beeswax, none of your

21 May 2020

It’s none of your beeswax is a rather common slang expression, with beeswax substituting for business. There doesn’t seem to be any metaphorical significance behind the substitution. Rather, it’s just that the two words alliterate and sound vaguely alike.

The phrase appears in the San Francisco Examiner of 30 July 1928 and is given a date of 1906, but no explanation or citation for the earlier date is given:

Withering retort, 1906—
“None of your beeswax!”

The phrase is also recorded in Marian Hurd McNeely’s 1929 children’s book The Jumping-Off Place, about life on the South Dakota prairie:

Joan quickly concealed both bottle and ring. No use in exhibiting her treasures all at once; it would prolong the pleasure to produce them one at a time. Moreover, they wouldn't have to be shared so generously. But she opened the package of gum, took out a thin wedge of Yucatan for Phil and a mint stick for herself; then put the rest away. When Phil came back her jaws were busy. She produced his stick.

"Where'd you get it?"

"None of your beeswax," answered his sister.

So, while it is likely somewhat older, it seems to have first become widely popular in the late 1920s.

There is one older form of the phrase that doesn’t use the word beeswax that appears in 1913. In Thomas “TAD” Dorgan’s comic strip Silk Hat Harry’s Divorce Suit of 30 April, the title character knocks on a door and when the character inside asks what he wants he says:

Its none of your stomach ache I don’t want you SEND KELLY OUT

Silk Hat Harry’s Divorce Suit, by T. A. “Tad” Dorgan, 30 April 1930

It’s likely that in the early years the phrase floated about with various words inserted to refer to business, concern, or worry.

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Sources:

Cook, Ted. “Cook-Coos.” San Francisco Examiner, 30 July 1928. 16.

Dorgan, Thomas A. “TAD.” “Silk Hat Harry’s Divorce Suit.” Omaha Bee, 30 April 1913, 12.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. beeswax, n.2.

chonk

20 May 2020

Chonk is a slang term used to refer to overweight cats, and by extension, other animals and people. For instance, the following story appeared in numerous news outlets in December 2018. This particular instance is from NBC–8 WFLA in Tampa, Florida:

On Tuesday, the Monterey Bay Aquarium tweeted a photo of a 46-pound otter named Abby with the caption, "Abby is a thicc girl. What an absolute unit. She c h o n k."

For those unfamiliar with the vernacular, the word "chonk" has been used as slang to describe both curvy women and obese house cats.

Like most slang terms, the exact coinage cannot be determined, but its use exploded in popularity in August 2018 when Emilie Chiang tweeted:

IS your chumk a chonk? Are you unsure of CHONK whenst you sees it? Behold:

And she accompanied the tweet with an image of a veterinary, feline body-fat index chart that had been photoshopped with the categories:

• A Fine Boi
• He Chomnk
• A Heckin’ Chonker
• HEFTYCHONK
• MEGACHONKER
• OH LAWD HE COMIN

Chonk is most likely a variation on chunky, a colloquial adjective for someone of stout build that dates to the eighteenth century.

While most people do not intend a racial implication in their use of the term, the use of American Black dialect words and phrases (i.e., thicc and Oh Lawd, he comin) in Chiang’s original tweet and in some of public instantiations of the term, such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s use, have come under fire for making questionable comparisons between Black women and animals. The word chonk itself, however, is not particularly found in Black dialect.

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Sources:

“Chonk / Oh Lawd He Comin.” Know Your Meme, 26 September 2019.

“Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Otter Fat-Shaming Tweet Ignites Online Firestorm.” NBC-8 WFLA (Tampa, Florida), 22 December 2018. NewsBank.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989. s.v. chunky, adj.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.