q.t., on the

14 May 2020

The phrase on the q.t. means in secret, confidentially. The q.t. is an abbreviation for quiet.

The phrase dates to the late nineteenth century. It’s first clearly attested to in 1885. It appears that year in George Moore’s novel A Mummer’s Wife:

Oh, I'm so glad; for perhaps this time it will be possible to have one spree on the strict q.t.

It also appears in the Sydney Bulletin on 18 July 1885:

Oh, my! what a pious world it is,
And how very good they all seem to be –
But what a ’duffing’ lot you’d find
If you would only raise the blind,
And see ’em on the strict Q.T.

The fact that it appears in both a British and Australian source in the same year, indicates that the phrase was already widespread by the time it first appears in print.

Farmer and Henley’s slang dictionary includes a citation that is supposedly from c. 1870 in the broadside ballad “The Talkative Man from Poplar,” by James McEvoy:

Whatever I tell you is on the Q.T.

But as far as I can tell, that song was not written until 1885, and the copy online at the British Library doesn’t contain the phrase. So, this citation appears to be inaccurate.

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Sources:

Farmer, J.S. and W.E. Henley. Slang and Its Analogues, vol. 5, 1902, s.v. Q.T.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. q.t. n.

McEvoy, James, “The Talkative Man from Poplar,” 1886. London, British Library MS H.1260.g.(41.). 

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. q.t., n.3 and adj.

light at the end of the tunnel

A railway tunnel with sun shining at one end, Bath, UK, 2017.

13 May 2020

The phrase the light at the end of the tunnel is a metaphor used to refer to signs that a long period of adversity is coming to an end. The metaphor, if not exact phrasing, dates to at least 1879 when it appears in a letter by writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) about a recent bout with an illness:

On Saturday I had a rather severe relapse and though I am getting out of the tunnel into daylight, this renewal of weakness taken with the dreary prospects of the weather under which nothing ripens and fruits hardly escape rotting, makes it seem as if we should be wiser to defer the visit till the 19th when the promised Rubicon of the 16th will have been passed.

The familiar phrasing is in place by 1891, when this book review criticizing the long-windedness of some nature writing appears in the Saturday Review:

You sentimentalize about autumn in the abstract (200 words), about autumn in Somersetshire (150 words), and about the “orchard-lawns” of Avilion (50 words). This is rather below the mark, so you hurry on to the apple-crop (100 words) and “the story of an apple-orchard” (500 words), throwing in the cricket—that “musician of the autumn”—wasps, and the “unnumbered hosts of other insects” (400 words). You now see light at the end of the tunnel, and a vigorous attack on the hibernation of these insects (250 words) prepares for a final burst on winters of unusual severity (150 words), and the thing is done before you know where you are.

There are earlier appearances of the phrase in various wordings, but all the ones I have found have been quite literal, referring to traveling through a railway tunnel.

In the 1960s, the light at the end of the tunnel became associated with the confidence (to be proven misplaced) that the U.S. would quickly win the Vietnam War. Journalist Joseph Alsop wrote on 13 September 1965:

The importance of this change that is now going on can hardly be exaggerated. It does not mean, alas, that the war is being won now, or will be won later without great effort and sacrifice. But it does mean that at last there is light at the end of the tunnel.

And the next day he penned:

You can see the transformation in the faces of American leaders like General Westmoreland, who looks like a man who suddenly sees light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

The phrase would be picked up by many others writing and speaking about the war.

Of course, the U.S. continued to fight until 1973, and Saigon would fall two years after that. As a result, the phrase took on a cynical connotation, and by 1975 an addition was made to the wording of the phrase. Canadian journalist Richard Gwyn, writing about the economy in March 1975 said:

Today the predictions of U.S. government experts have begun to sound like the “light at the end of the tunnel” promises of Vietnam. Forecasts of “recovery by mid-summer” have changed to “recovery by the end of the year.” Sometimes a light in a tunnel can be that of an oncoming train.”

The light at the end of the tunnel continues to be used to convey optimism, but since the debacle of the Vietnam War its reception has always included a note of pessimism.

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Sources:

Alsop, Joseph. “Big Change in Vietnam.” San Francisco Examiner, 13 September 1965, 32.

Alsop, Joseph. “Light at End of Tunnel in Viet War.” Chillicothe Gazette (Ohio), 14 September 1965, 6.

Fallows, James. “2020 Time Capsule #8: ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel.’” The Atlantic, 25 March 2020.

Gwyn, Richard. “Restraint a ‘Farce,’ Controls a Must.” Vancouver Sun, 8 March 1975, 4.

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

“The Rambles of a Dominie.” The Saturday Review, 18 July 1891, 93.

Photo credit: Great Western Railway, 2017.

balls to the wall / balls out

An aircraft throttle assembly with ball grips.

13 May 2020

The phrase balls to the wall refers to an all-out, maximum effort. The metaphor underlying this meaning isn’t clear until you understand that it got its start in the U.S. Air Force. The balls in question are the round caps on the throttle of many aircraft, and when they are pushed all the way forward, close to the front wall of the cockpit, the aircraft is generating maximum thrust.

The phrase is first recorded in William C. Anderson’s 1965 science fiction novel Adam M-1:

That’s the attitude, Captain [...] No more anxieties. Balls to the wall!

Anderson was a retired U.S. Air Force officer who had served from World War II through to the Vietnam War.

It also appears in Frank Harvey’s Air War: Vietnam from 1967:

That first Doomsday Mission (as the boys call a big balls-to-the-wall raid) against Hanoi.

There are claims that the term was in use as early as the Korean War. While these claims are plausible and even likely to be true, no one has yet produced contemporary evidence of the term’s use prior to 1965.

