blackguard

May 26, 2020

26 May 2020

In present-day use, a blackguard is a scoundrel or villain (when it’s used at all that is; it’s a rather old-fashioned term). The term dates to the early sixteenth century as a two-word, noun phrase, and it was compounded, with attendant loss of the / k / in the pronunciation, by the late seventeenth century. The word’s history, while on its face rather straightforward, tells us of class distinctions, religious bigotry, the world of seventeenth-century whores and pimps, and eighteenth-century, Oxbridge students.

From our position today in the twenty-first century, we can’t tell exactly what the two elements meant in the early uses. The black refers either to black livery of servants or clergy, dirt and soot covering menial servants, a connotation of evil and bad reputation, or a combination of some or all of these depending on the specific context. The guard, in the early uses, is not a reference to a literal body of soldiers, but rather a metaphorical use to refer to a body of people gathered for some purpose.

The oldest extant use of the term appears in financial records of the Church of St. Margaret in Westminster in a receipt for torches costing six pence:

Item Receyvid for the lycens of iiij. torchis of the blake garde vjd.

We can’t be sure exactly what the blake garde here refers to, but it’s probably to black-liveried, professional mourners that accompany a burial.

In other early citations the term is applied facetiously to soot-covered servants of the kitchen and scullery. William Fitzwilliam, the first earl of Southampton, writes in a 17 August 1535 letter:

Of the blak garde of the kings ketsyn bee two of the principalls.

And there is this by William Fulke in his 1579 sermon “A Refutation of Maister Rastels Confutation,” in which he advocates for the defrocking of Catholic clergy, some of whom he claims were kitchen servants raised to the priesthood:

That bagpipers, horscoursers, gailers, alebasters, were not admitted into the Cleargie without sufficient triall. We affirme they ought not, nor yet any of the scullerie or blacke garde, as some yet liuing were made Priestes in Queene Maries time.

And John Webster’s 1612 play The White Divel has this exchange between where the character Flamineo attempts convince Vittoria that she is better off with her husband Camillo than the man she really loves:

VITTORIA: I did nothing to displease him, I carued to him at supper-time
FLAMINEO: You need not haue carued him infaith, they say he is a capon already, I must now seemingly fall out with you. Shall a gentleman so well descended as Camillo.—a lousy slaue that within this twenty yeares rode with the blacke guard in the Dukes cariage mongst spits and dripping-pannes.

But at around the same period when blackguard was being used to refer to scullery servants, it was also in use to describe attendants liveried in black. For instance, there is this description of black-uniformed sailors at the 1513 Battle of Flodden written sometime before 1550:

This yer þe Skottyshe Kyng cam in to Ynglond with a gret power, whan þe Kyng was in France; & with hym mett þe Erle of Surrey with a gret power; & þer þe Skottyshe Kyng was slayn in þe fild & his ded body was browght to Rychemont. & at þat fild was my Lord Amerall, with his maryners, callyd “the black gard.”

And John Foxe’s 1570 edition of Actes and Monumentes, an anti-Catholic polemic, uses blackguard to describe black-cloaked Dominican friars in contrast to the gray-cloaked Franciscans:

With these and such other like reasons, the Gray Fra[n]ciscans voyded their aduersaries, defendyng the Conception of the Virgine Mary to bee vnblemyshed & pure from all contagion of Original sinne. Contrariwise the Blacke gard of the Dominike Friers, for their partes were not all mute, but layd lustely from them agayn, hauyng great authorities and also the Scripture on theyr side.

With some of these literal descriptions, though, we can start to see connotations of disrepute creeping in, as with Foxe’s description of the Dominicans.

And about a century after Foxe, blackguard was being used to denote criminals, as in this 1674 citation from News from Whetstones Parke, or, a Relation of the Late Bloody Battle There, Between the Bawds and Whores:

The first onset was given by Gammar Jilt, that flung a Bottle of Steppony, and beat out one of Doll Tiremons Eys, who in revenge pluckt off the old womans Nose, and flung it just in another Bawds Chops, who Spitt it out again in the Face of a young Whore that she was Engaged with, Hoods, Scarfs, Pinners, Laces went miserably to Racke, Biteing, Kicking, Scratching, and Confusion fill'd the place, never was there a Sadder Sight, here lay a Nose, there an Eye, a little further a Sett of Teeth, here a peice of a Necklace, there a parcel of Black Patches, and by and by the Ruines of a glorious Tower trod under Foot; The Bawds were never so Bang'd, nor the Morts so Mortified, but who had the better of it is hard to say, For Fortune had not yet declared in favour of either party, when the Pimpes, Hectors, Bullies, Bully-Rocks, Bully-Ruffians, Bully-Sandies, and the rest of the Black-Guard, taking the Alarm, came in Multitudes to part the Fray.

