breaking bad

11 April 2014

The popular U. S. television show Breaking Bad (2008–13) is about a high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque who, after being diagnosed with lung cancer and with the assistance of an ex-student turned failed drug dealer, begins to cook and sell crystal meth. While the show has been popular with both audiences and critics, the title has baffled many. What does breaking bad mean? Where does the phrase come from?

The answers to these questions are not surprising, but digging the answer out of reference books is somewhat difficult, because for most of its life to break bad was not a catchphrase, but simply a normal verb phrase, consisting of a verb coupled with a variety of adjectives. One could break bad, but one could also break good, or break lucky, or break better, etc. It wasn’t until the 1960s that to break bad developed into a fixed phrase, with a sense of to become angry or belligerent, in African-American slang.

In U. S. slang the verb to break can have the meaning of to happen, to develop along a certain course or trajectory, and it seems to have made its appearance, like many American slang terms, in baseball. The Oxford English Dictionary records this sense, with a first citation from the 15 August 1914 Saturday Evening Post:

They say my homer was lucky [...] but, believe me, it was time things broke for me. They been breakin’ for him all his life.

Baseball use of the term, however, is older than this. The use of the verb to describe a pitch that deviates from the straight course of a normal fastball dates to at least 1899, when it is used by The Chicago Daily News on 8 October:

Katoll is spoken of as the possessor of a sizzling curve that comes up with a phenomenal burst of speed and breaks lightning fast.

And The Sporting Life of 13 May 1905 has this description of a spitball:

The deceptive feature of this delivery is the fact that it is nothing but a straight ball until just as the batter swings at it, then “breaks” sharply.

The noun phrase breaking ball to denote such a pitch is quite common.

But baseball is not the starting point for this use of the verb; cricket is. In 1884 famed cricketer W. G. Grace writes in The Pall Mall Gazette:

He says that a fast bowler can “break” both ways, but admits that this cannot be done with precision.

Almost simultaneously with the verb’s appearance in baseball, it broke into general slang as well, and we find the first instance of broke bad that same year. Again from The Saturday Evening Post, this time from a 1905 article about baseball, the writer uses the verb more generally:

He knows things are liable to “break wrong” for him some time and that he will be the object of criticism [...] Things broke bad, didn’t they?

Early uses like this tend to come in baseball contexts, although cartoonist H. C. Fisher in 1907 writes about his character A. Mutt (who the following year would be joined by his partner Jeff):

Showing here how tough things broke for A. Mutt yesterday.

The 1928 You Gotta Be Rough: The Adventures of Detective Fiaschetti of the Italian Squad has:

Things weren’t breaking right, and he was broke.

Carroll and Garrett Graham’s 1930 Queer People has:

Everything broke lucky for her.

Even William Faulkner uses the verb in this fashion, in his 1934 novel Pylon:

If things break right today, I’ll get you a bottle.

Such examples of the verb to break paired with various adjectives can be found right up to the present day. But the use of break bad as a fixed phrase isn’t recorded until the 1960s, when it starts appearing in African-American slang with the sense of to become aggressive or angry. Claude Brown’s 1965 novel Manchild in the Promised Land has:

Down home, when they went to town, all the n[——]rs would just break bad, so it seemed.

And the New York Times has this from its 30 September 1992 issue:

I don’t want to make eye contact with this sucker because he may break bad on me.

The earlier uses of break bad are primarily in the sense of things taking an unfortunate turn, of bad luck. The use of the sense of break bad to mean to turn to criminal or evil acts would appear to be influenced by the African-American sense. It’s a short step from anger and aggression to criminality.

The creator of the TV series, Vince Gilligan, says the phrase was common when he was growing up in Richmond, Virginia in the 1970s and 80s, and there is no reason to doubt his memory or his account of the experiences from which he drew the title. But the term is not a regionalism as has been claimed by many popular press accounts. The usage is widespread and reasonably common. If it seems unusual, it’s probably because it’s so usual that few take notice of it when it appears, and the prominence it is given by being used in the title makes people notice it for the first time.

