Judeo-Christian

24 May 2019

Judeo-Christian has two main meanings. The first is a historical one, referring to the early Christian church made up of converted Jews, primarily in Jerusalem, in contrast to the Pauline churches made up of Gentiles that were scattered across the eastern Mediterranean. The second, and today more common, meaning refers to the common ethical and cultural values of Judaism and Christianity. This second meaning originally grew out of desire for inclusivity, but the term Judeo-Christian is now increasingly used to exclude other religions.

The etymology is simple. It’s a straightforward compounding of the standard combining form Judeo-, referring to Judaism, and the adjective Christian. The first meaning, referring to the early Christian church, is in use as early as 1821. The use of this sense has mainly been restricted to discourse on religious history.

The second meaning came about as part of the effort to reduce or eliminate anti-Semitism, particularly in response to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. The earliest use of this sense that I have found is from a June 1934 New York Times article:

We protest with all our might against the oppression of any individual on these grounds as contrary to the great Judaeo-Christian heritage of our civilization.

As in this early citation, the term was at first used to combat the idea that the United States was a “Christian nation,” by including the largest religious minority in descriptions of the morals and culture of the country.

But today, the term is more likely to be used to differentiate and exclude other religious faiths from participation in the American polity. For example, there is this from a November 2015 op-ed in the New York Times:

Mr. Huckabee has called Islam “a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet,” and Mr. Kasich has proposed a federal agency to spread “Judeo-Christian Western values.”

The term Abrahamic has been proposed as one that would include Islam in the same cultural tradition, but like Judeo-Christian, it fails to include Buddhism, Hinduism, or other religions.

The denotation, the dictionary definition, of this second sense hasn’t changed, but its connotation has.

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Sources:

“Good-Will Barred to Nazis by Rabbis.” New York Times, 16 June 1934, 16.

Hasan, Mehdi. “Why I Miss George W. Bush.” New York Times, 30 November 2015, A23.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2013, s. v. Judaeo-Christian | Judeo-Christian, adj. and n.

jones

3 September 2019

The exact origin of this word meaning an overwhelming yen or craving is unknown. It obviously refers to the name Jones, but exactly how it arose and developed is uncertain. 

The first known use of jones in this context is the 1962 edition of Maurer and Vogel’s Narcotics and Narcotic Addiction which glosses jones as “a drug habit.” Three years later, Claude Brown’s 1965 Manchild In the Promised Land uses it in that sense and also to mean the symptoms of heroin withdrawal:

My jones is on me; it’s on me something terrible. I feel so sick.

By 1970, it had generalized into any desire or yearning. From Clarence Major’s Dictionary of Afro-American Slang from that year:

Jones: a fixation...; compulsive attachment.

The verb meaning to suffer from heroin withdrawal is recorded in 1971, and by 1984 it was being used more generally to mean to crave or intensely desire.

Some sources relate the origin to Great Jones Alley in New York City, which at one point was a place where junkies would gather to shoot up, but no evidence linking the term to the alley has been proffered. The term may also relate to the phrase keeping up with the Joneses, in that both relate to a desire for more, but again, this is mere speculation.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2019. s. v. jones, n.1, jones, v.

Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 2. Random House, 1997.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005. s. v. Jones, v.

jerry-built / jury rig

1856 hand-colored lithograph of the HMS Dido returning to Tahiti on calm seas, port broadside view; jury rigged with jib, foresail, mizzensail, and a complete set of sails on main mast; two smaller crafts are in the background. The ship had been damaged in a hurricane on 21 January 1856.

1 March 2021

Jury rig and jerry-built are similar, but distinct, terms and often confused. Of the two, jury-rig is the older, but neither one has a definitive origin.

Jury rig is nautical in origin and comes from an older term: jury mast. It is thought to be a clipping of injury mast, that is a make-shift mast to replace a damaged one, a very plausible explanation but no record of the phrase injury mast has been found. Jury mast was in place by 1616, when John Smith used the phrase in a description of his second and unsuccessful attempt to travel to the New World:

But ere I had sayled 120 leagues, shee broke all her masts; pumping each watch 5 or 6000 strokes: onely her spret saile remayned to spoon before the wind, till we had reaccommodated a Iury mast, & the rest, to returne for Plimouth.

