beefeater

Display of bottles of Beefeater-brand gin.

19 May 2020

Beefeater is the popular name for the Yeoman of Guard in Britain and to the Warders of the Tower of London. Beefeater started out as slang, but whether it still fits within that category is debatable; it’s certainly not an official designation. The name has a quite literal origin, that of a well-fed servant.

The name beefeater arises in contrast with the older loaf-eater, a general term for a servant, one who eats the master’s bread (cf. lord). This name is much older, going back to the Old English hlafæta. From the Laws of Æthelbert of Kent, dating to the early seventh century:

Gif man ceorlas hlafætan ofslæhð, VI scillingum gebete.
(If someone slays a churl’s loaf-eater, he shall pay six shillings.)

So, beefeater was originally a term for a privileged servant. The word first appears in this general sense in John Marston’s play Histrio-mastix, or The Player Whipt, which was first performed in 1599 and published in 1610. In one passage, a master complains about how much it has cost to feed his servants, whom he has just dismissed from his service:

Walke sirs, nay walke; awake yee drowsie drones,
That long haue suckt the honney from my hiuevs:
Be gone yee greedy beefe-eaters y’are best:
The Callis Cormorants from Douer roade,
Are not so chargeable as you to feed.

Beefeater is applied to a royal guard in John Crowne’s 1671 play Juliana, Princess of Poland, in this exchange where the guard takes the name to be an insult:

LANDLORD:      There did the Beef-eaters o' the Guard and I—

GUARD:               Beef-eaters you Rascal!

LANDLORD:       Sit in Councel about the good o' Christendom, till at parting we did our reverences to Pope Paul, fall down and kiss his great Toe, the Spigot, and let the heavenly Benediction drop into our mouthes.

GUARD:               You'd have my Halbeard drop into your mouthes, would you Beef-eater, you saucy Cur? 

The word is applied specifically to the British court by 1736, when it appears in Henry Fielding’s satirical play Pasquin. In the scene, voters are lining up in an attempt to get patronage positions from the government:

1ST VOTER:        Could not your Lordship provide for me at Court?

LORD PLACE:    Nothing easier; what sort of Place would you like?

1ST VOTER:        Is not there as sort of Employment, Sir, call’d ———Beef-Eating? If your Lordship please to make me a Beef-Eater, I would have a Place fitted for my Capacity.

LORD PLACE:    Sir, I will be sure to remember you.

Fielding is clearly punning on the literal meaning of the word, and it’s clear from the context that the term was already in use.

There is a false etymology that beefeater comes from a supposed French word, *buffetier, and refers to an old function where the yeomen would serve at table, or buffet. This is simply incorrect, and there is no such French word as *buffetier. This spurious origin story has been floating about for years.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. hlaf-æta.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, beefeater, n., loaf-eater, n.

Photo credit: Maurice Enclave and D.J. Zachary, 2007. Public domain image.

bated breath

18 May 2020

To wait or speak or do something with bated breath is to do so while barely breathing, usually in anticipation or out of fear. It’s often misspelled baited breath, a reinterpretation of the phrase because the verb to bate is unfamiliar to us today. But it makes sense when you realize that to bate is a clipped, or more specifically an aphetic, form of the verb to abate. (Aphesis is the loss of a short, unaccented vowel.)

To bate is pretty much gone from present-day English, but the phrase bated breath hangs on, something of a linguistic fossil, because of who coined the phrase. Its first known appearance is in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which was written sometime 1596–99, and which was first published in 1600. This is Shylock speaking in Act 1, Scene 3:

Shall I bend low, and in a bond-mans key
With bated breath, and whispring humblnes
Say this: Faire sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last,
You spurned me such a day another time,
You calld me dogge: and for these curtesies
Ile lend you thus much moneyes.

Shylock is saying that he is not going to hold his breath and give obeisance like a slave just because a man, nominally his social superior who had debased and insulted him in the past, is about to ask Shylock to lend him money. I often caution against assuming that a first citation, particularly by a famous writer, is actually the first use of a word. Most of the time, the writer is using a term that is familiar to them. But in this case, the assumption that Shakespeare actually coined bated breath is a reasonable one. Phrases, rather than words, in such cases are more likely to be original, and its alliteration and the fact that stylistically it slips seamlessly into the flow of the passage indicates that Shakespeare is waxing poetical here.

But while Shakespeare probably was the first to use bated breath, he was far from the first person to use the verb to bate. That goes back several more centuries.