And roughly some seventy-five years after the description of this “battle,” the word is in use to mean someone who is dishonorable or scurrilous in general. From a complaint about the word humbug that appears in the January 1751 issue of The Student:

Upon the presumption therefore of having a little smattering of English, from the advantage of a liberal education, I will venture to affirm that this HUMBUG is neither an English word, nor a derivative from any other language.———It is indeed a black-guard sound, made use of by most people of distinction.———It is a fine make-weight in conversation, and some great men deceive themselves so egregiously as to think they mean something by it.

Unlike this student’s opinion of humbug, the word blackguard does mean something, although rarely something pleasant.

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Sources:

Dyboski, Roman, ed. Songs, Carols and Other Miscellaneous Poems. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1907. Early English Text Society.

Foxe, John. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1570 edition). The Digital Humanities Institute, Sheffield, 2011.

Fulke, William. “A Refutation of Maister Rastels Confutation.” In D. Heskins, D. Sanders, And M. Rastel, [...] Ouerthrowne. London: Henrie Middleton, 1579, 779. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, 2011.

News from Whetstones Parke. London: D.M., 1674. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. blackguard, n. and adj.

The Student, or the Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany, vol. 2 of 2. London: J. Newbery, 1751, 42. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Webster, John. The White Divel. London: Nicholas Okes, 1612. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

black box

May 25, 2020

25 May 2020

Whenever a commercial airliner crashes, which fortunately has become rare these days, there is the inevitable search for the black box, the flight recorder that provides data on the last moments of the aircraft’s flight to crash investigators. And almost inevitably the news stories will point out that the so-called black box is actually, in fact, orange, painted that color to make it easier to locate. If that’s the case, why is it called a black box?

To answer that, we need to go back to the early days of electronics, when electronic devices were literally packed into metal housings that were black. An early example is naval, not aeronautical. In 1931 the old battleship USS Utah was converted into a remote-controlled target ship, and a 1932 article in Astronautics describes the remote-control system:

On the destroyer that directs the activities of the crewless U.S.S. Utah is set up a radio transmitter. [...] For the sending of control messages, there is located on the destroyer a little black box, with keys arranged like those on a typewriter. By simply pressing one of these keys, an operator can direct the crewless battleship to make a complete turn, lay down a smoke screen, blow its siren, or go full speed ahead.

(Ironically, the Japanese sank the target ship Utah in the attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941.)

To bring it to the world of aviation, there is this 1936 piece that was widely syndicated throughout the United States about a black box used in simulating air force bombing runs:

The camera obscura or “target station” is a portable black box mounted on four wheels and pulled by a truck bearing a two-way radio apparatus. As the bomber plane approaches, its swooping image is projected through a lens in the roof of the box, upon a large square of paper or chart, inside a small, light-proofed chart-room where the scorer traces the path of the plane and records hits and misses.

Nor was this usage restricted to the military. Here is a 1937 story about the first police radio-cars deployed in Jackson, Mississippi:

Within the next week or so, Jackson’s police cruisers will be at an instant’s call of headquarters, as final installation service is completed on the city’s shortwave broadcasting set and auto receivers, officials said.
The big black box with just a couple of dials and a few switches to identify it as a transmitter has already been placed in the police headquarters, and the connecting wires and other equipment are being attached and placed as rapidly as possible. Noel’s Auto Electric service has charge of the installation.

Of course, World War II saw the widespread use of sophisticated mechanical and electronic devices in aircraft and ships. The gun sights, as described in the 1943 newspaper story, on a B-17 bomber were controlled by a black box:

The second secret and the answer to that question have emerged together with a demonstration for newspapermen of the “automatic computing sight.” It is installed in the turrets of all Flying Fortresses. With this sight turret gunners are able to knock down anything with 1,000 yards by the mere twisting of a dial and the pressing of a trigger.
A small black box packed with intricate machinery and attached to the guns automatically sights opposing aircraft and directs unbelievably accurate fire to the target.

These devices were literally black boxes, but they also shared the characteristic of being sophisticated devices whose internal mechanisms weren’t understood by the users. Not only were they black in color, but they were black in secrecy and inability to comprehend how they functioned. After the war, the term black box came to be used to refer to any system that could be described by its inputs and outputs, without knowledge of exactly what the system did to achieve those outputs. This article from the 1949 issue of the Bell System Technical Journal puts it this way:

In principle, one needs no knowledge of the physics of the transistor in order to treat it circuitwise; any “black box” with the same electrical behavior at its terminals would act in the same way.

