lam, on the

29 August 2007

This phrase meaning to be on the run from something is U.S. criminal slang from the turn of the 20th century. From Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly of April 1897:

To do a lam, meaning to run.

And from 1904 we have this from Life in Sing Sing by “Number 1500”:

He plugged the main guy for keeps and I took it on a lam for mine.

The verb to lam, meaning to escape, to run away is somewhat older. From Allan Pinkerton’s 1886 Thirty Years A Detective:

After he has secured the wallet he will…utter the word “lam!” This means to let the man go, and to get out of the way as soon as possible.

This slang usage probably comes from the English dialectical verb lam meaning to thrash or to strike and was used in parallel to beat it. This verb lam may ultimately be of Scandinavian origin; the Old Norse lemja means to lame, but the connection cannot be conclusively established.

---

Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1989.

Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

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

---

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.

hurricane

29 August 2017

As of this writing, hurricane Harvey has devastated much of the Texas Gulf Coast. (Here in College Station, Texas, we’ve avoided the worst of it, although it would be an understatement to say there has been a lot of rain.) But where does the word hurricane come from? It turns out it’s a rather straightforward borrowing.

Hurricane comes to us from the Taino language of the Caribbean via Spanish. The Taino word is hurákan. It makes its first English language appearance in Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’s 1535 summary of La historia general de las Indias (Eden included portions of Oviedo’s work, and the works of other authors, in his translation of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s Decadas del nuevo mundo):

Lykewyse when the deuyll greatly intendeth to feare theym, he threteneth to sende them great tempestes which they caule Furacanas or Haurachanas, and are so vehement that they ouerthrowe many howses and great trees.

Today, the official definition of a hurricane is a western-hemisphere tropical cyclone (i.e., forms over tropical or sub-tropical waters) with sustained winds of 64 knots (74 mph, 119 kph). Those with lower sustained winds are dubbed tropical storms. Hurricanes are classified into five categories of increasing severity based on windspeed, the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Category five is the worst, with sustained winds in excess of 137 knots (157 mph, 252 kph).

Before 1953, the names of individual hurricanes and tropical storms were arbitrary and unofficial. For instance an 1842 storm ripped the mast off the boat Antje and became known as Antje’s Hurricane. Saint’s names for storms that hit on the particular saint’s feast day were also common, but could be confusing if storms hit on the same day in multiple years. Beginning in 1953, names for storms were assigned by the U. S. National Weather Service. These names were originally all female ones. Eventually the responsibility for naming was transferred to the international World Meteorological Organization. In 1979, the WMO began alternating male names with female ones. The WMO currently maintains rotating lists of names used in different years and for different regions. When a storm is particularly devastating, the name is retired from the list and replaced. Recent retirees include Katrina (USA, 2005), Haiyan (Philippines, 2013), and Sandy (USA, 2012).

---

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2017, s. v. hurricane.

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

“Tropical Cyclone Naming,” World Meteorological Organization, accessed 29 August 2017.

“What is a Hurricane,” U. S. National Ocean Service, accessed 29 August 2017.

graduand

3 November 2015

I learned a new word yesterday, graduand: a candidate for graduation at a school or university; someone who has completed the requirements of a degree, but hasn’t received their diploma yet.

The oldest citation in the OED is from the 1882 Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, so the word is bound to be somewhat older than that. The word comes to English from the medieval Latin graduandus, which is the gerundive of the verb graduare, to graduate.

four-twenty / 420

20 April 2017

There are many origin stories for 420, a slang term referring to marijuana, but unlike most slang terms, researchers have been able to pin down its actual origin with specificity. 420 was first used by a group of students at San Rafael High School in 1971, and it refers to the time of day, 4:20 pm, when they would meet to search for a mythical crop of marijuana plants.

San Rafael is in Marin County, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and in 1971 a group of students who called themselves the Waldos—because they used to congregate along a wall near the high school—got wind of a crop of pot plants allegedly growing near Point Reyes, further north. They would meet each day at 4:20 pm, after the school’s athletic practice, and venture north in search of the cannabis cache. They never found the pot, but in the course of their quest they smoked a lot of weed, had a lot of fun, and began using the term 420.

Marin County in the 1970s was also the stamping grounds of the Grateful Dead, and members of the Waldos had friends and family members associated with the band. 420 was picked up and used by Deadheads, as fans of the band call themselves, and from there the slang term spread to the wider world.

We have solid testimonial evidence that 420 was in use by the Waldos in 1971, but the first known use in print is from the Red & White, San Rafael High School’s newspaper from 7 June 1974:

If you had the opportunity to say anything in front of the graduating class, what would you say? [...] 4-20.

The OED archives also has a letter from Dave Reddix, one of the Waldos, from 23 September 1975, in which Reddix writes:

P.S. a little 420 enclosed for your weekend.

That’s the real origin. Among the false alternatives that have been proposed over the years are:

• It was a police code referring to marijuana

• It was a section of [insert state here]’s penal code referring to marijuana

• It is the number of chemical compounds in marijuana

• It was the date [insert name of famous rock musician here] died

• It refers to Hitler’s birthday (Hitler was indeed born on 20 April, but the association with pot is never adequately explained).

There are many other explanations. All without any evidence.

---

Sources:

Grim, Ryan. “Here’s the Real Story of Why We Celebrate 4/20.” Huffington Post, 20 April 2016.

Mikkelson, David. “The Origins of 420.” Snopes.com, 14 September 2002.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2017, s. v. 420, n.