The verb to abate comes to use from the Norman French abater, which in turn is from the Latin battere, meaning to strike, to pound. The same root is found in the English verb to batter. Both abate and the aphetic bate appear in the record around 1300. Here is the verb to abate appearing in the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, written c.1300

So þat constantin adde · sone poer ynou
& toward þis luþer men · norþward sone drou
Hii cudde þat hii were men · & slowe to grounde
& þe prute of scottes · & of picars · abatede in an stounde

(So that Constantine soon had enough power and due to this the fierce men were soon driven northward. They knew that they were men and were slow to defeat and the pride of Scots and of Picts abated in a short time.)

And there is this from the poem Debate Between Body and Soul that appears in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, also c. 1300:

O poynt of ore pine to bate,
In þe world ne is no leche,
Al tegidere we gon o gate
Swilk is godes harde wreche.

(One mark of our pain to bate,
In the world there is no physician,
All together we go to the gate
Such is God’s hard retribution.)

So, Shakespeare used an aphetic form of a verb that today is no longer in widespread use to create a stock phrase that everyone knows the meaning of but that is no longer apparent from looking at the individual words. And as a result, it is often misspelled in an attempt to make the parts form a coherent whole.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. baten v.(1), abaten, -i(en v.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. bated, adj., bate, v.2.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2011, s.v. abate, v.1.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice, first quarto, London: James Roberts, 1600. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection.

barbecue

A man brushing meats with BBQ Sauce in the kitchen of the Salt Lick restaurant, Driftwood Texas, 2011

17 May 2020

Barbecue is a style of cooking, usually meat and usually outdoors, and it is also the grill on which it is cooked. There are various styles and methods of barbecue and fierce debate over which style is superior. My expertise is linguistics, not cookery, so I’m not going to try to describe the various styles or opine on whether, for instance, East Texas barbecue is better than West Texas style or whether either of these is superior to North Carolina’s.

The word barbecue comes to us from Taíno, an Arawakan language of the Caribbean, via American Spanish. The form barbacoa appears in Spanish by 1555 in The Commentaries of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. From an 1891 translation of the Spanish:

Every eighth day they came laden with venison and wild boar, roasted on barbacoas.* These barbacoas are like gridirons, standing two palms high above the ground and made of light sticks. The flesh is cut into steaks and then laid upon them and roasted.

* barbacoa, i.e. parrillas.

The word appears in English by 1625, but in the sense of a raised corn crib or granary. From Samuel Purchas’s Purchas His Pilgrimes of that year:

They haue barbacoas wherein they keepe their Maiz; which is an house set vp in the aire vpon foure stakes, boorded about like a chamber, and the floore of it is of cane hurdles.

William Dampier uses the word in the form we’re familiar with it today to refer to a raised sleeping platform in his 1697 A New Voyage Round the World:

We built Hutts upon its Banks and lay there all night, upon our Barbecu's, or frames of Sticks, raised about 3 foot from the ground.

And he uses it describe a platform for drying fish in his 1699 supplement to his earlier book in a description of the area around Campeche in what is now southern Mexico:

A little to the East of this River is a Fish-Range, and a small Indian Hutt or two within the Woods; where the Indian Fishers, who are subject to the Spaniards, lye in the Fishing-Seasons, their Habitations and Familes being farther up in the Country. Here are Poles to hang their Nets on, and Barbecues to dry their Fish.

From these uses, it seems likely that barbacoa or barbecue originally referred to any raised platform, and only later specialized to mean a grill for cooking meat.

In several seventeenth-century works, barbacoa is also used as a toponym, or place name. For example, Alexandre Exquemelin’s 1684 History of the Bucaniers uses it to refer to a location in what is now Panama:

The fifth day they marched to a place called Barbacoa, but as empty as any of the former, yet having ranged along, they found two sacks of Meal, with two Jars of Wine, and some fruits called Platanos this treasure Captain Morgan caused to be equally distributed amongst them who were in greatest necessity, which refreshed them, so that they marched now with greater courage than ever, till night.

It’s not clear whether Barbacoa was an actual native place name, or whether the Europeans mistook a reference to a raised platform as the name of the location.

The verb meaning to cook on a barbecue appears in English by 1661. From a description of the alleged cannibalistic practices of the natives of Guiana and Surinam in Edmund Hickergill’s  Jamaica:

But usually their Slaves, when captive ta'ne,
Are to the English sold; and some are slain,
And their Flesh forthwith Barbacu'd and eat
By them, their Wives and Children as choice meat.

I said I wouldn’t opine on the cookery, but I must say that I would prefer any of the present-day barbecue styles to this one.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. barbecue.

“The Commentaries of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca” (1555). The Conquest of the River Plate (1535–1555). London: Hakluyt Society, 1891, 154–55. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dampier, William. A New Voyage Round the World, London: James Knapton, 1697, 20. Early English Books Online.

