influenza / flu

Japanese schoolgirls wearing masks to prevent spread of influenza, 17 February 1920

22 May 2020

The English name of the disease comes from the Italian influenza, which in turn comes from the Latin verb influere, meaning to flow, and which is the same source of the English word influence. The metaphor underlying the name of the disease is an astrological one, the belief that that stars influenced the course of human events, such as plagues and diseases. But by the time the word reached English in the eighteenth century, that astrological belief was long gone.

In Italian, the word appears by 1363 and originally denoted any epidemic disease. By the late seventeenth century, it was being used specifically for the viral disease we’re familiar with today.

It appears in English by 1743, when the London Magazine reported on an outbreak of the disease in Italy:

News from Rome of a contagious Distemper raging there, call'd the Influenza.

On 5 June 1801, Admiral Horatio Nelson included a note in a dispatch that the disease was present on his flagship:

In the St. George we have got the Influenza.

And Jane Austen used the word in her 1816 novel Emma:

But colds were never so prevalent as they have been this autumn. Mr. Wingfield told me that he had never known them more general or heavy—except when it has been quite an influenza.

The clipped flu appears by 1839 when the poet Robert Southey includes it in a letter of 13 August:

I have had a pretty fair share of the Flue.

Of course, we have all heard of the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 that killed some fifty million worldwide—second only to the Black Death of the fourteenth century in terms of total deaths and the worst in terms of killing the most in the shortest period. The poet Wilfred Owen remarked about it in a letter of 24 June 1918:

About 30 officers are smitten with the Spanish Flu.

Fortunately, the disease has not been so deadly since.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. influenza, n., flu, n.

Photo credit: Bettman/Getty Images.

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.

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.