Sources:

“break,” “breaking ball,” The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, third edition, 2009, 134–35.

“break, v.” “break bad,” Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1, 1994, 264–65.

“break, v.,” def. 39.c., Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

“break bad, v.,” Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2010.

Rothman, Lily, “Breaking Bad: What Does that Phrase Actually Mean?,” Time, 23 September 2013.

boycott

26 August 2013

To boycott someone or something is to refuse to buy goods or otherwise engage in commerce with them. Boycotts are usually undertaken as a form of political or social protest.

Boycott is an eponym, or a word that comes from a person’s name. The namesake is Captain Charles Boycott, who managed the Irish estates of the Earl of Erne, an absentee landlord in County Mayo, Ireland. In September 1880, Erne’s tenants and laborers were demanding reduced rents, and Boycott evicted them. In response, the Irish Land League, under the leadership of Charles Parnell, organized the tenants and neighbors to resist the evictions, refuse to rent a farm from which someone had been evicted, refuse to work on the estate Boycott managed, and even to refuse to deliver the mail to Boycott. Boycott managed to get the autumn crop harvested, but at a loss, and by the end of the year he had resigned his post and returned to England.

The word was evidently coined by one or more of the local protesters. The first recorded use of the verb is in the Glasgow Herald of 1 November 1880. The noun appears in the Times (London) on 9 December.

The rapidity with which the word boycott caught on is astounding. It even managed to make its way into French by the end of the year. Also surprising is that the term has lasted. Most such eponyms rapidly fade as the events that inspired them recede into memory. For example, how many people still use to bork, meaning to defame someone in order to prevent them from attaining public office, a word inspired by the treatment political opponents gave U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987. Boycott has not only survived, but most people who use the word don’t even know who Charles Boycott was.

Source:

“boycott, v. & n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition.

bootstrap / boot up

9 July 2019

A self-made person is one who lifts or pulls oneself up by one’s bootstraps. The phrase is used unironically nowadays, despite the fact that the laws of physics make it impossible for one to actually lift oneself by one’s bootstraps. The phrase was originally ironic, recognizing that such a feat is impossible, but as the myth of the self-made man grew (and it is a myth; no one succeeds in life without help), the phrase became unironic in its application.

First though, what is a bootstrap? It is quite simply a loop at the top back of the boot used to help pull the boot on.

The earliest use of the metaphor underlying the familiar phrase that I know of is from an 1830 physics text by John Lee Comstock, A System of Natural Philosophy:

The man undertook to make a fair wind for his pleasure boat, to be used whenever he wished to sail. He fixed an immense bellows in the stern of the boat, not doubting but the wind from it would carry him along. [...] Had the sails received the whole force of the wind from the bellows, the boat would not have moved at all, for then, action and re-action would have been exactly equal, and it would have been like a man’s attempting to raise himself over a fence by the straps of his boots.

The phrase as we know it appears a few years later in another of Comstock’s texts, the 1838 Youth’s Book of Natural Philosophy. This is also the first use of the word bootstrap that I’m aware of. (I am sure that earlier uses of the word exist.):

Had this man made, and applied the experiment of attempting to raise himself into the air by pulling at his boot-straps, he would have saved himself the expense of building such a boat.

It also appears in the pages of the New York Daily Tribune on 4 February 1861:

The legislation would be as hopeless as the attempt of a man to lift himself by his boot-straps.

The phrase appears numerous times in various American newspapers in the latter half of the nineteenth century, all of them acknowledging the fruitlessness of the task.

The earliest apparently unironic use of the metaphor that I know of is from the Eumaeus episode of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses—although given that it’s Joyce, he may have meant it ironically, too:

However, reverting to the original, there were on the other hand others who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps. Sheer force of natural genius, that.

But a few years later, it is definitively used unironically. This use is also the first known use of the words bootstrapper and bootstrapping. From the Chicago Daily Tribune of 19 October 1927

Now everyone has heard of the American bootlegger. But the bootstrapper is an even greater national figure, just as the feat of “lifting oneself by one’s bootstraps” is an almost entirely American accomplishment. […] This is all right so long as there is plenty of room for the first rate man who has no capacity for bootstrapping and so long as there is no sudden crisis.

