Saracen

5 June 2019

Saracen is term for a Muslim that is primarily used historically to refer to Muslims during the medieval period and especially in reference to the Crusades. But it dates to antiquity, long before Islam arose as a religion, and its original sense was much more circumscribed. Its correct etymology isn’t all that interesting, but it does have a fascinating false etymology that circulated widely in Europe during the medieval period.

Saracen enters English from Latin (saracenus), which got it from Greek (σαρακηνός, sarakenos). The Greek probably comes from the Arabic root sharq, meaning east, and it originally referred to a people dwelling in the Sinai peninsula and what is now northwestern Saudi Arabia.

The word is first recorded in Greek as an adjective describing a species of rush growing in the Sinai in Dioscorides’s On Medical Material, a pharmacology written c. 50 C.E. But it’s Claudius Ptolemy’s second century Geographia that first mentions Saracens as a distinct group of people. He uses sarakēnē to refer to a region in the northern Sinai peninsula and sarakēnoí as a name for a people in northwestern Arabia. Eusebius takes the word into Latin in his fourth century Historia Ecclesiastica, where he quotes a letter from Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, that refers to the sarakēnoí of Arabia as existing c. 250 C.E.

The use of Saracen in English dates to the Old English period. For example, there is this from the Old English translation of Orosius’s History Against the Pagans:

Seo Ægyptus þe us near is, be norþan hire is þæt land Palastine, & be eastan hiere Sarracene þæt land & be westan hire Libia þæt land, & be suþan hire se beorg þe mon hæt Climax.
(Egypt is near us, to its north is the land of Palestine, and to its east is the land of the Saracens, and to the west of it is the land of Libya, and to its south is the mountain that men call Climax.)

In the medieval era, it was common for European writers to claim that the word Saracen derived from a claim of the Arab peoples that that they descended from Sarah and her son Isaac, rather than the slave Hagar and her son Ishmael, and in so doing, so the allegation claims, the Arabs were claiming a false genealogical legitimacy. Jerome gives this false etymology in his early fifth century commentary of the biblical book of Ezekiel. And Isidore, in his early seventh century Etymologiae, writes:

The Saracens are so called either because they claim to be descendents of Sarah or, as the pagans say, because they are of Syrian origin, as if the word were Syriginae. They live in a very large deserted region. They are also Ishmaelites, as the Book of Genesis teaches us, because they sprang from Ishmael, and Agarines, from the name Agar (i.e., Hagar). As we have said, they are called Saracens from an alteration of their name, because they are proud to be descendents of Sarah.

Isidore’s Etymologiae impute theological significance to the etymologies of words and are, by modern standards, laughably wrong, but they were widely copied and read and do provide historical insight into the beliefs of medieval Europeans.

Isidore appears to be using Saracen in the original, narrow sense, of a particular group of people, but the meaning of the word would be expanded to refer to all Muslims or even more broadly to those non-Christians in lands to the east. Saracen was not used to refer to Christian Arabs. An early example of this broader sense is the Rituale ecclesiæ Dunelmensis (Rite of the Church of Durham), an early ninth-century collection of Latin liturgical texts and with an interlinear Old English gloss:

Beatus thomas apostolus requiesat emina, in india saracenorum.
ðe ead’ thom’ ap’ gerestað | gireste æt frvmma in ðær byrig on india saracina.
(The blessed apostle Thomas dwells in Emina, in India of the Saracens.)

So the word Saracen in medieval writing is a non-specific term, referring generally to non-Christians of the east, and in particular to Muslims, and to medieval Europeans carried negative connotations because it supposedly characterized them as making a false claim of being descended from a more favored line of descent.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2019, s. v. Saracen, n.

Bately, Janet, ed. The Old English Orosius, Early English Text Society, SS 6, Oxford University Press, 1980, 1.1.11.

Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 110–12.