A popular song by George Alexander Stevens, written in 1757, uses the phrase and co-locates it with the verb to rig, a natural choice when discussing masts and sails:

On the lee-beam is the land boys,
            Let the guns o’er-board be thrown;
To the pumps, come every hand, boys,
            See! her mizzen-mast is gone.
The leak we’ve found, it cannot pour fast,
            We’ve lighten’d her a foot or more;
Up and rig a jury fore-mast,
            She rights! she rights! boys, wear off shore

We see jury rig by 1823 in a description of the 9 April 1804 battle between the British frigate Wilhelmina and the French frigate Psyché. The context is still nautical, but here there is no association with the ship’s rigging. Instead, jury rig refers to a makeshift disguise to make the British ship appear to be a merchantman in order to lure the French ship in unawares (a tactic that you see in every movie ever made about naval combat during the age of sail):

The jury-rig alone of an armée en flûte ship of war is a great deception; and it is always in the power of the officers and crew to give a mercantile appearance to her hull, in the case of the Wilhelmina in particular, she having been a dutch ship.

By 1864, jury rig was being used in contexts completely divorced from the sea. A letter by a William Newmarch to his mother on 4 December 1854, among other things, describes the operation of an unusual type of elevator:

The cage is lifted,—I should say operated,—by the pine tree or centre male worm being turned by a small steam engine,—the power required is not great. The advantage claimed is, that the cage cannot run away and fall down, as do some of the ordinary cages, suspended by chains or ropes, because the two worms work into each other, and the cage cannot slip down. There is, however, a disadvantage: if the engine breaks down while the cage is on its road between two stories, the cage must remain there until a jury rig is fixed to revolve the pine stem again.

The origin of jerry-built, on the other hand, is completely obscure. It refers not to a makeshift repair, but rather to a shoddy or haphazard construction in the first place. It has been suggested that it refers to a builder named Jerry who worked somewhere near Merseyside, England, but there is no evidence to support this conjecture. The term is first recorded in an 1869 glossary of the dialect of Lancashire, England:

Jerry-built, adj. slightly, or unsubstantially built.

Other than this early lexical entry, we have no evidence as to where the phrase comes from or who or what jerry refers to.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

James, William. The Naval History of Great Britain, vol. 3 of 5. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1823, 101n. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Newmarch, William Thomas. Letter, 4 December 1864. Letters Written Home in the Years 1864–65. London: 1880, 144. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. jerry-built, adj., jerry-builder, n., jury, adj., jury-mast, n.

Peacock, Robert Backhouse and J. C. Atkinson. A Glossary of the Dialect of the Hundred of Lonsdale. London: Asher & Co. for the Philological Society, 1869, 45. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Smith, John. A Description of New England. London: Humfrey Lownes for Robert Clarke, 1616, 49–50. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Stevens, George Alexander. “Song 207.” Apollo’s Cabinet, vol. 1. London: John Sadler, 1757, 292. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Effingham J. Kellow, 1856, Royal Museums Greenwich. Public domain image.

incel

29 June 2018

Incel is a portmanteau of involuntary celibate, referring to a person, usually a heterosexual man, who desires a sexual or romantic partner but is unable to find one. The term arose as a self-identifier and spawned a virtual subculture as those people reached out for support on the internet. But over the years that subculture and the term itself morphed into one associated with violent misogyny. Ironically, however, the movement was started and the term incel was coined by a bisexual woman.

In 1993 an undergraduate, bisexual, woman named Alana (she remains anonymous) at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario created the website Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project. The website is no longer online, although snapshots of the site can be accessed through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That website launch is apparently the first use of the phrase involuntary celibate. And sometime between 17 January – 20 April 1999 she posted an article to her site titled “The Incel Movement: What we can learn from the gay rights movement” that contained the sentence:

Society does not understand who we are, or have a name for our problem (in fact, straight incels are often assumed to be gay).

This is apparently the earliest use of the portmanteau incel. (The ambiguity in the date is a result of when the Internet Archive took its snapshots of the site. Alana’s web pages did not contain dates of publication.) Alana and the early incarnations of her site are in no way associated with the violent and misogynist nature of the incel movement today.

The term and the subculture remained largely unnoticed by mainstream media for the next fifteen years, as mainstream references to it are few and usually jocular, poking fun at those who cannot find partners. An article titled “Involuntary Celibacy: A Life Course Analysis” appeared in the Journal of Sex Research in 2001. And the New York Times published two articles in 2006 using the phrase, but not indicating that a subculture existed around the phenomenon. One by James Gorman published on 24 January 2006 said:

I don’t know where that happens in the brain, but I’m betting the graduate students are just going through periods of involuntary celibacy and trying not to be obvious about their desperation.

And a humor piece by Jeff Johnson from 5 June 2006 said offered this suggestion for a new internet domain name:

.cat The domain of choice for the involuntarily celibate.