The term enters the world of electrical engineering in the 1940s. From the 1946 volume of the Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers:

The “Bootstrap” Circuit […] is much used for generating a linear rise of voltage with time, for time-base and other purposes. […] It is called a “bootstrap” circuit because the potential at A is apparently being “pulled up by its own bootstraps.”

And in the 1950s, the phrase bootstrap technique began to be used in computing to refer to a self-executing program. From the 1953 volume of the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers:

A technique sometimes called the “bootstrap technique” […] Pushing the load button [...] causes one full word to be loaded into a memory address previously set up […] on the operator’s panel, after which the program control is directed to that memory address and the computer starts automatically.

By 1980, the verb to boot was in use in computing. From M. E. Sloan’s 1980 Introduction to Minicomputers & Microcomputers:

We turn the power knob to on, and depress the control and boot switches. We call this procedure booting the system. […] The computer is now in the machine language mode, in which machine language programs can be entered and run.

It is often claimed that lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps originates with R. E. Raspe’s 1785 novel Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, but neither the phrase nor anything like it appears in that work. However, Gottfried August Bürger, in his 1786 translation of the novel into German, Wunderbare Reisen zu Wasser und Lande, Feldzüge und Lustige Abentheuer des Freyherrn von Münchhausen, adds a tale in which the baron pulls himself and his horse out of a muddy swamp by his own hair. Bürger’s metaphor has the same meaning as the American phrase, but there are no bootstraps involved.

Sources:

Comstock, J. L. A System of Natural Philosophy, Hartford: D. F. Robinson, 1830, 40.

Comstock, J. L. Youth’s Book of Natural Philosophy, Hartford: Reed and Barber, 1838, 45.

“Editorial of the Day: The Bootstrapper.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 Oct 1927, 10.

Goranson, Stephen, “Re: [ADS-L] Bootstrap antedating,” ADS-L, 9 July 2019.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. bootstrap, n., bootstrap, v., and boot, v.4.

“The National Observer.” New York Daily Tribune, 4 Feb 1861, 4.

Waigl, Chris. “figurative ‘bootstraps’ (1834).” ADS-L, 18 Aug 2005.

boondocks

10 June 2020

Boondocks is a relic of American colonialism. British English imported lots of words from its far-flung colonial possessions, but American colonial aspirations primarily produced words derived from Mexican Spanish or North American and Hawaiian indigenous languages. This one, however, is an exception.

In English, the boondocks are any remote and isolated place. The word comes from Tagalog, the language of the Philippines that is spoken by more people in that country than any other. It means mountain in that language. It made its way into English during the U.S. occupation of that island nation following the Spanish-American War. For several decades, the word was used almost exclusively by marines and soldiers, entering into the general discourse during the Vietnam War era.

The U.S. seized the Philippines from Spain in 1898, and from 1899–1902 fought and won an insurgency against Filipino resisters. During that war and in the occupation that followed many U.S. soldiers and marines were stationed on the islands. In 1905, as part of that occupation, a U.S. Army officer, W.E.W. MacKinlay wrote A Handbook and Grammar of the Tagalog Language, which documents the existence of the word:

The mountain. Ang bundok.

Of course, this is not an English language appearance, but it is the first step in the word’s entry into English.

Within five years, Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language had included an entry for the word:

|| bun-docˊ (bo͞on-dok´), n. Also bondoc. [Tag.] A mountain. Also, in colloq. English (usually pl., pronounced bŭn´do͝oks), the hills and woods in general; the wilds; any place at a distance from a center of population. Phil.I.

That dictionary clearly indicates that the word is a foreign one and not yet completely Anglicized, but notes it is used colloquially. Presumably, that means by soldiers.

In the 1920s and 30s, use of boondocks seems to have been largely confined to the Marine Corps. Prior to World War II, the Corps was quite small, numbering less than 20,000 marines for most of this period (compared to about 660,000 during WWII or 180,000 today). In contrast, the U.S. Army was about seven times larger. Such a small and cohesive organization, in which many of the career marines knew one another, would be just the place to foster a specialized vocabulary.

