s.v. booty, n.3, booty call, n.; June 2016, s.v. botty, n.; 1989, s.v. booty, n.1.

Shapiro, Fred. “Antedating of ‘Booty Call.’” ADS-L, 29 June 2026.

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

Zimmer, Ben. “Antedating of ‘Booty Call.’” ADS-L, 29 June 2026.

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

lorem ipsum ...

Example of the placeholder lorem ipsum text mistakenly making its way into print in Singapore’s Straits Times, 26 April 2014

4 September 2026

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet ... This seemingly pseudo-Latin, phrase is used in the typesetting industry as a place holder for text. It is intended to be a meaningless passage used to demonstrate what a printed page will look like without the reader being distracted by the content. Occasionally, one will see it make its way into print or onto a web page due to an editorial oversight.

There are many variations on the lorem ipsum text, but one common version reads:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

But what, if anything, does it mean? It is a modified extract from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil) written in 45 B.C.E. Cicero’s actual words and a translation follow. Note that among other errors, the typesetter’s version begins not only in mid-sentence, but also in the middle of the word dolorem:

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia nonnumquam eiusmodi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

(Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?)

Long thought to be nonsense Latin, the identification of Cicero’s speech as the source was made in 1987 by Richard McClintock, a Latin professor and publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.

How long has this particular dummy text been around? It was created in 1966 by James Mosely of the St. Bride Printing Library for the Letraset company. Letraset produced transfer sheets of letters in various font sets that one could use to mockup page layouts. (My first job after leaving the army in 1989 was as an editor for a number of professional newsletters, and I used Letraset transfers to create the headlines on the camera-ready copies we sent to the printer.)

Some of the changes in lorem ipsum from Cicero’s original are random. Some, for instance, were introduced by typos when the makers of Pagemaker were typing the Letraset copy into the code for their digital product. But not all are random. The start of the text in the middle of the word dolorem, for example stems from the text having been taken from the 1914 Loeb Classical Library version of the text, which ends one page with do- and picks up on the next with lorem ipsum. (Some nineteenth century Latin dictionaries also split dolorem with a line break, but these only contain very short excerpts of only a few words, and and are not the source text for the typesetter’s version.) Other bits in various versions of the text are short phrases in Spanish and French that appear to have been added as plays on words.

In other cases, Mosley made changes to the Latin so that it would be more useful as English dummy text. letters and combinations of letters found in English but not in Latin, such y and ng, have been added, and letters more common in Latin, like q and m, have been removed to make the dummy text look more like English in form. And some entire words, like quia (because), have been consistently removed to make the text unintelligible to someone who knows Latin in order to preserve its utility as dummy text.

Extant evidence for the use of the lorem ipsum dummy text dates to 1966 when the Letraset company began using it in the sheets of body type that it sold. In the 1980s, electronic typesetting programs, such as Aldus Pagemaker, began including the text as default filler, and its usage exploded.

There are claims that the lorem ipsum text can be found in sixteenth-century printer’s samples, but these claims are unverified, and the technology of the day made the use of dummy text impractical. Setting a page using lead type is time consuming and labor intensive. Any need for dummy text simply does not justify the cost involved in setting the type. It wasn’t until the mid twentieth century that technology made the creation of dummy text practical.

For those interested in going more in depth on the history of lorem ipsum, I strongly recommend Emily Zhang’s 30 May 2026 YouTube video on the topic. She is the one who first identified Mosley as the creator of the dummy text, and the video includes interviews with McClintock and Laura Perry, one of the creators of Aldus Pagemaker. It is well worth twenty-six minutes of your time, at least it is if you are a word or design nerd.

I originally penned this entry in 2021, and while I had correctly identified Cicero and Letraset as the origin of the dummy text, I did not have the full story until Zhang produced her video earlier this year.

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Sources:

Adams, Cecil. “What Does the Filler Text ‘Lorem Ipsum’ Mean?” The Straight Dope, 16 February 2001.

Cicero. “De finibus bonorum et malorum.” On Ends. H. Rackham, trans. Loeb Classical Library 40. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1914, 1.10, 35–37. Loeb Classical Library Online.

Cima, Rosie. “The History of Lorem Ipsum.” Priceonomics, 13 March 2015.

Zhang, Emily (Rabbit Hole). “The Lorem Ipsum Mystery.” YouTube.com, 30 May 2026. Video Notes.

Photo credit: "Literary Icon in the Malay Community," Straits Times, 26 April 2014, D6. Unknown photographer, 2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

hokey / hokey pokey

The Hokey Pokey (Hokey Cokey)

2 September 2026

[Edit 3 September 2026: added Jonathan Green’s antedating of Winchell’s column.]