Isidore, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. and ed. by Stephen A. Barney, et al. Cambridge University Press, 2006, 195.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1989, s. v. Saracen, n. and adj.

Retsö, Jan, The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

redskin / red man

23 June 2014

Redskin, a now disparaging term for a Native American, is nearly two and a half centuries old. It is first recorded in a transcript of a speech given by Chief Maringouin, an Indian of the Illinois people, on 26 August 1769. It was interpreted by a Frenchman from the Illinois language and transcribed and translated into English by William Johnson:

I shall be pleased to have you come to speak to me yourself if you pity our women and our children; and, if any redskins do you harm, I shall be able to look out for you even at the peril of my life.

The French that redskin is translated from is peaux Rouges, and the original Illinois word is assumed to be *e•rante•wiroki•ta (person with red skin), but we don’t have a record of the original Illinois speech.

The term red man is older, dating to 1740, when it appears in the journal of John Wesley, and the French homme rouge dates to at least 1725. And the English use of the adjective red to refer to Native Americans is older still, dating to an appearance in the journal of Colonel George Chicken on 31 October 1725:

They desire always to be at peace wth [sic] the White people and desire to have their own way and to take revenge of the red people.

Like many ethnic slurs, redskin and red man did not start out as derogatory, but they acquired the disparaging connotation over time. The original reference is to skin color. Tales that the term redskin refers to the practice of scalping or the use of red dye by native peoples are false.

Regarding use of the name Redskins by the Washington, DC National Football League team, the name was never intended to be disparaging, and is part of a long tradition of using Native Americans as mascots of sports teams. Other examples in this genre include the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, and baseball’s Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians. (Not to mention my own high school teams, which were the Toms River South Indians.) But while the Redskins name was never intended to be so, it is nevertheless considered offensive by many Native Americans. Polls of Indians who live on reservations or are officially enrolled in tribes typically record 35–45% as wanting the Washington team to change its name. Polls that record the opinion of those that self-identify as having Native American heritage generally record a much lower figure, as many of those who self-identify as such have only a tenuous connection, at best, to actual native heritage and are seldom, if ever, subjected to the racist attitudes that those who are enrolled in tribes experience regularly.

The use of images and names of an oppressed minority as a sports mascot is, in and of itself, problematic. But the use of the name Redskins by the NFL is especially so, given the history of that particular word’s use in offensive contexts. Since the name offends a large segment of the Native American population, the NFL should change the name of the team.

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Sources:

Nunberg, Geoffrey, “When Slang Becomes a Slur,” The Atlantic, 23 June 2014.

The Papers of Sir William Johnson, v. 7, Albany: University of the State of New York, 1931, 133–38.

“red, adj. and n. (and adv.),” “red man, n.,” “redskin, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009.

Red Baron

22 August 2018

Manfred von Richtofen, Sanke postcard, 1917–18

Manfred von Richthofen is the most famous aviator of World War I, if not of all time. Credited with eighty air-to-air victories, he shot down more planes than any other flyer in the war. And he is popularly known as the Red Baron, probably because as commander of Jagdgeschwader (fighter wing) 1, known as the Flying Circus, he flew in a bright-red Fokker triplane. But researcher Brett Holman has discovered something quite interesting about the nickname Red Baron: until the mid-1960s, almost sixty years after his death in 1918, Richthofen was rarely called the Red Baron. Instead, the popularity of that nickname derives from the Peanuts comic strip, which often featured the beagle Snoopy engaging in imaginary dog fights with the German nemesis.

The nickname Red Baron did exist during the war, but was apparently quite rare. There is only one known mention of it in published sources from the war years. This is from the newspaper Graphic, 25 May 1918:

Cavalry Captain Baron von Richthofen was shot down in aerial combat on the day when the German papers announced his 79th and 80th victories. Boyd Cable writes: “The Red Baron, with his famous ‘circus,’ discovered two of our artillery observing machines.”

