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.

keener

18 December 2013

A recent episode of the radio show and podcast A Way With Words made mention of the slang term keener, citing it as a Canadianism for someone who is enthusiastic about something. I had noticed the word since coming to the University of Toronto three years ago, where my fellow graduate students use it to describe the enthusiastic, and usually top-performing, undergraduate students in their classes. Phrases like “I assigned extra reading, knowing that only the keeners would actually do it” are common in our discussions among ourselves. We graduate students are ambivalent about the keeners here at U of T. On the one hand, we appreciate their enthusiasm, but on the other that same enthusiasm can become tiresome, and their behavior sometimes verges on the sycophantic. (The joy of having a bright, motivated student who is destined to get an A wears off after the seventh frantic email on the night before an essay is due.)

Keener, or at least this particular usage of the word, is not well attested in the standard reference sources. It does, however, appear in the Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English, which defines it as: “Can. informal a person, esp. a student, who is extremely eager.”

Urban Dictionary (hardly authoritative, but still a useful resource for tracking current slang if taken with a grain of salt) provides several definitions, including this one from 2007:

(Canadian slang, noun) Individual eager to demonstrate knowledge or participate enthusiastically in school, church, seminars, etc. Like nerd, geek, brown-noser, smartypants, etc. but with more emphasis on willingness and enthusiasm, and less on social inadequacy, sycophancy, or natural ability.

And this one from 2005:

a person who is obsessed with school work. doesnt [sic] have much of a social life.

Other definitions from that source emphasize the sycophancy that keeners exhibit.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang traces keener back to 2001 defining it as: “(Can. juv.) a toady, a sycophant.” Given that most graduate students are in their late twenties, I would have to disagree with the label “juvenile.”

Dalzell’s and Victor’s New Partridge Dictionary of Slang push the usage back to 1984 and place it in the U.K., but provide no citations for these conclusions.

There is an older, better attested slang sense of keener meaning a sharp, alert individual, one who drives a hard bargain. This is an Americanism that dates to at least 1839. Citations of this sense in slang dictionaries tend to stop around the turn of the twentieth century, but given that keener is formed from a standard root, keen, and derived with the common suffix -er, there is no reason to think that people stopped using it, and the term was undoubtedly independently re-coined on many occasions. The current Canadian usage probably is a continuation of this older sense.

The slang term is unrelated to the word, from Irish, meaning one who sings a lament for the dead. English use of that keener dates to the eighteenth century and is from the verb to keen, caoin- in Irish, meaning to wail or lament.

Sources:

“keener,” Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Chambers Harrap, 2010.

“keener, n.,” Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Random House, 1997, 2:338.

“keener, noun,” New Partridge Dictionary of Slang, Routledge, 2006, 2:1139.

“keener, n.,” Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English, OUP, 447.

“keener, n.2,” “keener, n.1,” “keen, v.2,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

“keener,” Urban Dictionary, 2012.

just do it

4 September 2018

Nike’s famous Just Do It advertising campaign was launched in 1988 and went on to become one of the most famous slogans of all time. But the inspiration for the slogan is somewhat morbid, rooted in the execution of an infamous spree killer.

The campaign was the brainchild of the Wieden+Kennedy ad agency, and co-founder Dan Wieden says he got the idea from the last words of Gary Gilmore. Convicted in Utah of multiple murders in 1976, Gilmore was executed by firing squad in January 1977. The case was notable because Gilmore had refused to appeal the case and had protested stays of execution made on his behalf, and because in 1972 the U. S. Supreme Court had ruled capital punishment unconstitutional, but had reversed itself in 1976. As a result, Gilmore was the first person executed in the United States after that reinstatement. That, plus Gilmore’s express wish to die, made the case something of a media sensation. Prior to the execution, the cast of the comedy-variety show Saturday Night Live had performed a medley of Christmas songs titled “Let’s Kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas.” Shortly after the execution, Playboy published an interview it had conducted with Gilmore. And Norman Mailer wrote a Pulitzer-prize winning book, The Executioner’s Song, about Gilmore, which was later made into a TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore. And as late as 1991, an episode of the sitcom Seinfeld was quoting Gilmore’s “immortal” last words.

Those last words were, “Let’s do it.”

When tasked with the Nike account, Wieden recalled the phrase and tinkered with it, producing Just Do It. Evidently at the time Nike was unaware that Gilmore had been Wieden’s inspiration.

Sources:

Jones, Michael Owen. “Dining on Death Row: Last Meals and the Crutch of Ritual.” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 127, no. 503, Winter 2014, 3–26.

Peters, Jeremy W. “The Birth of ‘Just Do It’ and Other Magic Words.” New York Times, 19 August 2009.

Shapiro, Fred R. The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale UP, 2006, 310.

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.

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.

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.