The earliest English-language citation I have found for boondocks is from the September 1927 issue of the Marine Corps’s Leatherneck magazine, in which a marine stationed in Nicaragua makes use of it:

By we, I mean the remainder of the 57th Company, 11th Regiment, Marines, and I’m writing this to tell you that though we may be situated away out here in the “Boondocks” of Nicaragua, we held up the good old traditional Fourth [of July].

The quotation marks around the word indicate that either the writer or magazine editors thought that much of their readership would not be familiar with the term, but they did not gloss it, indicating that it wasn’t all that strange. A few months later, the January issue of Leatherneck includes the word without quotation marks, again in reference to Nicaragua:

The enlisted men of the hospital corps are widely scattered, part of them here at the field hospital and the rest scattered throughout the Boondocks, following the bull carts with rations, patrols, etc.

The word remained largely within the province of the Marine Corps until the Vietnam War. What appearances the word has in print are in the context of the Marines. But after Vietnam, the word filters into general use. So, in 1985 Nicholas Pileggi could write the following in his book Wiseguy, which would inspire Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas:

Instead, Stanley and Tommy got so carried was with the ball buster that they killed the guy. They were so pissed that the guy wouldn’t listen to Jimmy, that lived in the boondocks of Jersey, and that they had to go all the way out there just to talk to him, they got themselves so worked up that they just couldn’t keep from killing him.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Allyn, Cecil S. “With the Fifth Regiment on Duty in Nicaragua.” Leatherneck, 11.1, January 1928, 46.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. boondocks n.

Lighter, Jonathan, ed. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol.1, 1994, s.v. boondock n.

MacKinlay, William Edbert Wheeler. A Handbook and Grammar of the Tagalog Language. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905, 44.

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

Tobin, Earl W. “Distant Echoes from the Fifty-Seventh Company.” Leatherneck, 10.9, September 1927, 18.

Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language. Springfield, Mass.: G. and C. Merriam Company, 1910, s.v. bun-doc.

blitz

23 January 2015

Blitz is a clipping of blitzkrieg, the German word meaning lightning war, which referred to the high-speed, offensive tactics used by the German army in the opening months of World War II. In English, blitz originally referred to a sudden, violent military attack, especially one by air, or as a verb to conduct such an attack. And the Blitz refers to the German air raids on London during 1940.

Blitzkrieg makes its English debut about a month after the German invasion of Poland that started WWII, in the magazine The War Illustrated on 7 October 1939:

In the opening stage of the war all eyes were turned on Poland, where the German military machine was engaged in Blitz-Krieg—lightning war—with a view to ending as soon as possible.

The German word caught on quickly in English usage, as evidenced by this metaphorical use by newspaper columnist Walter Winchell only a week later on 14 October 1939:

The next job, six months later, consumed four weeks of rehearsals and closed the next day after the critics blitzkrieged it.

The first known use of the clipped blitz in English appears a few weeks later, this time as a verb in the 1 November 1939 issue of The Spectator, Columbia University’s daily paper:

Formal committee chairmen must have known how the poor Poles felt when the German blitzkrieg suddenly started “blitzing” around their ears yesterday noon.

The word was quickly co-opted as slang for any sudden dash or movement in or out of a place. Such slang uses are recorded as early as 1940.

Following the war, blitz began to be used in a variety of senses, all related to metaphorical attacks or overwhelming some type of competition with speed and power. Perhaps the most famous of these is the word’s use in American football, where a blitz is a play where defensive backs charge the opposing quarterback in an effort to disrupt a pass play. It appears in print in New York Giants’ linebacker Sam Huff’s 1963 book, Defensive Football:

Sometimes the blitz works. Linemen are bowled over.

So while the meaning of blitz has evolved somewhat over the years, it still remains close to its violent roots.

Sources:

“blitz, n.,” blitz, v.,” and “Blitzkrieg, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

“blitz, v.2,” Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2011.