The Hokey Pokey is a dance, and hokey pokey is also part of an old street vendors' cry indicating ice cream is for sale. It can refer to inferior or knock-off products. When standing alone, the first element in the phrase, hokey is an adjective meaning banal or melodramatic, and this sense is commonly used in theatrical slang. All these terms and senses of hokey stem from hokum, which in turn is a blend of hocus / hoax and bunkum. And ultimately these all come from hocus-pocus, which also supplies the inspiration for the second half of the phrase, pokey.

But hokey has an older sense that is unrelated to these others. It was part of a minced oath, a euphemistic substitute for another word, perhaps hell. We see the oath by the hokey in a 1789 Irish song poking fun at the English parliament:

I’m de boy, your souls! dat docked de money-bills, and put de free trade in your fists, sould Poyning’s to Mr. Foot of de corner, and bid de English Parliament kiss our a—es. Den your sould to de gallows! when I fobb’d my mocus’s, well becomes me, by de hokey, I falls a ballyragging F—d, spits in de Volunteers countenance, and corks de newspapers gobs, your souls, Huzza for de sweet Liberty!

Use of by the hokey or by hokey continues into the mid twentieth century, and in later use it is often rendered as by the hokey fiddle. James Joyce records this form of the oath in the Circe episode of his 1922 Ulysses:

I’m suffering the agony of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous. If they were they’d walk me off the face of the bloody globe.

Theatrical use of hokey to refer to melodramatic or banal performances dates to the early twentieth century. Variety of 28 June 1929 has this:

This mixed couple have the makings of a good hokey act when it gets a bit more even and more attention paid to the cueing on chatter stuff. The girl is a looker with personality and a click delivery, while the man also makes a personable appearance that will get over better through checkmaking some of his uncalled for mugging.

And Walter Winchell used the word to pan a performance by Carole Lombard in his On Broadway column of 5 November 1938:

Carole Lombard did a very hokey melodrama Monday night—pretty dull stuff…Not even thinking of Carole’s pretty face could help you forget its monotony.

The reduplicative hokey-pokey has been used to mean deception or fakery and to denote products of inferior quality or cheap knock-offs since the mid nineteenth century. James Halliwell’s 1846 Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words records hoky-poky as a northern English dialect form of hocus-pocus. And nineteenth-century street ice-cream vendors often used the cry hokey-pokey penny a lump to advertise their wares. Such street vendors were known for selling lower-quality products.

We see hokey-pokey and a reference to the ice cream vendors’ cry used to refer to inferior foodstuffs in an 1874 report by Georgia’s Commissioner of Agriculture:

There still remain in the State a few “junkers” who are constantly on the lookout for salvage, rejected and cast off food products which are sold for junk and peddled about to unsuspecting buyers at reduced prices. We are making one less of these people as often as we are able to catch them. The street ice cream cone “hokey-pokey” nuisance is fast passing out from the street corner and the newsboy’s alley and the traveling weinerworst [sic] peddler has retired to the “crack” in the wall.

And again Joyce in the Lotus Eaters episode of Ulysses used the vendors’ cry in reference to the Eucharist:

Yes, bread of angels it’s called. There’s a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim.

In New Zealand hokey-pokey is a type of honeycomb toffee, and there and also in Australia it is a flavor of ice cream containing bits of the toffee.

Finally, the song known as the Hokey Pokey or Hokey Cokey is a participatory dance that dates to the early nineteenth century. The name is more recent, however, and comes from an arrangement of the song by British bandleader Al Tabor in 1940. Tabor supposedly took the name from the cry of ice cream vendors, changing the pokey to cokey because he thought it sounded better. The dance is known as the Hokey Pokey in the United States.

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Sources:

“De M——R——S Done Over; or, All de Boys in a String.” Both Sides of the Gutter, or, the Humours of the Regency, third edition. William Carey, ed. Dublin: P. Byrne, 1789, 89. Archive.org.

First Annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, Being for the Year 1874. Savannah: J. H. Estill, 1875, 52–53. Google Books.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 11 August 2026, s.v. hokey, n.1, hokey, adj. hokey-pokey, n.1, hokey-pokey, n.3.

Halliwell, James Orchard. Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, vol. 1 of 2. London: John Russell Smith, 1846, s.v. hoky-poky, 455/1. Archive.org.

Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922). Hans Walter Gabler, ed. New York: Vintage, 1986, 5 (Lotus Eaters):360–63 and 15 (Circe): 2679–81.

“New Acts this Week.” Variety, 87/11, 29 June 1927, 31/1. ProQuest Magazines.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1899, s.v. hokey | hoaky, n., hokey-pokey, n.; 1976, s.v. hokey, adj.

Winchell, Walter. “On Broadway” (syndicated column). Binghamton Press (New York), 5 November 1938, 13/8. Newspapers.com.

Photo credit: Bryan Ledgard, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.