And:

We shall now take the purely empirical view and regard the transistor as a black box whose performance is to be determined by electrical measurements on its terminals.

But this last has little to do with flight recorders, which are called black boxes because of the history of calling any electronic device in a housing that, regardless of its color. The New York Daily News has one of the early examples of calling a flight recorder a black box in a January 1961 story:

The little black box in the world’s worst aviation collision spoke its long-awaited piece yesterday, helping explain why 134 persons died on Dec. 16.
The box—a flight recorder from a United Air Lines DC-8 jet—showed that a few seconds before the jet crashed with a Trans World Airlines Super Constellation over Staten Island, the jet—
1—Was traveling almost 300 miles an hour faster than it should have been going.
2—Was 3,700 feet higher than its pilot thought it was.

So that’s the explanation. Rather simple really; such devices were once colored black but no longer are.

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Sources:

“Automatic Rocket Control Foreshadowed by Crewless Ship.” Astronautics, No. 19, May 1932, 4.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. black box, n.

Pugh, Thomas and Neal Patterson. “Crash Jet Traveled Too Fast, Too High, Recorder Reveals.” Daily News (New York), 10 January 1961, C3.

“Radio Equipment Being Installed.” Daily Clarion Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi), 1 January 1937, 14.

Ryder, R.M. and R.J. Kircher. “Some Circuit Aspects of the Transistor.” Bell System Technical Journal, 28.3, July 1949, 367–400.

“Uncle Sam Is Practicing Aerial Bombing in Quiet.” Marshfield News-Herald (Wisconsin), 10 November 1936, 4.

“Where It Gets the Sting.” The Asheville Citizen (North Carolina), 5 July 1943, 4.

Photo credit: YSSY guy, 2015, used under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

bizarre

May 24, 2020

24 May 2020

Bizarre is a word with a rather straightforward etymology. English borrowed it from French in the mid seventeenth century, which in turn had borrowed it from the Italian bizzarro. But that has not stopped some baseless speculation about a weirder origin of the word.

The original Italian meaning of bizzarro is angry. The word appears in Dante’s early 14th century Divine Comedy. From the Inferno, canto 8:

Tutti gridavano: “A Filippo Argenti!”;
e ’l fiorentino spirito bizzarro
in sé medesmo si volvea co’ denti.
(They all were shouting: “At Filippo Argenti!”
the spirit of the wrathful Florentine
turning, meanwhile, his teeth against himself.)

Dante populated his hell with people he disliked (and some of his friends). Filippo Argenti was a aristocrat of Florence who had wronged Dante in some way (commentary differs on exactly what the dispute was).

Filippo also appears in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the ninth day, eighth story, where again bizzarro is one of his defining characteristics. In this case the translator choses choleric as its English equivalent:

Filippo Argenti, uomo grande e nerboruto e forte, sdegnoso, iracundo e bizzarro piú che altro.
(Filippo Argenti, a tall man and stout, and of a high courage, and haughty, choleric and cross-grained as ne'er another.)

The Decameron was written 1349–51, about thirty years after Dante’s death.

In later Italian usage, bizzarro developed the meaning of strange or odd, and French borrowed this meaning in the early sixteenth century. And this sense was borrowed into English in the mid seventeenth century. Edward Herbert, a soldier, diplomat, poet, and philosopher, is the first person known to have used bizarre in English. In his autobiography, of uncertain date but certainly written before his death in 1648, he describes a woman:

Her gown was a green Turkey grogram, cut all into panes or slashes, from the shoulder and sleeves unto the foot, and tied up at the distance of about a hand’s-breadth every where with the same ribband, with which her hair was bound; so that her attire seemed as bizare as her person.

The word has maintained this sense in English ever since.

Despite the etymology of bizarre being a rather ordinary one, a false etymology developed claiming that it comes from the Basque bizarra, meaning beard. The false etymology developed not only because the words are superficially similar, but perhaps out of a desire that a word meaning odd should not have an ordinary history, and also perhaps because Basque is a tempting language to associate with any word. Basque, a language of the Pyrenees region between France and Spain, is a language isolate, unrelated to any other living language; it’s not Indo-European like the languages that surround it. Basque, a linguistic oddity, is simply too tempting for some not associate with bizarre.