The Urban Dictionary added an entry for incel on 8 March 2007, indicating that despite the paucity of its appearances in mainstream publications, the term was alive and well in various corners of the internet. The Urban Dictionary’s definition, however, also did not indicate the existence of any kind of subculture around the concept:

incel
involuntary celibate: someone who is celibate but doesn’t want to be
“He’s an incel. He tries to get dates every week but gets turned down all that time.”

The term came into the general public’s awareness with the shooting at Isla Vista, California on 23 May 2014, when a self-proclaimed incel named Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured fourteen others before killing himself. The event caused the New York Times to use the portmanteau for the first time on 25 May:

He posted on sites where other young men shared their rages and frustrations at being virgins, and complained to classmates about the difficulty of meeting women. He referred to himself as an “INCEL,” short for “involuntary celibate.”

Since then, the term has entered mainstream discourse.

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Sources:

Donnelly, Denise, et al., “Involuntary Celibacy: A Life Course Analysis,” Journal of Sex Research, vol. 38, no. 2, May 2001, 159–69

James Gorman, “This Is Your Brain on Schadenfreude. Do You Feel Bad About Feeling Good?” New York Times, 24 January 2006, F3

Jeff Johnson, “Master of My Domain,” New York Times, 5 June 2006, A19

Peter Baker, “The Woman Who Accidentally Started the Incel Movement,” Elle, March 2016

Ian Lovett and Adam Nagourney, “Deadly Rampage in College Town After Video Rant,” New York Times, 25 May 2014

impeach / impeachment

21 December 2019

The verb to impeach has a straightforward and unsurprising etymology, but the noun impeachment has an unusual twist.

The English verb to impeach is a late fourteenth century borrowing from the Old French empechier. The French verb comes from the Latin impedicare, meaning to entangle or hinder. And the original meaning in English was the same. From the writings of John Wyclif, c. 1380:

He schal dwelle þere alle his lif, and no man enpeche hym.

Note that the Latin root is ped-, meaning foot, which is etymologically related to the English word fetter. But fetter comes down to us today via a different path, from the Old English feter. The difference between ped- and fet- is explained by Grimm’s law: the Indo-European /p/ changes to /f/ and the /d/ to /t/ in the Germanic languages, while they remain the same in Latin and the Romance languages. The root ped-, of course, means foot, and to fetter is to tie one’s feet.

But the Old French word has a second meaning, to accuse someone of a crime. And from the beginning, English also had this second, legal meaning. John Wyclif again:

Þat wickid men [...] þere schullen dwelle in seyntewarie, and no man empeche hem bi processe of lawe.
(That wicked men [...] should dwell there in sanctuary, and no man impeach them by process of law.)

Another sense of impeach that is often used in legal circles is to challenge, discredit, or disparage, as in to impeach a witness. This sense dates to at least 1600 when it appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.4:

You doe impeach your modestie too much, To leaue the citie, and commit your selfe, Into the hands of one that loues you not

But the sense that it is most famous for, at least in American political circles, is to bring formal charges against a government official for, in the words of the U.S. constitution, “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” This sense arises out of English law and appears by 1569 in Richard Grafton’s Chronicle at Large and Meere History of the Affayres of Englande and Kinges of the Same:

Whether the Lordes and commons might without the kings will empeche the same officers and iustices vpon their offenses in the parliament or not.

Here is where it gets unusual. The noun impeachment follows a similar development of its senses, but it has a twist in its etymology. The Old French empeschment was borrowed back into Latin during the medieval era, where it appears as impechementum. This is an instance of Latin borrowing a word from a later language. Most French words stem from Latin, but you don’t often see it work in the other direction. Of course, Latin didn’t die with the ancient Romans. It continued on as a living language well into the early modern period, and like all living languages borrowed words from others.

In the United States, the House of Representatives has the sole power of impeachment of federal officials, that is the bringing of charges against an official, and the Senate is the tribunal that adjudicates the charges and, if found guilty, removes the official from office. Three presidents (Andrew Johnson, 1868; Bill Clinton, 1998; and Donald Trump, 2019) have been impeached and one (Richard Nixon, 1974) resigned before the House could impeach him. Fifteen federal judges have also been impeached, eight of whom were convicted by the Senate and removed from office with one resigning before the Senate could convict, the most recent conviction being in 2010.

One final note, many people use impeach to mean remove an official from office. Technically, impeachment is just the charges; removal requires a trial before the appropriate tribunal. This sense of impeach meaning remove from office isn’t in any of the standard dictionaries and is incorrect from a legal perspective, but linguistically it is a correct usage because so many people use it in this manner.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, s. v. impeach.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2010, s. v. empescher.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. impeach, v., impeachment, n., fetter, n.