saved by the bell

4 August 2018

Saved by the bell, which the OED defines as “to be rescued from a difficult situation,” comes to us, as should be no surprise, from the world of boxing. It originally and quite literally referred to a boxer who was about to be beaten into submission only to have the bell ring, signaling the end of round. The origin is so obvious that it shouldn’t require evidence, but there is an absurd-on-its-face explanation that the phrase comes from devices rigged onto coffins that those buried alive could ring if they woke up after having been buried. This myth is pernicious and is repeated by many who should know better.

One of the regulars on this website, Richard Hershberger, turned up the oldest citation of the phrase that I’m aware of. It’s from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer of 30 January 1891:

In the fourth round Ramsey nearly knocked out Hennessey, who was very groggy, but was saved by the bell, and came up well for the fifth.

There are many uses of the phrase in boxing writing in the closing decade of the nineteenth century and the early ones of the twentieth. For instance, there is this from the Washington Post of 19 January 1897:

Wilson clinched repeatedly to avoid a knock-out during the last two rounds, and was saved by the bell in the last round.

The earliest non-boxing use of the phrase that I have found is still a sports writing one, but in reference to baseball, where the use is figurative; the “bell” is a rainstorm that ends the game and saves Yankee pitcher Waite Hoyt from ignominy after being shelled by the Athletics in the first two innings. It’s from the New York Times of 22 June 1928:

Old Jupe turned on a fancy brand of wet goods and Mr. Hoyt staggered gratefully to the bench when Umpire George Hildebrand suspended hostilities. After waiting a reasonable length of time the umpires called the game. Mr. Hoyt was saved by the bell.

As an aside, you don’t get many references to Jupiter Pluvius, or “old Jupe Pluv” as it is phrased elsewhere in the article, in today’s sports writing. (Jupiter Pluvius, or Rainy Jupiter, is reference to him being the god of storms.)

The earliest non-sports use of the phrase that I’ve found is from a Los Angeles Times gossip column from 31 July 1932:

Saved by the Bell
Echo from Chaplin’s English tour. Whenever Charlie Chaplin and Michael Arlen meet, they have an agreement whereby each is permitted to talk about himself without interruption for five minutes by the clock.

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Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2018, s. v. bell, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2012, s. v. save, v.

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.

run it up the flagpole

3 June 2018

The phrase run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes is credited to Madison Avenue admen of the 1950s. The phrase, and many others like it, is used in the context of brainstorming or “spitballing ideas” and refers to making a suggestion to see if people like it.

The earliest use of the phrase that I can find is in the April 1957 film 12 Angry Men, directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Reginald Rose, where it is uttered by Juror #12, a feckless advertising executive played by Robert Webber:

“I’m telling him about, in an ad agency, when a point like this is reached in a meeting, there’s always some character ready with an idea, see. And it kills me. It’s the weirdest thing, the way they sometimes precede their idea with a phrase. Like, some account exec will get up and he’ll say: ‘OK, here’s an idea. Let’s… run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.’ I mean, it’s idiotic, but it’s funny.”

The story had been produced as a television movie in 1954, also written by Rose, but the phrase doesn’t appear in that earlier version.

A month after the film’s release, the phrase appears in a Chicago Daily Defender newspaper column:

“Madison Ave. agency language has spread since the early TV days, and the ‘Let’s kick it around’ phrase meaning ‘Let’s talk about it.” The equivalent now is, ‘Let’s put it on the train for Westport [and see who comes down to the station].’ Then there’s, ‘Let’s jump on it and see if it squeals,’ and ‘Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes,’ and finally, ‘Let’s tickle it and see if it wiggles.’”

And an ad appeared in the New York Times a few months later that read:

“You’ll find the answers to these not-so-burning questions in December Holiday Magazine! The Article? The Minstrels of Madison Avenue! We suggest you run it up the flagpole, spread it on the cat (or better yet, read it) by tomorrow at the latest.”

Later in the film, Juror #12 also utters a less memorable, but more inane, equivalent:

“If nobody else has an idea, I may have a cutie here. I mean, I haven’t given it much thought, but let’s throw it out on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up.”

This may be a variation on the incomplete “spread it on the cat” phrase mentioned in the New York Times ad.

Of all these phrases, the one that survives is run it up the flagpole. It would appear that all these phrases did indeed arise among Madison Avenue admen, but the use of run it up the flagpole in the movie catapulted that particular one to stardom.

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“Are Admen Underworked and Overpaid” (advertisement), New York Times, 14 November 1957, p. 67.

Lyons, Leonard. “Lyon’s Den.” Chicago Daily Defender, 27 May 1957, p. 5.

Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, revised and updated edition. Edited by Paul Beale, Scarborough House, 1985, p. 259.

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.