In this case, the guilty party appears to be the nineteenth-century French lexicographer Émile Littré, who first put forward the idea that bizarre comes from the Basque word for beard. His argument is simple and, at first blush, tempting. In Spanish, bizarro means brave or gallant, and the phrase hombre de bigote (literally, man with a moustache) means a man of spirit, of bravery. The Spanish must, Littré reasoned, have gotten the word, with its association with facial hair, from their next-door neighbors, the Basques. His argument is seemingly bolstered by the fact that in early French use, bizarre could also mean brave. Littré believed French had borrowed the word from Spanish.

Unfortunately for Littré and his argument, the borrowing goes the other way. Bizarre is not attested in Spanish until the late sixteenth century, well after it was established in French. It seems that the Spanish borrowed the brave sense of the word from French. The evolution from anger to bravery is a natural one, just think of the wrath of Achilles, a great warrior, that drives the plot of the Iliad. The brave sense eventually fell out of use in French, but it held on in Spanish, where it is the primary meaning of the word today.

So, it seems that the Basque bizarra, meaning beard, and our word bizarre are false cognates. They look like they should be related, but they aren’t.

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Sources:

The Decameron Web. Brown University, Italian Studies Department, 2014.

Langdon, Courtney. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1 Inferno. Harvard University Press, 1918.

The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, Merriam-Webster, 1991, s.v. bizarre.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bizarre adj. and n.

bimbo

May 23, 2020

23 May 2020 (correction, 24 May)

In present-day parlance, bimbo is usually used to refer to an attractive, but unintelligent, woman, but it did not always mean this. The story of bimbo leads us through the worlds of criminals, racism and xenophobia, and gay sub-culture. It also appears to be a word that was borrowed from Italian multiple times in the early twentieth century, acquiring a different meaning for each group and sub-culture that borrowed it.

Bimbo is from the Italian word meaning baby, akin to bambino. It makes a number of appearances in English as a proper name in the opening years of the twentieth century. Searching turn-of-the-century newspapers turns up uses as the names of various animals: several pet dogs, a racehorse named Lady Bimbo, and a monkey. It was the name of a vaudeville comedy-acrobat act, and it was the name of an “Italian” hotel in San Francisco that appears as a crime scene in multiple news stories.

In what may be either a serious news story or a satire (from the remove of over a century, it’s hard to tell how much is fact and how much is fiction), Bimbo appears as the name of a “gypsy” a series of stories in Chicago’s Day Book about a certain George Bimbo, such as this one from 18 November 1913:

Love among they gypsies has given the police of the Maxwell street station more trouble. The case of George Bimbo and his purchased gypsy princess, Mary Mitchell, bids fair to end in tragedy unless the courts intervene. [...] Two of Bimbo’s loyal supporters have been Stephan George and Yanks Dureck. This morning they were found at the corner of 12th street and Racine avenue. They had been attacked and beaten by four men. Meanwhile the younger element of the tribe is planning to dethrone “King” Mitchell and make Bimbo kind of the nomads—if he can be found.

From these names and stories such as this, bimbo developed its first slang sense of a thug or tough guy, a sense laced with racial and ethnic implications. In another story, this time no mistaking it as anything but a satire, in the Washington Herald on 1 February 1914, the writer uses the name clearly expected the audience to connect the name with the sense of a thug:

A feud between Jacob Bimbo and Jacob Inski, sugar dealers, was settled today by Judge Dingbats in an unusual way. Bimbo was haled into court to answer to a charge of assault and battery on complaint of Inski. It developed that Bimbo had attacked Inski, his business rival, striking him in the face and kicking him in the stomach.

At about the same time, a second sense of bimbo developed in English, that of an insignificant or worthless person, a fool, or a dupe. There is this July 1919 story possibly by Damon Runyon in which some tough guys use bimbo to mean a man who isn’t one. (Green’s Dictionary of Slang credits the writer, but the Richmond Times-Dispatch version that I have access to has no byline.) I include the story in full because the full context is necessary to understand it and because it also involves cartoonist Thomas A. “Tad” Dorgan, who features in many origins of early twentieth century slang terms:

PEST ACCORDED BEATING
Yankee Schwartz Thrashes “Bimbo” Who First Challenges “Tad” Dorgan
TOLEDO, O., July 2.—A pest was operating in the lobby of the Secor last night. He challenged “Tad” Dorgan to battle. “Tad” was busy, so Yankee Schwartz, the old Philadelphia boxer, took charge of the case for him.
Everybody went out into the street in front of the Secor, and for twenty minutes there was as sweet a setto as you’d want to see. Schwartz finally got home in front. “No bimbo can lick me,” said he, breathlessly, at the finish. “What’s a bimbo?” somebody asked “Tiny” Maxwell, on the assumption that “Tiny” ought to be familiar with the Philadelphia lingo.
“A bimbo,” said Tiny, “is t-t-two degrees lower than a coo-coo-cootie.”