Dampier, William. Voyages and Descriptions. London: James Knapton, 1699, 12. Early English Books Online.

Exquemelin, Alexandre O. History of the Bucaniers, London: Thomas Malthus, 1684, 123. Early English Books Online.

Hickeringill, Edmund. Jamaica, London: John Williams, 1661, 59. Early English Books Online.

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

Popik, Barry. “Barbecue.” The Big Apple, 31 December 2006.

Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. 4, London: William Stansby, 1625, 1536. Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: vxla, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Karen

Tumblr post from 21 October 2016 featuring an early slang use of “Karen.” Image of a woman bringing a video game console to a party.

16 May 2020

The name Karen has become a byword for a middle-aged, obnoxious woman. Karen was a nominee for the American Dialect Society’s 2019 Word of the Year, although it did not win. The society defined Karen as the “stereotype of a complaining, self-important white woman, typically a member of Generation X.” Why Karen, out of all possible names, was chosen for this honor is something of mystery. This use of the name most likely does not have a single origin incident or inspiration but is rather the result of a confluence of a number of trends.

Finding antedates for a particular context for a common name like Karen is maddeningly difficult, and it’s likely there are earlier examples out there, waiting to be found. But here are the earliest ones I’m aware of.

In 2005, comedian Dane Cook released his album Retaliation that included the routine “The Friend that Nobody Likes,” which has the lines:

Every group has a Karen and she is always a bag of douche. And when she's not around, you just look at each other and say, "God, Karen, she's such a douchebag!"

This is the earliest use of Karen as a generic name for an obnoxious woman that I know of, and the album was immensely popular, debuting at #4 on the Billboard 200 and selling over 1.3 million copies. It appears too early, however, to be a plausible direct inspiration for the meme, which did not start trending until 2016, over ten years later.

But on 20 October 2016 Nintendo released a trailer for its Switch gaming system that featured a woman bringing a Nintendo Switch to a rooftop party. The next day, a certain Joematar posted a screenshot on Tumblr from the trailer with the subtitle:

Oh shit, Karen brought her stupid Nintendo thing to the party again. We’re DRINKING, Karen. We’re having CONVERSATIONS.

This Tumblr post is the first known instance of the Karen meme proper. A year later, on 7 December 2017, the subreddit /r/FuckYouKaren was launched.

And in March 2018, two definitions for Karen were posted to Urbandictionary.com. The first on 13 March 2018:

typically never a name given to a baby but somehow karen always turns up asking to see the manager

Karen "i would like to speak to the manager"

manager "is your name karen"

#karen

And the second a few days later on 18 March 2018:

44. mother of three. blonde. owns a volvo. annoying as hell. wears acrylics 24/7. currently at your workplace speaking to your manager.

watch out for fkn karen. MID AGED WHITE WOMEN WITH BOB CUTS ARE NOT TO BE SPOKEN TO IN ANY SORT OF TONE.

#mom #manage #store #moms #bitch

And on 29 May 2018 Karen hit mainstream media when comedian Franchesca Ransey wrote this on CNN Commentary:

Before I knew it, the comments started filling up with names I'd never seen before. I thought what I'd posted was pretty tame, but the whole conversation spiraled, becoming heated, fast. [...] Then someone named "Karen" (it's *always* a Karen) chimed in with, "Are you really comparing Allison to a slut shamer? WOW."

But why, of all the names, was Karen chosen for this honor? It’s most likely a combination of a number of factors.

First, Karen is a name that is identifiably common among women of a certain age. According to the Social Security Administration, the name Karen reached a peak in popularity in the years 1958–60, when it was the fourth most popular name for girls born in the United States during those years. It remained among the top ten most popular female names until 1969, and among the top one hundred until 1987. So, if, in 2016, one were to pick a generic name for a middle-aged woman, Karen would be among the top contenders.

Second, there is an old comedy truism, going back to Vaudeville, that words with the phoneme /k/ in them are inherently funny. Neil Simon’s 1972 play The Sunshine Boys has these lines, spoken by an aging comedian:

Alka Seltzer is funny. You say “Alka Seltzer” you get a laugh ... Words with “k” in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Car keys. Cleveland ... Cleveland is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there's chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. Cab is funny. Cockroach is funny—not if you get 'em, only if you say 'em.

So, if the Vaudeville axiom holds true, people who were aiming for humor about a middle-aged woman, they would naturally gravitate toward the name Karen.