P-47 Thunderbolt fighter plane with nose art of a charging bull with the words “balls out,” flown by Capt. Milton Thompson of the 509th Fighter Squadron, 405th Fighter Group, 1945.

Of course, the term also carries a connotation of the male genitals, and this undoubtedly contributed to its appeal from the start—and its omission from early published sources—even if it isn’t the metaphor originally underlying the phrase. In this respect, it’s related to the phrase balls out, which also means unrestrained, completely committed. This phrase probably got its start as a play on all out that includes a reference to the testicles.

Balls out also got its start in the U.S. Air Force, or more accurately the U.S. Army Air Forces, but it’s older than balls to the wall. Its first known appearance is in 1945 on the nose of a P-47 fighter flown by Captain Milt Thompson.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. balls, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2007, s.v. balls-to-the-wall, adj. (and adv.), balls-out, adv. and adj.

Sheidlower, Jesse. “Balls in the Air.” Slate.com, 10 February 2006.

coronavirus / COVID-19

Transmission electron micrograph of a coronavirus, 1975.

12 May 2020

Coronavirus is the name for a genus of viruses that infect mammals—including humans—and birds and can cause gastrointestinal, respiratory, and neurological disease. Corona is the Latin word for crown or wreathe, and the surface projections of the viruses resemble a solar corona when viewed under an electron microscope. The name was coined in conjunction with their classification as a separate genus in 1968. From the 16 November 1968 issue of the journal Nature:

In the opinion of the eight virologists these viruses are members of a previously unrecognized group which they suggest should be called the coronaviruses, to recall the characteristic appearance by which these viruses are identified in the electron microscope.

The coronavirus that started the global pandemic in December 2019 is called SARS-CoV-2, for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, CoronaVirus-2, the second coronavirus that causes SARS. (The first one being the 2002–03 outbreak.) The disease it causes is Covid-19, for Coronavirus Disease 2019. These names were in place by 21 January 2020.

The virus is also often referred to as novel coronavirus, which simply means that it is newly discovered. Novel can refer to any new virus, as seen in this quotation from a July 2004 article in the Journal of Medical Virology about the 2002–03 SARS outbreak:

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a newly emerged human disease caused by a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV).

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Sources:

Chan, Paul K.S., et al. “Persistent Infection of SARS Coronavirus in Colonic Cells in Vitro.” Journal of Medical Virology, 74.1, July 2004, 1–7.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. coronavirus, n.

Sheikh, Knvul and Roni Caryn Rabin. “The Coronavirus: What Scientists Have Learned So Far,” New York Times, 21 January 2020.

“Virology: Coronaviruses.” Nature, 220, 16 November 1968, 650.

Photo credit: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) / Dr. Fred Murphy, 1975.

baker's dozen

Medieval bakers at work, detail from a 13th century, Belgian psalter, Los Angeles, Getty, MS 14, fol. 8v.

12 May 2020

A baker’s dozen is thirteen of something. But why thirteen? The short answer is that we don’t know for sure, but we do have a pretty good guess.

The practice of adding an extra loaf of bread to the purchase of a dozen is widely believed to date to a series of medieval English laws, the Assizes of Bread and Ale. These laws strictly regulated the price and weight of loaves of bread that were to be sold and assigned punishments to bakers who shorted or overcharged customers. The first version of these laws was promulgated in the twelfth century during the reign of Henry II, but there were a number of them in succeeding years through to the early fourteenth century and the reign of Edward II. The most famous of these is the 1266 law promulgated under Henry III, but that is not the first nor only one.

So, the explanation goes, bakers began adding an extra loaf gratis to each dozen for two reasons. The first is that it prevented them from accidentally selling an underweight loaf and potentially being subject to punishment, but bakers often produced more than the local community could eat, and the excess was sold to hucksters who would resell the bread elsewhere. Since the law prohibited raising the price of a loaf of bread, the free loaf enabled the hucksters to make a profit.

The phrase baker’s dozen, however, doesn’t appear until long after these medieval laws were enacted, so there is no record that connects the phrase to the older laws, and the earliest known appearance of the phrase has nothing to do with baking. From Thomas Nash’s 1596 Haue Vvith You to Saffron-Vvalden:

Fie, this is not the fortieth dandiprat part of the affectionate Items, hee hath bequeathed on your mysterie, with fiue thousand other doctrinal deuotions, hath he adopted himselfe more than a by founder of your trade, conioyning with his aforesaid Doctor Brother in eightie eight browne Bakers dozen of Almanacks.

The phrase also appears in John Cooke’s play Green’s Tu Quoque, or the City Gallant, which is first known to have been performed in 1611 and was published in 1614.* In the play, a group of men are gambling at dice and calling out their bets:

Spend. For me, six.
Omnes. And six that.
Sta. Nine; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8: eighteene shillings.
Spend. What’s yours, sir?
Scat. Mine’s a Bakers dozen: master Bubble, tel [i.e., count out] your mony.
Bub. In good faith I am but a simple gamester, and doe not know what to doe.
Scat. Why, you must tell your money, and hee’le pay you.

From the use of the phrase in these two works without explanation in a context that has nothing to with baking, it’s pretty clear that baker’s dozen was a well-established term by the early modern era.

But while we can’t say for certain that the medieval laws are indeed the origin of baker’s dozen, it’s not an unreasonable guess.

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Sources:

“The Assizes of Bread, Beer, & Lucrum Pistoris.” Medieval Sourcebook. 1998. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/breadbeer.asp

Cooke, John. Greenes Tu Quoque. London: Iohn Trundle, 1614. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Nash, Thomas. Haue Vvith You to Saffron-Vvalden. London: John Dante, 1596. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Photo credit: J. Paul Getty Museum.

* = The OED dates Greene’s Tu Quoque to 1599, but this is probably an error. The OED entry hasn’t been revised since being written in 1885.