“Tiny” Maxwell, who was anything but, was a former football player, coach, referee, and sportswriter. He had a stutter.

Paradoxically, or perhaps not, this same sense also arises about this time in Polari. Polari was a cant used by British gay men and lesbians in the twentieth century until around 1970, when its use went into sharp decline. This use in Polari probably comes from the Italian via the Mediterranean Lingua Franca that was used by sailors into the nineteenth century, which would make it a parallel development to this particular American slang sense.

Bimbo seems to have been borrowed again sometime before 1920, where it came to mean an attractive person, a natural extension of the sense of baby. But it could be used either to refer to a man or to a woman. For instance, there is this from the Washington Times of 21 August 1922 in a column discussing a man who pretended to be a European prince in order to seduce women:

Women Be Warned and learn about men from him.
With Europe all mussed up, it’s going to be a cinch for bimbos from abroad to spill smooth social etiquette and hypnotize unsuspecting romantic damsels into matrimony. Better to gaze with favor upon some bashful American who may not be so oo-la-la when it comes to flash affection, but is a straight shooter and an honest breadwinner.
If a bimbo born right here can put over parody like that, look out girls for the baby who blows in from the other side and gets crusty with a crest ring he may have bought off some dealer in antiques.

Note that both bimbo and baby are used synonymously here. And while the article carries a note of racism and xenophobia—with Southern Europe being implied with the use of bimbo—it also uses the term to refer to Americans, who are presumed to be “Anglo-Saxon.”

But, of course, bimbos could be female too. The song “My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle” in the 1920 Broadway revue Silks and Satins carries much of the same xenophobia and racism, but with the genders of the seducer and the seduced being reversed:

Sailor Bill McCoy, was a daring sailor boy,
His ship got wreck’d awhile, on a Fee-jee-ee-jee Isle
He led a savage life, and hunted with a knife,
He said I’ll tell you about it don’t tell my wife.
I’ve got a bimbo down on the Bamboo Isle
She’s waiting there for me Beneath a bamboo tree
Believe me she’s got the other bimbos beat a mile
[...]
But by heck there never was a wreck like the wreck she made of me
For all she wore was a great big Zulu smile
My little bimbo down on the Bamboo Isle.

Again, we have a foreigner, a woman this time, dark-skinned and sexually alluring, naked except for her “Zulu smile.” Here it is the female bimbo who is stealing the innocent, white man away from his wife. The racism is palpable.

By the late-1920s the word had acquired the sense of an unintelligent woman. Walter Winchell notes this in November 1927 when writing about Variety writer Jack Conway:

Among Conway’s more famous expressions are “Bimbo” (for a dumb girl).

(I cannot, however, find any examples of Conway using the term bimbo in his writing.)

This sense of a woman who is attractive, sexually available, and stupid has largely driven out the other senses, although you can still find the term applied to men, where it has been generally more positive, although increasingly it connotes a young, attractive man who is also none too bright. As Kathy Lette wrote in her 1992 satire of Hollywood The Llama Parlour:

I was busy doing all this, when Pierce made his late, head-turning entrance. He tacked across the room, berthing briefly at various tables to ad-lib rehearsed quips and kiss the cheeks of the BBBs (the Blond, the Bronzed, and the Beautiful. Of both sexes. Believe me, living in LA you come to realise that the word “bimbo” is not gender-specific.)

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Correction: a previous version said that bimbo was a clipping of bambino, which implied the clipping happened in English.

Sources:

Baker, Paul. Polari—The Lost Language of Gay Men. Routledge, 2002, 165.

Bangs, John Kendrick. “The Genial Idiot.” Washington Herald (DC), 1 Feb 1914, 26.

Clarke, Grant (lyrics) and Walter Donaldson (music). “My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle” Irving Berlin, Inc. Music Publishers, 1920. Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries and University Museums.

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

King, Fay. “Warns Girls Against Smooth Talkers With Titles.” Washington Times, 21 August 1922, 4.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition 1989, with June 2004 draft additions, s.v. bimbo, n.2.

Runyan, Damon. “Pest Accorded Beating.” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3 July 1919, 8.

“War in the Gypsy Camp—All Over a Love Affair.” The Day Book (Chicago), 18 November 1913.

Winchell, Walter. “A Primer of Broadway Slang.” Vanity Fair, 1 November 1927, 67.

influenza / flu

May 22, 2020

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.

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Sources:

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

Photo credit: Bettman/Getty Images.