Mentions of the nickname can be found after the war, but they are few and far between. There is this from the Washington Post, 30 September 1928:

The British ship flew right into the formation without firing a shot. Then the Red Baron himself dived down on it to find out what it was all about.

Peanuts cartoon of 10 October 1965, featuring Snoopy pretending to dogfight the Red Baron

But then on Sunday, 10 October 1965, the comic strip Peanuts, by Charles Schulz, ran this strip:

References to Richthofen as the Red Baron began to become more and more common after this date. The novelty song “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” written by Phil Gernhard and Dick Holler, was released by the Royal Guardsmen in November 1966, which further contributed to the nickname’s popularity.

Here is an example from Time magazine of 24 March 1967 that shows how the term had become somewhat genericized by that date:

Students in Paris and London have been ransacking secondhand stores for old uniforms dating back to the Crimean and FrancoPrussian [sic] wars. But in the U.S., uniforms are generally out in favor of the Frank Nitti gangster look, including palm tree-studded ties and double-breasted pinstripe jackets. At Dartmouth, the particular “ drinking uni “ (for uniform) at the moment is the “ blow-lunch look “ (so called, one student explains, because “ when you look at one of those ties you want to blow your lunch “) topped off with a Red Baron Flying Ace helmet, complete with ear flaps and shrapnel holes.

Red Baron is a good example of why one should be careful in ascribing a date to a word or phrase without actual evidence of its use. The occurrence of an event, the coining of that event’s name, and when that name enters into the general parlance are not always the same.

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Sources:

Ames, John. “The Stolen Air Mail.” Washington Post, 30 September 1928, SM9.

“The Follies that Come With Spring.” Time, 24 March 1967.

Holman, Brett. “When Was The Red Baron?” Airminded, 20 August 2018.

rapture

24 August 2019

The other day, a friend of mine who lives in Berkeley, California posted this on her Facebook feed:

Anyone not getting raptured want to go to Nerd Nite East Bay on Monday?

After someone asked what she was talking about, she went on to explain in a comment:

raptured = the burning man rapture, or what happens to the Bay Area when everyone goes to burning man. Nerd Nite east bay is a monthly night of entertaining science-based presentations. You know, for nerds.

Burning Man, for those unaware, is a week-long festival held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada at the end of August. Around 70,000 people attend each year. The capstone event of the festival is the burning of a giant, wooden effigy of a man, hence the name. I was very familiar with Burning Man—I’ve never attended myself, but having lived in the Bay Area, I know many people who go each year—but before her post I’d never heard rapture used to describe the emptying out of the Bay Area each year.

Most people are at familiar with the word from the apocalyptic Christian doctrine of the rapture, but that’s a relatively recent development in theology. The word is much older.

The noun rapture comes from the post-classical Latin raptura, a participle of the verb rapio, meaning to snatch, seize, pillage. The Latin verb is also the source of our verb to rape. And many of the early uses of the word in English are in reference to the abduction and raping of women.

The earliest use of rapture recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from George Chapman’s 1594 poem Σκìα Νυκτòς (Shadow of Night):

It is an exceeding rapture of delight in the deepe search of knowledge [...] that maketh men manfully indure th’extremes incident to that Herculean labour.

Chapman, who we shall see was extraordinarily fond of the word, uses it here in the sense of a condition of delight or enthusiasm. And Shakespeare uses it in Coriolanus (1623):

Your pratling Nurse Into a rapture lets her Baby crie.

But the word has a darker sense, that of abduction and rape, which is just as old as the sense of a state of delight. Francis Sabie, in his 1595 Fissher-mans Tale, writes:

Priams famous towne, Nere bought so deare the rapture of faire Hellen.

And Chapman uses it to refer to sexual violation in his c. 1615 translation of the Odyssey:

My women servants dragg’d about my house To lust and rapture.