There are also several Karens in popular films that may have influenced the choice of the name. One is the character of Karen Hill, played by Lorraine Bracco, in Martin Scorcese’s 1990 Goodfellas, which features her husband, played by Ray Liotta asking her, after she has flushed a bag of heroin down the toilet during a police raid:

Why did you do that Karen?!

Another suggestion it that it was inspired by the character of Karen Smith, played by Amanda Seyfried, in the 2004 film Mean Girls, which featured the line:

Oh my God, Karen! You can’t just ask someone why they're white.

This line from Mean Girls inspired its own meme in 2010.

While these films, along with the Dane Cook comedy routine, appeared well before the rise of the Karen meme, their overwhelming and continuing popularity and familiarity may have subconsciously brought the name to the fore. The Dane Cook example, in particular, may be an early outlier that didn’t catch on in the public consciousness and become a meme.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

American Dialect Society. “2019 Word of the Year” (press release). 3 January 2020.

“FuckYouKaren.” Reddit.

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

Know Your Meme, 30 April 2020, s.v. Karen.

Ramsey, Franchesca, “Comedian: When S*** Gets Real, Take It Offline.” CNN Commentary, 29 May 2018. ProQuest: U.S. Newsstream.

Social Security Administration. “Get Ready for Baby.” Accessed 15 May 2020.

Urbandictionary.com, 2020, s.v. Karen.

bandwagon, jump on the

Circus bandwagon, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2009

15 May 2020

To climb on or jump on the bandwagon is to join what is believed will be the winning side in some endeavor. The phrase is moderately derisive; those who jump on the bandwagon are Johnny-come-latelys and fair-weather fans who join only when success is in the offing, if not assured.

Back when I lived in Washington, DC and was a daily reader of the Washington Post, sportswriter Tony Kornheiser would write of the city’s football team, the Redskins, as having a bandwagon of fans when they were winning. Here is an early example from 30 January 1983:

We are now witnessing what Robert Ludlum might call the Bandwagon Mosaic. I know it’s only a few hours before kickoff, but there’s still time to jump on the Washington Redskins’ bandwagon. Sure it’s crowded. You’re going to have to elbow your way past the television anchormen, the editorial writers, the politicians, the syndicated columnists—all the assorted bozos who recently learned the difference between quarterback sack and Dense Pack.

(For those who don’t remember the days of the Reagan-era Cold War, “Dense Pack” was a ludicrous idea that if a country packed its missile silos tightly together, incoming warheads would destroy each other, in what was dubbed “fratricide,” and the missiles on the ground would be protected.)

A bandwagon is originally literally that, a horse-drawn wagon that carries a band, often used to lead parades. Bandwagons were commonly used by circuses, which upon arrival in a town would parade the through the main street with the bandwagon at the fore as a means of advertising their presence. And indeed, the first records we have the word’s use is in reference to circuses. There is this from the American Quarterly, July 1849:

NIAGARA SUSPENSION BRIDGE.—The extensive circus and equestrian troupe of Col. Mann crossed the suspension bridge en route to Canada. The company occupied 22 horse teams, headed by the large four-horse band wagon, together with their baggage and paraphernalia.

And six years later P.T. Barnum included this in his autobiography:

At Vicksburg we sold all our land-conveyances, excepting four horses and the “band wagon;” bought the steamboat “Ceres” for $6000, hired the captain and crew, and proceeded down the river, stopping at desirable points to open our “budget of amusement.”

The earliest use of the metaphorical phrase that I have found is from the 14 June 1895 issue of the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader:

The Republican clubs of Oregon lately refused to declare for free silver and there is a great fight going on between Senator Mitchell and the Portland Oregonian to show whether they represented the Republican sentiment of the state. The clubs no doubt caught the drift of Republican sentiment in the country and determined to get on the bandwagon early.

But a year earlier there is this example of on the bandwagon plan from an article on a proposed Pan-American railway in the Detroit Free Press of 30 April 1894:

During the Harrison administration the bureau was conducted on the bandwagon plan. It made a great deal of music and was industriously paraded as the beginning of what might ultimately prove an all-America federation.

This usage could be a precursor of the phrase we know today, or it could be a one-off phrasing. In any case, it is a metaphor of sound and music that doesn’t amount to anything substantive.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Barnum, P.T. The Life of P.T. Barnum. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Co., 1855.

Evening Argus-Leader, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 14 June 1895, 6.

Kornheiser, Tony, “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Lighter Than You Think.” Washington Post, 30 January 1983, F2.

“New Cape Horn Route.” Detroit Free Press, 30 April 1894, 1.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. band-wagon, n.

“Quarterly Chronicle.” American Quarterly Register and Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 1, Philadelphia,  September 1849, 61.

Photo credit: Anonymous photographer, 2009, public domain image.