The idea of rapture being a carrying off to heaven is almost as old. Chapman (I warned you that he was extraordinarily fond of the word) uses the phrase divine rapture, albeit in a pagan rather than Christian sense, to refer to the transport of the mind into ecstasy in his 1598 publication of his translation of Seauen bookes of the Iliades of Homere:

This […] Diuine Rapture; then which nothing can be imagined more full of soule and humaine extraction.

Chapman’s use here is still more of transport of the mind to ecstasy than it is a physical carrying off, but he uses it in this latter sense in this 1609 poem Euthymiae Raptus; or the Teares of Peace:

A lightening stoop’t, and rauisht him to heauen, And with him Peace [...]: Whose outward Rapture, made me inward bleed.

The Christian doctrine of the rapture did not appear until the eighteenth century. The OED records this from Thomas Broughton’s 1769 Prospect of Futurity:

We have determined likewise, from the Circumstance of the Rapture of the Saints, [...] that the Air or Atmosphere will be the Place of the Judgement.

While there is some discussion of the bodily ascension into heaven of the believers among eighteenth-century theologians, the full flowering of the doctrine wouldn’t appear until the nineteenth century and the writings of the dispensationalist theologian John Nelson Darby. In his 1848 An Examination of the Statements Made in the Thoughts on the Apocalypse, by B. W. Newton, Darby writes:

It is certain that the immensely important fact of the rapture of the Church takes place between the two, whatever the interval, and that Christ cannot receive the power of His own peculiar kingdom below, till this has taken place. Nor can this rapture take place till after He has left the throne.

The doctrine that the saved will be bodily taken up into heaven has no place in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or the mainline Protestant churches.

So there you have it. Ecstasy, rape, apocalypse, and Burning Man, all in one word.

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Sources:

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1879, s. v. rapio.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s. v. rapture, n., rapture, v.

rap

14 June 2016

The sense of rap meaning a blow or strike is probably echoic in origin. Much like tap and clap, it represents the sound of the blow. The earliest citation in both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary is from the poem Roland and Vernagu, found in the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1), which was copied c. 1330. The passage depicts a battle between the knight Roland and the giant Vernagu:

Þai gun anoþer fiȝt,
And stones togider þrewe.
Gode rappes for þe nones,
Þai ȝauen wiþ þe stones,
That sete swithe sore.

(They began another fight, and together threw stones. For the moment, they gave good raps with the stones very violently in that place.)

The verb appears a few decades later.

This basic sense of a blow has spawned three metaphorical senses that are in common use today. (There are lots of different senses, but I’m focusing on these three that are probably of the most interest.) A rap can also be a criminal charge or accusation, a discussion, or a genre of music.

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The sense of rap, meaning a criminal charge comes from the sense of a blow or strike. Hugh Tootell, under the pseudonym Charles Dodd, used rap over the knuckles metaphorically in his 1715 The Secret Policy of the English Society of Jesus:

His Holiness himself [...]acquitted the appealing Clergy in a special Brief, and reprimanded the Arch Priest [...] You also, reverend Father, have a sensible rap over the Knuckles in the same Brief.

And several decades later we have the lone rap being used metaphorically to mean a rebuke. From a 1777 use published by the American Pioneer (Cincinnati) in 1843:

The post master general [...] has lately had a rap, which I hope will have a good effect.

By the twentieth century, the term had moved into North American criminal slang. A rap could be a prison sentence, as used by C. L. Cullen in his 1900 Tales of Ex-Tanks:

It was my first rap at Milwaukee.

Or in the 1935 Ellery Queen novel The Spanish Cape Mystery:

You’re in a tough spot. Do you know what the rap for blackmail is in this State?

But it could also mean a criminal accusation or charge, as in Hutchins Hapgood’s 1903 Autobiography of a Thief:

“What makes you look so glum?” [...]
“Turned out of police court this morning.”
“What was the rap, Mike?”
“I’m looking too respectable. They asked me where I got the clothes.”

The term rap sheet, meaning a police record of a person’s criminal arrests and charges dates to at least 1949. Some incorrectly believe this use is from an acronym for record of arrests and prosecutions, but while you can find this etymology in police manuals and forms, it is a backronym and not the origin of rap.

Another false belief is that this criminal sense of rap comes from counterfeiting and carries a connotation of the criminal charge being false. Rap did once refer to a counterfeit coin. This slang sense probably comes from the Irish rapaire. These counterfeit coins were used as currency in eighteenth-century Ireland due to a scarcity of copper. Jonathan Swift refers to them in his 1724 Letter to the Shop-Keepers of Ireland: 

Copper halfpence or farthings [...] have been for some time very scarce, and many counterfeits passed about under the name of raps.

But this sense was dying out in the nineteenth century when the criminal sense of rap developed. The connection to the counterfeiting sense is due to the phrase bum rap, meaning a false criminal charge, but the use of bum indicates that a rap is not necessarily, or even usually, false.

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The sense of to rap, meaning to speak arose in the sixteenth century, originally meaning to speak sharply, quickly, or vigorously, as if one’s words were blows. It was commonly used in reference to swearing an oath. Thomas Wyatt writes in 1541:

I am wonte some tyme to rappe owte an othe in an erneste tawlke.

By the eighteenth century it was being used in criminal slang, meaning to give evidence, often to inform on another. In 1728 criminal James Dalton wrote a Genuine Narrative of this crimes in which he said:

The Whores are our Safe-guard; [...] they’ll rap for us.

And Francis Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has:

TO RAP. To take a false oath; also to curse. He rapped out a volley; i. e. he swore a whole volley of oaths.

This criminal slang ties in with and may have influenced the previously discussed sense of a criminal charge.

Parallel to this criminal sense, the word also developed a sense of ordinary speech or conversation. Joseph Ritson writes in a 1787 letter:

I shall be most glad of my Lords arrival if it were only for the raps you promise me.

And R. Blakeborough’s 1898 Wit, Character, Folklore and Custom of the North Riding of Yorkshire has:

Lets ‘ev a pipe an’ a bit o’ rap.

By the beginning of the twentieth century this sense had crossed the Atlantic and became embedded in African-American speech. F. H. Tillotson’s 1909 How to Be a Detective explains:

“Rap” means to speak. If you “rap” to a man you speak to him or recognize him.

In African-American use the verb could also mean to impress via a verbal display. Nelson Algren writes in Playboy in 1957:

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People like to say a pimp is a crime and a shame. But who’s the one friend a hustling broad’s got? [...] Who puts down that real soft rap only you can hear to let you know your time is up and is everything alright in there Baby?

In 1965, Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther Party, used rap to mean casual conversation in a letter:

In point of fact he is funny and very glib, and I dig rapping (talking) with him.

Today, this use of the word comes across as dated, hopelessly associated with the counterculture of the 1960s.

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The musical sense of rap flows out of the speech sense, a reference to the rhythmic delivery of the lyrics. The earliest citation in the OED is from the 5 May 1979 issue of Billboard:

Young DJs like Eddie Cheeba, DJ Hollywood, DJ Starski, and Kurtis Blow are attracting followings with their slick raps [...] Tapes of Hollywood’s raps are considered valuable commodities by young blacks.

And:

He generally works with Cool DJ AJ, who does not rap but is a master of B-beats.

In September of that year the Sugarhill Gang released their single Rapper’s Delight, which had the lyrics:

Now, what you hear is not a test—I’m rappin’ to the beat,
And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet.

The Sugarhill Gang is often credited with coining this particular sense of rap, but while they were one of the first to use it in published form, and perhaps were the first to use the word in song lyrics, they were using a word that was already familiar to their musical circle.

By the following year rap had become the name for the musical genre.

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Sources:

Middle English Dictionary, 2001, s. v. rappe (n.); rappen (v.(1))

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s. v. rap, n.2; rap, v.2; rap, n.4